Category: porkbarrel politics

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Accountability folly general freedom moral hazard porkbarrel politics property rights responsibility tax policy too much government

No Rich No More

Connecticut, taxes, revenue, budget, tax and spend, wealth, common sense

Connecticut has a budget problem. There’s not enough money to spend.

WTNH-TV in New Haven paraphrased the situation along with the response of Connecticut’s very progressive governor: “Income tax revenue collapses; Malloy says taxing the rich doesn’t work.”

The news story explains, “Connecticut’s state budget woes are compounding with collections from the state income tax collapsing, despite two high-end tax hikes in the past six years.”

Hmmm. Despite the tax increases? Or . . . “because the state of Connecticut depends too much on its wealthy residents,” as the report continued, “and wealthy residents are leaving . . .”

A Yankee Institute report notes that “the exodus of wealth from the state as top earners and businesses relocate to more tax-friendly states” is a major problem. Institute President Carol Platt Liebau calls it a “terrible cycle of tax increases followed by deficits followed by even more tax increases.”

Yet, state legislative Democrats are back pushing more tax hikes on “the rich.” Senate legislation would jack up the tax rate — retroactively — on those with income of $500,000 or more. House legislation would slap a 19 percent surcharge on some hedge fund earnings. In response, the head of the Connecticut Hedge Fund Association testified that his “industry is populated by exactly that type of person that will move based on tax policy.”*

A song by Ten Years After comes to mind:  

Tax the rich, feed the poor
Till there are no rich no more

Doesn’t sound like a good idea even in song.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* It’s worth noting that Gov. Malloy is now “against raising taxes again to fill the deficits and is instead focusing on spending cuts . . .”

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Accountability free trade & free markets initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption moral hazard national politics & policies porkbarrel politics too much government

A Wall of Separation

cronyism, pork, stadium, Tom Hanks, ballot initiative, welfare

Whatever you think of Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, wherein he celebrated the First Amendment for “building a wall of separation between Church & State,” let’s agree that it would have been nice had he penned another letter — to the Waterbury Methodists or someone — urging a wall of separation between Sports and State.

Last week, actor Tom Hanks became another brick in my hoped-for wall. “It’s a billion-dollar industry,” Hanks said of the National Football League.

[T]hey have billion-dollar TV contracts. All the owners are billionaires. And yet when they want to build a stadium they’re going to use for 10 weeks out of the year, they expect the city taxpayers to buy the building.

Hanks is livid. The recent “deal” that lured his beloved Oakland Raiders to Las Vegas included $750 million in public funds to build a $1.9 billion stadium. The Raiders are planning to stay in Oakland for the 2017 and 2018 seasons, while that new stadium is built. “When the Raiders leave,” the beloved star declared, “I am going on an NFL moratorium for two years.”

Unfortunately, Hanks appears more angry that his team is leaving (eventually), than with the principle that taxpayers ought not be ripped off.

Subsidizing businesses is cronyism, not capitalism. It’s even more outrageous when the poor must pay for the rich.

But how to stop it? In every city where citizens can propose ballot initiatives, let’s petition and pass measures requiring a public vote before any such subsidy.

It may not be the great wall I’d prefer, but it’s a high hurdle providing taxpayers some important protection.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability folly free trade & free markets moral hazard national politics & policies porkbarrel politics

Super-Subsidize Me

welfare, taxes, charity, subsidy, subsidize, shrimp, stadium, Tesla

“In American political discourse, those on the side of the sick, poor, and underprivileged tend to favor more federal government intervention,” writes Heartland Institute policy advisor David D’Amato at The Hill. He explains that many “see government as . . . rather like a charity . . .”

Sure, government can act charitably, except that its money isn’t given voluntarily, and the recipients are often not so needy.

Earlier this month, the stock price of electric car company Tesla, Inc. rose high enough to overshadow General Motors. That’s great news for billionaire Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO. But an Investor’s Business Daily editorial noted, “[T]he company is heavily reliant on taxpayer support.”

Who benefits (in addition to Musk)? “A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 90% of electric car subsidies go to the top 20% of households,” the editorial stated. IBD added that it was “a lot of welfare-for-the-rich for very little environmental benefit.”

In addition to funding advanced technology, American taxpayers have spent $6.7 billion over the last few decades to subsidize stadiums for wealthy sports team owners. The latest? In Clark County, Nevada, taxpayers forked over $750 million ($354 for every resident) to bribe — er, bring — the Oakland Raiders to Las Vegas.

The ridiculous Minnesota legislation to feed $5 million in state funds to start two shrimp farms almost seems reasonable in comparison. Almost.

“Maybe growing shrimp in Minnesota is a great idea,” admits John Hinderaker of the Center of the American Experiment. “If so, the owners should do what other small businessmen do: either find investors, or get a bank loan.”

Government’s crony capitalism taxes the poor to give to the rich.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies political challengers porkbarrel politics responsibility too much government

Legislating in the Real World

Steve Bannon, Trump, Freedom Caucus, big government, Ryancare, Trumpcare, Obamacare

Rolling back Big Government is not easy, especially when you are not that into it.

Robert Draper, profiling Steve Bannon in the New York Times, gives us a view into the mind of Trump’s right-hand man, who appears to think GOP insiders are obsessed with principles. “[I]t’s all this theoretical Cato Institute, Austrian economics, limited government — which just doesn’t have any depth to it. They’re not living in the real world.”

At best, this only fits the Freedom Caucus members, who killed RyanCare. But who is avoiding reality, here?

“Bannon clearly is not as familiar with the mindset of congressional Republicans as he imagines,” counters Jeff Deist, head of the “Austrian” Mises Institute. “They are primarily concerned with how the whole ‘repeal and replace’ debacle plays back home.”

Like Deist, I see the spectacular fizzle of RyanCare as evidence of the increasing irrelevance of Republican compromising. “The GOP is the party of trillion dollar military budgets,” Deist insists, noting that it “won’t even kill an openly cronyist program like the Export-Import Bank.”

If keeping Big Government secure is all Republicans can do, what use are they?

“All around us are the almost unimaginable benefits of markets, cooperation, and technology,” Deist explains, “yet somehow we’re naïve if we don’t want to funnel human activity through government cattle chutes.”

Bannon will not secure solid GOP support if he keeps pushing the usual establishment compromises while pretending they are either realistic or revolutionary. Freedom Caucus Republicans seem bent on doing something Republicans usually avoid: change “the real world” for the better by practically limiting government.

Not just in theory.

Bannon seems to have other goals.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability free trade & free markets moral hazard national politics & policies political challengers porkbarrel politics responsibility subsidy too much government

Trump Proposes a Budget

Trump, budget, spending, big government, entitlements, welfare, cuts, pig

Will Donald Trump, infamously successful businessman, actually do something about the federal government’s out-of-control deficits and mounting debt?

Economist Pierre Lemieux, writing in the Financial Post, finds some reason for hope in President Trump’s “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again”:

The proposal to eliminate funding for agencies like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities is welcome. Artists should be able to stand on their own two feet with the support of private sponsors and organizations, of which there are many in America. Lovers of concerts should finance their own passion.

Though Lemieux gives good reason to want to cut “official arts and humanities” subsidies even sans their budgetary implications, imagine the backlash from Democrats, the media and the whole collegiate sector!

Actually, the backlash has already begun.

Can united government under the GOP cut even these most obviously least necessary aspects of government subsidy?

I’m not holding any pockets of air in my two lungs.

“Many monstrous bureaucracies would be reined in,” Lemieux goes on, listing proposed cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency (-31 percent), Department of Labor (-21 percent), and other departments of the so-called “discretionary” budget. But this is all small potatoes. “Really cutting federal expenditures would require reducing the welfare state — which Trump has no intention of doing.”

And the fortunes Trump wishes to throw at the military? No knack for parsimony there.

Though we can expect a little exceptional hack-and-slashery from Trump, Lemieux remains skeptical of any overall major effect.

Get used to ballooning debt.

Like you haven’t already.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment government transparency insider corruption local leaders moral hazard porkbarrel politics term limits

Another Political Crook

Arkansas, Jon Woods, corruption, crime, Micah Neal, term limits

Last week, the other shoe dropped.

When last we touched upon Arkansas state legislator Micah Neal, he had pled guilty to steering hundreds of thousands of state tax dollars to a small private college in exchange for big, fat bribes.

He also implicated the state’s No. 1 term limits opponent, former State Senator Jon Woods, as chief hoodlum in the criminal scheme. Woods is best known for his dishonestly worded 2014 amendment responsible for hoodwinking voters into weakening term limits.*

And it is upon Woods that the shoe fell.

The fingered wheeling-and-dealing Woods, pursued by both the FBI and an angry electorate, chose not to run for re-election in 2016. Now he’s finally been indicted on 13 felony counts of fraud and bribery. Woods helped secure $600,000 in state funds to Ecclesia College, allegedly for tens of thousands in kickbacks.

“I do know this confirms what I’ve always suspected about Jon Woods,” wrote Max Brantley in the Arkansas Times. “He never had a job. He bragged about the good life he lived off state pay, per diem, travel and the hog slopping legislators enjoy. I should mention, too, that he was the architect of the so-called ethics amendment that provided a path to 1) longer terms in office; 2) higher pay; 3) an end-around an end to wining and dining restrictions despite the appearance that’s what voters had done.”

Former Sen. Woods does deserve a longer term . . . in jail.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* State term limits activists are currently gathering the more than 100,000 signatures they need on petitions to place their original, stricter term limits on the 2018 ballot and allow Arkansans an honest vote.

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