by | BLOG, FREEDOM, HYPOCRISY, MEDIA, POLITICS
The concept of black lives matter is a reasonable expression of sentiment for people who are trying to ensure equality and equity. The problem is that the concept, “black lives matter” shares the same name as the legal entity “Black Lives Matter.” But Black Lives Matter is an anti-capitalist, anti-semitic organization whose policies are anything but helpful to black people as a whole. Indeed, they call themselves a “member based abolitionist organization,” focusing on abolishing “capitalism”, and supporting single parent households, according to their own BLM chapter website for Washington, DC.
I would wager that the vast majority of people expressing support for black lives matter (small letters) don’t actually support Black Lives Matter (capital letters). They support the general concept but wouldn’t have anything to do with the organization if actually presented with its current objectives and ideologies. The problem arises when people support that general concept, but then any monies raised as a gesture of solidarity go to the big organization because it’s easy — or else they think it is a benign group.
Continuing to use the “black lives matter” mantra gives credibility to Black Lives Matter; this is dangerous and almost as bad as supporting Black Lives Matter outright. The worst way to poison someone is to tell them something is good, but then tell them its poison only after they’ve consumed it. Same with “black lives matter.” It would be wise to adopt another slogan that shows solidarity with the plight of black Americans without supporting and funding the anti-capitalist, anti-family, anti-police Black Lives Matters movement.
by | ARTICLES, ECONOMY, ELECTIONS, FED, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, POLITICS, POTUS, SOCIAL SECURITY, TAXES, TRUMP
Are we past the tipping point for economic reform? I would argue that Obama’s budgets and spending accelerated the deficits beyond repair. Some people will go back to Reagan and say that the deficit and the debt ballooned during the Reagan Administration and they will blame it on his tax cuts. But what is actually true is that the tax cuts generated a large increase in revenue, and the only reason why he had deficits was that the Democrat-led Congress increased spending even over the increased revenue. The same thing happened with the Bush tax cuts which were very pro-growth; the revenue went up sharply, but spending went up even faster. But at this point the debt was still manageable.
Then you come to Obama. At the beginning of his administration, we had the deep recession -which arguably could have benefited by one year of stimulus. The concept of a stimulus is supposed to be a one-off event. In other words, you engage in big one-time expenditures to get the economy on track and then spending goes back to previous levels as the recovery occurs. The problem is that Obama didn’t put things in for just one year. He did long term things, like food stamps, teacher’s compensation, etc., knowing full well that once put into effect they could not easily be withdrawn. And it was pretty clearly his intent all along, for political reasons, to bake them into the budget. So now when we started to have a recovery, you had ballooning deficits — even with a growing economy. Then by the time Trump was elected, the locked-in recurring spending with its locked-in annual increases made the deficit – and the debt – almost impossible to rein in.
Now we have the pandemic and we have no place to go. There’s no surplus to go to the deficit. Millions of Americans are unexpectedly unemployed, which means they’re not paying into Social Security. At the same time, we see older workers who have lost their jobs choose to draw their benefits as soon as they become eligible. This will speed up the insolvency train. But then Trump did something that was very stupid (though his political motivation is clear). He said that entitlements are off the table. If entitlement reform is off the table at this point, we’re headed to bankruptcy.
We’ve been talking about the coming insolvency of the Social Security and Medicare programs for many, many years now and Congress has done nothing to stave off the inevitable. Couple that with Obama budgets, Trump’s lack of action, and the pandemic, and the deficits are even larger now. Anyone seriously looking at the situation knows that absent a major change to entitlements, the mandated annual increases, both because of cost of living adjustments and demographics, will bankrupt both programs in the next ten to fifteen years. It’s very safe to say that absent major entitlement reform, we’re basically past the tipping point.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, COVID, ECONOMY, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, NEW YORK, POLITICS
I am a long-term supporter of the Manhattan Institute and participate in their events and webcasts regularly. Heather MacDonald, Steve Malanga, and Nicole Gelinas are three of my favorite people. But Michael Hendrix seriously dropped the ball as moderator of the discussion on “Planning for the City’s Reopening” several weeks ago. Given the current pandemic and civil unrest, exploring how business can reopen is a laudable topic; however, the actual discussion was immensely disappointing. He allowed it to simply ignore the real reasons for the problems the City now faces with regard to “reopening”.
For instance, during the question on how we were going to reopen the city, much of the conversation had to do with needing to do more with affordable housing, and needing more help from the city government. He of course knows that this has nothing to do with the “reopening”. The problem long preceded COVID, and doesn’t need the government to fix it. Government actions – zoning, land use, overburdening businesses and building regulations leading to ridiculously high costs – are the cause of lack of affordable housing, and without reversing those actual issues, there is no solution.
Additionally, the “racial crisis” was a significant topic. He ignored any response regarding whether this was true and/or meaningful since the City has been run by extraordinarily liberal, non-racist leaders for generations, including full representation of the minority community. Can racial bias then really be a thing in New York City? Also in every single major city in which there has been extensive looting and rioting, the cities have been in the hands of minorities and liberals for the past 50 years. Yet he as the moderator didn’t even allow for this perspective to come up.
Furthermore, there was absolutely no discussion about the rioters and looters destroying businesses; the conversation only focused on police brutality. Though police brutality may be a problem, is it really a factor in the reopening after COVID? For a panel exploring the city and businesses, it was egregious that he virtually ignored the very real problem: businesses that have been destroyed by looters and rioters are being ignored by law enforcement, making businesses hesitant to invest in reopening and insurers hesitant in providing insurance at affordable rates.
Another topic was education, but there was no mention about charter schools and how they fit into the equation of reopening, even though charter schools are the most successful educational endeavor in the city.
Likewise, another topic was insurance, which he allowed to proceed in a manner that just showed the economic ignorance of the panelists. Since the happening of a pandemic is not a quantifiable risk, it is not insurable. To insist that the government provide insurance, at a premium that can only be set politically, has many problems. What’s more, the ignorance of the position espoused – that the government should somehow make the insurers who did not provide or charge for such coverage pay for it anyway – should not have been allowed to go unanswered.
On a related note, there was talk about how the city may or may not be able to help because there is a budget crisis. But where was the mention that DeBlasio is the cause? There was already a budget crisis before the pandemic and the civil unrest, not because of it. And DeBlasio’s actions during the pandemic and protests will certainly inhibit the ability of the City to reopen.
Hendrix should have made sure that the discussion included the knowledge and competence that the people of the Manhattan Institute espouse. There is no question in my mind that Heather MacDonald, Steve Malanga, and Nicole Gelinas would have been very disappointed with the exchange.
by | BLOG, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, LAW, POLITICS
The police have a PR problem and a culture of cover up and it’s finally being talked about. On the one hand, the police have millions of contacts with the public over a given year and the vast majority of interactions are fine, even dull. But sometimes you have bad police and sometimes you have a bad interaction (including, though not limited to, a shooting). However, almost never do you see the police admit that they messed up.
George Floyd’s situation was unique in that they admitted the wrongdoing right away, though this was likely because the horrific actions were immediately all over the internet. But police have this culture of lying and doing nothing about terrible tragedies in which they do the wrong thing. For instance, the police typically want to see body cams first before the public gets a chance to so they can see what the cams show and then figure out how to spin it. The proper way to conduct an investigation would be to actually investigate first and then look at the body cams to see what they can corroborate or dispute. Maybe this attitude is symptomatic of the public service culture, because typically in the private sector you don’t have the same attitude. If, for example, a Walmart employee, through an improper action ,hurts a customer, Walmart will get rid of the employee because they don’t tolerate the abuse of a member of the public. Not necessarily so with the police, and this attitude needs reform if there is going to be meaningful change.
Police in this country need to remember that they are public servants but they are also responsible for their own behavior and police departments need to hold accountable the bad cops if they are going to maintain public trust.
by | BLOG, EDUCATION, OBAMA, POLITICS
It is clear, from any economic sense, that compensation paid in the private sector is more beneficial to society than that paid in the public sector. This is because amounts in the former is controlled by people risking their own money making sure it is maximizing output for a given input. (It also works for charities funded by people parting with their own hard earned money).
Federal state and local governments and government funded not-for-profits are less good for society, and they normally pay too much for what they receive in services. So how stupid must one be that we want to incentivize- by forgiving student loans – those who would take more from and contribute less to society??
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, GOVERNMENT, HYPOCRISY, OBAMA, POLITICS
Last week, Nick Gillespie of Reason moderated a webinar on policing and protests with Jacob Sullivan and C.J. Ciaramella. Gillespie is a thoughtful libertarian whose discussions I generally enjoy. Thus, I was appalled to hear Gillespie –no less than five times during the hour-long segment–refer to the 2014 Ferguson incident with Michael Brown as the beginning of the focus on police abuse and brutality. That is completely fictional. It was very clearly established that the police did nothing wrong in that case, a determination subsequently confirmed by the DOJ report — under Eric Holder no less!
It’s bad enough that this particular lie continues to be propagated by the left and progressives and repeated again and again, but for Reason to do so? For Nick Gillespie to do so? This is shameful. There are certainly well known cases of very wrongful and egregious cases of police misconduct that inform society’s dealing with the problem. But the Michael Brown incident – with its now famous though absolutely false “hands up, don’t shoot” – is actually a potent example of a mantra of a movement built on a lie.
To present Michael Brown’s case in the same sentence as George Floyd or Breonna Taylor is both damaging and reckless and it undermines the credibility of any meaningful conversation on a very important topic.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, FREEDOM, LAW, POLITICS
I’ve been thinking a lot about the riots lately from my apartment in Manhattan, watching the looters come down my streets without a cop in sight. At first, I understood the protests to be about George Floyd and wanting appropriate action for the officers who were responsible for his death. So far, that has been handled correctly as the powers in charge have said the right things, and the perpetrators have been charged with murder. But now the tone has shifted; the assertion is that systemic police bias exists. However, the proposed fix has now become an outright assault on law enforcement, culminating in some cases in the takeover of police stations and the call for defunding of police units. That is neither okay nor actually productive.
One of the biggest problems with the systemic bias narrative is the fact that the overwhelming majority of cases of racist police brutality have occurred in cities where liberal Democrats, supported by significant involvement of black officials, have been running the system for roughly 50 years. In other words, if systemic racism exists, it exists within the realm of Democrat policies and leadership. Thus the majority of those protesting are–at the same time–the very people responsible for such a racist system in the first place.
A recent article in the WSJ reviewed the very idea of systemic police bias and found that statistics don’t bear out such a charge. “Crime and suspect behavior” on the other hand, are the factors that drive most actions taken by law enforcement. For instance, in 2019, African-Americans accounted for just under 25% of those fatally killed by police, which was a statistic relatively unchanged for the prior 4 years. Likewise, the Washington Post police database shows that in 2019, 9 unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites were killed by law enforcement, a number which had decreased since 2015. Furthermore the National Academy of Sciences published an important report in 2019 on the very topic of “officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings” which concluded: “we did not find anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity.”
The problem is more police quality control than it is police bias. Very often, police unions use their power to represent a bad cop (as is their job), giving bad cops protection instead of accountability. In the case of George Floyd, the officer who knelt on his neck allegedly had a total of 18 misconduct reports in his file, and yet he was still allowed to hold a badge. But this isn’t a new thing. The Atlantic took pains back in 2014 to chronicle how police unions and arbitrators keep bad cops on the street. Yet they still exist largely unchecked today. Want true systemic reform? Tackle the issue of police unions.
In fact, there are other policy changes that can be done to ameliorate the situation. Starting with ending ludicrous public service union protections as mentioned above, we can also limit qualified immunity, make the offending police individual or department be responsible for lawsuit settlements, and end militarizing the police. Such items are the result of years and years of liberal and minority policies that have produced the broken system we see today. These areas of police reform will go a long way toward rebuilding public trust instead of removing law enforcement from the public altogether.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, GOVERNMENT, NEW YORK, POLITICS, TAXES
New York’s state budget director, Robert F. Mujica, Jr., wrote an anemic, laughable Letter to the Editor (printed in the Wall Street Journal) trying to defend New York’s fiscal record in an effort to get a federal bailout. Those of us who live in New York couldn’t help but notice it was full of half-truths. For instance, Mr. Mujica boasted lowering income-tax rates, but neglected to include the fact that Florida doesn’t even have an income tax yet still manages to operate on a budget of $93 million vs NY’s $177 million — in a state with 2 million more people!
Furthermore, he talks about a 20% increase of private-sector jobs, but leaves out the fact that “private job growth in Florida has been about 60% higher than in New York from Jan 2010 to Jan 2020.”
Likewise, he claims that New Yorkers send $29 billion more in taxes to the federal government than it gets back, but fails to mention that the reason for this is New York’s tax code punishes high income earners by adding extra taxes, so much that some earners pay nearly 50% of their earnings in taxes! Nor does he mention that many wealthy New Yorkers have wised up to being fleeced over the last decade, making New York one of the top ten out-migration states in order for earners to try to keep their own income — some going to Florida, no less. This loss undoubtedly contributes to the $6 billion budget shortfall that existed before Coronavirus even hit, something that was also conveniently left out of his defense.
Finally, Mr. Mujica tries to suggest that the $29 billion New Yorkers send to the federal government somehow subsidizes Florida’s budget because Florida receives $30 billion more from the federal government than Floridians send. But he leaves out the fact that New York’s budget contains 35.9% of federal money compared to Florida’s 32.8%. With a budget of $177 billion, that’s $63 billion of spending from federal dollars compared to $30 billion in Florida. Who is more fiscally irresponsible?
If states like New York are not willing to take any of the economic risk going forward, they should not get any money. They have willfully chosen to engage in a prolonged economic lockdown in hopes that someone else pays for it. Florida was one of the last states to shut down and has begun opening up once again, understanding the need for economic recovery. If New York wants to continue to take the economic risk of staying closed while other localities choose to reopen, they should be the ones to pay for it.
by | BLOG, ELECTIONS, POLITICS
For years I have been following the candidates that have been supported by the Club for Growth, contributing to both their campaigns and to the Club. Although overall they do a decent job finding and supporting candidates , there are two areas in which they are weak.
The Club For Growth has always been an advocate of the free market, limited government, and low taxes — the same thing that the Tea Party originally intended to be. However, within this realm, there are four things that the Club For Growth does not focus on, but they need to. These are: immigration, tariffs, the Jones Act, and ethanol. So you can have a good libertarian, free market candidate, but if that person turns out to also have unfavorable stances in one or more of those areas, they weaken their position. The Club For Growth needs to expand their vetting to include these four areas in their overall approach.
Additionally, the Club For Growth needs to continue to monitor those who have taken office. While it is understandable that with somewhat limited resources, they want to use most of those resources to find new candidates, it does no one any good if the people they have recommended end up going off the rails. There has to be some sort of follow up. For instance, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and Josh Hawley are all examples of people elected in no small part by the Club, but for which we now have serious buyers remorse. These three have taken inexcusable positions on tariffs, free markets, big government, etc.
It is disappointing and unacceptable to see Club For Growth focus only on getting new people elected while neglecting to hold these and other candidates accountable for their changed positions. It would be wise for the Club For Growth to practice better vetting and consistent follow up if they want to maintain being a trusted voice in the political landscape.
by | BLOG, ELECTIONS, POLITICS
For years I have been following the candidates that have been supported by the Club for Growth, contributing to both their campaigns and to the Club. Although overall they do a decent job finding and supporting candidates , there are two areas in which they are weak.
The Club For Growth has always been an advocate of the free market, limited government, and low taxes — the same thing that the Tea Party originally intended to be. However, within this realm, there are four things that the Club For Growth does not focus on, but they need to. These are: immigration, tariffs, the Jones Act, and ethanol. So you can have a good libertarian, free market candidate, but if that person turns out to also have unfavorable stances in one or more of those areas, they weaken their position. The Club For Growth needs to expand their vetting to include these four areas in their overall approach.
Additionally, the Club For Growth needs to continue to monitor those who have taken office. While it is understandable that with somewhat limited resources, they want to use most of those resources to find new candidates, it does no one any good if the people they have recommended end up going off the rails. There has to be some sort of follow up. For instance, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and Josh Hawley are all examples of people elected in no small part by the Club, but for which we now have serious buyers remorse. These three have taken inexcusable positions on tariffs, free markets, big government, etc. It is disappointing and unacceptable to see Club For Growth focus only on getting new people elected while neglecting to hold these and other candidates accountable for their changed positions. It would be wise for the Club For Growth to practice better vetting and consistent follow up if they want to maintain being a trusted voice in the political landscape.
