Category: Spending

Buy the team instead of running for office.

I’ve written about this case before, but a federal appeals court held that security searches before Tampa Bay Buccaneers games are not unconstitutional because the fan who challenged them had consented. I have no idea on whether or not the reasoning is legally valid. I assume the court would find some similarity to the security need that would allow a default airport search to be constitutional. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but it’s beyond my point here. Specifically, the case is being influenced by this:

Rick Zabak, an attorney for the Tampa Sports Authority, the government agency that runs the stadium, said he’s trying to determine whether the court’s decision allows the searches to automatically resume at the Buccaneers first preseason game Aug. 10 or if he has to ask a court to reinstate them.

Operating a sports stadium is never going to qualify as a public good. No government should be involved.

If the team owned the stadium, the ruling would be a slam-dunk touchdown. As a private entity, the Buccaneers have the right to put in place such a security measure. If you don’t like it, don’t buy a ticket to the game. It’s that simple.

The court relied on the correct notion that there is no “constitutional right to watch a football game”. But the city placed itself in charge of how fans may partake of that activity. Perhaps the city has evidence to suggest its stadium is at high-risk of an incident. Watching Black Sunday one too many times doesn’t count. When it (incorrectly) controls access in this manner, it should have a higher burden than fans are aware of the search policy in advance and that tickets can be revoked by the team.

This case stinks of all that is wrong in public financing of preferred private ventures.

History will wonder why all businesses employ 14 people.

Sen. Barack Obama hates liberty. And economics. And jobs. And health care. There’s no other way to describe the eventual outcome of his fantasy world where wishes lead to outcome.

Mr. Obama would pay for his plan by allowing President Bush’s tax cuts for the most affluent Americans — those making over $250,000 a year — to expire. Officials estimated that the net cost of the plan to the federal government would be $50 billion to $65 billion a year, when fully phased in.

The Obama proposal includes a new requirement that employers either provide coverage to their employees or pay the government a set proportion of their payroll to provide it. …

Obama advisers said the smallest businesses would be exempt from this requirement. The advisers said that those business might have under 15 employees, but that no number has been set.

And on it goes with the make-believe. Soak the rich. Corporations are evil. Government can solve every problem if given enough money. Why can’t progressives make some progress in understanding economics?

I’m sure I’ll have more later on this. For now, it’s late, so let it stand that this is a bad idea and will lead to reduced employment, less health care, and lower quality. That’s not a perfect trifecta for a man who wants to lead our country.

I can excuse a lot in voting, but I don’t let ignorance slide. Sen. Obama will not receive my vote in 2008.

Government cares with our money.

Here’s the fundamental flaw in how politician’s think, summed up in the course of discussing the $2,900,000,000,000 budget proposed by Congressional Democrats:

… said House Appropriations Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.). “I haven’t had too many people grab me back home and say, ‘Obey, why don’t you come to your senses and cut cancer research?’ That’s what the president’s budget has done for the past two years, and that’s what it would do again.”

Rep. Obey deceives. Accept this budget or you hate cancer research. That’s an unfair assessment. Everyone wants to find cures for cancer. It’s an undeniably “good” cause. But Rep. Obey makes the assumption that something everyone wants will not happen without the point of the government’s gun commandeering money from Americans and spending it on cancer research. He doesn’t trust people to spend their money on the things he wants they want.

Can you spot the phrase meant for Google?

There’s an obvious solution to these types of lawsuits:

A [twelve-year-old] girl and her grandparents have sued the Chicago Board of Education, alleging that a substitute teacher showed the R-rated film “Brokeback Mountain” in class.

Whether or not Brokeback Mountain is appropriate for a twelve-year-old is valid decision for parents. Here, it was probably stupid. Of course, seeking $500,000 in damages is also stupid.

Ultimately, I don’t care about the details. This is more important.

“It is very important to me that my children not be exposed to this,” said Kenneth Richardson, Turner’s guardian. “The teacher knew she was not supposed to do this.”
…

“This was the last straw,” he said. “I feel the lawsuit was necessary because of the warning I had already given them on the literature they were giving out to children to read.”

End public provision of education. Allow parents to educate their children at the private school of their choice and the odds that parental wishes won’t be honored will decrease. I don’t think it’s a big deal if a kid sees an occasional curse word in literature, but I understand that not all parents agree. Different parents want different amounts of cultural scrubbing. So, yeah, one size doesn’t fit all. Let’s have that guide us, not whether or not Jake Gyllenhaal’s ass is educational.

Are we funding computers, as well?

From a few days ago:

Members of a House committee charged yesterday that a five-year, $1.2 billion program to expand broadband Internet services to rural communities has missed many unserved areas while channeling hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidized loans to companies in places where service already exists.

There’s not much shock there, of course, as success is in the details and government doesn’t handle details well, always forgetting the law of unintended consequences. Instead, it’s more fun to follow the words of members of Congress.

“If you don’t fix this, I guarantee you this committee will,” House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin C. Peterson (D-Minn.) told James M. Andrew, administrator of the Rural Utilities Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “I don’t know why it should be this hard.”
…

Last week, Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-S.D.) introduced legislation to close loopholes that allow areas that “are neither rural nor suffer a lack of service” to collect the loans and loan guarantees.

Congress shouldn’t have created this mess. It did. And now it’s blaming the USDA while implying that somehow the same people who messed this up can fix the problem now that it exists. It’s an absurd but classic move for a politician, demonstrating that politicians aren’t leaders.

Of course, the true discussion here is whether or not this program should be funded at the federal level. It shouldn’t. Broadband access to The Internets is not a public good. Still, for anyone who believes this is a public good worthy of being on the federal dole, consider:

Congress created the rural broadband program in 2002. To date, according to Andrew, 69 loans for $1.2 billion have been approved to finance infrastructure in 40 states. Only 40 percent of the communities benefiting were unserved at the time of the loan, Andrew said.

Forty percent. That’s good if it’s the success rate for a hitter in baseball. With everything else, it’s miserable. And we’re not even analyzing how successful that forty percent has been compared to what would happen with private efforts, assuming that private industry would deem it necessary. Heckuva job.

New meaning to “elective” surgery.

Does this sound like it’s based on principle or politics?

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was part of the last significant effort to overhaul the system during her husband’s administration. That attempt failed, but the Democratic candidates said Saturday that the conditions exist to push for dramatic change.

But Clinton warned that getting there would still be difficult. “We don’t just need candidates to have a plan,” she said. “All of them have plans. We need a movement. We need people to make this the number one voting issue in the ’08 election.”

At least Sen. Obama had the decency to speak of “the need to solve the problem now,” although I’m sure his solution will involve the kind of theft proposed by John Edwards. Instead, Sen. Clinton made a transparent plea about getting elected above any need to debate the merits of this “problem.”

I can’t imagine any of these candidates getting my vote in 2008.

Congress legislates against fixing a problem it created.

What is the government qualified to do?

Stored in such places as the vacant land near an airfield in Hope, Ark., an industrial park in Cumberland, Md., and a warehouse in Edison, N.J., are the results of one of the federal government’s costliest stumbles in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — tens of thousands of empty trailers.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency hurriedly bought 145,000 trailers and mobile homes just before and after Katrina hit, spending $2.7 billion largely through no-bid contracts. Now, it is selling off as many as 41,000 of the homes, netting, so far, about 40 cents on each dollar spent by taxpayers.
…

FEMA cannot sell unused mobile homes directly to the public because of legislation passed by Congress in October at the industry’s urging. Instead, the agency must now go through a time-consuming process of trying to donate them first to federal, state and local agencies and public service groups, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute’s Web site.

Remind me why I should be enthusiastic about government-managed health care or schools or . Every process becomes politicized and designed to protect he who lobbies hardest and with the most cash. This is not the fault of the money. Politicians are corrupt. They should not be allowed near any task that isn’t in the Constitution.

“While FEMA has 8,420 brand new, fully furnished, never-used mobile homes in a cow pasture in Hope, Arkansas, they refuse to provide the people from Desha, Back Gate and Dumas counties with help. This is crazy,” said Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.). “If this is the new and improved FEMA, I don’t want any part of it.”

Fair enough, but if it worked as Rep. Ross wants, I wouldn’t want any part of it. That’s the point of not having the government meddle in things it’s not capable of doing. Someone will be abused. Keep out, expect people to be responsible, and let the private market take care of those who can’t or won’t. It’s rough, but it can’t be worse than the mess we have now.

“Soak the rich” is not shared responsibility.

I haven’t had time to work my way through John Edwards’ proposed health plan (pdf), but I’ve read enough to know that it’s a preposterous joke that would end in fully socialized health care. No thanks. But instead of summarizing such a silly idea, I’d rather briefly explore Ezra Klein’s analysis of the plan. (Link courtesy of Balloon Juice.) I suspect it’s a fair representation of a good swath of left-leaning liberals who buy into the economically unsound view sold by most prominent Democrats. Consider:

In other words, the public sector will finally be allowed to compete with the private sector, and consumers will be able to decide which style they prefer. For Democrats, this is a significant step forward. From there, the plan offers the usual mix of sliding subsidies to ensure affordability, individual mandate to universalize coverage, pay-for-performance promises, and public health fixes. You’ve heard those bits before. What’s new, and what’s important, are the community rated health markets that include public insurance. Indeed, the plan satisfied every plank of my progressive health reform test from last week.

The plan will cost between $90 billion and $120 billion a year, and according to Edwards, taxes will have to be raised to pay for it. Readers should remember that this is the first full health reform plan from a major candidate in the 2008 election. As such, it has widened the field of the debate, and unless the other candidates want to explain why they lack the boldness of Edwards’ plan, they’ll have to offer similarly comprehensive proposals. What they will have to match is full community rating, a public insurance option, total universality, scaleability towards more public involvement, and a willingness to propose something comprehensive enough to require revenue increases to fund. In other words: The goalposts have been moved. To the left.

I don’t like this at all. The public sector has no business competing with the private sector. Aside from the centuries of data demonstrating that private markets work better, the public sector isn’t tasked with such endeavors. It must tackle public concerns like national defense. Individual choices of managing personal risk is entirely different. The public sector can’t know what my preference is for medical insurance. Inevitably, I will be forced to pay for something I don’t want or need, or I will be forced to pay for something for someone else that I don’t believe is appropriate. Why should a third-party be involved in that decision?

From what I’ve seen of Mr. Edwards’ tax plans with respect to health coverage, he believes that the rich should pay more and that the IRS can find unpaid taxes to minimize the new burden. Nonsense on both counts. The “rich” have no obligation to the “poor,” just as no man has any specific obligation to another man. That’s what individual, private sector transactions are for. People can create their own network of obligations and commitments. With such a radical shift, and massive increase in the tax burden of a few, those proposing such a change must prove why their new path is justified. If consumers can decide which version they prefer, why will some still get stuck with the bill for those who prefer the other? Using the barrel of a government gun to make me pay for someone else’s choices is wrong, regardless of how much money I make.

Of course, Mr. Klein’s entire premise is absurd, so everything preceding his final point adds little but easy counter-arguments. “Comprehensive enough to require revenue increases” is an ideological assumption, not a practical foundation. It shouldn’t be hard to see the byzantine mess that can evolve if bold vision requires only greater revenue. Too many supporting universal, taxpayer-funded health care seem confused that poor people receiving inadequate care and groups of people lacking health insurance are the same problem. They are not. You can solve one in this debate. Either everyone gets coverage and medical care becomes rationed, or people in need of medical care who can’t pay for it get the specific, immediate care they need, with the question of who pays being a separate discussion. If it’s the latter, this babble about universal health care is a utopian dream. If it’s the former, why do supporters believe that worse health care for most Americans is justifiable to give poor people what they’re generally already getting?

The short version is better. Wishing it so and making it so aren’t the same action.

Fiscal Denial

The Wall Street Journal’s blatant partisan blinders never stops driving me nuts amusing me. From today:

Politicians are typically late in picking up trends, so it will be interesting to see how long it takes Washington to acknowledge the big story in the Fiscal 2008 budget that President Bush unveiled yesterday: To wit, with a little spending restraint, Congress could balance the budget in no time.

Or President Bush could stop signing the spending increases. I’ve read that it can work as a constitutionally-provided strategy.

The news Mr. [Kent] Conrad won’t broadcast is that over the past three years the federal deficit has shrunk by 58%. The Congressional Budget Office–not the White House–is estimating that the current year’s deficit (for fiscal 2007) will fall to $172 billion. That’s not bad given continuing Katrina relief spending, $30 billion for homeland security, and a couple hundred billion or so to fight the war on terror.

Only a partisan would offer the White House credit for (not really) proposing to (partially) clean up a mess it created. But the best bit arrives in the conclusion:

The best news in yesterday’s budget may be that Mr. Bush seems to be rediscovering some fiscal nerve. His proposals won’t raise taxes, while using the power of the market to combat problems in health care, and putting a tight leash on domestic discretionary programs. Defense gets the bulk of spending increases, as it should in a time of war. Maybe we’ll finally get a debate over national spending priorities.

A tight leash on discretionary spending? Not so much, when analyzing the numbers honestly. Holding on tightly when the leash is fully extended is not what the Journal’s editors are saying, but it’s much closer to the truth. And about that war… America has expressed how it feels about the war and the current “extra more of the same” strategy. It’s logical to infer that it wants to fund that with a budget increase? How?

I don’t know how serious this is.

If you need to break the oppressive chain blocking you from using someone else’s property on your own terms, resourceful individuals are working to make sure you can have whatever you want. Behold the WiFi Liberator:

Wifi Liberator is an open-source toolkit for a laptop computer that enables its user to “liberate” pay-per-use wireless networks and create a free, open node that anyone can connect to for Internet access. The project is presented as a challenge to existing corporate or “locked” private wireless nodes to encourage the proliferation of free networks and connectivity across the planet. The project was inspired by the ongoing “battle” between providers broadcasting wireless signals in public spaces, in particular: corporate entities, wireless community groups, individual users, and proponents of open networks. Like my Wifi-Hog project, the Wifi-Liberator critically examines the tensions between providers trying to profit from the increasingly minimal costs associated with setting up a public network and casual users who simply want to see the Internet transform into another “public utility” and become as ubiquitous and free as the air we breath. The project targets pay-per-use wireless networks as often found in airports, other public terminals, hotels, global-chain coffee shops, and other public waiting points.

I’ve traditionally recognized such liberation as theft.

It’s irrelevant how minimal the costs associated with setting up a public network happens to be. Price and value include more than just expense. Bandwidth supply is not unlimited at any one point. For users who have a critical need, however legitimate, they can have the access they need if they’ll pay the price. Casual users need not pay or use the service if they don’t like the price. If it’s not profitable because enough people won’t pay to cover those minimal cost, the business will adjust or die. As long as there’s a profitable model, someone will find it. That is how (closer to) free access should and will arrive.

Via Boing Boing