When you systematically reward failure, incompetence and irresponsibility…what results should you expect?
QE – Toxic Asset Government Purchases
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Category: too much government
Government failure checklist. . .
Reference:
The Government Poisoned Flint’s Water—
So Stop Blaming Everyone Else
Flint’s water crisis isn’t a failure of austerity. It’s a failure of government.
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People who spend other people’s money in Indiana are applauding their amazing ability to write big checks and hand them out.
The Regional Cities initiative — enacted by the Republican legislature and heralded by the Republican governor — just awarded grants of $42 million of taxpayer dough to three of seven county consortia in the Hoosier State.
“This is big. This is a big deal in Indiana,” Gov. Mike Pence told reporters, “and I believe it’s part of a third century strategy for growth that will pay dividends for generations.”
Really? Government redistribution will fuel “growth” . . . and “pay dividends”?
The more-spending “strategy” is “geared toward quality of life projects ranging from economic development and job creation, to improved recreational and arts opportunities,” according to WNDU-TV in South Bend, adding that, “The Regional Cities Initiative is aimed at the younger generation and giving those people more reasons to love — than leave the state.”
Love it or leave it, eh?
“The public has been told that we have some sort of $42-million jackpot to spend on wonderful things,” explains Fort Wayne City Councilman Jason Arp in his Indiana Policy Review. “What hasn’t been made clear is that with the award comes [an] obligation not only to match that $42 million with taxpayer and private money but a separate eight-year commitment to a portfolio of $1.4 billion in projects. . . .”
In other words, it’s a classic government-spends-our-money-better-than-we-can program.
The Regional Development Authority will, in the end, “have discouraged actual entrepreneurship, innovation and free enterprise,” Arp explains. In their place? A “sort of unaccountable directorate.”
Growing ever bigger to better spend our hard-earned dough.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Bernie Sanders has risen in the polls. He may even beat Hillary Clinton in the first caucus and primary contests for the Democratic presidential nomination.
A cause for celebration! Witnessing a huge hunk of Americans accept Mrs. Clinton, the consummate and corrupt insider, is too disheartening.
Bernie Sanders, for all his faults, is at least not an insider like Hillary.
And even when he’s obviously wrong, he’s a breath of fresh atmosphere. Take his recent call for turning the credit ratings institutions into non-profits, or into government-run bureaus. It’s good to hear someone on the left blame something other than the partial repeal of Glass-Steagall as the cause of the Crash of 2008, and (thus?) of the current “Great Recession.” Glass-Steagall was utterly irrelevant to the institutions that were hit hardest in 2008’s collapse; it has, nevertheless, served as leftists’ idée fixe for years now. Embarrassing.
The ratings agencies, on the other hand, did play a part in the crash.
Still, remember: their prominence and importance (and very existence) in financial sectors rests entirely upon one provision of FDR’s New Deal.
More importantly, Bernie’s favored solution — government bureaus — is no solution at all. Europe’s ratings system failed in 2008, too, as Mark A. Calabria has noted, and “it was the international financial regulators, not the rating agencies, who decided that Greek debt was ‘risk-free.’”
Earth to Bernie: government regulatory failure is normal.
Calabria agrees that we need to have a political conversation about the ratings agencies, but insists it be “based on facts,” not ideology.
I’m all for the facts, but ideologies are inevitable. And ideologies promoting Big Government inevitably fail.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Would your favorite presidential candidate force women to register for the military draft?
A federal court case, National Coalition for Men v. Selective Service System, is bouncing around the Ninth Circuit. It challenges the male-only draft registration program as discriminatory against men.
Thirty-five years ago, when yours truly was fighting the draft, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a male-only program because women were then barred from combat. Now the All-Volunteer Force has opened all military fields to women, including combat roles. It follows that the federal courts will likely strike down male-only registration.
What will Congress do? What will the next commander-in-chief advocate? Allow the program to end — or mandate that both young men and young women register?
Hillary Clinton answered this question in 2008, during her first run for the presidency: yes, register women for the military draft.
What about the other presidential hopefuls?
Back in 1980, then-candidate Ronald Reagan pledged to end it, saying that conscription (and registration for it) “destroys the very values our society is committed to defending.”
Sadly, President Reagan continued draft registration, prosecuting me and others.
“The question is nothing less, than whether the most essential rights of personal liberty shall be surrendered,” the great Daniel Webster railed against conscription, “and despotism embraced in its worst form.”
Men and women have an equal right to freedom — not conscription. Free people will always volunteer to defend their country.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Bernie Sanders promises universal health care, but, up until the other day, just waved his hands in the air, without specifics. Now he has a plan.
Sort of.
Ezra Klein, writing at Vox, says Sanders’s “Medicare for All” is not a plan at all. It’s a “gesture towards a future plan.”
But that doesn’t mean that the thing isn’t “well sold.”
After praising the Obamacare/Affordable Health Care Act for giving “health insurance” to more than 17 million people, the preamble of Sanders’s proposal made its most predictable statement: “Twenty-nine million Americans today still do not have health insurance and millions more are underinsured and cannot afford the high copayments and deductibles charged by private health insurance companies that put profits before people.”
Forget that deductibles are integral to the very idea of insurance. Forget that profits are absolutely necessary for the success of an industry. Forget that profits come from serving people.
Remember, instead, the leftist clichés.
Sanders’s plan, such as it is, is a lie — or, in Klein’s phrasing, “has nothing to do with Medicare.” Sanders aims to get rid of deductibles and copays, on which Medicare depends. It’s what makes Medicare distinct from, say, socialized medicine.
Insurance covers individually unforeseeable but actuarially manageable risks. Socialized medicine gets rid of the idea of “payment for service” on every level — and thus the very idea of insurance — and turns the whole thing over into a tax-and-spend program, i.e., what Sanders really wants.
That won’t be cheap, as Megan McArdle demonstrated some time back during the Vermont “single payer” kerfuffle.
The only option for increasing value while lowering prices? Go the opposite direction from socialism.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
