Two Blockbuster IRS Annoucements

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Yesterday, in a blockbuster announcement, Thomas Kane, Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel for the IRS, wrote in a sworn lawsuit declaration that former IRS senior manager Lois Lerner’s now infamous BlackBerry was “removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.”

The magnitude of lies, deceit and corruption is incredible isn’t it? But that’s how it is when an out-of-control bureaucracy does the political bidding of Congress.

Thankfully, the FairTax® will eliminate the IRS and replace the income tax code with a simple and fair national sales tax. For the first time in 200 years, the American people will have independence from oppressive income taxation.

Much like when Gandhi sought independence for India and Pakistan and when asked about his non-violent protest in support of that goal he said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

For years, Washington’s elites have ignored, laughed and even fought the FairTax Plan. But as the IRS targeting investigation has unfolded, the laughing has all but stopped and the FairTax is being talked about more and more as a viable alternative to the current tax code.

More importantly, “experts” are openly discussing it as the only tax reform plan that can eliminate a completely corrupt and out-of-control IRS. 

Meanwhile, during this election year, most members of Congress continue to operate with their usual level of arrogance; acting like they own their elected office. Yet, make no mistake; they secretly fear being ousted in any primary election when their electorate finally gets smart. Just ask former Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

The ouster numbers, however, are not currently in favor of We the People.

As the Washington Post stated in June, “Overall, voter turnout among the 25 states that have held primaries is down 18 percent from the 2010 election, according a study by the Center for the Study of the American Electorate. There were almost 123 million age-eligible voters in these primary states, but only about 18 million of them voted.” With an average of 15% of the eligible voters turning out in primary elections, an average of 40,000 voters decided the primary election.

A new initiative in the FairTax campaign aims to change that dynamic. 

We know that Members are most influenced by groups that have large numbers of paying members in their districts. Imagine the influence on just one Congressional district if AFFT had 3,000 paying members who could influence 1, 5, or 10 voters. Now we have their attention!

As a 501(c)(4), AFFT cannot directly participate in political campaigns, but we can let our supporters know if a candidate supports the FairTax Plan. And, those supporters can take that knowledge to the election booth.

Today, AFFT is announcing a new AFFT membership drive designed to increase our sphere of influence in Washington and accelerate passage of the FairTax. 

Each of you is being asked to become a paying member of AFFT. Annual membership plans begin at $5.00 and best of all, your membership payment will be divided equally between AFFT and your state FairTax organization!

Your membership will help fund greater efforts at both the local and national levels. And, in exchange for your paid membership, you will receive a credit in the FairTax.org store equal to 10% of your paid membership.

And here’s how you can multiply your membership impact and AFFT’s ability to make Congress listen. Think of 5 or 10 family members, employees or friends and sponsor them for AFFT membership! Please make sure you let these individuals know in advance that you would like to sponsor their membership so they do not hit “unsubscribe” or “spam” when we begin providing them with information on the FairTax Plan.

You will get store credit, your state will still receive their share of your membership and you will have magnified your impact!

Napoleon Hill said, “You must get involved to have an impact.”

Don’t delay – go to FairTax.org and click on “Become a Member” today.

RELATED ARTICLE: Campaigning Against Tax Inequality

America, Our Debt-Ridden Nation

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Let’s look at just some of the latest news about the U.S. economy:

  1. According to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Services, the federal government paid $2,007,358,200,000—over $2 trillion—in benefits and entitlements in the 2013 fiscal year, October 1, 2012 to September 30, 2013. Most of the benefits, 69.7% came from non-means tested government programs that provide them to recipients who qualify regardless of income. That would include Medicare, Social Security, unemployment compensation, veteran’s compensation, and railroad retirement, to name a few.
  2. The total federal government spending in 2013 totaled $3,454,253,000,000—over $3.4 trillion—encompassing defense, highway and transportation costs, public education, immigration services, and government worker salaries, to name a few.
  3. An astonishing amount of that spending constitutes wasted taxpayer money. In July the Government Accountability Office (CAO) testified before Congress that federal agencies made more than $100 billion in improper payments in 2013. That is an amount comparable to the combined total budgets of the Coast Guard, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and the Federal Emergency Agency, et cetera. Improper payments result when people collect money from government programs for which they are ineligible.
  4. By August, the total U.S. federal debt had increased to more than $7 trillion during the five and a half years since Barack Obama has been President. That is more than the debt increased under all U.S. Presidents from George Washington through Bill Clinton—combined! More debt than was accumulated in the first 227 years from 1776 through 2003.
  5. During the time President Obama has been in office the number of unemployed reached 37.2%, a 36-year high for those 16 or older who do not have a job and are not actively seeking one. From December 2013 through May of this year, the labor participation rate had been at 62.8%. The last time the labor participation rate was that low was February 1978 when Jimmy Carter was President.
  6. As the nation sank deeper into debt by the end of 2012 there were 109,631,000 Americans living in households that were receiving one or more federally funded “means-tested programs”, more generally referred to as welfare. Combined with those receiving non-means-tested benefits and it added up to 49.5% of the population.

Money BombIt is always tempting to blame everything on the President and, despite the usual rebound from a recession that has occurred in the past, it has not occurred during his first term, nor into his second at this point. In fact, the latest data reveals that the U.S. economy shrank at a 2.9% annual rate during the first quarter of 2014. Its long-run average rate of growth has been 3.3%, but the highest since Obama took office was 2.8%.

According to the World Bank, in 2013 the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, the value of its goods and services, was $16,800,000,000,000. The federal, state and governments took their share via taxation on income and/or property. The rest was saved or spent by those either holding a job or receiving government benefits; very nearly half of the population old enough to be employed if there were jobs for them.

The problem that affects all of us is the imbalance of the U.S. budget where more money is going out than coming in. The difference is deemed the “deficit.” In order to pay bills, Congress has to agree to raise the limit on how much the nation can borrow.

Nick Dranias, the constitutional policy director for the Goldwater Institute, has come up with a proposal, “The Compact for a Balanced Budget”, and it was been published by The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank, in July.

As Dranias points out, “The U.S. gross federal debt is approaching $18 trillion. That figure is more than twice what was owed ($8.6 trillion) in 2006, when Barack Obama was a junior U.S. Senator from Illinois and opposed lifting the federal debt limit.” It represents more than $150,000 per taxpayer.

“What if states could advance and ratify a powerful federal balanced budget amendment in only twelve months, asks Dranias. His proposal is “a new approach to state-originated amendments under Article V of the U.S. Constitution.

Two states, Georgia and Alaska, are expected to establish a Balanced Budget Commission, an interstate agency dedicated to organizing a convention—before 2014 ends—to propose an amendment to achieve a balanced budget. The amendment would put “an initially fixed limit on the amount of federal debt.” It would ensure Washington cannot spend more than tax revenue brought in at any point in time, with the sole exception of borrowing under the fixed debt limit. It would force Washington to reduce spending long before borrowing reaches its debt limit, preventing any default on obligations; something threatening many other nations as well.

Suffice to say, the proposed amendment involves some complex elements and, if the Compact does not receive sufficient support from many more states than just the two that have signed on, it won’t see the light of day.

What the rest of us understand, however, is that federal spending is out of control at the same time as the amount of money it takes in is more than what it “redistributes.” Add in a sluggish economy, not growing at its usual rate, and you have a recipe for a lot of trouble ahead.

Republicans are usually credited with being more financially prudent. If true, we need to elect a Congress controlled by the GOP in November and a Republican President in 2016. If we don’t, all bets are off.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

TWO REPORTS: Teachers make up only 50% of all Education Jobs

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Parents, concerned citizens and taxpayers have long been concerned about the growing number of non-teaching jobs in public schools. Taxpayers want their property tax dollars to go primarily to the classroom. Two recent studies show that, overtime, education funding is increasingly going to non-teaching jobs.

Visual Editor at The Daily Signal and digital media associate at The Heritage Foundation, Kelsey Harris reports, “Even though the Obama Administration proposes spending $25 billion specifically to ‘provide support for hundreds of thousands of education jobs’ in order to ‘keep teachers in the classroom,’ research by both Heritage and The Fordham Institute reveal alarming numbers: only half of education jobs belong to teachers.”

The Fordham Institutes Matt Richmond writes, “The number of non-teaching staff in the United States (those employed by school systems but not serving as classroom teachers) has grown by 130 percent since 1970. Non-teachers—more than three million strong—now comprise half of the public school workforce. Their salaries and benefits absorb one-quarter of current education expenditures. ”

To show how teachers are no longer the majority The Fordham Institute and Heritage provide the following four charts and map (NOTE: For a larger view click on the chart/map):

Chart 1 & 2: Only half of education jobs are teachers:

Hidden-Half-Report chart 1

chart2-1 (1)

Chart 3: How education staffing has outpaced student enrollment:

chart1600

Chart 4: The farther a school is from a city, the more non-teaching staff it has:

Hidden half report chart 2

Map showing the number of teachers aides per 1,000 students by state:

Final-National-Map-Web

 

EDITORS NOTE: Click on the chart/map for a larger view.

Miami, FL: Possible FCAT Science Cheating at Crestview Elementary?

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An official complaint has been filed with the Superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools regarding suspected test cheating on the FCAT Science exam at Crestview Elementary School during the 2013-2014 school year. The complaint is based upon a report from Mr. Keith Guthrie.

Guthrie stated he had suspicions about test scores on the Grade 5 FCAT Science exam involving two students (one ESE, the other ESOL). Mrs. Matilda Ysidro, told Guthrie that she witnessed the former Science Coach, and current Grade 5 Science teacher, Ms. Lori Caraccia assisting these two students last school year by “emphasizing” the answers on the science exam.

Guthrie came to me “for direction,” as his case is similar to the test cheating on the Industrial Arts exams at Miami Norland Senior High School in April 2012. Guthrie knew my experience with exposing test cheating. I have also represented Guthrie in past grievances and labor disputes with Crestview administration.

Guthrie told me that the events occurred while Ms. Caraccia was testing these two students for the Grade 5 FCAT Science exam during the last school year. Mrs. Ysidro told Guthrie she walked in on them and observed Ms. Caraccia “emphasizing” the right answers. During a second interview with Guthrie, Ysidro said as students were taking the test, if the student marked the wrong answer, Ms. Caraccia would tell them, “You better check your answer”, in some cases multiple times, until the student marked the right answer before moving on to the next question.

Mr. Guthrie deemed what Mrs. Ysidro told him as credible because the two students in question attended his classes. One student was ESOL, the other ESE, and both students failed his class. Both students hardly participated in class and displayed Level 1 performance on their last FCAT Reading exams. Yet both students scored Level 5 on the Grade 5 FCAT Science exam- a clear disparity between classroom performance and their FCAT Reading scores.

Guthrie said only five (including these two) Grade 5 students scored a Level 5 on the Grade 5 FCAT Science exam.  He knew the other three students; he tested them; and their scores were reflective of their classroom achievement and other test scores.

I advised Mr. Guthrie to email the Florida Department of Education Inspector General. He indicated he would email his complaint. Mr. Guthrie has not contacted the FL DOE IG at the time this column was published.

The Florida Department of Education investigators simply need to obtain the names of the five students who scored a Level 5 on the Grade 5 FCAT Science exam; identify those coded as ESOL and ESE and confirm with Mr. Guthrie that they failed his class.  After the two students, and potentially others, are identified, retest them using a different proctor. As the school went from a “D” to a “C,” and Grade 5 FCAT Science performance shot up from 27% in 2013 to 38% in 2014.

Recently school administrators have been involved in cheating scandals in other states (Atlanta, El Paso, Houston, and Philadelphia). Ms. Caraccia was the Science Coach appointed by the principal and on her leadership team. It will be up to the District, and the FLDOE IG, to determine whether or not school administration was aware of possible cheating (coaching) of these students and, if so, when they knew it.

The dramatic rise in Crestview’s school grade from a “D” to a “C” (Crestview scored 477 points; 42 points above the minimum of 435)  lead to a total a payout of $40,000- $50,000 in teacher incentives from the Florida School Recognition Program.

Hopefully it was an isolated incident, but given that test cheating at Norland went largely unnoticed and unpunished by the FLDOE and by law enforcement, the message is clear that cheating pays.

I am reporting what was told to me by Guthrie. This case is not unlike what happened at Miami Norland Senior High School two years ago.  Only a complete and thorough investigation will get to the bottom of how widespread the test cheating is, as was the case at Norland.

If substantiated, many troubling questions are raised: why is there cheating on different levels within the Norland feeder pattern?  What will the District do about it? Will the people involved go the way of Emmanuel Fleurantin or Brenda Muchnick? Time will tell.

The following is a comparison of FCAT Science test results for Crestview Elementary.

Elementary
School Percentage Passing (Satisfactory and Above)
Grade
Level		 Science
(Achievement Level 3 and Above)
2013 2014
Dade
Top of Form CRESTVIEW ELEMENTARY SCHOOL (1161) Bottom of Form
5 27 38 

 

Elementary
School Percentage Passing (Satisfactory and Above)
Grade
Level		 Reading
(Achievement Level 3 and Above)		 Mathematics
(Achievement Level 3 and Above)		 Science
(Achievement Level 3 and Above)		 Writing Essay
(3.5 and Above)
2013 2014 2013 2014 2013 2014 2013 2014
Dade
Top of Form CRESTVIEW ELEMENTARY SCHOOL (1161) Bottom of Form
3 41 48  40 42  NA NA  NA NA 
4 55 56  61 58  NA NA  42 30 
5 49 55  42 48  27 38  NA NA 

 

INFOGRAPHIC: How Unions Are Chewing Through Taxpayer Dollars

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Nicole Rusenko and Kelsey Harris write and graphically display on The Daily Signal:

Did you know your tax dollars are financing unions?

Thanks to what the federal government calls “official time,” government workers spent 2.4 million hours on union work in 2010. In fact, the Internal Revenue Service alone has 286 full-time employees who work exclusively for the National Treasury Employees Union.

Check out the infographic below for more details on whose special interests (and pockets) your money is going.

WARNING: This infographic may upset your stomach and shrink your wallet.

OfficialTime_Infographic_Rusenko-011

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Nicole Rusenko Nicole Rusenko@ncrusen20

Nicole Rusenko is a senior designer at The Heritage Foundation.

 

Portrait of Kelsey Harris

Kelsey Harris
Kelsey Harris is the visual editor at The Daily Signal and digital media associate at The Heritage Foundation.

How Ferguson Rioters Look and Act just like President Obama

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Black protesters in Ferguson, MO. (Photo: Chris Lee/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/MCT)

President Obama took a brief respite from his Martha’s Vineyard vacation to address the ongoing rioting in Ferguson, Missouri. President Obama stated during the news conference:

And when something like this happens, the local authorities, including the police, have a responsibility to be open and transparent about how they are investigating that death and how they are protecting the people in their communities. There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting. There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights. And here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground.

Perhaps we should analyse this statement sentence by sentence in light of who is doing the rioting and looting (blacks) and the record of this President, who is black.

Obama: “And when something like this happens, the local authorities, including the police, have a responsibility to be open and transparent about how they are investigating that death and how they are protecting the people in their communities.”

Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson

Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson

This is a direct attack against Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson (who is white) and the entire Ferguson police department (66% of which is white). It is like the pot calling the kettle white by accusing Chief Jackson of not being “open and transparent.” President Obama has himself been accused of not being open and transparent by the Huffington Post here, here, here and here. As HuffPo’s Calvin Woodward writes, “It’s as if the United States has two governments, one open and one very much not. President Barack Obama leads both, trying not to butt heads with himself.”

President Obama is the last man to criticize any police department of not being open and transparent. It appears President Obama is once again butting heads with himself.

Obama: “There is never an excuse for violence against police or for those who would use this tragedy as a cover for vandalism or looting.”

rahm_emmanuel-03

Rahm Emmanuel

Unless you are President Obama. President Obama has used tragedy to loot America. As President Obama’s former Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emmanuel stated, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” All the Ferguson blacks are doing, with the help of black leaders like Al Sharpton, is using this shooting to “do things you could not do before.”

President Obama has used various crisis, on multiple occasions, to bypass Congress via Executive Orders as reported here, here, here and here. Whether it is the current immigration crisis, financial crisis or a shooting (remember Obama saying Trayvon Marin could have been me). President Obama never lets a crisis go to waste to loot (increase taxes and expand federal regulations) and vandalize (use the IRS and DOJ to take down political opponents or infringing on the Second Amendment rights of individuals).

Obama: “There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.”

What about the IRS using excessive force to stifle the First Amendment rights of ordinary citizens? What about the IRS targeting St. Louis reporter Larry Conners? What about the U.S. DOJ charging Dinesh D’Souza, producer of the films Obama 2016 and America? What about President Obama investigating the Ferguson Police Department to potentially stifle their ability to do their law enforcement job?

Obama: “And here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground.”

gty_eric_holder_obama_thg_120620_wg

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder

What about the Obama Department of Justice targeting (bullying) twenty reporters from the Associated Press and charging (bullying) James Rosen under the Espionage Act of 1917? According to Wikipedia:

On May 13, 2013, the Associated Press announced telephone records for 20 of their reporters during a two-month period in 2012 had been subpoenaed by the Justice Department. AP reported the Justice Department would not say why it sought the records, but news sources noted the US Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia was conducting a criminal investigation into a May 7, 2012, AP story about a CIA operation which prevented the Yemeni terrorist Fahd al-Quso’s plot to detonate an explosive device on a commercial flight. The DOJ did not direct subpoenas to the Associated Press; instead, the subpoenas were issued to their telephone providers, including Verizon Wireless.

The AP claimed these acts were a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into news-gathering operations. Gary Pruitt, CEO of the Associated Press stated: “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the news gathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s news gathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington responded that federal investigators seek records from news outlets only after making “every reasonable effort to obtain information through alternative means.”Verizon neither challenged the subpoena nor did it try to alert the journalists whose records were being requested. Debra Lewis, Verizon Wireless spokeswoman, said the company “complies with legal processes for requests for information by law enforcement.”

You see President Obama looks and acts just like Ferguson blacks. The only difference is he is President of the United States of America.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Police: Before Shooting, Brown Robbed Store | The Smoking Gun
Ferguson police say Michael Brown was suspect in robbery
12 Unbelievable Photos From Ferguson

EDITORS NOTE: According to the most recent census, 67% of Ferguson’s community is black; 29% is white; there is less than 1% Asian and Native American. A little more than 1% of the population is Hispanic or Latino. Its residents are mostly young; the average age is 31. Median household income is about $37,000. Twenty two percent of people in Ferguson live below the poverty line.

A Remarkable 37th President

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Forty years ago, on August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned the office of President; the first and only President to do so.

I was just into my thirties in 1968, the year Richard Nixon was elected the 37th President of the United States. What I recall most of that year was the way the Chicago police, after enduring an onslaught of name-calling and insults from anti-war protesters aggressively drove them away from their effort to disrupt the Democratic Party convention that would nominate Hubert Humphrey.

His opponent would be Nixon. George Wallace, a segregationalist, ran as an independent that year as well. I wasn’t particularly interested in politics at the time. My focus was on my career where I had transitioned from having been a journalist to positions with the New York State Housing Finance Agency and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Looking back, I now know I should have been paying more attention because, in the end, whoever is President affects the lives of not just Americans, but others throughout the world.

Like millions of Americans I had turned against the Vietnam War and, in a seminal way, it would influence my movement toward conservatism. For many people Nixon was instrumental, not just in rejuvenating the Republican Party, but for giving a voice to the “silent majority” who didn’t like the war in general and Lyndon Baines Johnson in particular. In 1968, LBJ announced he would not seek reelection.

Cover - Greatest ComebackIn the years since the Watergate scandal whose cover-up forced Nixon to resign in 1974, subsequent generations know him only for that historic event. Patrick J. Buchanan has done us all a favor by writing “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority.” and it is a special treat for anyone who loves history in general and politics in particular.

As much as today’s media may have loved Obama when he was nominated the Democratic Party’s candidate, in Nixon’s day he was loathed by them for his strong anti-communist stance when he served in the House of Representatives and Senate, and thereafter throughout the Cold War. After having been Eisenhower’s Vice President for two terms, Nixon would lose to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and in a race to become the Governor of California in 1962. Few would have ever imagined that he would be elected President in 1968. In 1972 he was reelected in a landslide.

Labeled by his political enemies “Tricky Dick”, Nixon was a politician of prodigious talent, but mostly he was a man who, through sheer determination overcame defeat, revived the Republican Party, and, while devoted to conservative principles, was also pragmatic enough to be open to new ideas and events. His circle of advisors shared his principles, but diverged among each other as to tactics and issues. Nixon wanted that. He would choose what advice he thought best.

Buchanan was a member of Nixon’s inner circle, a writer of superb talent and one with a keen eye for the political times in which he lived and which Nixon would shape. As he notes in his book, “The years that followed that 1969 inaugural would be a time of extraordinary accomplishment. By the spring of 1973, all U.S. troops were out of Vietnam, the POWs were home, every provincial capital was in Saigon’s (South Vietnam) hands.”

“Nixon had negotiated SALT I and the ABM treaty, the greatest arms-limitation treaties since the Washington Naval Agreement” in 1922. Significantly, “he had ended decades of hostility between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, dating to Mao’s revolution and the Korean War. He had put an end to the draft, signed into law the eighteen-year-old vote, put four justices on the Supreme Court including Chief Justice Warren Burger and future chief justice William Rehnquist.”

Those of us who lament Big Government must acknowledge that Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and on the plus side the National Cancer Institute. He would “rescue Israel from defeat in the Yom Kippur War (and) end Soviet domination of Egypt.”

What I recall about the 1960s was how volatile and violent that decade was. There were riots in many of our largest cities which engendered Nixon’s “law and order” message that was widely embraced. There were anti-war protests and there were assassinations that took the lives of JFK, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

The greatest contrast between now and then is a general feeling of apathy that does not manifest itself in marches on Washington, D.C. anymore and a very distinct breakdown in social mores that includes the embrace of same-sex marriage and the push to legalize marijuana in some states.

The al Qaeda attack on 9/11 generated a massive intelligence program and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. It made Americans angry enough at first to endorse the invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq.

Later Americans would watch the chaos the “Arab Spring” and these days the threat of the Islamic State, a self-declared caliphate that intends to control the whole of the Middle East and then destroy Israel and the U.S. The greatest threat of our times is Iran’s intention to build its own nuclear weapons.

Nixon brought about change on the basis of his vast knowledge of history, foreign affairs, and his judgment regarding the American people. By contrast, President Obama does not seem to like the American people or America.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

It’s about the Money, Not the Climate

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Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), the Irish poet and dramatist, wrote “Pray don’t talk to me about the weather. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else.”

These days, when some world leader or politician speaks of the climate—the weather is what is happening right now wherever you are—they are not talking about sunshine or rain. They are talking about a devilishly obscene way of raising money by claiming that it is humans that are threatening the climate with everything they do, from turning on the lights to driving anywhere.

That’s why “global warming” was invented in the late 1980s as an immense threat to the Earth and to mankind. Never mind that Earth has routinely passed through warmer and cooler cycles for billions of years; much of which occurred before mankind emerged. And never mind that the Earth has been a distinct cooling cycle for the past seventeen years and likely to stay in it for a while. If the history of ice ages is any guide, we could literally be on the cusp of a new one.

If, however, a government can tax the use of energy, it stands to make a lot of money. That is why carbon taxes have been introduced in some nations and why the nearly useless “clean energy” options of wind and solar have been introduced even though they both require the backup of traditional coal, natural gas and nuclear energy plants because they cannot produce electricity if the wind isn’t blowing and the sun is obscured by clouds.

Taxing energy use means taxing “greenhouse gas” emissions; primarily carbon dioxide (C02) so that every ton of it added to the atmosphere by a power plant and any other commercial activity becomes a source of income for the nation. The Australians went through this and rapidly discovered it drove up their cost of electricity and negatively affected their economy so much that they rid themselves of a prime minister and the tax within the past year.

Fortunately, every effort to introduce a carbon tax has been defeated by the U.S. Congress, but that it has shelled out billions for “climate research” over the years. That doesn’t mean, however, that 41 demented Democrats in the House of Representatives haven’t gotten together in a “Safe Climate Caucus” led by Rep. Henry A. Waxman. The Washington Post reported that when it was launched in February 2013, the members promised to talk every day on the House floor about “the urgent need to address climate change.”

Check out the caucus and, if your Representative is a member, vote to replace him or her with someone less idiotic.

When you hear the President or a member of Congress talk about the climate, they are really talking about the scheme to generate revenue from it through taxation or to raise money from those who will personally benefit from any scheme related to the climate such as “clean energy.”

The need of governments to frighten their citizens about the climate in order to raise money is international in scope. A United States that has a $17 trillion debt is a prime example, much of it due to a government grown so large it wastes taxpayer’s money in the millions with every passing day whether it is sunny or rainy, warm or cold.

In late July, Reuters reported that Christine Lagarde, the chair of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) opined in her new book that “energy taxes in much of the world are far below what they should be to reflect the harmful environmental and health impact of fossil fuels use.”

Please pay no attention to the billions of dollars that coal, oil and natural gas already generate for the nations in which they are found. Nations such as India and China are building coal-fired plants as fast as possible to provide the electricity every modern nation needs to expand its economy, provide more employment, and improve their citizen’s lives in every way imaginable.

IMF logo“For the first time,” Reuters reported, “the IMF laid out exactly what it views as appropriate taxes on coal, natural gas, gasoline, and diesel in 156 countries to factor in the fuel’s overall costs, which include carbon dioxide emissions, air pollution, congestion and traffic accidents.” The problem with this is that the costs cited are bogus.

“Nations,” said Lagarde, “are now working on a United Nations deal for late 2015 to rein in greenhouse gas emissions that have hit repeated highs this century, but progress has been slow as nations fret about the impact any measures may have on economic growth.” As in bad impacts!

Ignore the claims that carbon dioxide affects the climate. Its role is so small it can barely be measured because CO2 represents 380 parts per million. When our primate ancestors began to climb down out of the trees, CO2 levels were about 1,000 parts per million. More CO2 means more crops, healthy growing forests, and all the other benefits that every form of vegetation provides. The breath we humans exhale contains about 4% of CO2.

The fact is that the United States and other nations are being run by politicians who are incapable of reducing spending or borrowing more in order to spend more. Venezuela just defaulted again on the payment of bonds it issued to raise money. They did this in 2001 and one must wonder why any financial institution purchases them.

There are eleven other nations whose credit ratings are flirting with big trouble. They include Greece, Ukraine, Pakistan, Cypress, and in the Americas Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador and Belize. Borrowing by such nations is very expensive. A U.S. Treasury Note pays an annual coupon of just 2.5%, but the yields on 10-year bonds issue by Greece reached 29% in early 2012, just before it defaulted.

Adding to problems in the U.S. is the Obama agenda being acted upon by the Environmental Protection Agency whose “war on coal” has shuttered several hundred plants that produce the electricity needed to maintain the economy. In coal producing states this is playing havoc and it is driving up the cost of electricity in others.

The growth of oil and natural gas production in the U.S. is almost entirely on privately owned land as opposed to that controlled by the government. Supporting the attack on energy are the multi-million dollar environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club.

There is no “global warming” and the climate is determined by the Sun, the oceans, clouds, and volcanic activity. Nothing any government does, here and worldwide, has any impact on it, but if nations can demonize the use of energy and tax the CO2 it produces, they can generate more money to spend and waste.

The lies that governments, the United Nations, and the International Monetary Fund tell about the climate are about the money they can extract from citizens who must be kept frightened enough to pay taxes on their use of energy.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of Sonari.net.

Florida Solar Power: Free electricity? Not so much!

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We  have all heard the line “if it sounds too good to be true…” Well solar power is one of those ideas that is too good to be true. Another favorite if it sounds too good to be true are the often repeated statements of President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry claiming renewable energy will lower our electric bills and create millions of jobs that can’t be sent overseas.

For an example of “too good to be true” close to home in the sunshine state, consider Hillsborough County, where the courthouse in 2010 was outfitted with rooftop solar panels, designed to produce 40% of the facility’s electricity, save $60,000 annually in electricity costs, and pay for themselves. The initial cost was $1.2 million, so by saving $60,000 per year, they would pay for themselves in 20 years – a nice, round number. Oh, and by the way, they were going to produce jobs. As part of the Obama Stimulus.

You believe this, right? Sounds good, right?

Well, not exactly. According to the WFTS News article “Solar Panels on Tampa Courthouse Fail to Meet Promises“, the panels are reducing electricity need by 15 – 18%, a savings of less than $2000 per month. At that rate, it will take 45 years for the panels to pay for their cost – if they last that long. As far as I know, there is no hard data yet on solar cell lifetime duration. Estimates range between 15 and 20 years. Solar panels deteriorate over their lifetime, so the $2000/month savings will be going down.

The cruelest blow in all this? Jobs: 12 of them, for four months.

Who brought this too good to be true miracle to pass? Well, you remember who brought us the Obama Stimulus Bill, as well as ObamaCare, the Democratic Party, which controlled Congress and the White House in 2010. They thought it was wonderful:

It is so wonderful to see the Recovery Act at work in our community, creating jobs and saving money” said U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Tampa).

This is a nice initiative that will allow the county to put a little money back into the pockets of taxpayers at a time that they need it most, and to create jobs,” said Castor.

These, by the way, were advanced solar cells, touted as being able to produce electricity even by moonlight. If this pie-in-the-sky Obama engineering doesn’t work in Florida, it bodes ill for other, more Northerly locations.

Obama came to Denver to sign the Stimulus Bill, at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science – which, like Hillsborough County Courthouse, was fitted with solar cells. Denver’s system (200 kilowatts, DC) cost $720,000, and was estimated to cover 1 to 2 % of DMNS use. The chief technology officer, Dave Noel, tried to sell the idea to the board, but admitted, without the Stimulus incentive, 110 years would be required to amortize the cost. Colorado is a pretty sunny state, with over 300 sunny days per year, but it also gets a little cold and Winter days are short. DMNS has an online graph of their solar power generation; over the last 74 months, they’ve generated 16,448 kWh per month. At $0.10/kWh, that’s worth $1645/month. Compared to the initial cost of $720,000, we’re paying off the investment over a period of only 37 years. Less than 110 years, but still twice the expected life of the solar cells.

This defiance of science, engineering and good sense has been going on all over the world, furthered by faddish green enthusiasts. Thankfully, it’s htting the wall of reality. Germany is retreating, both in the face of economic reality and their dependence on Russian natural gas. Germany has 28 electrical generating plants under construction, powered by….coal. In some cases, it’s lignite (brown) coal, the most CO2-intensive variety.

Reality means nothing to the Obama administration, however. Monday’s Wall Street Journal carries an article on the Obama plan to help Africa, specifically Kenya….wait, is this ironic? Doesn’t Obama have some connection with Kenya? The article, headlined “Kenyan Wind Project Reveals Challenges to Obama Aid Plans” reveals that Kenyan farmers are reluctant to give up their land and homes for a wind farm. Perhaps they’ve heard that no electricity flows when the wind doesn’t blow – as the Germans have learned, the hard way.

al gore statement on icecapsLaugh of the Week:

The EPA was in Denver last week, taking comments from citizens on the new regulations to diminish CO2 emissions from coal and save us all from asthma, heart attacks, and other health hazards. Apparently, Al Gore has a fleet of ice cream trucks that he sends to occasions like this to hand out free ice cream to people suffering from the heat – omnipresent because of global warming. Hey, who doesn’t like ice cream, even from The Goreacle, on a hot Summer day?

The temperature in Denver was 58F, in a steady (cold) rain. Even free ice cream wasn’t a big hit. The Gore Effect strikes again. God really does have a sense of humor.

10 Things You Need to Know About Boehner Suing Obama by Elizabeth Slattery

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Last week, the House of Representatives voted to authorize Speaker John Boehner to file a lawsuit challenging President Obama’s failure to fully implement Obamacare. Specifically, the lawsuit will challenge the administration’s delay of the employer mandate—requiring many employers to provide health insurance or pay a fine—that was supposed to go into effect Jan. 1. It’s clear President Obama repeatedly has abused executive power to circumvent Congress and essentially rewrite the law, but this lawsuit still raises a host of questions.

Q: Can you sue the president?

Yes. Presidents enjoy immunity from lawsuits for civil damages resulting from their official acts, but they are not immune from all lawsuits. For example, the Supreme Court allowed Paula Jones’ suit for sexual harassment against President Clinton to proceed while he was in office. Further, members of Congress have filed dozens of lawsuits against presidents over the years. Most have been unsuccessful, usually because members fail to allege a sufficient injury. Since Boehner’s lawsuit will deal with implementing Obamacare, the suit likely will be brought against Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell and other executive branch officials charged with carrying out the law. It’s possible Obama won’t actually be named in the lawsuit.

Q: Who will represent the House in court?

The House’s Office of General Counsel routinely represents the House in legal disputes, such as suits to enforce congressional subpoenas or the Speech and Debate Clause. In the past, the House also has hired outside counsel, such as when the House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Committee hired former Solicitor General Paul Clement to handle the Defense of Marriage Act litigation.

Q: How will this lawsuit be funded?

As with past lawsuits, the House will appropriate funds to pay for the litigation. The Committee on House Administration will make public quarterly statements in the Congressional Record detailing expenses.

Q: Does the Senate have a role?

The Senate probably is not required to join in the lawsuit. Under the Supreme Court’s precedents, members of Congress have standing to assert personal injuries or direct and concrete institutional injuries. In Coleman v. Miller (1939), the Supreme Court found a group of state senators demonstrated a sufficient institutional injury even though the suit was brought by 26 members of one chamber.

Q: Why would the House sue when it has other remedies?

Boehner has determined filing a lawsuit will be the most effective way to rein in the executive branch. Other remedies do exist—mainly appropriations and impeachment—but they require the Senate’s involvement. The House could try to leverage appropriations to encourage the president to faithfully execute the law, but as Boehner has pointed out, the Democratic Senate could refuse to pass such an appropriations bill. Similarly, impeachment requires conviction by two-thirds of the Senate. Although Boehner’s lawsuit may face obstacles, it would not require Senate concurrence.

Q: What happens if Obama loses?

Courts routinely enforce statutory mandates, such as the express deadlines in Obamacare that the executive branch has “relaxed.” Concerns the president would ignore the courts likely are unfounded. Even though Obama has complained about his losses, “There is no case in which he completely refused to follow a Supreme Court ruling he lost,” said Todd Gaziano,executive director of the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Washington, D.C., center.

Q: What happens if Boehner loses?

Before a court considers the merits of Boehner’s lawsuit, it first must decide whether the House has standing to bring this suit. If a court determines Boehner failed to establish Article III standing (a constitutional requirement for all lawsuits), it would result in dismissal of the case, but it would not mean the court agrees the president acted properly. If the suit is dismissed, it’s possible a private party may file suit, although the lack of private parties is one reason Boehner says his lawsuit is necessary. After members of Congress failed in their challenge to the Line Item Veto Act in Raines v. Byrd in 1997, the Supreme Court struck down the law when the City of New York and a group of private parties challenged it the next year.

Q: Didn’t Bush issue more executive orders than Obama?

Yes, but that is irrelevant to Boehner’s lawsuit. Executive orders are directives issued by the president to run the various parts of the executive branch—ranging from George Washington’s proclamation calling on the militia to put down the Whiskey Rebellion to Harry Truman’s order desegregating the armed forces. Most executive orders throughout our nation’s history are perfectly appropriate and non-controversial. Boehner’s lawsuit does not address Obama’s use of executive orders per se. Instead, the suit will challenge his failure to faithfully execute the law. The American Presidency Project, which has cataloged every executive order, says Bush issued 291 executive orders, Obama has issued 183 to date, and Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the most with more than 3,500.

Q: Will this open the floodgates for Congress and the Executive Branch to turn to the courts to resolve their disputes?

No. There have been plenty of lawsuits brought by members of Congress against presidents and other executive branch officials in the past. The Supreme Court has been pretty clear that courts should not entertain “sore loser” suits where members of Congress sue over a vote they lost. This suit will not change the judiciary’s reluctance to get involved in political disputes between the other branches of government.

Q: Now that the House has authorized the suit, what happens next?

The Wall Street Journal reports the House “isn’t expected to bring the suit for at least another month.” The House Office of General Counsel and any outside lawyers that will be involved in the case likely are deciding which court would be most advantageous and drafting the complaint which will lay out specific allegations as well as the relief the House will seek in its lawsuit.

Peter Bigelow contributed to preparing this Q&A.

ABOUT ELIZABETH SLATTERY

Portrait of Elizabeth Slattery

Elizabeth Slattery @EHSlattery

Elizabeth Slattery writes about the rule of law, the proper role of the courts, civil rights and equal protection, and the scope of constitutional provisions such as the Commerce Clause and the Recess Appointments Clause as a legal fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Read her research.

Charlie Crist: Using the power of the pen for evil — a case study

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Each Florida Governor swears to enforce the laws of the land. The governors role is as chief administrator and not law maker. In Florida a duly elected Governor takes the following oath:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support, protect, and defend the Constitution and Government of the United States and of the State of Florida; that I am duly qualified to hold office under the Constitution of the State, and that I will well and faithfully perform the duties of Governor on which I am now about to enter, so help me God.

Both Rick Scott and Charlie Crist have taken this oath. But have they kept true to their oath? That is the question.

When Crist was governor he used the “power of the pen” via Executive Orders to bypass the legislature and impose his “green agenda” upon Floridians. The EPA.gov website has archived examples of former Governor Crist issuing Executive Orders to impose his agenda:

  • In May 2008 the state legislature passed an energy bill that included a prohibition on the state DEP from adopting GHG auto standards without legislative approval. On July 13, 2007, Florida Governor Charlie Crist issued Executive Order 07-126, which requires the Department of Management Services to only approve the purchase of new vehicles with the greatest fuel efficiency in a given class as required for that vehicle to minimize GHG emissions. The Governor also issued Executive Order 07-127 (July 13, 2007), which adopted California’s GHG standards for motor vehicles.
  • On July 13, 2007, Florida Governor Charlie Crist issued Executive Order 07-127, which established statewide GHG emission reduction targets of 2000 levels by 2017, 1990 levels by 2025, and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.
  • Executive Order 07-128, signed by Governor Crist on July 13, 2007, creates a new “Action Team on Energy and Climate Change,” to develop a “comprehensive energy and climate change action plan” that would lay out policy options and suggest strategies for meeting the orders’ goals and provide analysis of whether to implement mandates, voluntary standards, or market-based regulatory mechanisms.

When he signed these EOs gas prices rose and five coal fired energy plants closed causing electric bills to rise.

It appears Crist is up to his old proven tactics of bypassing the legislature in order to implement his personal beliefs upon all Floridians. According Brandon Larrabee and Dara Kam of The News Service of Florida report:

When former Gov. Charlie Crist floated a campaign promise this week to use executive orders on state contractors to boost wages for some workers and to bar discrimination against gay and transgender Floridians, Republican condemnation quickly rolled in.

GOP leaders in the Legislature issued a joint statement comparing the Republican-turned-Democrat Crist unfavorably to President Barack Obama and saying the proposal amounted to a power grab.

“Crist is lifting a dangerous page from President Obama’s playbook, saying he will do an end-run around the people’s elected representatives and single-handedly mandate policies through executive order,” said the statement, signed by the outgoing and incoming House speakers and Senate presidents. ” … Florida needs a governor who will work with the Legislature and not force his personal agenda on Floridians with the stroke of a pen.”

Larrabee and Kam point out that in 2011 Governor Rick Scott also used the power of his pen requiring all of Florida’s agencies and contractors to use the federal e-verify system when hiring. E-verify is a Department of Homeland Security system. According to the DHS website, “U.S. law requires companies to employ only individuals who may legally work in the United States – either U.S. citizens, or foreign citizens who have the necessary authorization. This diverse workforce contributes greatly to the vibrancy and strength of our economy, but that same strength also attracts unauthorized employment.”

Governor Scott used the power of his pen to enforce the laws of the land. Charlie Crist has a history of using the power of the pen to force his ideology upon all Floridians. That is a key difference between Rick Scott and Charlie Crist.

Yes, Sue Our Lawless President!

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“Today, however, President Obama has taken the concept of discretion and so distorted it, and has taken the obligation of faithful enforcement and so rejected it, that his job as chief law enforcer has become one of incompetent madness or chief lawbreaker. Time after time, in areas as disparate as civil liberties, immigration, foreign affairs and health care, the President has demonstrated a propensity for rejecting his oath and doing damage to our fabric of liberty that cannot easily be undone by a successor.”

That is Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, a Fox News commentator, writing in the July 31 edition of The Washington Times.

Americans and many around the world are increasingly fearful of a President who has demonstrated no regard for the checks and balances of our incredible Constitution, the oldest in the world that still functions to protect individual rights and which sets forth the divisions between our legislative, judicial and executive departments of government.

Congress, however, will not impeach President Obama, but the House will sue him on the basis of just one of the many examples of his dictatorial use of executive orders to ignore the power of the legislative branch to pass laws he took an oath to enforce. He has unilaterally and illegally altered the Affordable Care Act 27 times, his signature legislation that former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said Congress had to pass “so we can find out what is in it.” No Republican member of Congress voted for this two-thousand-page-plus law, passed late in the evening of Christmas Eve, 2009.

The decision to impeach a President is essentially a political one and Republicans understand that the impeachment of President Obama would be interpreted by nearly half of the voters as an attack on a President they support. There have only been two impeachment actions in U.S. history and both have failed.

The nation is significantly divided regarding the President and Congress has been in gridlock as Democrats as the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, has refused to let more than 300 House bills sent to the Senate be debated and voted upon.

Suing the President has ample history. It is hardly “a stunt” as Democrats have labeled it. New York Democrat Louise Slaughter called it “preposterous”, but failed to mention that eight years earlier, in 2006, she was a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by congressional Democrats against George W. Bush!

In a 1939 case, Coleman v Miller, the Supreme Court granted standing to members of the legislature to sue. Two years ago, four Democratic members of the House filed a suit against Vice President Biden in his capacity as head of the Senate, challenging as unconstitutional the filibuster. Other Democratic legislators had filed lawsuits claiming standing in 2001, in 2002, in 2006, and in 2007. The judiciary concluded their cases had little merit.

In a July 30 Wall Street Journal commentary, David B. Rivken who served in the Reagan and Bush administration’s Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office, and Elizabeth Price Foley, a constitutional law professor at Florida International University, wrote:

“These barriers between the branches are not formalities—they were designed to prevent the accumulation of excessive power in one branch, As the Supreme Court explained in New York v. United States (1992), the ‘Constitution protects us from our own best intentions. It divides power among sovereigns and among branches of government precisely so that we may resist the temptation to concentrate power in one location as an expedient solution to the crisis of the day.”

“Congress has the exclusive authority to make law because lawmaking requires pluralism, debate and compromise, the essence of representative government…Litigation in federal court is an indispensable way to protect all branches of government against encroachment on their authority,”

“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” said President Obama. In April, a poll by PolitiFact of the Tampa Bay Times, revealed that 63%–nearly two thirds—of respondents agreed that President Obama lies at least some of the time on important issues and an additional 20% said he lies every now and then. Only 15% believed the President is completely truthful. Democrats were 39% of the 1,021 registered voters polled. Republicans were 38% and independents were 20%,

The President has lied so routinely that this character flaw is likely to play a role in the forthcoming midterm elections on November 4. When you add in his lawlessness and his leadership failures that have created a far more dangerous and divided world, Americans are likely to vote for change in Congress.

That’s how democracy works and how our Constitutional system works. Suing the President is just one part of it.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

CLICHES OF PROGRESSIVISM #16 – Ownership Must Be Tempered by Sharing by Lawrence W. Reed

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Progressives have a problem with ownership, especially when it’s yours. The very notion seems to conjure up in their minds an anti-social acquisitiveness, selfishness, and greed. Far more quickly, they come to the defense of “sharing” because it suggests sacrificing ownership for the sake of others. Indeed, the most regressive Progressive is drawn to the idea of common ownership, in which no one owns anything because somehow we all will own and share it equally.

The Progressives’ hostility to ownership is neither well-founded nor consistent. While they have a visceral distaste for private ownership (and busy themselves taxing, regulating, seizing, and redistributing it), they have few problems with state ownership. It’s as if men are devilish with what’s theirs but angelic with what belongs to someone else. This is not a concept that explains life on any planet I am personally aware of.

The fact is, “ownership” as a general concept is never really at issue in any society. It is neither possible nor desirable to construct a society in which people or the material things they create are not “owned.” Either you will “own” yourself or someone else will own you. As far as material things are concerned, somebody must own them, too. Those “somebodies” will be those who either created them, received them as a gift, or traded freely for them, or they will be those who take them by force. There is no middle ground, no “third way” in which ownership is somehow avoided.

Indeed, ownership is both a virtue and a necessity. What is yours, you tend to husband. If it belongs to someone else, you have little incentive to care for it. If it belongs to “everyone”—the nebulous, collectivist approach—then you have every incentive to use and abuse it. That’s why over thousands of years of history, experience continually reinforces this essential axiom: the more the government owns and thereby controls, the less free and productive the people are.

Ownership is nothing less than the right to shape, use, and dispose. Even if you have legal title to something, you wouldn’t think you really owned it if the government told you what you could do with it, how, and when; in that instance, the government would be the de facto owner. In a real sense, ownership is control and the actual owner of anything is the controller.

For thoroughly trashing the resources of any society, no more surefire prescription exists than to take resources from those to whom they belong (the rightful owners) and give them to those who are convinced in the fantasyland of their own minds that they have a better idea of what to do with them. Think “Soviet.” Socialist regimes, which take from some and give to others at the point of a gun, have their cockamamie schemes for how to squander the loot, but they display an infantile ignorance of how to create wealth in the first place.

Much has been made in the past about alleged differences between fascism and communism. Sure, the Nazis invaded Stalinist Russia (after the two had made a deal to squash and divide Poland), but that was a dispute between thieves that proved the old adage that there’s no honor among them. On the question of ownership, the difference was a cosmetic one that ultimately mattered little to the ordinary citizen.

Communists didn’t let you own a factory, and if you did own one, when they came to power you were shot. Fascists often refrained from nationalizing a factory, but if you as the alleged owner didn’t do as you were told, you were shot. Under either system, real ownership was in the hands of the omnipotent State, regardless of what any scrap of legal title paper said.

The myth of “common ownership” only muddies the issue. Public parks are thought of as held in common (“the people’s property”), but that really means that the government owns them, the taxpayers pay the bill, and the public gets to use them according to the rules established and enforced by the government. Some have argued that the post office is another example of common ownership. That would mean that theoretically, each American owns about one-three-hundred-millionth of it, but show up at the counter and try to redeem your share and you might be surprised how fast the response can be.

From the remote but fascinating country of Mongolia comes an ownership story told to me by the country’s current president (as of 2014), Elbegdorj Tsakhia (known by his friends as “E. B.”). He earlier served as Prime Minister twice, and visited me in Michigan between those terms. I asked him during that visit what he was most proud of having accomplished as PM. He said, “I privatized Mongolia’s 25 million yaks.”

Yaks are large, furry cattle that wear their hair in bangs. For decades under communist rule, the poor creatures were owned by the government, which claimed they were “the people’s property.” Their total population hardly budged from the 1920s to the 1990s. E. B. decided that yaks were not a core function of government, so he worked up a formula whereby all of them would be sold to the individual herdsmen. Three years later he was Prime Minister the second time. I visited him in his office in the capital of Ulan Bator and asked him, “What’s the latest on the yaks?” Excitedly, he replied, “Remember when I told you we had 25 million for seven decades? Well, now we have 32 million!”

When it’s your yak, not “everybody’s” yak, wonderful things happen. You have a personal interest in the investment, in the capital value of the asset. You take care of the yak and make more yaks, which you then “share” with more and more people in an endless stream of peaceful, mutually beneficial trades of yak products.

Progressives yak a lot about sharing, but you can’t share it if you don’t produce it and take care of it in the first place. Private, personal ownership of material things we create and trade for is unsurpassed as a source of the wealth that Progressives want to share.

Moreover, we should ask ourselves, “Is it really ‘sharing’ if I have to do it at gunpoint?” I was always taught that sharing was an act of free will. When you give half your sandwich to a friend who forgot to pack his lunch, you’ve shared it. If he threatens to beat you up if you don’t give it to him, “sharing” is no longer the operative term.

So when it comes to this thing we call “ownership,” it’s either you or somebody else. Who should own your retirement savings—you or the government? Who should own your health-care dollars—you, the government, or some third-party payer you’d prefer to avoid? Who should decide where your child goes to school—you the parent or a handful of other parents different from you only by virtue of the fact that they work for the government? Who should decide what charitable activities you support—you or some congressman or bureaucrat who prefers the social welfare department over the Red Cross or your local church?

Those questions should not be answered solely on utilitarian grounds. In a free society, Person A might choose a better school or make a better investment than Person B—a fact that can’t be known for certain in advance. But in any event, that does not mystically grant Person B the right to make Person A’s choices for him. If freedom means anything, it means the right to make your own choices even if you make what others regard as mistakes. When someone argues that we cannot allow people more choices over their retirement, health care, or schools, we should demand they tell us, by what right do they make these decisions for us?

Make no mistake about it: The more someone else controls you or the important decisions that govern your life or the material things that sustain it, the more they own you. We used to call that slavery, and no gauzy, self-righteous calls to “share it” made it any less inhumane.

If you’re a principled and articulate defender of private ownership of property, be ready for some Progressive social engineer to lay a guilt trip on you if he thinks you’re not “sharing” enough. I suspect that the preponderance of Progressives will not be satisfied until their coercion-based policies effectively own the rest of us lock, stock, and barrel.

Own or be owned. Take your pick.

Lawrence W. Reed
President
Foundation for Economic Education

Summary

  • Progressives are two-faced when it comes to ownership. They are suspicious of it when it’s private and personal but supportive when it’s politicized and centrally directed.
  • Whether it’s people or property, it will be owned. It’s just a matter of whether it’s owned by those to whom it belongs or those who simply want to claim it for some alleged higher cause.
  • Private ownership of property is both a virtue and a necessity. Get rid of it and you flush civilization down with it.
  • “Common ownership” is largely impractical and meaningless, even destructive.

For further information, see:

“The Economics of Caring and Sharing” by Dwight R. Lee
“Experiments in Collectivism” by Melvin D. Barger
“Little Lessons in Larceny” by Russell Madden
“The Puritan Experiment in Common Ownership” by Gary North
Plus previous Clichés #6 and #9: http://fee.org/publications/page/cliches-of-progressivism

20130918_larryreedauthorABOUT LAWRENCE W. REED

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s. Prior to becoming FEE’s president, he served for 20 years as president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan. He also taught economics full-time from 1977 to 1984 at Northwood University in Michigan and chaired its department of economics from 1982 to 1984.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this essay appeared in the July/August 2005 issue of The Freeman under the title, “To Own or Be Owned: That Is the Question.” The featured image is courtesy of FEE and Shutterstock.

The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is proud to partner with Young America’s Foundation (YAF) to produce “Clichés of Progressivism,” a series of insightful commentaries covering topics of free enterprise, income inequality, and limited government.

Our society is inundated with half-truths and misconceptions about the economy in general and free enterprise in particular. The “Clichés of Progressivism” series is meant to equip students with the arguments necessary to inform debate and correct the record where bias and errors abound.

The antecedents to this collection are two classic FEE publications that YAF helped distribute in the past: Clichés of Politics, published in 1994, and the more influential Clichés of Socialism, which made its first appearance in 1962. Indeed, this new collection will contain a number of essays from those two earlier works, updated for the present day where necessary. Other entries first appeared in some version in FEE’s journal, The Freeman. Still others are brand new, never having appeared in print anywhere. They will be published weekly on the websites of both YAF and FEE: www.yaf.org and www.FEE.org until the series runs its course. A book will then be released in 2015 featuring the best of the essays, and will be widely distributed in schools and on college campuses.

See the index of the published chapters here.

Tragedy of the Healthcare Commons: The Affordable Care Act contributes to an already unsustainable situation by D.W. MacKenzie

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Recent difficulties with implementing the Affordable Care Act have increased opposition to the program. A majority of Americans now oppose it. Problems with the healthcare.gov website are in all likelihood temporary. However, there are serious long-term problems, particularly considering long-term finance and labor-supply issues. Give the mounting difficulties with and growing concerns about the ACA, it is worthwhile to reconsider the main issues regarding this program.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently published a report examining some of these problems. It contains nothing new. Many commentators have discussed the projection of lower labor-force participation. Obamacare subsidies will allow lower-income Americans to work less. People do in fact work less if their costs are shared. The tendency of people to withhold work from collective undertakings is known among economists as a tragedy of the commons.

Reduced labor-force participation means both lower total tax revenue and higher spending on government benefits. The CBO’s long-term forecasts report serious imbalances between tax revenues and federal spending. Federal deficits are projected to remain high, but “manageable,” for about a decade.

The costs of entitlements, along with regular budget items (defense and non-defense), are relevant to any discussion of the ACA’s affordability. The retirement of the baby boomers, though, will result in steadily rising costs for older entitlement programs. Taxpayers are already legally responsible for a national debt of $17 trillion (which  will hit $20 trillion by the time Obama leaves office). Interest payments on the national debt are low for the time being, but they won’t stay that way forever. The Medicare trustees have admitted to a long-term deficit of $34 trillion, but independent estimates run much higher. Social Security has an unfunded liability of more than $12 trillion. These costs pile on top of the current regular budget of $3.5 trillion, not to mention projected growth in this budget. Taxpayers are also responsible for the ACA’s cost overruns. Section 1342 of the ACA makes taxpayers responsible for bailing out insurance companies if the need arises.

Taxpayers are legally obligated to finance all of the above-mentioned expenditures, debts, and unfunded liabilities. People who believe in individual liberty reject the idea that people are morally obliged to fund ever-rising Federal expenditures. But the dispute over whether American taxpayers should fund projected federal spending is rendered academic by the fact that younger Americans will not be able to afford to pay for all of it. The commons created out of the New Deal and the Great Society is collapsing.

Economist Larry Kotlikoff estimates that average rates of taxation would have to rise 56 percent to cover projected increases in federal expenditures. Kotlikoff’s estimate may be high, but even a lower figure would leave Americans in dire financial straits. Taxpayers simply will not be able to fund all projected increases in all current federal programs. Bond investors will not finance our rising national debt in unlimited amounts. The ACA’s increased spending and lower labor-force participation, on top of these increases, makes national bankruptcy that much more likely.

National bankruptcy is not inevitable. The U.S. government is heading toward bankruptcy superficially because politicians have failed to set rational budget priorities, and fundamentally because citizens expect far too much of the public sector. The ACA was created out of concern that financial considerations bar access to healthcare to many people. And Americans do spend a large percentage of national income on healthcare.

The good news is that “we” have a substantial amount of leeway to save money on healthcare. Data on the overall effectiveness of public healthcare spending is clear, but not nearly as well known among voters. For example, The RAND Corporation conducted a health insurance experiment from 1974 to 1982, which showed that making healthcare “free,” or available at no personal marginal cost, does lead people to buy more. Much of this extra healthcare is inappropriate or largely unneeded, however. When people pay for more of their healthcare out of pocket, they tend to waste less money. The RAND study concluded, “In general, the reduction in services induced by cost sharing had no adverse effect on participants’ health.” Many other studies cast doubt on the effectiveness of providing healthcare at no private cost. According to another study, “Medicare enrollees in higher-spending regions receive more care than those in lower-spending regions but do not have better health outcomes or satisfaction with care.” Studies of people with health savings accounts (HSAs), as compared with people with plans like PPOs, show HSA holders control premium inflation better than their PPO counterparts.

Having people pay deductibles or bear other out-of-pocket costs causes us to economize on healthcare. Health insurance pools risks and creates a type of commons, whether done privately or publicly. The private commons of insurance companies does, however, have limits. Private insurance companies deny some types of coverage, depending on how much insurance people contract for in the first place. In other words, private insurance is not an open commons—it specifies the extent to which each policy holder can draw out of the insurance pool.

Public insurance programs lure people in by promising more benefits than private insurance plans offer. Yet public programs ultimately run into the basic problem of scarcity. The ACA pushes people out of very basic insurance plans into plans with higher levels of coverage, but excessive coverage is a major source of high healthcare costs. Americans spend a sizable portion of GDP on health expenses (17.9 percent in 2011). The overconsumption of healthcare by overinsured Americans is both a major source of excessive costs and a cost that can be cut with little adverse effect.

The tendency of people to waste money in open-access healthcare financing is simply going to produce another tragedy of the commons. Too few young people have been signing up at Healthcare.gov because younger Americans are mostly smart enough to avoid paying into a commons. Americans are signing up mainly because they expect to draw subsidies out of this commons.

Problems with managing a commons in healthcare financing are serious. Once someone enters into a life-threatening medical condition, they and their family will want every possible available step taken to save this person—provided that “someone else” pays. Passing costs onto someone else is, aside from being morally dubious, unworkable in the aggregate because we are each “someone else” to everyone else.

There are many costs associated with government intervention into the healthcare industry: administrative and regulatory compliance costs, elevated costs of litigation and court rulings, lobbying costs, costs of perverse incentives. The perversities associated with treating health as an open-access and politicized commons have, along with other, government spending programs, created an unsustainable fiscal situation. The unaffordability of the Affordable Care Act leaves us with two main options: Congress can repeal the ACA immediately through the legislative process, or we can all wait for the repeal process of national bankruptcy.

ABOUT D.W. MACKENZIE

D. W. MacKenzie is an assistant professor of economics at Carroll College in Helena, Montana.

EPA Still Wants to Garnish Your Wages Without a Court Order

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A few weeks ago, EPA quietly tried to reinterpret its authority and wanted to garnish wages from those who owe it a debt. After a storm of criticism from Members of Congress and the public, EPA pulled back.

However, the agency is still trying to grant itself this power, only this time it’s going through the standard notice-and-comment process that most federal regulations go through.

What’s is the problem EPA wants to solve by having the ability to dig to go after your wallet? Will this stop polluters? Is EPA inundated with deadbeats?

Apparently not, according to Catrina Rorke and Sam Batkins at the American Action Forum who looked at EPA’s data.

They point out that, over the past six years, EPA has imposed more than $2.3 billion in “non-major” fines against companies and individuals that committed “infractions that do not involve large facilities emitting tons of toxic pollutants annually.”

However, Rorke and Batkins found, “the majority of fines for individuals involve paperwork infractions – not environmental contamination.” Individuals or businesses were fined for failing to file notification or reports with EPA.

And as for a delinquency problem, here’s their key finding:

[T]he average length of time that individuals were delinquent paying EPA was zero quarters. In other words, people generally pay their fines on time.

So why does EPA want to be able to garnish an individual’s wages? Based on its data, it’s not to ensure a cleaner environment nor solve delinquency problems. Roark and Batkins conclude (correctly in my view):

EPA’s proposal to grant itself wage garnishment authority more closely resembles a power grab than an appropriate administrative step to rectify an observed issue in their fine repayment process.

Stay tuned.