It’s well established by now that the stimulus won’t be stimulating much of anything.
Turns out one sector of the economy is better off – the lobbying industry. The Hill reports:
After a tough 2008 in which revenues at top firms fell, the stimulus package has been a boon to K Street’s economy. Hundreds of firms, companies and trade groups registered to lobby on the recovery package this January, usually a sleepy month in Washington.
Good for them, I guess. Too bad for the rest of us.
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Posted in Economics, Political Animals, Stimulus
Reps. Darrell Issa and Patrick McHenry write that the census should be free of politics, and I completely agree. Life would be better if most things were free of politics.
Wishing won’t make it so, sadly. The census determines House seat redistricting. It also helps direct where billions of dollars worth of federal goodies are spent.
The census allocates power and money, in other words. Of course it’s going to be politicized!
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Posted in Political Animals
Tagged census, darrel issa, issa, mchenry, patrick mc henry
Brett Favre is done playing football. For good this time, thinks Peter King.
It sure was weird seeing him in a Jets uniform. People often asked if I felt any bitterness. Some Packer fans do. But not this one. I’ll always cheer for Brett Favre, I’d say.
I meant it, too. As with his playing career, so after it. Here’s hoping Brett enjoys retirement, and that he finds a new calling. Something that he’s as passionate about as he is with football.
Bonus self promotion: Here is an article I wrote the first time Brett retired, and here is one I wrote when he un-retired.
Tonight I picked up a book that has been sitting on my shelf for some time, taunting me: Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire. Heather has a crisp, easy to read prose style, lightened by occasional flashes of dry wit. The subject matter is of interest, at least to this old history major. Good book.
There’s a sentence early on (p. 19) that made my mind wander to the stimulus package currently before our own Senate.
Disclaimer: I have a dim view of the stimulus. But I don’t see it as an existential threat to society. Thousands of years from now, when some future historian writes The Fall of the American Empire, I doubt that the word “stimulus” will appear in its pages.
All Congress and the President are doing is slowing down the economy temporarily. A bad thing, yes. The decline of our civilization? No.
Why the connection to Rome’s decline, then? Heather speaks to something that doesn’t change a whole lot across time or space: human decency. His simple, profound sentence reads, “Ancient Roman society held that you should not attempt to control others until you could control yourself.”
Ignore that “Ancient Roman society” part. It doesn’t much matter. The bit about control does. At heart, the stimulus is an assertion of control. That’s why it came to mind so readily. Congress is saying, “we know how to run the economy better than the people do. Therefore we will.”
Yet Congress cannot control itself. President Obama’s hopes for a clean bill have proven futile. Billions of dollars in pork projects are making the stimulus even worse for the economy than a clean version.
Congress really must learn to control itself before it attempts to control others. Decency demands it.
CEI’s Wayne Crews occasionally bestows “Least Objectionable Legislator” awards when Congress critters do good things. I have two nominations of my own, one Democratic and one Republican.
The Democrat is Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee. At a previous job I had the opportunity to occasionally work with him and his staff. I found him to be more open-minded than most partisans, and more willing to buck his party leadership when he thinks they are in the wrong.
He gets his award for his recent remarks about the stimulus. President Obama wants a “clean” bill, meaning free of earmarks and other trickery; the House version of the stimulus is decidedly unclean.
Rep. Cooper has publicly taken Obama’s side, and voted against the bill. Leadership is furious. He is sticking to his guns, possibly at great professional cost. Well done, Rep. Cooper.
The Republican nominee is Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. He has been a thorn in the side of both parties for years. Not only is he adamantly anti-pork, he is crafty enough to use Senate rules to make his point as irksomely as possible.
Sen. Coburn also co-sponsored the bi-partisan Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 with then-Sen. Obama. It created USAspending.gov, which attempts to make it easier for the public to track where federal taxpayer dollars are spent.
The stimulus contains the largest earmark ever: $2 billion for FutureGen Industrial Alliance, Inc, of Illinois. Recall that the “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark that led to the end of Sen. Ted Stevens’ career cost barely one tenth that.
Sen. Coburn has offered an amendment to eliminate this earmark from the bill. But that’s not all. Another Coburn amendment “would prohibit any funding provided by the stimulus bill to be spent on casinos, museums, golf courses, stadiums, parks, or highway beautification projects.” The stimulus is supposed to create jobs; such projects don’t.
Coburn’s amendments usually fail. I expect the same fate of these latest Coburn amendments. But at least he’s trying; most members couldn’t be bothered.
Congratulations, Rep. Cooper and Sen. Coburn. Keep up the good work.
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Posted in Earmarks, Political Animals, Stimulus
A man was arrested today for jumping a ropeline and asking President Obama for his autograph.
You guessed it – he’s a reporter.
Kind of surprising this hasn’t happened before, given the tenor of much presidential media coverage.
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Posted in Media
Yesterday I posted about Sen. Claire McCaskill’s proposal to legislate a maximum salary. Simple economic logic shows it to be a bad idea.
This bad idea also gets 92% support in a CNN.com poll. Sen. McCaskill must be smarter than I thought.
And far more cynical.
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Posted in Economics, Political Animals, Price and Wage Controls
The economist Hernando de Soto, writing about his native Peru in 1989, makes a point that holds true twenty years later and a continent away. Echoes of F.A. Hayek:
“Those who expect things to change simply because rulers with greater determination and executive skills are elected are guilty of a tremendous conceptual error.”
–The Other Path, p. 237.
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Posted in Executive Power, Great Thinkers, International, Political Animals, Uncategorized
Tagged hernando de soto
The Obama administration has found an innovative way to close the tax gap. Via the satire site Scrappleface:
1. Find a wealthy individual who hasn’t paid their taxes.
2. Nominate him or her to a cabinet-level position.
3. Bad publicity ensues. Taxes are paid.
Best of all, tax evasion is a bi-partisan phenomenon. It’ll work just as well during a Republican administration.
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Posted in Economics, General Foolishness, Taxation
The House stimulus vote did not contain a single Republican “yes” vote. Andy Roth thinks that “Democrats now ‘own’ this massive spending bill.”
Maybe the public will see it that way. If they do, that would be a coup for Republicans, akin to the Clinton health care debacle in 1994. If they succeed in labeling Democrats as the bigger-spending party, they’ll probably gain seats in 2010.
All this political maneuvering got me thinking. The Republicans’ main selling point is that Democrats are unfit to govern. They’re right.
The Democrats’ main selling point is that Republicans are unfit to govern. They’re right, too.
Sometimes I think it’s a real shame that elections have to have a winner.
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Posted in Elections, Political Animals, Stimulus, The Partisan Mind
Tagged 2010 election, andy roth, clinton, democrat, election, election 2010, hillarycare, republican
Inertia Wins! 