03.16.10
Posted in Financial markets, Government bureaucracy, Government spending at 1:01 pm by Administrator
Ed Fuelner at Townhall says that the government’s zeal to respond with regulation to any financial crisis proves that Congress does two things well: 1.) nothing, and 2.) overreact. He points out that Sarbanes-Oxley, enacted in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom collapses, wound up costing, like all government programs (think Medicare and Social Security) vastly more than originally envisioned, and harmed smaller businesses’ access to credit. We’re about to do the same thing with Chris Dodd’s panel or council or whatever that will sit in judgement of investment banks that don’t meet government standards of performance. Just who is going to sit on these panels? The reason I ask is that the FHer record for choosing people to fill such seats of wisdom is not encouraging. Think Andy Stern and deficit reduction.
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03.03.10
Posted in Economics, Financial markets, Government bureaucracy at 2:02 pm by Administrator
Tony Blankley on the folly of Chris Dodd’s push to create a government postion empowered to head off “systemic risks” to the financial system.
Among the questions that Blankley raises:
Who gets to define “systemic?”
How big is the scope of this “system”?
What if an overly cautious approach would make a give situation worse?
Given the pointy-headed nature of these kinds of positions, how much real-world experience is such a person likely to have?
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03.01.10
Posted in Behavior and motivation, Government bureaucracy, Government spending at 2:56 pm by Administrator
The governor of my state, Mitch Daniels, about whom I had a post a few back, has a great column in today’s WSJ about medical savings accounts for Indiana state employees and how it’s been win-win for all parties involved.
The core of his argument is that behavior – and motivation for it – is the key factor in not only health care, but government’s fiscal health as well. If the cost of something is your direct responsibility, you will be motivated to keep an eye on the numbers.
There are other columns out today, notably those of Irwin Steltzer and Robert Samuelson (HT for all of these: Real Clear Politics) that deal with this larger issue of fiscal responsibility. Samuelson is quite blunt, saying today’s so-called governmental leaders are living in la-la- land. He takes the right as well as the left to task for failing to provide grown-up solutions to what they claim the problem is.
That’s where my own set of views comes in, and it gets us back to Gov. Daniels’s point about behavior and incentives.
We’re going to have to touch some third rails in this country. We’re just going to have to. The New Deal and Great society entitlements – most notable Social Security and Medicare – are the fastest-growing items in our federal budget, and they’re going broke fast. We absolutely cannot continue to dish out those programs’ benefits in the manner that previous generations enjoyed.
I try really heard to be a serious thinker on matters of public policy and stay away from obvious crank proposals for anything. I get quite tired of callers to talk shows who make these sweeping “why, we just otta do away with this” or “make everybody do that” pronouncements without considering the actual details of the process by which it would be possible to do that. So it is with the fortification of forethought that I say that we could dismantle some entire departments and agencies of the federal government in addition to drastically altering the nature of Social Security and Medicare. Education could go this afternoon. We’d be a better society for it. Ditto Housing and Urban Development. The EPA. Diversity officers in any department or agency that has one.
My wife and I have made periodic stabs at Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University course. The steam always seems to go out of our efforts when we get to his lesson on putting a strict household budget in writing. He says that you must account for every dollar that will come in during a given month before the month begins. Where it gets squirmy is when hs says, “This will bring your stuff up. It will make you look at certain aspects of your marriage and your life.” We know he’s right, but it’s about at that point that various other time commitments encroach upon the agreed-upon times to sit down with the pen, paper and calculator. You know, like getting nails done, or heading to the gym.
Still it would be the best way to get and keep a handle on household finances. Once one is through the squirmy stuff, one sees that it’s really about declaring mastery over one’s own life.
This is what our federal government will ultimately have to do. It becomes a necessity when the creditors start calling during dinner hour (which is not going on in our household, which may be why we’re not fully motivated to buckle down and put numbers on paper), which is where our country is.
There is really only one way for an individual or household to get financial traction: control the income and outgo numbers, and create more wealth. Since government can’t create more wealth, it must control its numbers and free its citizens to create wealth.
Really controlling the numbers is going to bring various factions’ stuff up. The alternative is living in la-la land, but there arrives a point where your green card for that realm expires.
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02.18.10
Posted in Government bureaucracy at 1:58 pm by Administrator
Take a look at the guy whom the Senate just confirmed to be head of the Corporation for National and Community Service.
Hell, I’d never heard of this Corporation for National and Community Service. The name was certainly creepy. And my tax dollars have been going for this dog vomit? So I checked it out. It’s the umbrella organization that encompasses AmeriCorps, among other hey-everybody-let’s-get-together-and-do-this-program outfits. It was founded in 1993, the last time the FHers felt like they had America by the throat.
There is so much totalitarianism that would be easy pickings for any Pub who wanted to offer the American people a sane alternative to the Freedom-Hater vision. Get rid of Patrick “ACORN” Covington. Dismantle this whole corporation. Defund this envoy-to-the-OIC position. Cut off the grant to the seniors-claiming-special-identity-status community in Chicago. And that’s just real recent stuff.
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02.17.10
Posted in Culture, Government bureaucracy, U.S. Constitution at 2:32 pm by Administrator
Walter Williams on the 2010 census.
Does anybody else find the advertising blitz for what’s supposed to be a simple head count of citizens and legal residents a little creepy?
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10.03.09
Posted in Congress, Government bureaucracy, Socialism, health care at 2:08 pm by Administrator
Of course, those who coined it are referring to “broad outlines” of socialist health care legislation that hasn’t actually been fleshed out, much less written, that the Senate Finance is “studying.”
You could also say it refers to the way fog obscures a transparent surface – or process.
Or another hopeful interpretation is that it denotes the wispy, ephemeral hopes of Freedom-Haters, who are aware they still face a challenge from Blue Dog Dems who don’t want to be out of a job thirteen months from now, as well as an American public that overwhelmingly – as in 92 percent – is satisfied with the way its health is cared for.
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09.28.09
Posted in Entrepreneurial spirit, Government bureaucracy at 8:19 pm by Administrator
My newest ongoing freelance writing gig is providing the two (sometimes three) main feature articles for each issue of a monthly business magazine. I wasn’t sure how I’d like business journalism. It’s actually turning out to be quite interesting.
This morning, I interviewed the CEO of a small company he founded in the 1970s. He became interested in public-policy issues related to his industry, which has led to several years of trade-association activity, culminating with a year’s term as association president. He confirms a pattern I’ve seen in the viewpoints of other trade-association figures I’ve encountered, that being the view of their role as principally one of putting out fires. “We probably get more bad things stopped that good things implemented,” he told me. In other words, keeping the tentacles of government out of their companies’ business consumes most of these associations’ attention.
For one thing, government bureaucrats – we’re talking about the paper-shufflers at the regulatory agencies here, not the actual anti-freedom lawmakers themselves, although this applies to them in spades – tend to take a one-size-fits-all approach to situations that arise within a particular industry. This gentleman spent considerable time pursuing the application of reasonable safety standards to one type of valve used by one type of vehicle, trying to get the regulators to see that particulars of overall compliance with their code didn’t pertain to this valve.
“I went to Washington two days a month for three years,’ he says. “Paid my own way. We sat around a table and negotiated ways to make our industry safer. Behind everybody at that table was a team of attorneys.” He spoke of an “invisible wall between regulatory people and regular people.” He says that after two years he finally got some of these bureaucrats to get out in the field and see that actual equipment companies in his industry used.
As for the lawmakers themselves, he says that the atmosphere of the D.C. world makes them different to talk to when he’s out there than when he gets their ear back home in the district. He also says that there is a mercenary class of lobbyists who sell their skills of persuasion and doing lunch to the highest bidder, sometimes leaving even legislators with integrity wondering just who is being square with them.
This guy has been a leader in innovation in his line of work. His company is considered a pace-setter. How sad that there is a class of people so far removed from basic human impulses like inventiveness and vision that it offers entire careers in the spread of mind-numbing inertia.
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05.14.08
Posted in Government bureaucracy, North Korea at 4:45 pm by Administrator
What is the common thread in the last few posts here at BN – Hizbollah’s smackdown of Lebanon’s ineffectual “official” government, the attack on the Ashkelon shopping center, and Ahmadinejad’s latest threats – as well as this news item from Jaipur, India about near-simultaneous bomb blasts that killed 61 and injured 216?
Go to the front of the class if you said “radical Islam.”
Anybody who thinks Western civilization is jauntily rolling along save for the occasional random challenge of a law-enforcement nature is sadly and willfully ignorant of what is going on.
Occasionally, commenters here at BN respond to posts in the various dhimmitude categories with remarkds along the lines of “Oh, lighten up. These isolated instances aren’t making any serious transformations of our culture.” How pathetically blind.
It’s way past time to see the pattern in all the “diversity” / multiculturalism programs in our educational system, the Muslim-women-only days at public fitness gyms and swimming pools, the British prison toilets turned to face Mecca, the Anglican archbishop’s acceptance of the encroachment of sharia into British law, the bathing of the Empire State Building in green light for the end of Ramadan, and so on – and on and on and on.
Let me be blunt. It doesn’t look like our way of life is going to make it. We don’t have the will to resist the above violations, dilutions and affronts, much less rockets or nuclear bombs.
The degree of resolve it would take to seriously address what we face would require a shift in our mindset that I’m not sure we can accomplish. I don’t know that I’m blaming anyone – us, collectively, or any one group or individual. It’s probably just a natural result of the veil of normalcy that’s still draped over our daily lives, which, for all the high fuel prices and economic uncertainty, are still pretty cush by worldwide standards. The worst stuff is still happening “over there.”
I think such canaries in the coal mine as Robert Spencer and Mark Steyn look like skunks at the garden party to the major swath of our populace that still preoccupies itself with pop culture and personal ambition. We’ve seen this set of circumstances before in history. Is it just the nature of things for an ominous threat to be just beyond the periphery until a sudden moment when it appears center stage?
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