Right and left agree: they know what's good for you

Speaking of welfare in the form of cash transfers, Gabriel Rossman notes,

...there is an implicit, pan-ideological consensus that transfers are about society providing the poor with that which we deem it appropriate for them to have and not that which they would purchase themselves if they had the money.

Democrats unanimous for corporate welfare

Sallie James notes,

the U.S. Senate in a 78 to 20 vote elected to follow the House’s lead (330 to 93, in that case) to re-authorize, with a bigger budget, the Export-Import Bank of the United States until 2014.

Even though, as she links to Brian Darling, who reminds us, on September 22, 2008, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)

talked about duplication in government programs and advocated cutting those programs.  The Senator hammered the Export-Import Bank “that’s become little more than a fund for corporate welfare.” 

Illinois judges

From an editorial in the Chicago Tribune:

[Illinois judges] sued former Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the Legislature in 2003 after he stripped their automatic 3 percent cost-of-living pay increases from the budget, saying Illinois taxpayers couldn't afford them.

So the judges went to court, and some of the judges got to rule:

A circuit court ruled in favor of the judges.

And the Illinois Supreme Court, which heard the case on an expedited schedule (of course it did!), ruled in favor of the judges.

Fast-forward to 2012: Illinois judges remain among the top-paid in the nation. They earn generous pension benefits and, thanks to the Jorgensen case, get their guaranteed 3 percent cost-of-living increases every year.

If the judges file suit to preserve free retiree health care for themselves, will they again rule in their own favor?

Man, I'd like to see that guaranteed 3%, not to mention the free health care.

Crony capitalists unite!

Timothy P.Carney writes,

Obama's closeness to subsidized industrial giants General Electric and Boeing (the CEOs of both of these companies are top advisers) and his ties to solar and wind companies (the top investor in Solyndra was an Obama campaign bundler) undermines Obama's anti-special-interest rhetoric and highlights how government intervention ends up benefiting the biggest and most connected companies.

Republicans have hinted that they will run against the collusion of Big Business and Big Government. Romney, after winning the Pennsylvania primary last month, pledged, through restoring free markets, to "stop the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends' businesses."

Congressional Republicans have launched investigations into the Solyndra deal. "Crony capitalism" has become a common phrase on the GOP campaign trail.

So Ex-Im, a naked example of corporate welfare mostly benefiting one giant corporation, presented a great opportunity for a Republican fight. As President Obama campaigned hard for reauthorization of Ex-Im, free-market institutions in Washington called for abolition....

But the business lobby is almost unanimously agreed in the opposite direction. The Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, Business Roundtable, American Petroleum Institute and most big businesses have lobbied to reauthorize the agency and raise the lending cap to $140 billion.

On Wednesday, House Republicans sided with their business base over their conservative base -- 147 House Republicans, including the entire leadership, voted for reauthorization, compared with 93 nays.

Who says the Republicans never agree with Obama?

Still not done with war

Peter Maass writes,

One of the scariest developments of the post-9/11 era isn’t the challenge to constitutional principles by the Bush administration—though many of these challenges were indeed quite worrisome—but their extension by the Obama administration, when one of Bush’s land wars is already over and the other looks to be wound down relatively soon. The organization that attacked the country, Al Qaeda, has been all but dismantled and its leader killed. If the war that began on 9/11 might have had a surrender-on-the-deck-of-the-Missouri moment, the death of Osama bin Laden should have been it. Yet that moment has passed. The New York Police Department has felt no need to apologize for its recently revealed surveillance of Muslim students during a whitewater rafting trip upstate.

Indeed, how can we explain the wartime-like secrecy about the use of weaponized drones? The government refuses to explain attacks that have been widely reported, even attacks in Yemen that, in a remarkable challenge to constitutional notions of due process, killed three American citizens (Anwar al-Awlaki, AbdulRahman al-Awlaki and Samir Khan). Dudziak provides a clue in her observation that the cold war was perpetuated not only by the activities of the Soviet Union but also by domestic politics. “National security became a tool of partisan politics,” she writes. “Domestic and often partisan political discourse can be more important to public opinion on military conflict than international events themselves.” The Obama administration may believe that there is a genuine national security need to continue Bush-era policies, but there’s also a domestic political benefit to doing so. By perpetuating the wartime of 9/11, Obama cannot be accused of failing to perpetuate it. The only way Republicans can criticize him for being “soft” on Muslim terrorism is to pivot to Iran and urge an attack on its nuclear facilities. The position is so extreme that, though useful in the primaries, it may hurt the Republican nominee in the general election. These days, we prefer that wartime not involve a land war.

What you think you know is wrong

In the absence of publicized regulations like traffic laws, the elevation of shared knowledge to common knowledge can be unpredictable, even chaotic. Outlandish fashions, surprise bestsellers, dark-horse candidates, currency hyperinflations, and asset bubbles and crashes are all cases in which people behave according to the way they expect other people to expect other people to expect other people to behave. The craving for common knowledge can even lead to a false consensus, in which everyone is convinced that everyone believes something, and believes that everyone else believes that they believe it, but in fact no one actually believes it.

From "Usage in The American Heritage Dictionary" by Steven Pinker.

How much will retirees have to pay for insurance? (II)

Why seven tiers?

According to the Illinois State Universities Annuitants Association (SUAA):

As sited [sic] from a memo to Rep. Tom Cross from CMS which is to be a part of the record this
Amendment allows:

• the Director of CMS to set the premiums that are paid by retirees in the Group Health Insurance Program every year.   
• the proposed retiree contributions will pay a percentage of their healthcare costs on a sliding scale. The scale is based on (1) length of service, and (2) ability to pay.   
• the percentage of cost the retiree will pay will also be based on his or her pension level. Pension amounts will be broken up into seven tiers; the higher the tier, the more the retiree will pay.  
• retirees who are eligible for Medicare (generally 65 years old and above) cost the state substantially less than those who are not on Medicare. Since the contributions will be based on paying a percent of the cost of care for the state, those retirees on Medicare will pay significantly less than those (generally younger and still working) who are not.  
• those who have already retired when this plan goes into effect will pay based on their ability to pay, but will be given service credit at the highest level. However, regardless of the contribution amount determined under those rules, the new plan contribution will not be less for any retiree than the amount they contribute under the current policy.

Why seven tiers?

Leviathan

Glenn Greenwald on the American Leviathan:

...like almost all of the most consequential and destructive policies — endless war, the Drug War, the sprawling and barbaric American prison state — the domestic Surveillance State expands with equal fervor under both Democratic and Republicans administrations, and opposing it thus affords no partisan gain and it is therefore entirely off the table of debate. In lieu of any dispute over these types of actually consequential government policies, we instead endure a series of trivial weekly scandals that numb the brain, distract attention, and produce acrimony as virulent and divisive as it is petty.

Pew Research Center: the media virtually ignored Ron Paul.

Ron Paul enjoyed the most consistently positive portrayal of any candidate in the race. But that was offset by the fact that the media virtually ignored him.

How much will retirees have to pay for insurance?

Bill to cut state-subsidized health care advances

A House committee moved today to end a guarantee that the state will subsidize retiree health care.... Instead, Central Management Services would present a premium that retired state employees, university employees, lawmakers and judges would have to pay.

Who know if this will pass. If it does, I hope they use the Illinois Policy Institute's suggestion.

Why Republicans never want to compromise

People always complain about how Republicans never want to compromise and trade tax hikes now for spending cuts in the future. Yet as John Hinderaker writes, Spending cuts? Never today, always tomorrow.

a more nuanced portrait of George Zimmerman

a more nuanced portrait of Zimmerman has emerged from a Reuters investigation

Obama saves jobs--at nearly a million dollars each:

President Obama was so proud of the jobs saved by shutting off imports of Chinese tires he cited the action in his 2012 State of the Union Address. According to analysts Gary Hufbauer and Sean Lowry of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, known for its support of free trade, the victory had a heck of a cost: at least $936,000 for each job saved.

Child labor wasn't always slavery. As Lawrence Reed wrote some time ago:

Professor Ludwig von Mises, the great Austrian economist; put it well when he noted that the generally deplorable conditions extant for centuries before the Industrial Revolution, and the low levels of productivity which created them, caused families to embrace the new opportunities the factories represented: “It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.”^[3]

Private factory owners could not forcibly subjugate “free-labour” children; they could not compel them to work in conditions their parents found unacceptable. The mass exodus from the socialist Continent to increasingly capitalist, industrial Britain in the first half of the 19th century strongly suggests that people did indeed find the industrial order an attractive alternative. And no credible evidence exists which argues that parents in these early capitalist days were any less caring of their offspring than those of pre-capitalist times.

The situation, however, was much different for “apprentice” children, and close examination reveals that it was these children on whom the critics were focusing when they spoke of the “evils” of capitalism’s Industrial Revolution. These youngsters, it turns out, were under the direct authority and supervision not of their parents in a free labor market, but of government officials. Many were orphans; a few were victims of negligent parents or parents whose health or lack of skills kept them from earning sufficient income to care for a family. All were in the custody of “parish authorities.”

The situation is not dissimilar from so-called "exploited" workers.

3.   Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949). p. 615. 

Doug Bandow writes of America’s bipartisan statist consensus

Although politicians on both sides of the aisle like to pose as defenders of constitutional liberties, leaders of both parties have consistently supported more expansive government. Despite the odd exception here or there, members of America’s political class have enthusiastically promoted the relentless growth of government.

...

Most Democrats don’t even voice the verities of limited government and individual liberty. Their answer to every problem is to raise taxes. In their view, there is no human vice which should not be fixed by the national government. Moreover, government is supposed to enrich business and every other interest group.

Democrats also believe in international social engineering—through war, if necessary. There may be a few genuine pacifists on the Left, but they possess no political power, while the Lyndon Johnsons, Bill Clintons, and Barack Obamas bomb, invade, and occupy other nations whenever the Zeitgeist strikes.

Only in one area does the Democratic Party seemingly believe in freedom: to have sex. People can be prohibited from smoking, making contracts, and speaking incorrectly. Their money can be seized and wasted for the most bizarre and ludicrous purposes. People can be conscripted and forced to kill. However, Americans must be allowed to have sex, preferably with publicly subsidized contraceptives. That is, for Democrats, the essence of a free society.

President Obama enthusiastically and eloquently represents the modern Democratic Party.

Most Republicans, in contrast, chatter endlessly about their commitment to limited government and individual liberty. And the majority of Republicans prefer not to raise taxes. But there the differences with Democrats end. When it comes to most practical policies, the disagreements quickly vanish into nothingness.

For Republicans, only a few human vices should not be fixed by the national government. Like smoking. But Uncle Sam should crusade against other drugs, battle the scourge of pornography, and make us all moral. Moreover, government is supposed to enrich business and other favored interest groups, only those which contributed to the GOP instead of the Democratic Party.

And then he details the faults of both Obama and Romney.

Higher taxes, but not for me

Shikha Dalmia writes,

Obama’s latest tax returns show that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary, just like his billionaire buddy Warren Buffett. Buffett created a stir last year — spearheading the Buffett Rule — when he complained in an op-ed that he was not being taxed enough. His secretary paid a whopping 35.8 percent tax rate on her $60,000 annual income, while he paid a paltry 17.4 percent rate on his multimillions. There is some fuzzy math involved in this claim. But if this inequity was Buffett’s real concern — as opposed to doing quid-pro-quo propaganda for the billions in bailout money that he received from Obama — he could have simply gone to the Treasury website and voluntarily paid more taxes.

If Buffett has trouble putting his money where his mouth is, he’s not alone. Obama’s tax returns (released last week) show that he paid a 20 percent effective tax rate on his $790,000 income — slightly lower than his secretary’s and a whole four points lower than the average rate for people in his income category. He could have easily avoided this by filing his tax returns the way he advocates millionaires do — by forgoing all deductions. But he didn’t. Not only did he claim a $47,564 mortgage deduction on his $1.6 million home in Chicago, he also claimed tax breaks on the $172,130 — about 22 percent of his gross adjusted income — he gave to charity...

It almost seems that the president would rather give his money to literally anyone but the government. He didn’t break any laws in the process, but many of his fellow tax-and-spend liberals in fact do. Indeed, Buffett himself is engaged in dueling lawsuits with the IRS over nearly $1 billion in unpaid back taxes. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner conveniently forgot to pay his taxes (even though the International Monetary Fund, his employer, gave him the money to do so). And in 2010, 41 White House aides owed $831,000 in unpaid taxes.

Gu Kailai is no Jackie Kennedy

This is from a couple of weeks ago, but I only now just noticed the dubious contention that Gu Kailai 谷開來was known by the Chinese as "China's Jackie Kennedy".
It seems to have first surfaced here:

The wife of sacked Communist Party official Bo Xilai made quite an impression when she showed up in Mobile, Ala., 15 years ago with her young son in tow. Denver lawyer Ed Byrne, whom she had hired to represent Chinese companies embroiled in a legal mess in U.S. federal court, was struck by her brains, charm and beauty. Gu Kailai, he says, seemed like the "Jackie Kennedy of China."

and then been embellished here:

Mr Byrne...worked with Ms Gu - whom he knew by the name of Horus Kai - on a number of other cases, meeting her in both the US and Dalian.

He also met her husband and was an "honoured" guest at lunches and dinners.

"People likened her and her husband to the Jack and Jackie Kennedy of China. They were the modern liberal element there."

I never understood the adulation for Jackie Kennedy, but this is ridiculous. Even if like Ed Byrne the Chinese were smitten with Gu Kailai's supposed glamour, few of them are likely to have even heard of Jackie Kennedy (or Jacqueline Kennedy or Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). And certainly to have been impressed by the Kennedy glamour, one would have to have been around in the 1960's, but at that time the Chinese weren't able to access foreign news. I'm afraid this tells us more about Ed Byrne than it does about Gu Kailai's image. (Also, he has a curious idea of what "liberal" means.)

Worse, the fact that the WSJ, the BBC, CNN and others have picked up this meme reveals a lot about lazy reporters.

Illinois’ unfunded liability for retiree health care

Aside from the $83 billion Illinois state government owes to the pension plans it operates for retired employees, the state has an unfunded liability to provide health insurance for pensioners, totaling more than $54 billion. The Illinois Policy Institute suggests

basing premium subsidies on income, age at retirement and years of service. Lifelong public workers collecting modest retirement incomes would largely see their insurance subsidies remain the same, but former union bosses or university executives collecting annual pensions nearing $200,000 would be required to cover their own health insurance costs. Moving forward, the state could reduce this liability further by capping subsidies to new retirees at supplement levels and by phasing out subsidies for new hires altogether.

It sounds like a no-brainer to me.

The most fairest, most moral system in the world

Senator Jon Kyl:

Free market capitalism is the most fair system in the world--and the most moral. It is premised on voluntary transactions that make both sides happy by meeting their needs. Unfortunately, the past few years have shown us what unfair economic policies look like. When the government picks winners and losers in the marketplace, it is being unfair. When it rewards certain companies or industries for ideological reasons while effectively punishing and demonizing others, it is being unfair. That is crony capitalism. When it shapes a corporate bailout to favor organized labor over secured debtholders, as the Obama administration did in the Chrysler bailout, it is being unfair. When it plays venture capitalist and gives a taxpayer-funded $545 million loan guarantee to a doomed company such as Solyndra, it is being unfair. When it makes the Tax Code even more complex and even more tilted in favor of special interests, it is being unfair. When it adopts financial regulations that institutionalize "too big to fail," putting taxpayers on the hook, it is being unfair. I could go on, but you get the point. Does anyone really think America's economic system is "fairer" today than in January 2009?

Yes, I'd say "fairest", but otherwise, this is spot on. (Of course, I suspect there's been a certain amount of Republican tinkering with the tax code, too.)

The rationale was that government employees would do a better job for less money.

The result? D.C. Escalator Nightmare