Tag Archives: responsibilities

“About That ‘Gutting the Safety Net'”

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That’s the title of a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Critics are accusing President Trump’s 2018 budget of “gutting the safety net” with cuts to food stamps and disability insurance. In reality, the White House is proposing long-needed reforms that would fix a dysfunctional disability system that traps Americans in dependency.

The editor is right as far as he goes, but he doesn’t go far enough.  It isn’t just our social security disability system that is a welfare trap, it’s our entire welfare system.

There is no incentive for folks to get off welfare; in fact, there is a “welfare cliff” designed in that throws up terrible obstacles blocking folks from getting off welfare.  Those obstacles are more concretely illustrated by this:

The less-noticed harm is that a mere 1% of beneficiaries return to work every year….

One reason so few return to the labor force is that payments are essentially a tax on work. A 55-year-old who previously earned about $30,000 a year at work could receive more than $15,000 a year in disability payments, plus health-care benefits and perhaps other cash transfers such as food stamps. That means any job would have to pay more than what he loses in subsidies….

It’s not a safety net.  It’s the Progressive-Democratic Party’s seine, with which it seeks to trap our poor so they can continue trading handouts for votes.

Disingenuosity

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At the State level, more and more legislatures are succeeding in ceasing to send taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood recently announced the shuttering of four of its 12 Iowa’s clinics in Iowa [sic] after the Hawkeye state’s Republican-led legislature voted earlier this year to cut funding to clinics that performed abortions. Also last week, the health care nonprofit announced it was closing its only clinic in Wyoming and three of its clinics in New Mexico in what it called a “realignment of resources.”

Texas and other States have similarly acted, and Congress is moving to stop transfers of taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood, also.  Of course pro-abortion folks are up in arms about this.  Raegan McDonald-Mosley, Chief Medical Officer at Planned Parenthood Federation of America:

This is hardest on people who already face barriers to accessing health care—especially people of color, young people, people with low to moderate incomes, and people who live in rural areas.

And hold-overs from the Obama administration:

Estimates by the Congressional Budget Office indicate that defunding Planned Parenthood would save roughly $200 million in federal spending while reducing health care for as many as 390,000 people.

These claims are disingenuous at best.  If the reductions or removals of taxpayer money to abortion providers like Planned Parenthood are “hardest on people who already face barriers to accessing health care,” if pending cuts really would “reduc[e] health care for as many as 390,000 people,” it’s only because abortion providers insist on allocating the monies they have away from providing health care to needful women toward providing abortions instead—thereby denying health care to those needful babies as well as to the needful women, pregnant and otherwise.

Organizations like Planned Parenthood really do provide valuable health care services to needful women, and to their families.  They could continue to do so largely unabated if only they’d use the funds they bring in for that instead of for abortions.

“Full Responsibility”

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said, regarding leaks to the New York Times tabloid and others,

We take full responsibility for that and we obviously regret that that happened.  With respect to the release of information inappropriately…certainly we condemn that.

The same sort of questions I’ve put to Hillary Clinton applies here: what are you going to do with that “responsibility” you’ve taken?  What concrete actions will you take?

How’re the criminal and civil investigations into the leaks going; what progress are you making in identifying the criminals and the miscreants?

Assuming you find any, what will you do with them?

Department of YGTBSM

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Amtrak has decided to refurbish New York City’s Penn Station, which will involve unavoidable disruption through the summer.  New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) doesn’t think Amtrak is up to the task, so he’s bringing New York to the rescue.

The state will step up and do it.  We don’t own Penn Station but we will step up and we’ll take over construction and we’ll do it with a private construction company or let the Port Authority do it.

So generous.  Here’s how the Democrat will execute his generosity.

As long as New York City steps up to the plate with funding, I will step up to the plate with leadership and management responsibility,

Let’s you and him get to work.  Bring your wallet and safety boots; I’ll bring my clipboard.

When Were They Not?

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All IT Jobs Are Cybersecurity Jobs Now goes the headline on a recent Wall Street Journal article, and the subhead reads The rise of cyberthreats means that the people once assigned to setting up computers and email servers must now treat security as top priority.

It’s like these folks—both in the IT arena and in the reporting media—have just had an epiphany.

The global “WannaCry” ransomware attack that peaked last week, and has affected at least 200,000 computers in 150 countries, as well as the growing threat of Adylkuzz, another new piece of malware, illustrate a basic problem that will only become more pressing as ever more of our systems become connected: the internet wasn’t designed with security in mind, and dealing with that reality isn’t cheap or easy.

No, it wasn’t.  But it’s not the Internet that’s at the heart of these failures.  It’s the company connections to the Internet, and the corporate human employees who aren’t being trained in how to handle the company’s connection to the Internet that is at the heart of these failures.  IT has—or should have had—security at its heart from the time the first companies connected themselves to the Internet.

Even if nation-level espionage might not have been on the minds of private enterprise, the proprietary nature of company information and the fact of corporate espionage are as old as corporations.

Christopher Mims, in his article at the link, offered some sound advice for today.  That the advice should have been obvious yesterday in no way invalidates it for today.

  1. Retrain IT staff on security—or replace them. In today’s world of ever-multiplying threats and dependence on connected assets, all IT staff must now be cybersecurity staff first.

Indeed.

  1. Push everything to the cloud. It used to be the job of IT personnel was to build and maintain the tools employees need. Now, pretty much anything can be done better with a cloud-based service.

I disagree with this.  The cloud is no more securable than a corporate’s internal network—and when (not if) the cloud gets hacked, it won’t be only one company’s stuff that gets stolen or held hostage.  Even if it’s only a company’s internal cloud that gets hacked, the whole of the company’s innards get exposed.

  1. New IT investment will need baked-in security.

Can I get an amen, brothers and sisters?