RICHARD RIDER RANT 7/24/09
No republic has long outlived the discovery by a majority of its people that
they could vote themselves largess from the public treasury.
Alexander Tytler
1. Spendthrift New York state needs California’s super-majority vote protection
2. Left’s media champion for higher California taxes thoroughly debunked
3. Private prisons crush government prison guards’ pay con job
4. If San Diego city public worker pay is so low, have city employees fled their jobs these past few years? Au contraire!
5. Does Obama want to own the airlines?
6. The Golden State's political class comes unglued in the face of a citizens' revolt.
7. Two Rider comments on why CA voters deserve only small part of blame for runaway spending
8. Fans Flock to Mourn California, 1849-2009
9. The coming federal tax increase(s)
10. How many of California’s 480+ agencies and commissions can you list – let alone recommend dissolving? Here’s one hell of a cheat sheet
11. Liberals love majority rule – except when it works against them
12. The feminist “78 cents on a dollar” myth
13. Thomas Sowell: “You can usually only equalize downwards”
14. Past (and many present) City Managers in San Diego County are the biggest crooks when it comes to the local pension debacles
15. Man bites dog. Rider supports labor union proposition
16. Over half the price of a ticket for international flight can be taxes
17. Tech Corner – Offsite backup – DO IT! Easier and cheaper than ever.
18. Financial tip: How to get extra discounts on online purchases
19. Latest updates to my “California Breaking Bad” article
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1. Spendthrift New York state needs California’s supermajority vote protection
RIDER COMMENT: Previously I published a “must read” Chris Reed blog item showing how simple majority voting is working in our liberal sister state – New York. http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034073.html
As that blog item showed, in the teeth of this severe downturn, NY politicians are raising taxes left and right while increasing the state budget 8%.
If you didn’t read that item, do it now. If you DID read that item, reread it, commit its essence to memory, and send it to everyone you know – that’s one chain letter that needs to circulate the California Internet.
This Chris Reed follow-up blog item below is almost as valuable. Like California, some in New York are pushing for a constitutional convention to solve their government’s budget problems. But unlike California, they want and need such a convention to ELIMINATE simple majority tax increases – to adopt supermajority requirements for raising taxes!
When it comes to simple majority voting, they’ve been there, done that, and are now through with that.
http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034488.html
CHRIS REED BLOG
New York, like California, ponders constitutional convention -- partly to block tax hikes on simple majority vote!
So in California, things are so dysfunctional that self-styled "good government" groups like the Bay Area Council want a constitutional convention, where job no. 1 would be killing the Legislature's two-thirds requirement for raising taxes and adopting a budget. California may be among the most heavily taxed states in the union, but these "goo goos" somehow think our problem is the budget process, not a refusal to live within our means.
Now for the hilarious twist:
In New York, things are so dysfunctional that perhaps the most popular politician in the state wants a constitutional convention, where job no. 1 would be killing the Legislature's ability to raise taxes by a simple majority vote. Introducing Mr. Rudy Giuliani:
Too often increasing taxes is the first impulse for Albany legislators. Requiring a supermajority for tax increases would provide a powerful check on those who still think we can tax and spend our way out of economic problems. A supermajority would protect already over-burdened citizens and attract businesses, improving our long-term competitiveness.
What led Rudy to this constitution? The appalling 2009-10 New York state budget I wrote about here. Rudy shares my low opinion of it:
There are more New Yorkers unemployed than at any time in 33 years, and the poverty rate is rising. Our combined state and local tax burden is the highest in the nation after New Jersey. Our business tax climate is rated the second worst in the country. And in the face of the worst recession in a quarter-century, the State Legislature decided to increase spending by 9 percent while increasing taxes and fees by $8 billion. No wonder a recent poll showed that more than 20 percent of New Yorkers are thinking of leaving the state in search of lower taxes and fewer government mandates.
Giving the California Legislature the option of behaving like the New York Legislature is what Jim Wunderman and the Bay Area Council want for California? Really? Really? Really?
Thanks to Bruce Kesler for drawing Giuliani's New York Times op-ed to my attention.
Posted by Chris Reed at June 24, 2009 01:05 PM
2. Left’s media champion for higher California taxes thoroughly debunked
RIDER COMMENT: The liberal press got all excited by a Michael Hiltzik column in the LA TIMES claiming that California’s spending problem is just a right wing myth. But the piece has since been crushed by a simple look at Hiltzik’s incorrect math and pathetic research.
Naturally, the TIMES and other liberal publications have failed to give much coverage to this robust rebuttal. Fortunately for you, this blog ain’t the LA TIMES! Here’s the REASON column tearing it to shreds – I had a tiny hand in it.
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/133764.html?success=1#lastpost
LAT Columnist: State Spending Problem a "Myth"...Unless You Count All State Spending
Matt Welch | May 28, 2009, 11:01am
In today's installment of You Californians Are Just Too STUPID, L.A. Times anti-business columnist and recovering sock-puppeteer Michael Hiltzik thunders: "California's problem is spending? That's a myth." Hiltzik's case:
[T]he idea that California's budget has been out of control as measured against inflation and population growth is a deeply cherished talking point in the debate over the state's fiscal deficit.
Unfortunately, it turns out to be yet another infectious myth. The truth is that over the last 10 years, California's spending has tracked population growth and price increases almost to the penny.
This finding comes from the nonpartisan legislative analyst's office, which subjects the state budget to more careful scrutiny than almost anyone else in Sacramento.
Analyzing the 2008-09 budget bill last year, the legislative analyst determined that since 1998-99, spending in the general fund and state special funds -- the latter comes from special levies like gasoline and tobacco taxes -- had risen to $128.8 billion from $72.6 billion, or 77%.
During this time frame, which embraced two booms (dot-com and housing) and two busts (ditto), the state's population grew about 30% to about 38 million, and inflation charged ahead by 50%. The budget's growth, the legislative analyst found, exceeded these factors by only an average of 0.2% a year.
What's missing from this analysis? Hiltzik cops to it a few paragraphs later: Bond spending. Which, as he quotes the state legislative analyst as saying, has amounted to $85 billion in voter-mandated issuances this decade alone.
In what universe does "bond spending" not count as "spending"? Does this mean I am not technically spending when I buy stuff with my credit card? If a "deeply cherished talking point" turns out to be true, can it still be "infectious"? These are the questions.
To see what an honest and complete accounting of California budget data over the past two decades looks like (hint: the phrase "almost to the penny" is not used), consult the Reason Foundation's study [PDF] "California Spending By the Numbers."
UPDATE: The San Diego Union-Tribune's Chris Reed has found what he calls a "Huge, obvious error" in Hiltzik's calculations of population growth.
RIDER NOTE: What Chris Reed discovered is that columnist Hiltzik claimed that CA population grew 30% over a 10 year period. But a check of the numbers shows that the state grew only 13.8% during that timeframe. I brought this point to REASON’s attention, and I think that was the reason for the “UPDATE” to the article (see comments at the REASON website).
3. Private prisons crush government prison guards’ pay con job
RIDER COMMENT: As you may know from my previous rants, the powerful California Correctional Peace Officers Association was instrumental in effectively banning private CA state prisons, driving up the California cost of incarceration. And then they bribed Gray Davis and the legislature to give the guards a 35% pay boost for dessert.
“California Correctional Peace Officers Association” – isn’t that a great name for a prison guard union? “Peace officers”? Uh huh. Funny how “public safety” employees never want to call their unions what they are – labor unions!
As usual, I digress. Below is a comparison of the cost of government vs. private prisons in the U.S. The cost savings from competition can be dramatic. The study is done by a Washington state think tank so it’s geared to that state’s needs, but the lesson available is more universal.
Bottom line of the study – comparing states with more than and less than 20% of inmates in private prisons: The states with less than 20% in private prisons are paying 49.4% more per day per inmate than states with more than 20% in private prisons.
http://tinyurl.com/pnxrjw
Washington Policy Institute
Private Prisons and the Public Interest
Improving Quality and Reducing Costs through Competition
by Paul Guppy, Vice President for Research
2003-06
________________________________________
The cost of maintaining Washington’s state-run prison system is becoming increasingly unsustainable. The state Department of Corrections budget has more than doubled over the last ten years, rising from $502 million in the 1991-1993 biennium to $1,072 million in the current biennium. Corrections costs rose more than 12.3% over the last two years, a rate more than four times faster than inflation. The increasing cost of operating the state prison system has outpaced the rise in total General Fund spending in every biennium in the 1990s, and is now one of the fastest growing areas of state spending.
Mounting prison expenditures are a major cost driver for state government, and are one reason overall state spending is increasing considerably faster than the rising level of tax revenues. State legislators now face a $2.4 billion deficit compared to what they had planned to spend in the 2003-2005 biennium.
Every state prison facility but one is overcrowded, some by as much as 50%. Many of Washington’s 39 county jails are also filled beyond capacity. Together county jails are designed to hold 8,770 prisoners, but instead house an average daily population of around 10,000, resulting in an average over-capacity of just over 113%.
The state’s tight financial situation lends fresh urgency to privatization and competitive bidding as a long-term way to bring rising spending under control. Introducing competition from the private sector would allow state leaders to provide critical prison services at lower cost.
Recent research compares two groups of states over four years, 1997 through 2001. The first group consists of nine states that took strong advantage of competitive forces by devoting at least 20% of their corrections system to privately run prisons. The second group consists of 24 states with few or no private prisons. Washington is one of these. In every rated category, the states in the first group operated a more cost-effective prison system than those in the second group. The results are summarized in the graph.
Comparison of Increasing State Prison Costs Based on Number of Privately Run Prisons
Over the four-year period the states with few or no private prisons experienced significantly faster growth in total spending, higher corrections costs and higher daily prisoner costs than states with a large proportion of privately run prisons.
States that made a greater investment in private prisons enjoyed far lower expenses per day per inmate than other states. These states had an average daily cost of $82.59 per inmate in 2001, compared with an average daily cost of $123.43 for states with few or no privately run prisons.
In Washington, with little prison privatization, per diem costs in 2001 were $104.25. Yet in neighboring Idaho, where state leaders made a significant investment in private prisons, per diem costs were 42% lower, just $60.21.
Other Western states that greatly benefited from lower per day costs because they had significant number of private prisons were Montana ($80.93), New Mexico ($85.89) and Colorado ($67.05).
There is a measurable relationship between states that have invested in private prisons and their ability to control the rise in total structural costs of state government.
States with 20% or more private prisons saw their total spending increase an average of 24.34% over four years, compared with an average increase of more than 32% for non-privatized states.
Concurrently, such states were better able to contain costs in their Department of Corrections budgets. In the states with more private prisons, Department of Corrections costs increased an average of 38.12%, while the states that had neglected privatization opportunities saw their corrections budget soar an average of 50%. Over the same period the populations of the two groups of states rose at similar rates, in the 15% to 18% range.
Details from the study reveal striking examples of the efficiencies states gain from investing in prison privatization:
Utah spends $125.40 per day for each prisoner housed, while neighboring Colorado spends just $67.05 per day for the same service.
Minnesota spends $164.03 per prisoner per day, while Wisconsin spends $93.33 per day, or 43% less.
Tennessee was able to reduce prisoner costs per day by more than 8% over four years, while in neighboring North Carolina per diem corrections costs over the same period increased by 15%.
In Washington per day costs increased almost 25% over four years, while in Idaho they increased at less than one-third that rate, by only 7.4%.
The measurable results of prison privatization have been overwhelmingly positive. While the private prison system is not perfect, the high quality, safety, low cost and management innovations that resulted from competitive pressures have been beneficial to the public interest.
Adopting a policy of prison privatization in Washington could go a long way to relieving prison overcrowding and slowing the growth in the government’s long-term structural costs.
See the full study on “Private Prisons and the Public Interest” here. http://tinyurl.com/q8qdot
4. If San Diego city public worker pay is so low, have city employees fled their jobs these past few years? Au contraire!
RIDER COMMENT: I meant to post this Chris Reed blog item in a March, 2008 Rider Rant. It’s still excellent ammo, so I’m “publishing” it now.
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http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/020735.html
The public employee pay urban myth, part 2: The numbers don't lie
John Kaheny says I don't know what I'm talking about when I mock his claim that constantly improving pay and great benefits are crucial to retaining municipal employees in San Diego. I quoted local government expert Steve Frates saying this claim was an "urban myth" and that there was essentially no market demand for public employees except for police officers.
OK, John, you want stats, here are stats.
"Median occupational tenure" -- the length of time a worker toils for the same employer -- is a very accurate indicator of job satisfaction. (Job satisfaction maybe not in the sense of personal fulfillment, etc., but in the sense of not looking for greener pastures elsewhere.)
"Median occupational tenure" is far higher for public employees than for the average U.S. worker. As this Bureau of Labor Statistics report confirms ...
In January 2006, wage and salary workers in the public sector had almost double the median tenure of private sector employees, 6.9 versus 3.6 years.
Also this:
Federal employees had a higher median tenure (9.9 years) than state (6.3 years) or local government (6.6 years) employees.
Now guess what the figure is in San Diego for general city employees (all but police, firefighters and lifeguards): 12.32 years -- way more than the national average even for other public employees, not just all workers. And this despite years of union leaders telling the rank and file they're being abused by city leaders.
There's more.
Here's the average annual turnover rate the past three fiscal years for general city employees: 3.8 percent.
Cue the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The total separations, or turnover, rate fell to 3.1 percent in December 2007. Separations are terminations of employment that occur at any time during the month.
Got that? The monthly overall job turnover rate for the U.S. as a whole is similar to the turnover rate for the city of San Diego FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR!
Put another way: Over the past six weeks, the total percentage of people who have changed or lost jobs in the economy as a whole is a higher percentage than we saw in the San Diego municipal work force for all of 2007.
Oh, yeah, municipal employees are in high demand, they're eager to leave, an exodus is imminent. City Hall would just be crazy to not jack up pay and benefits.
Bunk.
Case closed. Kaheny and friends will offer anecdotes galore, but the numbers don't lie.
Posted by Chris Reed at March 7, 2008 03:27 PM
5. Does Obama Want to Own the Airlines?
Manny Klausner Comment: Holman Jenkins' column in the Wall Street Journal poses an ominous question, in analyzing the current approach of the Obama Justice Department -- which threatens to undermine the prospects for survival of the chronically troubled U.S. airline industry.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124701148185808655.html
Wall Street Journal
July 8, 2009
Does Obama Want to Own the Airlines?
Welcome to government for the benefit of government officials and their hangers-on.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Only luck and falling oil prices saved Washington from having to face mass bankruptcy of the airline industry last year. Now the specter is rising again. Fuel prices are up. Traffic continues to plummet amid a global recession. United Airlines last week mortgaged its spare-parts inventory to raise cash at a usurious 17% interest rate.
Yet the Obama Justice Department has come out of the blocks trying to scuttle a promising experiment to stabilize the chronically unprofitable U.S. airline sector. The new administration seemingly won't let companies fail, and won't let them succeed either.
The airline industry's self-help solution has been an evolving trio of international alliances, partly blessed with "antitrust immunity" by the U.S. Department of Transportation. One, the Star Alliance led by United and Lufthansa, is currently poaching Continental from a rival alliance, SkyTeam. DOT was set to approve their application last week when Justice belatedly intervened with a 58-page complaint about why the pact should be restructured.
To anyone drilled in the antitrust mindset, Justice's argument won't seem outlandish. It frets about reduced competition on this or that international route, and sees little chance of competitive entry by new carriers despite fat profits that presumably would be on offer. It argues, in a fashion typical of antitrust these days, that nonstop flights are a market unto themselves, so connecting flights on the same routes don't count.
But the real fulcrum is Justice's insistence, or plea, that DOT should set a high bar for antitrust immunity, because antitrust enforcement has been such a gosh-darn boon to consumers.
Justice offers no supporting evidence for this proposition, which has resisted academic verification. And in dismissing the "putative" benefits of immunized airline alliances, Justice fails even to acknowledge the one benefit that Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has emphasized: "These alliances are life savers for airlines. That is the premise from which we start. We believe it. The airlines believe it."
In part, such alliances are substitutes for international airline mergers (which are prohibited under U.S. law), but are more interesting than mergers, thanks to the flexibility with which carriers can enter and exit cooperative agreements with each other.
The antitrust mindset naturally sees such cooperation as always harmful, inflating prices and gouging consumers. But then why does organized labor oppose the deals? Shouldn't workers favor alliances if they reduce competitive pressure on wages? Yet Justice's intervention came after United's pilots ran a full-page ad in Roll Call attacking the company's own deal.
And why do carriers lobby against each other's pacts? Shouldn't they favor anything that leads to oligopoly pricing? And what to make of Continental's decision to jilt SkyTeam and jump to Star, shifting the competitive balance on the North Atlantic?
Obama antitrust chief Christine Varney doesn't have much good to say about her Bush predecessors. But she praises their record of cartel-busting. She might examine that record for what it actually says about the incentive to collude.
It shows, for one thing, that companies are inclined to snuggle up mainly to share losses and preserve capacity in a downturn or to curb the free-riding of powerful customers. When profits are available, on the other hand, they quickly go back to competing to maximize their respective shares rather than colluding to limit their individual upsides.
These incentives would very likely prevail in the highly flexible airline alliances. Such alliances are no miracle cure for what ails the domestic carriers, but they would open a window to let us see beyond antitrust's indiscriminate prejudice against cooperative acts by competitors.
Of course, this would fly in the face of Ms. Varney's agenda, which is to expand the bailiwick of the Washington antitrust bar. Even now, she has turned her attention from airlines to the mobile-phone business on the theory that any industry that hasn't collapsed into government receivership must be doing something wrong.
Mr. Obama blabs about the evils of lobbying, but his administration is fast becoming the greatest fillip to lobbying ever seen. Ms. Varney has now horned in on the DOT's action, forcing the airline business and all its camp followers to come and pay tribute. Her choice of targets is obviously designed for political effect. Airlines and mobile-phone operators both touch the public in ways that leave the public frequently annoyed.
What we're seeing here and elsewhere from the new administration is not some rebirth of thoughtful liberalism, but a spastic descent into machine liberalism -- government for the benefit of government officials and their hangers-on. Mr. Obama, however, may not be so pleased with the result if it means he must soon add the airlines to the collection of failed industries being run out of the White House.
6. The Golden State's political class comes unglued in the face of a citizens' revolt.
RIDER COMMENT: Below is an excellent article from REASON magazine that details the huge chasm between the grubby voters and the elitists who think they can direct us towards European socialism. It’s both an instructive and fun read.
Excerpt:
> According to Adam Summers -- a policy analyst at the Reason
> Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine -- the
> state's annual pension fund contribution vaulted from $321 million
> in 2000-01 to $7.3 billion last year. According to public
> databases, more than 5,000 people are drawing pensions in excess
> of $100,000 from the state of California each year.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/134445.html
Reason Magazine
August/September 2009 Print Edition
California Screaming
The Golden State's political class comes unglued in the face of a
citizens' revolt.
By Matt Welch
On May 19, California voters went to the polls to decide whether to pass a package of six tax-and-gimmick ballot propositions. Its supporters—Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Democratic legislative leaders, the California Teachers Association, and the overwhelming majority of the state’s major newspapers—billed it as the last best hope to plug Sacramento’s $24 billion budget deficit. “Either pass it,” warned the Los Angeles Times editorial board, “or risk fiscal disaster.”
Those who believe that either money or the media determine political outcomes should pay close heed to what happened next: Although opponents were outspent by more than 7 to 1, they trounced the state’s political class, rejecting five of the six measures by an average of 30 percentage points. The only proposition to pass was an anger-driven new law that limits elected officials’ salaries.
Faced with such thorough repudiation, California’s best and brightest then did a telling thing. They lashed right back.
The Los Angeles Times headlined its morning-after news analysis, “California Voters Exercise Their Power—and That’s the Problem.” Sacramento columnist George Skelton argued that “voters helped get themselves into this fix” by “passing feel-good ‘ballot box budgeting’ initiatives” and sanctioning “heavy borrowing” for “infrastructure projects.” Business columnist Michael Hiltzik (RIDER NOTE: see item #2 in this Rant to get a better feel for this guy’s credibility) averred that “far more blame for the deficit belongs to California voters” because “year in, year out, they enact spending mandates at the polls, often without endowing a revenue source.” Missing from any of these critiques was the fact that the Times’ own editorial board endorsed more than 90 percent of the very same ballot-box bond measures during the last decade. No matter: A perpetrator had been located.
“Good morning, California voters,” The Sacramento Bee’s post-election editorial began. “Do you feel better, now that you’ve gotten that out of your system?” The Bee, which (like the Times) had endorsed four of the five losing measures, came under immediate attack for its heavy-handed, citizen-blaming sarcasm. (A sample: “So, now that you’ve put those irksome politicians in their place, maybe it’s time to think about this: Since you’re in charge, exactly what do you intend to do about that pesky $25 billion hole in the budget?”) Rush Limbaugh gleefully read passages on his show, San Diego Union-Tribune editorial writer Chris Reed called it “staggeringly juvenile, arrogant and revealing,” and commenters on the Bee’s website were full of reactions like, “What an obnoxious editorial. Nevertheless, it illustrates that the Bee is completely in favor of bigger government and higher taxes.”
Then another funny thing happened: The Bee scrubbed the editorial off its website, replacing it with a much more conciliatory piece, addressed this time to legislators. The original editorial had been posted in “error,” the paper explained, and the new piece was the one that appeared in the print edition. “That [first] article was a draft prepared for internal discussion among members of The Bee’s editorial board,” a brief note said. “Such discussions are a routine part of our work, and frequently lead to editorials that are considerably different from writers’ first drafts.”
This instant airbrushing, normally fodder for such journalism-tracking websites as Jim Romenesko’s Media News, went virtually ignored by all but a few mostly right-leaning websites. So did another colossal gaffe, by the aforementioned Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik, who thundered that the very notion California had a “spending problem” was an “infectious myth.”
Hiltzik claimed that the state government’s budget growth had kept pace “almost to the penny” with growth in population and inflation during the last decade. There were three problems with this analysis: Hiltzik miscalculated population growth (claiming 30 percent instead of 14 percent), he chose a federal inflation rate of 50 percent during that period instead of the California Consumer Price Index figure of 35 percent, and, most important, he excluded from state spending more than $100 billion in bond measures. This whopper was roasted and dissected on local talk radio, but it was unmentioned by more august repositories of public policy and journalism debate, such as the Times-tracking LA Observed.
Rarely has the chasm between elite political discourse and grubby popular opinion been displayed in such sharp relief. The implications of this citizen revolt—and the hostile reactions to it—stretch far beyond Nevada’s western border. California is the Ghost of Federal Government Future.
During the last two decades, the Golden State has been transformed from what was once known as the nation’s most anti-labor outpost to a state essentially run by public-sector unions. Nearly three in five public sector workers are unionized, compared to less than two in five public employees in other states. The Democratic Party, which is fully in hock to unions, has controlled the legislature and most statewide posts, with the notable exception of the governor’s mansion, for more than a decade. That means more government workers, higher salaries, and drastically higher pension costs.
According to Adam Summers—a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine—the state’s annual pension fund contribution vaulted from $321 million in 2000–01 to $7.3 billion last year. According to public databases, more than 5,000 people are drawing pensions in excess of $100,000 from the state of California each year.
So pervasive is the union influence that big labor doesn’t even try to defend its deleterious effects on California’s finances. Just before the special election, a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board asked Service Employees International Union chief Andy Stern to respond to charges that unions are the 21st-century equivalent of the railroads that were once all-powerful in California. Stern verbally shrugged: “I think democracy is an ugly thing at times.”
That ugliness has made the California budget, like those in most of the other 49 states, less efficient and more bloated. Government spending, unlike spending in the private economy, is a zero-sum game—especially on the state level, since governors can’t print money. Every dollar spent gilding a pension is a dollar not spent funding an orphanage. Naturally, the same elite outlets that were busy blaming voters after the election spent even more time detailing the horrors of the “annihilating cuts,” as the Los Angeles Times called them in a news article, that were coming down the pike. (In early June, the paper invited readers to be shocked that a high school with 3,200 students would have to make do with just three guidance counselors.) Bloated pension costs and the increasingly inefficient provision of state services received a fraction of the coverage.
The federal government is now run by a president and Congress more responsive to union concerns than any in at least two decades. The same bloat currently bogging down statehouses and city halls is being duplicated in boomtown Washington, D.C. President Barack Obama even brought Andy Stern in to help warn Schwarzenegger that federal stimulus money would not be disbursed to California unless the governor rescinded some proposed state job cuts. Though that threat was later withdrawn, Schwarzenegger at press time was pushing for a measly work force reduction of 2 percent.
But there’s another interpretation of California’s rebellion, one with far sunnier implications for those of us who prefer our governments constrained. Faced with a political class that ignored bureaucratic inefficiency, that demanded higher taxes, that filled the newspapers with scare stories about people who will literally die as a result of budget cuts, the citizens of one of the bluest states in the nation collectively said we just don’t believe you anymore. If even California’s famous fruits and nuts can call the statists’ bluff, there may be hope for the rest of the country.
Matt Welch (matt.welch@reason.com) is editor in chief of reason.
7. Two Rider comments on why CA voters deserve only small part of blame
RIDER COMMENT: I have a foolish habit of commenting on articles online – and verbally sparing with opponents. I can’t help myself!
Well, I’ve decided I should make a greater effort to disseminate such thoughts by posting insightful comments in my Rant when appropriate. Like now.
These two comments were in response to elitists’ claims that it’s the voters who are to blame for our state mess. But much of that is from a lack of understanding of what’s being voted on, and the ramifications. Of course, these same elitists campaigned mightily via the press and through contributions to convince the public to support all these spending measures. But that’s well covered in the REASON piece above.
Here are my two comments:
A. Yes, California voters supported more spending and $100B+ in bonds. But sadly, the average voter doesn't see the connection between these commitments and higher taxes.
When it comes to state bonds, the deception is by design.
A LOCAL bond usually includes a specific tax increase to go with it -- so the voter knows what the measure is going to cost. Furthermore most such bonds require a 2/3 vote majority to pass (55% for most school bonds).
On the state level, no tax is included with the bond -- it seems to be almost free. In addition, the bond can be passed with a simple majority vote. Unsophisticated voters are left to assume that the payments somehow will be magically paid out of the general fund, and proponents are not about to indicate otherwise.
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B. Voters deserve only a small part of the blame.
Voters didn't decide to ban private jails in California, resulting in our per-prisoner incarceration costs being over 50% higher than the rest of the nation.
Voters didn't decide to give away huge pensions and opulent health care benefits to our "public servants."
Voters didn't decide to pay over $100K annually to age 20-something prison guards with high school educations.
Voters didn't decide to let most highway patrol personnel to retire on bogus disability claims.
Voters didn't vote for most of the state commissions that impede commerce while paying the "commissioners" patronage salaries of $120K or more for at most six weeks work.
Voters didn't decide to give away community college educations at fire sale prices. (The average nationwide community college tuition is 4.5 times higher than California's.)
I could go on (and often do). Enough for now.
8. Fans Flock to Mourn California, 1849-2009
RIDER COMMENT: A sad yet quite humorous report of the demise of California, a la Michael Jackson.
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/
Fans Flock to Mourn California, 1849-2009
LOS ANGELES - Millions of fans from around the globe gathered along Sunset Boulevard to pay final respects to California today, as a slow moving funeral procession transported the eccentric superstar state's remains to its final resting place in a Winchell's Donuts dumpster in Van Nuys. The self-proclaimed 'King of Pop Culture' died last week at 160, in what coroners ruled an accidental case of financial autoerotic asphyxiation. The death sent shock waves across the world and sparked an outpouring of grief by rabid fans.
"I don't care what the tabloids and the Wall Street Journal say," said a weeping Illinois. "I still love you, Cali!"
The 640-mile long funeral parade route was lined with flowers, candles, teddy bears, and IOUs from millions of mourners and debtors who made the somber journey to watch the passing of the state that had once ruled the box office and industrial charts. Among them were current chart-toppers who cited California as a key influence.
"If it wasn't for California, I wouldn't be where I am today," said Arizona of Westside 3, the popular sunbelt trio who recently benefited from the late state's generous gift of fleeing taxpayers and businesses. As a tribute to their mentor, Arizona vowed the group would start spending money "like crack-addled hip hop stars."
"California's financial and musical legacy will never die," said band mates Nevada and Oregon.
At the official funeral service at the LA Coliseum, a grief stricken Washington, who teamed with California on several hit software and wine projects, had to be physically restrained from climbing into the deceased's gold plated casket.
Similar emotional outpourings were the rule of the day. Stories - apocryphal or not - of the late state's bizarre self-destructive behavior and fondness for molesting children did little to dampen the flood of tributes from fans who preferred to remember California as America's Sweetheart.
From a humble beginning as a water-poor remote Spanish mission outpost, California proved to be a precocious and talented child performer. It struck gold with 'Sutter's Mill' in 1849, earning accolades and attracting millions of crusty bearded prospectors. Black gold soon followed with 'La Brea Tar Pits.' Unlike many child acts, California made a smooth transition to adolescence, scoring a major hit with 'Agriculture' in 1891.
Even a frightening bout with tremors did not stop the flow of hits. The 1915 megasmash 'Hollywood' broke all records, as did the wartime favorite 'Aerospace.' More recently, California topped the charts with 'Tourism,' 'High Tech,' and 'Coastal Pretension.'
For a time it seemed as if the superstar could do no wrong, but behind the glittering facade of Disneyland Manor troubling signs of mental instability began to emerge. The state developed a well publicized drug problem during filming of 1967's 'Summer of Love,' and briefly dabbled in strange religious cults. Under the influence of spiritual guru Jerry Brown, it began wholesale experimentation in exotic spending programs, eventual resulting in a traumatic 1979 stay at the Prop 13 Rehab Center.
During the 80's and 90's California enjoyed a brief career renaissance with hits like 'Olympics,' 'Real Estate' and 'Dot Com Boom,' but personal problems plagued the reclusive star once again. During the recording of the 'OJ' and 'Rodney King' albums, friends and visitors expressed concern over its recurring tremors and penchant for self-mutilation.
"California used to be so happy and beautiful," said a horrified Ohio. "I hardly recognize it any more."
During that period, camp insiders say the increasingly psychotic state began driving away its long time professional management team and support crew. In its place, it assembled an entourage of con men and embezzlers, some of whom stoked California's increasingly bizarre environmental paranoia. It was seldom seen in public without a breathing mask to ward off imagined pollutants.
Worse, the hits began drying up; the huge 2001 flop 'Dot Com Bust' put a huge crimp into California's once unlimited cash flow. Despite the setback, insiders say the superstar was unwilling to change its lavish lifestyle, and retreated once again into spending abuse. Personal expenses skyrocketed, propelled in part by California's 8 million adopted foster children. During the 90's sensationalistic accounts of child abuse began surfacing. Eyewitnesses reported California cruising local neighborhoods in school buses, luring unsuspecting kid for sessions of 'public education.' By some estimates hundreds of thousands were left traumatized and severely brain damaged.
The charges were vigorously denied by California camp spokestate Vermont.
"California loves children," said Vermont. "California loves children, because deep inside California is a also a child -- full of innocent wonder, and the belief that any budget wish can come true as long as you just wish hard enough."
True or not, the charges alienated many longtime fans, leaving California in an ever worsening financial position. In 2003 the state rejected suggestions that it was facing bankruptcy, saying that "I can't be out of money, I still have checks left." Amid the maelstrom, though, it fired tour manager Grey Davis who many blamed for California's financial woes. In his place, California hired Arnold Schwarzenegger to help engineer a career-saving comeback tour.
Under the management of the flamboyant Austrian body builder / therapist, California began a rapid descent that ultimately ended in death. Some faulted Schwarzenegger's unconventional therapeutic methods and prescription spending pills, including state pension steroids that some say were powerful enough to kill a Scandinavian industrial power. Schwarzenegger denied culpability, saying that his spending pills "help build de upper financial torso and lats, and deese other sings and so on."
Despite the last minute financial maneuvers analysts say the state died penniless, owing creditors as much as $100 billion. Amid the swirling recriminations between California camp factions, fans chose to mark its passing quietly. Longtime California fan club president Iowa said that despite being the constant butt of the Golden State's insults and jokes, it will remember the late superstar fondly.
"Let's not remember California as a bloated, rotting freakshow corpse hanging above a filthy public pension toilet," it said. "Let's remember the good times. Like my 6-day bender at the '91 Rose Bowl."
"California's pain is finally over, and I like to think that the whole state is going to a better place," Iowa added. "Just look at all those U-Hauls headed to Oklahoma."
9. The coming federal tax increase(s)
RIDER COMMENT: VAT’s an interesting topic. Not to mention a broader income tax increase.
But you greedy citizens can afford it. Just ask Obama and company.
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jul/12/awaitinga-taxincrease/?uniontrib
Awaiting a tax increase
George F. Will
THE WASHINGTON POST
2:00 a.m. July 12, 2009
What's your bet on a tax increase? Economic policy, which became startling when Washington began buying automobile companies, has become surreal now that disappointment with the results of the second stimulus is stirring talk about the need for a . . . second stimulus. Elsewhere, it requires centuries to bleach mankind's memory; in Washington, 17 months suffice: In February 2008, President George W. Bush and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who normally were at daggers drawn, agreed that a $168 billion stimulus — this was Stimulus I — would be the “booster shot” the economy needed. Unemployment then was 4.8 percent.
In January, the administration, shiny as a new dime and bursting with brains, said that unless another stimulus — Stimulus II wound up involving $787 billion — was passed immediately, unemployment, which then was 7.6 percent, would reach 9 percent by 2010. But halfway through 2009, the rate is 9.5. For the first time since the now 16-nation Eurozone was established in 1999, the unemployment rate in America is as high as it is in that region, which Americans once considered a cautionary lesson in the wages of sin, understood as excessive taxation and regulation.
“Everyone guessed wrong” about the economy's weakness, says the vice president, explaining why Stimulus II has not yielded anticipated benefits. Joe Biden is beguiling when unfiltered by calculation, as he often is and as he was when he spoke about guessing (“Meet the Press,” June 14) and how everyone “misread” the economy (“This Week,” July 5). To be fair, economics is a science of single instances, which means it is hardly a science. And it is least like one when we most crave certainty from it — when there is a huge and unprecedented event and educated guessing is the best anyone can do.
But before embarking on Stimulus III, note that only about 10 percent of Stimulus II has yet been injected into the economy in 2009. This is not the administration's fault, the administration's defenders say, because government is cumbersome, sluggish and inefficient. But this sunburst of insight comes as the administration toils to enlarge governmental control of health care, energy, finance, education, etc. The administration guesses that these government projects will do better than the Postal Service (its second-quarter loss, $1.9 billion, was 68 percent of its losses for all of 2008) and the government's railroad (Amtrak has had 38 money-losing years and this year's losses are on pace to set a record).
Let's guess: Will a person or institution looking for a place to invest $1 billion seek opportunities in the United States, where policy decisions are deliberately increasing taxes, debt, regulations and the cost of energy, and soon will increase the cost of borrowing and hiring? Or will the investor look at, say, India. It is the least urbanized major country — 70 percent of Indians live in rural areas, 50 percent on farms — so the modernizing and productivity-enhancing movement from the countryside to the city is in its infancy. This nation of 1.2 billion people has a savings rate of 25 percent to 30 percent, and fewer than 20 million credit cards. Which nation, India or the United States, is apt to have the higher economic growth over the next decade?
Yet while government diminishes America's comparative advantages, liberals are clamoring for . . . higher taxes. Partly because of changes endorsed by presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, approximately 60 percent of taxpayers now pay either no income tax (43 percent) or less than 5 percent of their income. Because one cannot raise significant money by that tax without nicking the middle class, or without bringing millions of people back onto the income tax rolls, attention is turning to a value-added tax.
A VAT is levied at every stage of production. Like the cap-and-trade regime being constructed, a VAT is a liberal politician's delight: It taxes everything, but opaquely.
Before he became an economic adviser in the Obama White House, where wit can be dangerous, Larry Summers said: Liberals oppose a VAT because it is regressive and conservatives oppose it because it is a money machine, but a VAT might come when liberals realize it is a money machine and conservatives realize it is regressive.
At the June 29 White House briefing, press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked, with reference to health care legislation, if the president's pledge not to raise taxes on couples making less than $250,000 is “still active.” Gibbs answered: “We are going to let the process work its way through.” What is your guess?
Will can be reached at georgewill@washpost.com .
10. How many of California’s 480+ agencies and commissions can you list – let alone recommend dissolving? Here’s one hell of a cheat sheet
RIDER COMMENT: This is not so much a “must read” entry as a “must scroll through” article.
http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034862.html
CHRIS REED BLOG
July 13, 2009
Arnold is furloughing employees. How about permanently furloughing dozens of these 480-plus state agencies?
This e-mail is going around listing all the state agencies with "California" in their title. It's pretty stunning. Just a scroll of it in a TV ad would be powerful -- the point being, get a load of all these never-heard-of wings of state government. Why can't lots be cut?
Here goes:
* California Access for Infants and Mothers * California Acupuncture Board * California Administrative Office of the Courts * California Adoptions Branch * California African American Museum * California Agricultural Export Program * California Agricultural Labor Relations Board * California Agricultural Statistics Service * California Air Resources Board (CARB) * California Allocation Board * California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority * California Animal Health and Food Safety Services * California Anti-Terrorism Information Center * California Apprenticeship Council * California Arbitration Certification Program * California Architects Board * California Area VI Developmental Disabilities Board * California Arts Council * California Asian Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus * California Assembly Democratic Caucus * California Assembly Republican Caucus * California Athletic Commission * California Attorney General * California Bay Conservation and Development Commission * California Bay-Delta Authority * California Bay-Delta Office * California Biodiversity Council * California Board for Geologists and Geophysicists * California Board for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors * California Board of Accountancy * California Board of Barbering and Cosmetology * California Board of Behavioral Sciences * California Board of Chiropractic Examiners * California Board of Equalization (BOE) * California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection * California Board of Guide Dogs for the Blind * California Board of Occupational Therapy * California Board of Optometry * California Board of Pharmacy * California Board of Podiatric Medicine * California Board of Prison Terms * California Board of Psychology * California Board of Registered Nursing * California Board of Trustees * California Board of Vocational Nursing and Psychiatric Technicians * California Braille and Talking Book Library * California Building Standards Commission * California Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education * California Bureau of Automotive Repair * California Bureau of Electronic and Appliance Repair * California Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation * California Bureau of Naturopathic Medicine * California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services * California Bureau of State Audits * California Business Agency * California Business Investment Services (CalBIS) * California Business Permit Information (CalGOLD) * California Business Portal *California Business, Transportation and Housing Agency * California Cal Grants * California CalJOBS * California Cal-Learn Program * California CalVet Home Loan Program * California Career Resource Network * California Cemetery and Funeral Bureau * California Center for Analytical Chemistry * California Center for Distributed Learning * California Center for Teaching Careers (Teach California) * California Chancellor's Office * California Charter Schools * California Children and Families Commission * California Children and Family Services Division * California Citizens Compensation Commission * California Civil Rights Bureau * California Coastal Commission * California Coastal Conservancy * California Code of Regulations * California Collaborative Projects with UC Davis * California Commission for Jobs and Economic Growth * California Commission on Aging * California Commission on Health and Safety and Workers' Compensation * California Commission on Judicial Performance * California Commission on State Mandates * California Commission on Status of Women * California Commission on Teacher Credentialing * California Commission on the Status of Women * California Committee on Dental Auxiliaries * California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office, Junior Colleges * California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office * California Complaint Mediation Program * California Conservation Corps * California Constitution Revision Commission * California Consumer Hotline * California Consumer Information Center * California Consumer Information * California Consumer Services Division * California Consumers and Families Agency * California Contractors State License Board * California Corrections Standards Authority * California Council for the Humanities * California Council on Criminal Justice * California Council on Developmental Disabilities * California Court Reporters Board * California Courts of Appeal * California Crime and Violence Prevention Center * California Criminal Justice Statistics Center * California Criminalistic Institute Forensic Library * California CSGnet Network Management * California Cultural and Historical Endowment * California Cultural Resources Division * California Curriculum and Instructional Leadership Branch * California Data Exchange Center * California Data Management Division * California Debt and Investment Advisory Commission * California Delta Protection Commission * California Democratic Caucus * California Demographic Research Unit * California Dental Auxiliaries * California Department of Aging * California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs * California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control Appeals Board * California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control * California Department of Boating and Waterways (Cal Boating) * California Department of Child Support Services (CDCSS) * California Department of Community Services and Development * California Department of Conservation * California Department of Consumer Affairs * California Department of Corporations * California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation * California Department of Developmental Services * California Department of Education * California Department of Fair Employment and Housing * California Department of Finance * California Department of Financial Institutions * California Department of Fish and Game * California Department of Food and Agriculture * California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF) * California Department of General Services * California Department of General Services, Office of State Publishing * California Department of Health Care Services * California Department of Housing and Community Development * California Department of Industrial Relations (DIR) * California Department of Insurance * California Department of Justice Firearms Division * California Department of Justice Opinion Unit * California Department of Justice, Consumer Information, Public Inquiry Unit * California Department of Justice * California Department of Managed Health Care * California Department of Mental Health * California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) * California Department of Personnel Administration * California Department of Pesticide Regulation * California Department of Public Health * California Department of Real Estate * California Department of Rehabilitation * California Department of Social Services Adoptions Branch * California Department of Social Services * California Department of Technology Services Training Center (DTSTC) * California Department of Technology Services (DTS) * California Department of Toxic Substances Control * California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) * California Department of Veterans Affairs (CalVets) * California Department of Water Resources * California Departmento de Vehiculos Motorizados * California Digital Library * California Disabled Veteran Business Enterprise Certification Program * California Division of Apprenticeship Standards * California Division of Codes and Standard s * California Division of Communicable Disease Control * California Division of Engineering * California Division of Environmental and Occupational Disease Control * California Division of Gambling Control * California Division of Housing Policy Development * California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement * California Division of Labor Statistics and Research * California Division of Land and Right of Way * California Division of Land Resource Protection * California Division of Law Enforcement! General Library * California Division of Measurement Standards * California Division of Mines and Geology * California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) * California Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources * California Division of Planning and Local Assistance * California Division of Recycling * California Division of Safety of Dams * California Division of the State Architect * California Division of Tourism * California Division of Workers' Compensation Medical Unit * California Division of Workers' Compensation * California Economic Assistance, Business and Community Resources * California Economic Strategy Panel * California Education and Training Agency * California Education Audit Appeals Panel * California Educational Facilities Authority * California Elections Division * California Electricity Oversight Board * California Emergency Management Agency * California Emergency Medical Services Authority * California Employment Development Department (EDD) * California Employment Information State Jobs * California Employment Training Panel *=2 0California Energy Commission * California Environment and Natural Resources Agency * California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal/EPA) * California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES) * California Executive Office * California Export Laboratory Services * California Exposition and State Fair (Cal Expo) * California Fair Political Practices Commission * California Fairs and Expositions Division * California Film Commission * California Fire and Resource Assessment Program * California Firearms Division * California Fiscal Services * California Fish and Game Commission * California Fisheries Program Branch * California Floodplain Management * California Foster Youth Help * California Franchise Tax Board (FTB) * California Fraud Division * California Gambling Control Commission * California Geographic Information Systems Council (GIS) * California Geological Survey * California Government Claims and Victim Compensation Board * California Governor's Committee for Employment of Disabled Persons * California Governor's Mentoring Partnership * California Governor's Office of Emergency Services * California Governor's Office of Homeland Security * California Governor's Office of Planning and Research * California Governor's Office * California Grant and Enterprise Zone Programs HCD Loan * California Health and Human Services Agency * California Health and Safety Agency * California Healthy Families Program * California Hearing Aid Dispensers Bureau * California High-Speed Rail Authority * California Highway Patrol (CHP) * California=2 0History and Culture Agency * California Horse Racing Board * California Housing Finance Agency * California Indoor Air Quality Program * California Industrial Development Financing Advisory Commission * California Industrial Welfare Commission * California InFoPeople * California Information Center for the Environment * California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank (I-Bank) * California Inspection Services * California Institute for County Government * California Institute for Education Reform * California Integrated Waste Management Board * California Interagency Ecological Program * California Job Service * California Junta Estatal de Personal * California Labor and Employment Agency * California Labor and Workforce Development Agency * California Labor Market Information Division * California Land Use Planning Information Network (LUPIN) * California Lands Commission * California Landscape Architects Technical Committee * California Latino Legislative Caucus * California Law Enforcement Branch * California Law Enforcement General Library * California Law Revision Commission * California Legislative Analyst's Office * California Legislative Black Caucus * California Legislative Counsel * California Legislative Division * California Legislative Information * California Legislative Lesbian, Gay , Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Caucus * California Legislature Internet Caucus * California Library Development Services * California License and Revenue Branch * California Major Risk Medical Insurance Program * California Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board * California Maritime Academy * California Marketing Services * California Measurement Standards * California Medical Assistance Commission * California Medical Care Services * California Military Department * California Mining and Geology Board * California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts * California Museum Resource Center * California National Guard * California Native American Heritage Commission * California Natural Community Conservation Planning Program * California New Motor Vehicle Board * California Nursing Home Administrator Program * California Occupational Safety and Health Appeals Board * California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board * California Ocean Resources Management Program * California Office of Administrative Hearings * California Office of Administrative Law * California Office of AIDS * California Office of Binational Border Health * California Office of Child Abuse Prevention * California Office of Deaf Access * California Office of Emergency Services (OES) * California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment * California Office of Fiscal Services * California Office of Fleet Administration * California Office of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Implementation (CalOHI) * California Office of Historic Preservation * California Office of Homeland Security * California Office of Human Resources * California Office of Legal Services * California Office of Legislation * California Office of Lieutenant Governor * California Office of Military and Aerospace Support * California Office of Mine Reclamation * California Office of Natural Resource Education * California Office of Privacy Protection * California Office of Public School Construction * California Office of Real Estate Appraisers * California Office of Risk and Insurance Management * California Office of Services to the! Blind * California Office of Spill Prevention and Response * California Office of State Publishing (OSP) * California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development * California Office of Systems Integration * California Office of the Inspector General * California Office of the Ombudsman * California Office of the Patient Advocate * California Office of the President * California Office of the Secretary for Education * California Office of the State Fire Marshal * California Office of the State Public Defender * California Office of Traffic Safety * California Office of Vital Records * California Online Directory * California Operations Control Office * California Opinion Unit * California Outreach and Technical Assistance Network (OTAN) * California Park and Recreation Commission * California Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) * California Performance Review (CPR) * California Permit Information for Business (CalGOLD) * California Physical Therapy Board * California Physician Assistant Committee * California Plant Health and Pest Prevention Services * California Policy and Evaluation Division * California Political Reform Division * California Pollution Control Financing Authority * California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo * California Postsecondary Education Commission *=2 0California Prevention Services * California Primary Care and Family Health * California Prison Industry Authority * California Procurement Division * California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) * California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) * California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) * California Real Estate Services Division * California Refugee Programs Branch * California Regional Water Quality Control Boards * California Registered Veterinary Technician Committee * California Registrar of Charitable Trusts * California Republican Caucus * California Research and Development Division * California Research Bureau * California Resources Agency * California Respiratory Care Board * California Rivers Assessment * California Rural Health Policy Council * California Safe Schools * California San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission * California San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy * California San Joaquin River Conservancy * California School to Career * California Science Center * California Scripps Institution of Oceanography * California Secretary of State Business Portal * California Secretary of State * California Seismic Safety Commission * California Self Insurance Plans (SIP) * California Senate Office of Research * California Small Business and Disabled Veteran Business Enterprise Certification Program * California Small Business Development Center Program * California Smart Growth Caucus * California Smog Check Information Center * California Spatial Information Library * California Special Education20Division * California Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology Board * California Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) * California Standards and Assessment Division * California State Administrative Manual (SAM) * California State Allocation Board * California State and Consumer Services Agency * California State Architect * California State Archives * California State Assembly * California State Association of Counties (CSAC) * California State Board of Education * California State Board of Food and Agriculture * California Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) * California State Children's Trust Fund * California State Compensation Insurance Fund * California State Contracts Register Program * California State Contracts Register * California State Controller * California State Council on Developmental Disabilities (SCDD) * California State Disability Insurance (SDI) * California State Fair (Cal Expo) * California State Jobs Employment Information * California State Lands Commission * California State Legislative Portal * California State Legislature * California State Library Catalog * California State Library Services Bureau * California State Library * California State Lottery * California State Mediation and Conciliation Service * California State Mining and Geology Board * California State Park and Recreation Commission * California State Parks * California State Personnel Board * California State Railroad Museum * California State Science Fair * California State Senate * California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS) * California State Summer School for the Arts * California State Superintendent of Public Instruction * California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS) * California State Treasurer * California State University Center for Distributed Learning * California State Water Project Analysis Office * California State Water Project * California State Water Resources Control Board * California Structural Pest Control Board * California Student Aid Commission * California Superintendent of Public Instruction * California Superior Courts * California Tahoe Conservancy * California Task Force on Culturally and Linguistically Competent Physicians and Dentists * California Tax Information Center * California Technology and Administration Branch Finance * California Telecommunications Division * California Telephone Medical Advice Services (TMAS) * California Transportation Commission * California Travel and Transportation Agency * California Unclaimed Property Program * California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board * California Unemployment Insurance Program * California Uniform Construction Cost Accounting Commission * California Veterans Board * California Veterans Memorial * California Veterinary Medical Board and Registered Veterinary Technician Examining Committee * California Veterinary Medical Board * California Victim Compensation and Government Claims Board * California Volunteers * California Voter Registration * California Water Commission * California Water Environment Association (CWEA) * California Water Resources Control Board * California Welfare to Work Division * California ! Wet lands Information System * California Wildlife and Habitat Data Analysis Branch * California Wildlife Conservation Board * California Wildlife Programs Branch * California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) * California Workers' Compensation Appeals Board * California Workforce and Labor Development Agency * California Workforce Investment Board * California Youth Authority (CYA) * Central Valley Flood Protection Board * Center for California Studies * Colorado River Board of California * Counting California * Dental Board of California * Health Insurance Plan of California (PacAdvantage) * Jobs with the State of California * Judicial Council of California * Learn California * Library of California * Lieutenant Governor's Commission for One California * Little Hoover Commission (on California State Government Organization and Economy) * Medical Board of California * Medi-Cal * Osteopathic Medical Board of California * Physical Therapy Board of California * Regents of the University of California * State Bar of California Veterans Home of California
Arnold is furloughing state employees. He should start permanently furloughing dozens of the 480-plus agencies listed above. This is ridiculous.
Thanks to reader Bob C. for passing that to me.
Posted by Chris Reed at July 13, 2009 12:05 PM
11. Liberals love majority rule – except when it works against them
RIDER COMMENT: Recently Democrats have been decrying Prop 13’s 2/3 majority vote requirement, claiming that it’s undemocratic. Here’s an online riposte I wrote to counter such complaints:
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Liberals' love of majority rule is pure hypocrisy. After all, it was a simple majority California citizen vote that IMPOSED the 2/3 majority rule on raising some taxes.
IF you progressives are serious about bowing to the rule of the majority, we can settle this once and for all. Liberals, put a statewide prop on the ballot to repeal the 2/3 majority vote rule for new taxes -- returning to a simple majority vote requirement.
If it passes by a simple majority vote, it becomes the law of the state. If not, gracefully accept defeat.
Of course, you scheming hypocrites won't put such a measure on the ballot, because you know you'd lose -- AGAIN.
And not by some close vote either. And not from a lack of spending -- your unions would spend over $100 million to support such a measure. You'd outspend opponents at least 20 to 1. All for naught.
Be honest. You simply want to make it easier to raise taxes -- REGARDLESS of the will of the citizens.
12. The feminist “78 cents on a dollar” myth
RIDER COMMENT: One oft-repeated claim by women is that for every dollar a man gets paid for doing a job, women get paid only 78 cents for the same work. Obama recently repeated this canard at a recent ceremony signing of more bad legislation (you don’t wanna know). But this claim assumes that business owners (all male, I guess) are more chauvinist than greedy – an odd position indeed, as explained below.
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Columnist Ilana Mercer was not at the ceremony, but asked the kind of economically-informed question that rarely percolates up through discussions of pay equity: If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, wouldn't men have long-since priced themselves out of the job market? The fact that men haven't done that might mean that different abilities and experiences are at work, Mercer guessed, "rather than a conspiracy to suppress women."
13. Thomas Sowell: “You can usually only equalize downwards”
RIDER COMMENT: Thomas Sowell probably offers more pithy insights on economics and society than anyone I know. Here’s a recent gem, followed by my online comment on the topic.
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/07/you-can-usually-only-equalize-downwards.html
You Can Usually Only Equalize Downwards
The problem with trying to equalize is that you can usually only equalize downward.
If you are going to try to equalize the chances of women getting jobs as firefighters then you are going to have to lower the physical requirements of height, weight and upper body strength. That means that you are going to have more firefighters who are not capable of carrying an unconscious person out of a burning building.
If you are going to have these lower physical requirements be the same for both women and men, that means that you are not only going to have women who are not capable of carrying someone out of a burning building, you are also going to have men who are likewise incapable of carrying someone to safety.
Most activities do not exist for the sake of equality. They exist to serve their own purposes-- and those purposes are undermined, sometimes fatally, when equality becomes the goal.
~Thomas Sowell
RIDER COMMENT: What is sometimes not appreciated is that too often the physically sub-par "worker" in strenuous jobs is a threat to their coworkers.
For instance, it's not too important how fast (as in sprint speed) a military ground-pounder can run -- it's important how LONG and fast they can move with their full combat gear to advance or retreat. If a grunt is slow and/or weak, the others have to carry their load for them, or slow their movement as a unit to the least mobile grunt, or leave the laggards behind and have less firepower when conflict arises -- not good choices.
Firefighters don't want a relative weakling as a coworker on a fire, but are often pressured not to say so. To complain about the "weaker sex" is to risk charges of sexism and sexual harassment.
Not to say women can't do such jobs -- but the standards should be rigorous for whoever applies, regardless of gender. No double standard -- and no dropping of the standards for all to accommodate the unqualified.
14. Past (and many present) City Managers in San Diego County are the biggest crooks when it comes to the local pension debacles
RIDER COMMENT: Recently the SD UNION-TRIBUNE and local TV stations publicized the names and pensions of CalPERS recipients in the county. Most local cities put their pension funds with CalPERS – the city of San Diego is the only one that doesn’t, as far as I know.
As it turns out, some of the highest pensions in the county are for city managers who pushed for the retroactive pension increases for city workers -- including for themselves. How objective was their fiscal advice concerning the pensions to their gullible city councils? What do YOU think?
Sometimes these senior city bureaucrats would push these retroactive pension increases through, and then retire within the year – before the magnitude of the disaster became apparent. The previous Vista city manager for one followed this path, if memory serves me.
So just what does "retroactive" entail? Example:
A city manager's pension is unilaterally raised from $100K to $150K. But the city manager has been paying only into a formula based on a $100K pension. If the city employee retires in a year, then they make only one year's contribution at the $150K level, but they get a lifetime $150K pension payout, plus annual (limited) COL increases.
Assuming that as an employee these city managers even have to make ANY contribution to their pension. For instance, La Mesa and Chula Vista don’t charge their employees a DIME for their 90% of salary pensions for 30 years “service.” The hapless city taxpayers pay both the city and the employee CalPERS contribution. And I’m sure that’s due in large part to the “impartial” advice of their greedy city managers.
Our city politicians are woefully inept when it comes to financial matters. In my experience, most quite literally could not balance their own checkbooks. So naturally they turn to “staff” for guidance in such fiscal matters. No one seemed to want to raise the issue of the HUGE conflict of interest facing “their” city managers.
From what I can see, a successful city manager’s most important skill is ingratiating himself or herself to the politicians – smoozing seems to be these bureaucrats’ greatest asset.
Generally city managers are loved and revered by their city council critters. Councils too often generously boost their manager’s salary just before retirement to further bulk up the managers’ obscene pensions.
15. Man bites dog. Rider supports labor union proposition
RIDER COMMENT: I support the unions' efforts to let the voters vote on term limits for San Diego County Supervisors.
Indeed, to be more accurate, they now support MY efforts. We tried without success a few years ago to put term limits for the Sups on the ballot, but our funding fell through. I'd guess that today it would cost about $200K to gather the needed signatures to put the prop on the ballot.
Not that it will be hard to GET the needed prop signatures. Such measures are popular with voters. If term limits makes it on the ballot, it will surely pass, even without union support.
Judging from the reader comments posted for a SD U-T article detailing this effort, it appears that paradoxically the labor union support for this measure is the biggest reason it might fail. Over and over, readers say something to the effect that “normally I support term limits, but if the unions are pushing this measure, then I’m against it.”
And I must sympathize with that viewpoint. Indeed, it’s great that unions’ support for ANY measure is now a big negative with the voters. Increasingly it seems that voters are looking to vote against the candidates the labor unions support – a welcome sea change.
In this case, the Supervisors can rightly claim that the unions are striking back for the Sups not being not quite as subservient to union demands as in previous years. But all in all, I doubt the union involvement will keep voters from passing the initiative.
Voters know that we've got an aristocracy ruling the county. With their $11 million annual slush fund explicitly designed to buy votes, our elected County Supervisors have become impossible to dislodge. It's time to end this DE FACTO reelection guarantee.
Let's not forget that the current batch of Supervisors gratuitously raised the public employee pension benefits and then issued over a BILLION DOLLARS worth of muni bonds to pay for the increase. We are still paying for those bonds, and will be for many years.
And note that these "pension obligation bonds" were issued without a vote of the electorate, thanks to friendly judicial rulings. But the ruling did not PROHIBIT such bonds from going to a vote of the citizens -- the Sups made that decision to avoid a public election (and public debate).
Remember, our Sups get the same fabulous pensions that our county workers get. Gee, I wonder if that might have influenced their decision to vote for the unsustainable, retroactive pension increases.
Ya think?
Time to turn 'em out to pasture. PAST time, actually.
16. Over half the price of a ticket for international flight can be taxes
RIDER COMMENT: We’ve all seen domestic ticket fees and taxes rise after 9/11, but it’s the international flights where madness prevails. If you manage to score a well-discounted international ticket, then over half the price you pay can be for taxes.
http://www.openmarket.org/2009/07/15/flying-is-a-taxable-event/
Flying Is a Taxable Event
Posted by Ryan Young on July 15, 2009 @ 5:18 pm
The potential specter of federal carry-on bag size restrictions [1] has not deterred me from flying. But my jaw nearly hit the floor recently when I saw that I had paid more in taxes and fees than for actual airfare for an international flight.
Click here [2] to see a list of 17 taxes we pay for flying. The September 11th Fee. International Departure Tax. International Arrival Tax. And those are just the direct taxes.
Indirect taxes are also legion. They’re harder to see. But they’re still there. And they, too, increase the price of flying. Airports have to pay an electricity tax to keep the lights on. Airlines have to pay a corporate tax on any profits. Pilots and crew have to pay income taxes. All these also affect the price of airfare. There is far more to taxation than meets the eye.
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Article printed from OpenMarket.org: http://www.openmarket.org
URL to article: http://www.openmarket.org/2009/07/15/flying-is-a-taxable-event/
URLs in this post:
[1] restrictions: http://spectator.org/archives/2009/07/07/unnecessary-baggage
[2] here: http://www.airlines.org/economics/taxes/excisetaxes.htm
17. Tech Corner – Offsite backup – DO IT! Easier and cheaper than ever.
RIDER COMMENT: I’ve written before about this matter. This post is an update.
Assuming you don’t keep all your computer files, address book, emails, photos, music, etc. online at a server such as Gmail, you need offsite backup. It’s gotten easier – and cheaper.
Try to imagine what life would be like if today someone stole your computer – along with your backup external hard drive or memory stick. Or imagine a fire burned down your home or office with all your computer data. Or an earthquake swallowed it all up. Or a nuclear blast vaporized your computer (along with you, of course).
Don’t dwell on the thought. Too depressing (at least for me!).
Use an offsite backup service. It’s safe, heavily encrypted and usually backed up at more than one offsite location. And it can be quite reasonably priced.
Some offsite services are free for small amounts – 1 to 5 gigs. For many people, that might be enough. And you can use more than one free service – maybe one for your docs, and another for your photos.
But if your home or office computers need more, get more. The price is quite reasonable – especially for home/personal use.
Not that you shouldn’t have ONSITE backup as well. It’s FAR easier and much faster to retrieve files from your external hard drive (or a networked computer, or a flash drive) than to download gigs of backup files via the Internet.
In the past, I’ve used Mozy for online backup, but I think I’ve found a significantly better service – MemoPal. www.MemoPal.com
Perhaps its best feature is that, for home use, you can sign up to 10 computers and have an aggregate 150 gigs of backup – for $50 a year. Mozy cost $60 annually and could be used by only one computer.
MemoPal also provides real time incremental backup (backs up your file every time you save it WHEN you save it), has good backup software for selecting and maintaining your backup procedures. It’s highly rated by computer mavens, and rightly so, from what I can tell.
If you have large files – a gig or more – it also can be very useful in sharing files with friends that you normally can’t send as attachments. You designate who you want to be able to access certain files, and they can download them online.
With the proper codes, your backup files are accessible from any computer – while you are traveling, for instance.
I should be selling this stuff!
18. Financial tip: How to get extra discounts on online purchases
RIDER COMMENT: Sometimes when one is buying something from a commercial vendor online, there’s a box to put in a “Promotion code.” What does that tell you? It tells you that some people may be getting the same item as you for less cost!
“But,” you say, “I don’t HAVE a promotion code.” Probably not, but there’s a reasonable chance you can get one if it’s out there. For instance, for my purchase of the MemoPal backup service, I got an amazing 30% off the annual $50 price by using a promotion code.
Like you, I didn’t have the code, but I figured I’d Google “MemoPal promotion code.” Bingo!
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And hardly a time consuming online exercise.
19. Latest updates to my “California Breaking Bad” article
RIDER COMMENT: As my veteran readers know, I keep updating my Breaking Bad article with the latest stats – comparing California with the other states. It’s also available as a Word file, which prints out as a fine two page flyer. Ask and ye shall receive. It’s a powerful sharing document, and to a degree has gone viral.
To make it easier for previous readers, I’m going to try to highlight the CHANGES from the last Rant version, so that you can quickly see what’s different, and what’s been added.
Here are the changes first – with comments:
A. Highest gasoline tax (averaging 64.5 cents/gallon) in the nation (July, 2009) – up from #2 in last report. When gas hits $3.00/gallon, we are numero uno – because unlike many states, we charge sales tax on gasoline purchases (built into the price). And boy, do we have a sales tax!
http://www.api.org/statistics/fueltaxes/
B. Sixth highest unemployment rate in the nation. (June, 2009) 11.6%. National rate 9.5%. This is good news and bad news. The good news is that we’ve dropped from 4th to 6th worst, our best showing in some time. The bad news is that our unemployment rate STILL went up – it’s just that some other states are doing even worse.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.nr0.htm
C. California has 12% of the nation’s population, but 36% of the country’s TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) welfare recipients – more than the next 7 states combined. Unlike other states, this “temporary” assistance becomes much more permanent in CA.
http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034662.html
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Breaking Bad: California vs. the Other States
by Richard Rider, Chairman, San Diego Tax Fighters
Version 1.47 Revised 18 July, 2009
Here’s a depressing comparison of California taxes and economic climate with the rest of the states. The news is breaking bad, and getting worse (I keep updating this article):
California has the 2nd highest state income tax in the nation. 9.55% at $48,000. 10.55% at $1,000,000
By far the highest state sales tax in the nation. 8.25% (not counting local sales taxes)
Highest state car tax in the nation – at least double any other state. 1.15% per year on value of vehicle.
Corporate income tax rate is the highest in the West. 8.84%
2009 Business Tax Climate ranks 48th in the nation.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/topic/15.html
Fourth highest capital gains tax 9.55%
http://www.thereibrain.com/realestate-blog/capital-gains-tax-rates-state-by-state/109/
Highest gasoline tax (averaging 64.5 cents/gallon) in the nation (July, 2009). When gas hits $3.00/gallon, we are numero uno – because unlike many states, we charge sales tax on gasoline purchases (built into the price).
http://www.api.org/statistics/fueltaxes/
Sixth highest unemployment rate in the nation. (June, 2009) 11.6%. National rate 9.5%.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.nr0.htm
California’s 2009 “Tax Freedom Day” (the day the average taxpayer stops working for government and start working for oneself) is again the 4th worst date in the nation – up from 28th worst in 1994.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/387.html
To offset lower state revenues, 29 states are proposing 2009 state tax and fee increases totaling $24 billion. California, with 12% of the nation’s population, is proposing 47% of that increase (6/5/09).
http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/04/news/economy/states_budget_crises/index.htm
1 in 5 in LA County receiving public aid.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-welfare22-2009feb22,0,4377048.story
California has 12% of the nation’s population, but 36% of the country’s TANF welfare recipients – more than the next 7 states combined. Unlike other states, this “temporary” assistance becomes much more permanent in CA.
http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034662.html
California prison guards highest paid in the nation.
http://www.caltax.org/caltaxletter/2008/101708_fraud1.htm
California teachers easily the highest paid in the nation.
http://www.nea.org/home/29402.htm (CA has the second lowest student test scores)
California now has the lowest bond ratings of any state, edging out Louisiana.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/19/BA7F16JLKH.DTL
California ranks 44th worst in “2008 lawsuit climate.”
http://www.instituteforlegalreform.com/component/ilr_featured_tools/29/item/LAI/19.html
In 2005 (latest figures), for every dollar Californians sent to D.C. in taxes, we got back 78 cents – 43rd worst.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/22685.html
America’s top CEO’s rank California “the worst place in which to do business” for the fourth straight year (3/2009). But here’s the interesting part – they think California is a great state to live (primarily for the great climate) – they just won’t bring their businesses here because of the oppressive tax and regulatory climate.
Consider this quote from the survey (a conclusion reflected in the rankings of the characteristics of the state): “California has huge advantages with its size, quality of work force, particularly in high tech, as well as the quality of life and climate advantages of the state. However, it is an absolute regulatory and tax disaster.”
http://tinyurl.com/cyvufy
California, a destitute state, still gives away college education at fire sale prices. Our community college tuition is by far the lowest in the nation. How low? Nationwide, the average community college tuition is 4.5 times higher than California CC’s. This ridiculously low tuition devalues education to students – resulting in a 30+% drop rate for class completion. In addition, 2/3 of California CC students pay no tuition at all – filling out a simple unverified “hardship” form that exempts them from any tuition payment, or receiving grants and tax credits for their full tuition.
http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/capitolalertlatest/020722.html
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jun/29/1n29fees225829-two-year-colleges-fees-likely-rise-/
On top of that, California offers thousands of absolutely free adult continuing education classes – a sop to the upper middle class. In San Diego, over 1,400 classes for everything from baking pastries to ballroom dancing are offered totally at taxpayer expense.
http://www.sdce.edu
California residential electricity costs an average of 35.4% more than the national average. For industrial use, CA electricity is 56.2% higher than the national average (2007).
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/fig7p5.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html
It costs 38% more to build solar panels in California than in Tennessee – which is why European corporations have invested $2.3 billion in two Tennessee manufacturing plants to build solar panels for our state.
http://www.foxandhoundsdaily.com/blog/jack-stewart/more-solar-companies-producing-elsewhere-sell-california
Consider California’s net domestic migration (migration between states). From April, 2000 through June, 2008 (8 years, 2 months) California has lost a NET 1.4 million people. The departures slowed this past year only because people couldn’t sell their homes.
http://www.mdp.state.md.us/msdc/Pop_estimate/Estimate_08/table5.pdf
These are not welfare kings and queens departing. They are the young, the educated, the productive, the ambitious, the wealthy (such as Tiger Woods), and retirees seeking to make their pensions provide more bang for the buck. The irony is that a disproportionate number of these seniors are retired state and local government employees fleeing the state that provides them with their opulent pensions – in order to avoid the high taxes that these same employees pushed so hard through their unions.
As taxes rise and jobs disappear, we lose our tax base, continuing California’s state and local fiscal death spiral. This spiral must stop NOW.
NOTE: If you would like to receive my free periodic “Richard Rider Rant” e-newsletter with more of this type of information and analysis, just drop me an email at RRider@san.rr.com. To see the latest version of this “Breaking Bad” column, plus samples of my free “Richard Rider Rant” e-newsletter, go to my blog at http://www.RichardRiderRant.blogspot.com/.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Saturday, July 4, 2009
RICHARD RIDER RANT Fourth of July, 2009
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety,
deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Benjamin Franklin
1. My Baltic Sea cruise confirms that government employees are the New Aristocracy
2. Government spending has REVERSE “multiplier” effect
3. Congress covers up EPA study debunking global warming to approve cap and trade madness
4. High school graduates can’t pass basic U.S. citizenship test
5. To provide free Internet, subsidize Internet cafes, not libraries
6. An analysis of Supreme Court Ricci decision overturning firefighter affirmative action – and Sotomayer’s ruling
7. The climate change climate change – global warming scientist proponents are changing their minds
8. Media doing more data mining – great news for the public
9. Canooks come to U.S. for timely medical care – where will we be going for ours if ObamaCare passes? Plus comments on the bogus reports of high U.S. infant mortality rates.
10. Amid budget mess, CHP could get raise
11. Obama blowing hot air concerning California energy efficiency policies
12. Case study of a bloated pension -- complete with details
13. The NEW YORK TIMES bloviates on CA budget problems
1. My Baltic Sea cruise confirms that government employees are the New Aristocracy
RIDER COMMENT: Diane and I recently returned from a Baltic Sea cruise. We visited Copenhagen, Germany, Estonia, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Stockholm and back to Copenhagen. It’s our third cruise – previously we did Alaska and the Mediterranean.
This time there was too much rain, it was too cold, and I caught the plague, but otherwise an interesting two weeks. Boy, am I glad to be back!
Back from our future, apparently. Denmark had perhaps the worst taxes. In addition to a 26% VAT (sales) tax and extra taxes making cars and other luxuries cost triple what they cost here, they have what our tour guide described as a “progressive” income tax system. According to her, after an exemption, working people pay a 52% income tax. If you are rich, you go up into the 62% bracket. Gee, that sounds more like our vaunted “flat tax” to me!
But to my point. On my two previous cruises, I started to notice something rather odd, but didn’t look into it at the time. It seemed to me that many people we met on past cruises were government employees, or their spouses.
This trip I decided to be a bit more scientific in delving further into this tendency. We chose to do “open seating” dining, which means we usually had different dinner companions each evening – and new audiences for my one-liners.
When it seemed appropriate (and sometimes when it didn’t), I would ask my companions about their livelihood. Most were open with their replies. I got 22 responses from families or individuals.
Counting my retired teacher spouse and myself as one of the family units, I found that 15 of the 23 “groups” at our dinner table had one or two government employees – working or retired. Two were retired Canadian firefighters in their mid-fifties. One was a British bureaucrat. The rest of the government employees were All American.
Most folks would be surprised to find so many government employees on such a 5 star cruise. Most would have expected to find businesspeople and professionals composing the bulk of the patrons. Maybe in the past, but no more.
While this is admittedly a small sample size, the results are consistent with what I anecdotally found on my previous two cruises.
It’s like I’ve been saying – government employees are the new aristocracy.
2. Government spending has REVERSE “multiplier” effect
THE GOLDWATER INSTITUTE
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco recently published an article summarizing research on economic multipliers. http://tinyurl.com/pwxbo2
It turns out that a dollar of government spending results in 70 cents of job-creating activity after two years. A dollar in tax cuts results in $1.30 to $3 of job-creating activity after two years. Put another way, a $1 cut in spending cuts job-creating activity by 70 cents. A $1 increase in taxes cuts job-creating activity by as much as $3.
3. Congress covers up EPA study debunking global warming to approve cap and trade madness
RIDER COMMENT: This story has gotten belated play, but it ain’t over yet. The enviro-wacko juggernaut will be hard to reverse. If you can’t see the little graphic at the bottom of the article, go to the link to view it. It’s important.
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=330911757213432#
INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY
Carbongate
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, June 26, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: A suppressed EPA study says old U.N. data ignore the decline in global temperatures and other inconvenient truths. Was the report kept under wraps to influence the vote on the cap-and-trade bill?
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Read More: Global Warming
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This was supposed to be the most transparent administration ever. Yet as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill, the largest tax increase in U.S. history on 100% of Americans, an attempt was made to suppress a study shredding supporters' arguments.
On Friday, the day of the vote, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said it was releasing "an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency."
In the release, the institute's Richard Morrison said "internal EPA e-mail messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the administration's agenda of regulating carbon dioxide."
Reading the report, available on the CEI Web site, we find this "endangerment analysis" contains such interesting items as: "Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."
What the report says is that the EPA, by adopting the United Nations' 2007 "Fourth Assessment" report, is relying on outdated research by its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The research, it says, is "at best three years out of date in a rapidly changing field" and ignores the latest scientific findings.
Besides noting the decline in temperatures as CO2 levels have increased, the draft report says the "consensus" on storm frequency and intensity is now "much more neutral."
Then there's one of Al Gore's grim fairy tales — the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and glaciers the size of Tennessee roaming the North Atlantic. "The idea that warming temperatures will cause Greenland to rapidly shed its ice has been greatly diminished by new results indicating little evidence for operations of such processes," the report says.
Little evidence? Outdated U.N. research? No reason to rush? This is not what the Obama administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were telling us when they were rushing to force a Friday vote on Waxman-Markey. We were given the impression that unless we passed this cap-and-tax fiasco, polar bears would be extinct by the Fourth of July.
We have noted frequently the significance of solar activity on earth's climate and history. This EPA draft report not only confirms our reporting but the brazen incompetence of those "experts" that have been prophesying planetary apocalypse.
"A new 2009 paper by Scafetta and West," the report says, "suggests that the IPCC used faulty solar data in dismissing the direct effect of solar variability on global temperatures. Their report suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68% of the increase in Earth's global temperatures."
The report was the product of Alan Carlin, senior operations research analyst at the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE). He's been with the EPA for 38 years but now has been taken off all climate-related work. He is convinced that actual climate observations do not match climate change theories and that only the politics, not the science, has been settled.
Thomas Fuller, environmental policy blogger with the San Francisco Examiner, wrote Thursday in a story developed in conjunction with Anthony Watts' Web site wattsupwiththat.com: "A source inside the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed many of the claims made by analyst Alan Carlin, the economist/physicist who yesterday went public with accusations that science was being ignored in evaluating the danger of CO2."
All this is particularly interesting because of the charges by Al Gore, NASA's James Hansen and others that the Bush administration and energy companies actively suppressed the truth about climate change.
One of the e-mails unearthed by CEI was dated March 12, from Al McGartland, office director at NCEE, forbidding Carlin from speaking to anyone outside NCEE on endangerment issues such as those in his suppressed report.
Carlin replied on March 16, requesting that his study be forwarded to EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, which directs EPA's climate change program. Carlin points out the peer-reviewed references in his study and points out that the new studies "explain much of the observational data that have been collected which cannot be explained by the IPCC models."
For saying the climate change emperors had no clothes, Carlin was told March 17: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office."
In other words, the administration and Congress had their collective minds made up and didn't want to be confused with the facts. They certainly didn't want any inconvenient truths coming out of their own Environmental Protection Agency, the one that wants to regulate everything from your lawn mower to bovine emissions and which says the product of your respiration and ours, carbon dioxide, is a dangerous pollutant and not the basis for all life on earth.
The problem the warm-mongers have is they now are in a position of telling the American people, who are you going to believe — us or your own lying eyes? Forget the snow in Malibu, the record cold winters. Forget that temperatures have dropped for a decade.
In April, President Obama declared that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over." Apparently not, for as he spoke those very words his administration was suppressing science to advance a very pernicious ideology.
4. High school graduates can’t pass basic U.S. citizenship test
RIDER COMMENT: Only 3.5% of Arizona high school graduates can get just 60% of the basic civics questions right on the citizenship exam. Augghhhhh!
It is indeed important to remember just how uneducated today’s electorate is. Perhaps that was always true, but I think it has deteriorated since, well, since I graduated from high school in 1963 (the world revolves around me). The other bit if info to keep in mind is that all these folks’ votes count every bit as much as yours.
Previously I published another study showing that college graduates know even less about U.S. civics than high school graduates – college grads forget what little they learned in K-12, or are mistaught in college. Couple this second study with the survey described below, and that is VERY bad news.
GOLDWATER INSTITUTE
Why aren't Arizona high schools teaching civics?
by Matthew Ladner, Ph.D.
Just in time to celebrate Independence Day, the Goldwater Institute will release its new report, "Freedom from Responsibility: A Survey of Civic Knowledge Among Arizona High School Students." It reveals that only 3.5 percent of Arizona high school students have learned the basic history, government and geography necessary to pass the U.S. Citizenship test.
To conduct the survey, we hired a firm to interview 1,140 Arizona high school students and ask 10 questions drawn at random from the exam given to applicants for United States citizenship. Applicants for citizenship must get six out of 10 questions correct to pass. A recent trial found that 92.4 percent of citizenship applicants passed the test on the first try.
Below are the survey questions, the correct answers, and in parentheses the percentage of public school students providing the correct answer for each question.
1. What is the supreme law of the land?
Answer: The Constitution (29.5%)
2. What do we call the first 10 amendments to the Constitution?
Answer: The Bill of Rights (25%)
3. What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?
Answer: Senate and House (23%)
4. How many Justices are on the Supreme Court?
Answer: Nine (9.4%)
5. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
Answer: Jefferson (25.3%)
6. What ocean is on the East Coast of the United States?
Answer: Atlantic (58.8%)
7. What are the two major political parties in the United States?
Answer: Democratic and Republican (49.6%)
8. We elect a U.S. Senator for how many years?
Answer: Six (14.5%)
9. Who was the first President of the United States?
Answer: Washington (26.5%)
10. Who is in charge of the Executive Branch?
Answer: The President (26%)
Only 3.5 percent of traditional public high school students passed the test. That's 40 students out of a sample of 1,134 district high school students.
Arizona's 8th grade social studies standards require that students learn about everything from John Locke to the Mayflower Compact to the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution before high school. It isn't clear what, if anything, Arizona students are learning in these classes, but it is abundantly clear what they are not learning--U.S. civics, history and geography.
In the report, I recommend that all Arizona high school students be required to pass a version of the U.S. Citizenship exam in order to graduate. Since then, one of our supporters came up with an even better idea: Make the exam a requirement for receiving a driver's license. Interesting thought...
Dr. Matthew Ladner is vice president for research at the Goldwater Institute.
5. To provide free Internet, subsidize Internet cafes, not libraries
RIDER COMMENT: One of the many rationales for a new monster central San Diego downtown library is more free computer access for the “poor” – and particularly the pungent homeless. The progressives won’t be happy until all folks not only have Internet access for free, but they must be using it regularly. If they are NOT using the Internet, then somehow that’s the taxpayers’ fault for not making it attractive/easy/accessible enough.
It’s just another in the ENDLESS subsidies liberals mandate from taxpayers. Redistribution is the name of the game – one small bite at the time.
That being said, IF we want taxpayers to pay for widespread free Internet access for the disadvantaged (in case it’s not obvious from my rants, I oppose this goal), then we should look to – of all places – the US Post Office for guidance. The post office contracts with local stores to serve as mini post offices, making such service far more convenient to the public.
Similarly the city could contract with cafes, coffee shops, etc. to provide such service -- paying maybe $15,000-$20,000 per year per location (including buying and maintaining perhaps 10 basic computers). These small struggling businesses benefit from the steady core revenue, plus the ancillary revenue from the computer users making other purchases.
The computers can be geographically positioned in the areas where such service is most needed -- not housed in a giant central library building that only relatively few can get to.
The results? FAR cheaper, and FAR better service. At $20K per coffee shop, a million dollars would provide 40 such locations. Furthermore, this business model would entail little in the way of operating costs or liabilities – unlike the library, where overpriced city employees are expected to help patrons navigate the Internet (or play games, view porn, or whatever).
The downside? No ribbon-cutting photo op for the politicians comparable to the grand opening of a quarter billion dollar library.
6. An analysis of Supreme Court Ricci decision overturning firefighter affirmative action – and Sotomayer’s ruling
RIDER COMMENT: The US Supreme Court’s Ricci decision that disparate racial results on firefighter written tests not being grounds for affirmative action bodes well for limiting further racial preferences (a.k.a. quota systems). Here’s a good article on the decision, and how Sotomayer’s overridden ruling can be viewed.
The article is prefaced by cogent comments from Thomas E. Wood, moderator of AADAP, a free email service on affirmative action. Wood is quite interesting, as he is a liberal opposed to affirmative action.
It has been suggested that New Haven could have certified the test results and found "alternative ways to deal with these issues in the future." Does this mean that every test that does not achieve the desired demographic result should be tossed out?
At some point, in some cases, the liberal argument places diversity above the skill level of a workforce. It is exactly this thinking that contributes to the decades of distance between Democrats and working and middle class whites.
For Sotomayor in particular, her role in the Ricci case is hardly radical. She upheld precedent. So-called "judicial activism" is not a tool exclusive to the right or left. Sotomayor's view on affirmative action was in the mainstream of liberal thought. But on this policy, liberal thought is not in the mainstream.
A Quinnipiac University poll recently detailed the Ricci case and found that seven in ten Americans, including 53 percent of blacks, believed the Court should compel "the city to promote" the firefighters even if no blacks "scored high enough to qualify."
Blacks overwhelmingly support affirmative action. But when given a specific example of the negative side of the policy, even a majority of blacks changed their mind.
Yet the liberal justices hid from these moral issues. The minority opinion sought to stay within the safe confines of precedent. It focused on defending the city's effort to avoid a civil rights lawsuit. The deeper issues that liberal justices ache to confront on other occasions, questions of fairness and equality, went ignored.
The liberal justices sought sanctuary in the legalese of the case. They argued for the continued use of unequal actions to attain an equal outcome and thereby undercut the roots of liberalism, the right to equal opportunity. Those who once fought for equality, and stood on the shoulders of that fight, are reduced to justifying inequality to combat inequality. In this era of Obama, it's the measure of what remains unchanged that is sometimes most striking.
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www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/30/left_dodges_moral_debate_on_ricci_case.html
June 30, 2009
Left Dodges Moral Debate on Ricci Case
By David Paul Kuhn
It took the story of one firefighter to expose the tension between fairness and affirmative action.
The nation's four most prominent liberal justices ignored that tension Monday. By consequence, the liberal justices decided that equal outcome should trump equal opportunity, when the two values compete. And in that decision, supported by a chorus of liberal analysts, American liberalism continued decades of thinking that places diversity, not fairness, as its first principle.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that white and Hispanic firefighters were unfairly discriminated against when the city of New Haven discarded a promotional exam because no blacks, or not enough minorities in the city’s view, earned a sufficient score to be promoted.
The ruling concludes one of the most widely debated discrimination cases of the past decade. Much of that attention is based on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's involvement in the case. Sotomayor, as an appellate judge, upheld the initial decision siding with New Haven.
In the end, the Court's conservative majority prevailed in yet another 5 to 4 vote. But it's the minority's dissent--a view supported by the Obama administration in its brief submitted to the Court--which stirs up liberalism's ongoing avoidance of affirmative action's "real-world" negative consequences.
The uniform liberal Court view on affirmative action takes on a heightened resonance today. Democrats hope President Obama marks the beginning of an enduring political majority. A primary aim of either party, when seeking sustained dominance, is to shift the Court to their side. Had today's Court been left leaning, liberals should be troubled to know, it would have almost certainly upheld a policy that denied a promotion based on the color of those promoted.
The Ricci case gets to the core of the American ideal of "the pursuit of happiness" as an "inalienable right." This right was most egregiously denied to blacks through slavery. It was not until the 1960s that the nation finally confronted and outlawed discriminatory practices. Affirmative action was instituted to correct past inequality.
Nearly a half-century later, liberalism faces new questions. In the time of the first black president, when white men's unemployment rate increases at twice the rate of black women in this recession, liberal thought has remained hinged to an earlier era.
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination based on disparate treatment or disparate impact. In 1960s and 1970s America the tension between the two principles was mitigated by the need to right history.
The liberal opinion, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on behalf of all four left-leaning justices, argued Monday that the "purpose" of Title VII's disparate-impact provision "is to ensure that individuals are hired and promoted based on qualifications manifestly necessary" and "do not screen out members of any race."
The liberal justices refused to reckon with the instances when the desire for "manifestly necessary" skills creates an unequal racial outcome, as was the case in New Haven.
The conservative majority addressed this tension Monday. It decided New Haven's actions amounted to disparate treatment, what the rest of us call overt discrimination.
An Illiberal Argument
Liberals now find themselves bunkered down beneath illiberal logic. Conventional affirmative action supporters effectively back discrimination for the sake of diversity. The driving role that class and culture play in endemic inequality is ignored. Affirmative action has become an entitlement supported despite consequence or context.
Whites overwhelmingly support a move toward class-based affirmative action that would still disproportionately aid minorities. But liberals remain seemingly vested in defending affirmative action as it was conceived, in a time far different than today.
The liberal opinion on the Ricci case upheld the city's effort to find any means to hold fast to conventional affirmative action. The city, after extended deliberation, decided that it was legal to discard the test results if no one was promoted.
Ginsburg echoed earlier decisions when she wrote that the city policy was "race-neutral in this sense" because "‘[A]ll the test results were discarded, no one was promoted, and firefighters of every race will have [the opportunity] to participate in another selection process to be considered for promotion.'"
The liberal argument feels like the cold legal judgment opposed by Barack Obama, in his criteria for nominating new liberal justices.
"She understands that upholding the rule of law means going beyond legal theory to ensure consistent, fair, common-sense application of the law to real-world facts," the White House wrote when Sotomayor was nominated.
Consider the well known details of the case's lead plaintiff, Frank Ricci. He gave up a second job and spent a third to half of his days studying over a period of months. He paid an acquaintance more than $1,000 to read textbooks onto audiotapes to overcome his dyslexia. He passed the test. Earned the promotion. But he was denied that promotion because diversity took precedent over qualification.
As I wrote in an earlier article on Ricci and concepts of "white male privilege," Ricci personifies the negative impact of so-called "positive discrimination." It's precisely this impact that liberalism must confront. The liberal argument ignored issues of harm, the loss of time or additional income suffered by Ricci and his fellow plaintiffs.
Ginsburg wrote that the majority opinion ignores firefighters' "long history of rank discrimination against African-Americans." It's an important consideration. But Ginsburg ignored the decades of distance from that history.
The liberal opinion goes on to write of the city's "unlikely" desire to exclude white firefighters from promotion because "a fair test"--fair, in this sense, meaning equal outcome--"would undoubtedly result in the addition of white firefighters to the officer ranks." This line of argument would have us believe that a “fair” system would promote some deserving white applicants while denying other white applicants. This illiberal liberal reasoning places disparate impact over disparate treatment. It argues, at best, that subtle discrimination is preferable over its more overt form. This is the inverse of our common hierarchy of justice. Common sense dictates that intentional harm is worse than accidental.
The test was created by a firm specializing in employment exams and met legal requirements, such as a review by independent experts. It was not the test but the color of those who passed it that led the nation’s top liberal legal minds to determine it was not "fair." This view defines quality by demographic result. It consequently upholds the outdated use of quotas.
The city claimed that it trashed the test only because it was afraid of being sued for discrimination by the minority applicants. But practical consequences also matter in law, as Obama has said.
Liberals continue to argue today that affirmative action is the result of employers impeding the progress of minorities. But the Ricci case captures how affirmative action improves the position of minorities often by impeding the progress of whites. And it's the most vulnerable whites who often pay the price of affirmative action, those men who lost blue-collar jobs and know nothing of privilege.
Mistaking Cure for Disease
Sotomayor has commendably acknowledged that affirmative action played a critical role in her admittance to Ivy League universities. And to be sure, diversity has its practical benefits. One needs Spanish speaking social workers or black police officers patrolling black neighborhoods. Whites can be ill served by a homogenous education. But when diversity is emphasized solely for its own sake, the cure becomes the cause rather than the true cause--curing the disease of discrimination.
It has been suggested that New Haven could have certified the test results and found "alternative ways to deal with these issues in the future." Does this mean that every test that does not achieve the desired demographic result should be tossed out?
At some point, in some cases, the liberal argument places diversity above the skill level of a workforce. It is exactly this thinking that contributes to the decades of distance between Democrats and working and middle class whites.
For Sotomayor in particular, her role in the Ricci case is hardly radical. She upheld precedent. So-called "judicial activism" is not a tool exclusive to the right or left. Sotomayor's view on affirmative action was in the mainstream of liberal thought. But on this policy, liberal thought is not in the mainstream.
A Quinnipiac University poll recently detailed the Ricci case and found that seven in ten Americans, including 53 percent of blacks, believed the Court should compel "the city to promote" the firefighters even if no blacks "scored high enough to qualify."
Blacks overwhelmingly support affirmative action. But when given a specific example of the negative side of the policy, even a majority of blacks changed their mind.
Yet the liberal justices hid from these moral issues. The minority opinion sought to stay within the safe confines of precedent. It focused on defending the city's effort to avoid a civil rights lawsuit. The deeper issues that liberal justices ache to confront on other occasions, questions of fairness and equality, went ignored.
Imagine the opposite of the Ricci case. A test is tossed out because not enough whites earned a promotion and too many blacks did. Would liberals support the city's action then?
"We are not unsympathetic to the plaintiffs' expression of frustration," Sotomayor and her fellow appellate justices wrote last year. The Supreme Court liberal justices wrote in their opinion that the firefighters denied a promotion "understandably attract this Court's sympathy."
Sympathy is exhibited not in words but actions. The liberal justices sought sanctuary in the legalese of the case. They argued for the continued use of unequal actions to attain an equal outcome and thereby undercut the roots of liberalism, the right to equal opportunity. Those who once fought for equality, and stood on the shoulders of that fight, are reduced to justifying inequality to combat inequality. In this era of Obama, it's the measure of what remains unchanged that is sometimes most striking.
7. The climate change climate change – global warming scientist proponents are changing their minds
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html#mod=rss_opinion_main
•
• OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH
• JUNE 29, 2009
The Climate Change Climate Change
The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.
• By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
• Comments (537)
Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.
If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.
Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.
In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)
The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.
Credit for Australia's own era of renewed enlightenment goes to Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published "Heaven and Earth," a damning critique of the "evidence" underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist -- and ardent global warming believer -- in April humbly pronounced it "an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence." Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.
The rise in skepticism also came as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, elected like Mr. Obama on promises to combat global warming, was attempting his own emissions-reduction scheme. His administration was forced to delay the implementation of the program until at least 2011, just to get the legislation through Australia's House. The Senate was not so easily swayed.
Mr. Fielding, a crucial vote on the bill, was so alarmed by the renewed science debate that he made a fact-finding trip to the U.S., attending the Heartland Institute's annual conference for climate skeptics. He also visited with Joseph Aldy, Mr. Obama's special assistant on energy and the environment, where he challenged the Obama team to address his doubts. They apparently didn't.
This week Mr. Fielding issued a statement: He would not be voting for the bill. He would not risk job losses on "unconvincing green science." The bill is set to founder as the Australian parliament breaks for the winter.
Republicans in the U.S. have, in recent years, turned ever more to the cost arguments against climate legislation. That's made sense in light of the economic crisis. If Speaker Nancy Pelosi fails to push through her bill, it will be because rural and Blue Dog Democrats fret about the economic ramifications. Yet if the rest of the world is any indication, now might be the time for U.S. politicians to re-engage on the science. One thing for sure: They won't be alone.
Write to kim@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A15
8. Media doing more data mining – great news for the public
RIDER COMMENT: The SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE is spearheading the establishment of a nonprofit to do “data based investigative journalism.” See the article below.
As I’ve pointed out often in the past, most journalists are poorly prepared to do such analysis, so they avoid it, or get it wrong because they cannot analyze government propaganda releases. But I think that some of the media is discovering that this data area is a treasure trove waiting to be mined.
Media people are usually poorly armed when it comes to number crunching, but they are NOT stupid. They can learn, and some ARE back-learning about this neglected aspect of their liberal arts education.
Here are my comments to the U-T staff – an open letter praising the effort.
Perhaps more important, I present two potential areas for data mining.
FROM: RICHARD RIDER
TO: SD U-T STAFF
Interesting new venture -- data based investigative journalism. Kudos to the U-T for spearheading this effort.
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2009/06/30/this_just_in/053loriehearn062909.txt
GREAT IDEA! It's been the neglected area of reporting. It's often a daunting area in which to drill, but with Pulitzer Prize results awaiting the drillers.
Here's my suggestion for two difficult projects that can provide critical information the public desperately needs to understand. These projects are easy for me to suggest, but difficult to do -- especially the first suggestion.
A. Look at public vs. private sector pay.
The stereotype of public employment is that it's a tradeoff -- low pay and modest benefits in exchange for solid job security and a stately work pace. The public employee unions perpetuate this myth.
It might have been true 30-40 years ago, but not today. Most of today's public employees receive salaries considerably HIGHER than the equivalent jobs in the private sector. The benefits are literally unbelievable. Meanwhile the job security is as good as ever. The work pace comparison is harder to define.
What is missing in this data comparison is a current, accurate comparison of public vs. private sector salaries for the same work. NO ONE has yet done this work -- and it's a Herculean task.
Police and firefighters are hard to compare with the private sector, but most of the rest of government work is indeed comparable.
The trick is to compare NOT just with other government agencies. This is the public employee unions favorite gambit -- where every government jurisdiction is the opposite of Lake Woebegone -- every government's pay is below average.
Instead the comparisons should be with the local PRIVATE sector. And not just with the big rich corporations and utilities (the usual comparison by government bureaucrats). A full range of private firms should be surveyed, down to the small businesses which are be primary employers in San Diego.
I'll tell you what I'm confident that you'll find: The pink and blue collar government jobs (the vast majority of the public sector jobs) pay 25%-50% higher than the average private pay of sector workers doing the same tasks -- and that's not counting the opulent public employee benefits, health care and early retirement. The technical and professional jobs will be closer to parity, and in some specialty areas the private sector pays more -- while the companies are still in business.
Managerial jobs are not equivalent. Private sector managers are supposed to MAKE the company money. Public sector managers are tasked only with SPENDING taxpayer funds. It's a huge difference in responsibility and accountability.
B. Look at the percentage of government employees who take disability retirement.
One old study I recall noted that public employees become disabled 28 times more frequently than private sector employees. And no area is more prone to disability than police and firefighters.
It's not just the "chief's disease" scandal of recent years. For instance, many and perhaps most firefighters try to go out with some sort of disability, yet they are healthier than the general population of similar age.
The city of San Diego has made some effort to rein in this problem, but it's an area ripe for further investigation -- for the city, the county and the other cities in the county.
9. Canooks come to U.S. for timely medical care – where will we be going for ours if ObamaCare passes? Plus comments on the bogus reports of high U.S. infant mortality rates.
RIDER COMMENT: The following column describes where the Canadians go who need timely health care. They go South!
More and more, perhaps the same will be true for U.S. citizens if ObamaCare is implemented (and I think it will be). Maybe we won’t go South. Perhaps East – like to India. Indeed, this overseas treatment trend is already growing at a brisk clip.
One aspect of the story deserves more attention. It completely debunks one canard by the single payer plan supporters – the claim that the infant mortality rate in the U.S. is high compared to a lot of countries. But these are not apples to apples comparisons. Many other countries have decided that if a baby dies within 24 hours, it was never born. Not so in the U.S. However weak, premature or deformed a newborn is, if it dies, it’s a death on our records.
And there is another factor. Cuba ranks well in health care. But how do we acquire the stats from Cuba? Why, the Cuban government tells us! Simply put, they lie.
Cuba has a handful of showcase hospitals (“showcase” by THEIR standards), but the rest of the country’s medical care is appallingly bad. The health numbers they report are literally unbelievable, yet are taken as fact by the U.N. and socialized medicine supporters.
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=331254362316405#
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Canada's Single-Prayer Health Care
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, June 30, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Health Reform: A critically ill premature baby is moved to a U.S hospital to get the treatment she couldn't get in the system we're told we should emulate. Cost-effective care? In Canada, as elsewhere, you get what you pay for.
________________________________________
IBD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For Failure
________________________________________
Ava Isabella Stinson was born last Thursday at St. Joseph's hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. Weighing only two pounds, she was born 13 weeks premature and needed some very special care. Unfortunately, there were no open neonatal intensive care beds for her at St. Joseph's — or anywhere else in the entire province of Ontario, it seems.
Canada's perfectly planned and cost-effective system had no room at the inn for Ava, who of necessity had to be sent across the border to a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital to suffer under our chaotic and costly system. She had no time to be put on a Canadian waiting list. She got the care she needed at an American hospital under a system President Obama has labeled "unsustainable."
Jim Hoft over at Gateway Pundit reports Ava's case is not unusual. He reports that Hamilton's neonatal intensive care unit is closed to new admissions half the time. Special-needs infants are sent elsewhere and usually to the U.S.
In 2007, a Canadian woman gave birth to extremely rare identical quadruplets — Autumn, Brooke, Calissa and Dahlia Jepps. They were born in the United States to Canadian parents because there was again no space available at any Canadian neonatal care unit. All they had was a wing and a prayer.
The Jepps, a nurse and a respiratory technician flew from Calgary, a city of a million people, 325 miles to Benefit Hospital in Great Falls, Mont., a city of 56,000. The girls are doing fine, thanks to our system where care still trumps cost and where being without insurance does not mean being without care.
Infant mortality rates are often cited as a reason socialized medicine and a single-payer system is supposed to be better than what we have here. But according to Dr. Linda Halderman, a policy adviser in the California State Senate, these comparisons are bogus.
As she points out, in the U.S., low birth-weight babies are still babies. In Canada, Germany and Austria, a premature baby weighing less than 500 grams is not considered a living child and is not counted in such statistics. They're considered "unsalvageable" and therefore never alive.
Norway boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world — until you factor in weight at birth, and then its rate is no better than in the U.S.
In other countries babies that survive less than 24 hours are also excluded and are classified as "stillborn." In the U.S. any infant that shows any sign of life for any length of time is considered a live birth.
A child born in Hong Kong or Japan that lives less than a day is reported as a "miscarriage" and not counted. In Switzerland and other parts of Europe, a baby is not counted as a baby if it is less than 30 centimeters in length.
In 2007, there were at least 40 mothers and their babies who were airlifted from British Columbia alone to the U.S. because Canadian hospitals didn't have room. It's worth noting that since 2000, 42 of the world's 52 surviving babies weighing less than 400g (0.9 pounds) were born in the U.S.
It must be embarrassing to Canada that a G-7 economy and a country of 30 million people can't offer the same level of health care as a town of just over 50,000 in rural Montana. Where will Canada send its preemies and other critical patients when we adopt their health care system?
As we have noted, in Canada roughly 900,000 patients of all ages are waiting for beds, according to the Fraser Institute. There are more than four times as many magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) units per capita in the U.S. as in Canada. We have twice as many CT scanners per capita.
Expensive? Wasteful. Just ask the Jepps or the parents of Ava Isabella Stinson.
10. Amid budget mess, CHP could get raise
RIDER COMMENT: Thank goodness the government keeps reminding us why tax increases are NOT needed. When the politicians and their labor unions refuse to control public employee cost but rather provide raises, that puts the dagger in the heart of liberal claims that tax increases are needed. Indeed, that gives new meaning to the term “bleeding heart liberals”!
http://tinyurl.com/lsz3hn
The Buzz: Amid budget mess, CHP could get raise
Published: Wednesday, Jul. 1, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 3A
While rank-and-file state employees face as much as a 14 percent pay cut through furloughs, California Highway Patrol officers could well get a raise. The CHP contract adjusts pay based on salary levels at five local law enforcement agencies in the state. The results of this year's survey are expected out soon.
11. Obama blowing hot air concerning California energy efficiency policies
RIDER COMMENT: The following is from the WS JOURNAL’s James Taranto 1 July blog http://online.wsj.com/article/best_of_the_web_today.html :
President Obama was touting California, with its decades-old "energy-efficiency policies," as an example to the nation. After all, the president noted, "Californians consume 40 percent less energy per person than the national average."
As Harvard's Edward Glaeser pointed out in an April New York Times blog post, the "primary reason" California's energy consumption is low is the weather:
January temperature does a terrific job of explaining carbon emissions from home heating and July temperature does almost as well at explaining electricity usage. California has the most temperate climate in the country and as a result, homes use less heat in the winter and less electricity in the summer. In hot, humid Houston or frigid Minneapolis, people use plenty of energy to artificially recreate what California has naturally.
Obama also claimed that California's paucity of power plants is evidence of its success. But California uses more electricity than it generates--some 53 terawatt-hours more in 2007, or just over 20% of total consumption, according to the federal Energy Information Administration--which means it has to import power from other states not subject to California's environmental restrictions.
Moreover, also according to the EIA, Californians pay an average of 14.42 cents a kilowatt-hour of electricity, the sixth-highest rate in the contiguous U.S. and more than the average of any region except New England. Obama, it seems, would like to make the rest of the country pay California prices for energy. It might be worth it if he could guarantee us California weather.
12. Case study of a bloated pension -- complete with details
RIDER COMMENT: This well researched article details how a 51 year old “public servant” making a paltry $221,000 can walk away with a $284,000 pension. Your blood should boil.
The details of this case may NOT apply to your specific local and county jurisdictions, but it’s only the details and degree of taxpayer largesse that change. ALL government employees have extra gains that factor into their pensions over and above just their “highest base salary” – and nowhere is the abuse more rampant than in the public safety jobs.
The one thing that is probably universal is that public safety employees are ALWAYS surprised and sometimes stunned at the total pension they end up receiving.
For instance, in many jurisdictions covered under CalPERS, the taxpayers pay part or all of the employee’s share of the pension contribution. Only when the pension is actually issued does the employee discover that the employer contributions boost their “salary” off which the pension is calculated. Locally cities such as La Mesa and Chula Vista pay the public employee’s 9% contribution. That means that instead of getting a “90% of salary” pension after 30 years, the employee gets 98.1% of salary.
Again, most employees do not know this, and it does not show up in their annual CalPERS statement about their pensions. ONLY when they retire does this come up – and the reckoning comes for the taxpayers footing the bill.
Remember, this unknown windfall is only one of many such windfalls for public employees – especially police and firefighters. Even the folks in the California State Controllers office are usually unaware of many of these giveaways.
Just to repeat my admonition – get a government job. Especially a local government job. And ideally a public safety job – firefighter is best. This is the most lucrative financial advice I can dispense.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/danielborenstein/ci_12265599
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
Daniel Borenstein: Guide to bad pension policy
By Daniel Borenstein
Staff columnist
Posted: 05/02/2009 10:00:00 PM PDT
Updated: 05/03/2009 10:23:02 PM PDT
CRAIG BOWEN'S SALARY during his final year as chief of the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District was about $221,000 a year. So how did he end up retiring in December with a tax-advantaged annual pension of $284,000?
The answer provides an amazing case study that highlights problems with public employee compensation and reveals tricks that allow workers to spike their pensions at the expense of their fellow employees and taxpayers.
The Bowen story has some similarities to the case I examined last month of Peter Nowicki, the chief of the Moraga Orinda Fire District who was able to turn his $185,000 annual salary into a $241,000 yearly pension. While each public agency has different rules that provide new ways to take advantage of retirement systems, many of the lessons can be applied across the board.
In Bowen's case, residents of the fire district serving Danville, San Ramon, Alamo, Blackhawk and Diablo should pay close attention because they got shafted. The San Ramon district's flawed compensation system and generous rules for pension calculations allowed Bowen to increase his starting pension from about $193,000 to $284,000 a year — a 47 percent increase. The pension will be increased in future years for inflation.
Bowen was only 51 years old when he retired at the end of 2008. If he or his wife lives another 30 years, that bump-up alone would add $2.7 million in today's dollars to his pension. His total retirement payout for the next 30 years would be worth about $8.5 million in today's dollars — far more than most taxpayers have in their 401(k)s when they hit the half-century mark.
Bowen is a beneficiary of a system that merits closer scrutiny. His devotion to the job is not at issue. By all accounts, he was a hardworking guy during his 29-year career. Indeed, it apparently took a toll on his health.
As he told a reporter in December, a medical condition influenced his decision to retire. In March, the board of the Contra Costa County Employees' Retirement Association, which administers the fire district's pension plan, approved Bowen's request for a service-connected disability.
As a result, under state and federal laws, much of his pension payment is exempt from income tax. Moreover, under state rules, if his wife survives him, she will be entitled to 100 percent of his pension for the rest of her life.
The spousal benefit is part of a public employee retirement system that creates pension payments unmatched in the private sector — a system that is financially unsustainable and is excessively sucking away dollars that could otherwise be used for providing public services.
With that in mind, let's look at the factors that make Bowen's pension so lucrative — and the changes that could be made locally to fix the system in the future.
The fire district, like most police and fire agencies across the state, has adopted the retirement calculation known as "3 percent at 50" — meaning that a worker can receive a pension starting at age 50 equal to 3 percent of his highest 12 months' salary multiplied by the number of years of employment. For example, someone who worked 30 years would be entitled to a pension equal to 90 percent of his salary.
While those pension benefits seemed like a good idea to some people in better fiscal times a decade ago when local governments across the state started implementing them, the time has come to reconsider whether taxpayers can afford to fund them.
There are two key variables in the "3 percent at 50" equation: the number of years worked and the highest 12 months' salary. Here are some of the factors that go into each and some rough estimates of how much they increase Bowen's pension annually:
Unused sick leave ($10,700 a year): In addition to work credit for his 29 years on the job, Bowen received credit for more than a year of unused sick leave. As a result, his pension was calculated as if he had worked 30.3 years. The difference means Bowen will receive an additional $10,700 in his annual pension.
The idea of receiving retirement credit for unused sick leave is generally peculiar to the public sector. It's a benefit public agencies could, and should, end. Sick leave is supposed to serve as insurance to provide compensation when a worker is ill; it shouldn't be a tool to bolster retirement.
Standby and management pay ($14,500 a year): In the San Ramon Valley district, managers don't just receive a salary. They have add-ons. There's "standby" pay that adds roughly 5 percent to the salary. This is extra compensation for carrying a pager and being available 24/7 for emergencies. Also, there's "management" pay that adds another 2 percent. This is for a manager to be ... well, to be a manager.
It seems odd that a fire chief would be paid extra to perform duties that are basic to his job. What makes it worse is that the extra money is added to the salary figure used for pension calculations. In other words, even after the chief retired, he continues to benefit from these perks. They live on for the rest of his, or his wife's, life, adding at the start roughly $14,500 a year to his pension.
Auto allowance ($7,600 a year): A couple of years ago, the fire district offered managers the option of a flat monthly stipend in lieu of a car for the job. Bowen chose the stipend, which was $700 a month when he retired. But the salary figure used to calculate Bowen's pension includes the auto allowance, which adds nearly the full amount to his actual retirement check. He received the auto allowance for only two years while on the job — and now he's going to get it in retirement for the rest of his and his wife's lives.
If the standby pay, management pay and auto allowance seem excessive, that's because they are. What makes them worse is that once the district offers them to employees, it must, under state law, include the amounts in the salary figure used for pension calculations. There is, however, a simple solution: Stop offering the benefits. Then they need not be factored into the retirement calculations.
Administrative leave ($17,000 a year): The chief, like other managers, was entitled to administrative leave — time off in exchange for having to work outside normal business hours. In other words, he was paid extra for the additional hours through standby and management pay, and then offered time off in exchange for them as well.
If the chief didn't use his administrative leave of 80 hours a year, he would receive cash payment for the hours at the start of the following year. Bowen, however, played the system well. In January 2008 he received payment for all 80 hours of administrative leave he didn't use in 2007. And then, when he retired on Dec. 31, 2008, he immediately received payment for nearly 80 hours of administrative leave he didn't use in 2008. In other words, he got two years' worth of administrative leave paid in the same 12-month period, the period that was used to calculate his salary for pension purposes.
Timing here was critical. By waiting until the last day of the year to retire, instead of, say, leaving during the summer, he added thousands of dollars to his annual pension payments. All told, by not taking administrative leave those two years and cashing it out instead, Bowen added about $17,000 annually to his pension.
Administrative leave is a costly and unjustified benefit to begin with, especially considering all the other compensation managers receive. In Bowen's case, doubling it up for the pension calculation just adds insult to the taxpayer's injury. Fire district directors should eliminate administrative leave. Then there will be no need to include it in the pension calculation.
Selling back vacation time ($17,000 a year): The fire district allows employees to sell back unused vacation time up to 80 hours a year. The new policy, implemented for the first time to apply to the 2007 calendar year, requires the sell-back to take place in December of each year.
But for the first year, because of delays implementing the contract, the sell-back took place in April 2008. Bowen sold 80 hours then, and 80 more in December 2008. The proceeds from those sales, in turn, were added to the salary used to compute his pension. Because he was able to sell back twice within the final 12 months of his employment, he doubled the effect on his pension. All told, the vacation sell-back boosted his pension by about $17,000 a year.
Vacation buyback is another unnecessary benefit that should be eliminated. Workers should be told to take their time off. Like in most of the private sector, limits should be set on the amount they can accrue. Once those limits are reached, the worker should, as is the case in most of the private sector, be blocked from accruing more vacation.
Cashing out vacation time upon retirement ($25,500 a year): Finally, there's the unused vacation Bowen had remaining when he took retirement. District policy allows employees to cash out up to a year's worth of unused vacation when they leave. That's what Bowen did. The extra income in his final 12 months had the effect of bumping up his annual pension by about $25,500.
This is the single biggest spike to Bowen's pension. It's also the easiest item to fix for future retirees. The state Court of Appeal has been clear that termination payments need not count toward pension calculations. Public agencies should stop giving away this money.
Let's be clear. Bowen deserves a pension. He worked hard and, by all accounts, he performed well. The question is how much is fair for him and the others who come behind him.
There's nothing the San Ramon fire district's board can do to reduce Bowen's pension now. But his case can serve as a road map for fire district directors, and board members of other agencies across the state, looking to end unjustified spiking and bring some sanity to the public pension system.
13. The NEW YORK TIMES bloviates on CA budget problems
RIDER COMMENT: The NEW YORK TIMES Magazine is running a numbing 8,000 word story on California government’s travails.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05California-t.html?pagewanted=10&_r=1&ref=magazine
You need not read this tripe. I’ll summarize it for you. The writer’s conclusion is what you’d expect – in a state that consistently ranks in the top four highest tax rate states, California’s problem is that politicians are not easily able to raise taxes even higher and faster (as they can and just did in NY state where “simple majority” literally rules – and both taxes AND spending are now soaring). http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034073.html
Even more fascinating – in the entire 8,000 word article, there is not a SINGLE mention of our state and local public employee overcompensation, bloated pensions, or government labor union lock on the legislature. NOTHING!
The U-T’s Chris Reed covers this well in his blog:
http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034678.html
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety,
deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Benjamin Franklin
1. My Baltic Sea cruise confirms that government employees are the New Aristocracy
2. Government spending has REVERSE “multiplier” effect
3. Congress covers up EPA study debunking global warming to approve cap and trade madness
4. High school graduates can’t pass basic U.S. citizenship test
5. To provide free Internet, subsidize Internet cafes, not libraries
6. An analysis of Supreme Court Ricci decision overturning firefighter affirmative action – and Sotomayer’s ruling
7. The climate change climate change – global warming scientist proponents are changing their minds
8. Media doing more data mining – great news for the public
9. Canooks come to U.S. for timely medical care – where will we be going for ours if ObamaCare passes? Plus comments on the bogus reports of high U.S. infant mortality rates.
10. Amid budget mess, CHP could get raise
11. Obama blowing hot air concerning California energy efficiency policies
12. Case study of a bloated pension -- complete with details
13. The NEW YORK TIMES bloviates on CA budget problems
1. My Baltic Sea cruise confirms that government employees are the New Aristocracy
RIDER COMMENT: Diane and I recently returned from a Baltic Sea cruise. We visited Copenhagen, Germany, Estonia, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Stockholm and back to Copenhagen. It’s our third cruise – previously we did Alaska and the Mediterranean.
This time there was too much rain, it was too cold, and I caught the plague, but otherwise an interesting two weeks. Boy, am I glad to be back!
Back from our future, apparently. Denmark had perhaps the worst taxes. In addition to a 26% VAT (sales) tax and extra taxes making cars and other luxuries cost triple what they cost here, they have what our tour guide described as a “progressive” income tax system. According to her, after an exemption, working people pay a 52% income tax. If you are rich, you go up into the 62% bracket. Gee, that sounds more like our vaunted “flat tax” to me!
But to my point. On my two previous cruises, I started to notice something rather odd, but didn’t look into it at the time. It seemed to me that many people we met on past cruises were government employees, or their spouses.
This trip I decided to be a bit more scientific in delving further into this tendency. We chose to do “open seating” dining, which means we usually had different dinner companions each evening – and new audiences for my one-liners.
When it seemed appropriate (and sometimes when it didn’t), I would ask my companions about their livelihood. Most were open with their replies. I got 22 responses from families or individuals.
Counting my retired teacher spouse and myself as one of the family units, I found that 15 of the 23 “groups” at our dinner table had one or two government employees – working or retired. Two were retired Canadian firefighters in their mid-fifties. One was a British bureaucrat. The rest of the government employees were All American.
Most folks would be surprised to find so many government employees on such a 5 star cruise. Most would have expected to find businesspeople and professionals composing the bulk of the patrons. Maybe in the past, but no more.
While this is admittedly a small sample size, the results are consistent with what I anecdotally found on my previous two cruises.
It’s like I’ve been saying – government employees are the new aristocracy.
2. Government spending has REVERSE “multiplier” effect
THE GOLDWATER INSTITUTE
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco recently published an article summarizing research on economic multipliers. http://tinyurl.com/pwxbo2
It turns out that a dollar of government spending results in 70 cents of job-creating activity after two years. A dollar in tax cuts results in $1.30 to $3 of job-creating activity after two years. Put another way, a $1 cut in spending cuts job-creating activity by 70 cents. A $1 increase in taxes cuts job-creating activity by as much as $3.
3. Congress covers up EPA study debunking global warming to approve cap and trade madness
RIDER COMMENT: This story has gotten belated play, but it ain’t over yet. The enviro-wacko juggernaut will be hard to reverse. If you can’t see the little graphic at the bottom of the article, go to the link to view it. It’s important.
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=330911757213432#
INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY
Carbongate
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, June 26, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: A suppressed EPA study says old U.N. data ignore the decline in global temperatures and other inconvenient truths. Was the report kept under wraps to influence the vote on the cap-and-trade bill?
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Read More: Global Warming
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This was supposed to be the most transparent administration ever. Yet as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill, the largest tax increase in U.S. history on 100% of Americans, an attempt was made to suppress a study shredding supporters' arguments.
On Friday, the day of the vote, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said it was releasing "an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency."
In the release, the institute's Richard Morrison said "internal EPA e-mail messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the administration's agenda of regulating carbon dioxide."
Reading the report, available on the CEI Web site, we find this "endangerment analysis" contains such interesting items as: "Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."
What the report says is that the EPA, by adopting the United Nations' 2007 "Fourth Assessment" report, is relying on outdated research by its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The research, it says, is "at best three years out of date in a rapidly changing field" and ignores the latest scientific findings.
Besides noting the decline in temperatures as CO2 levels have increased, the draft report says the "consensus" on storm frequency and intensity is now "much more neutral."
Then there's one of Al Gore's grim fairy tales — the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and glaciers the size of Tennessee roaming the North Atlantic. "The idea that warming temperatures will cause Greenland to rapidly shed its ice has been greatly diminished by new results indicating little evidence for operations of such processes," the report says.
Little evidence? Outdated U.N. research? No reason to rush? This is not what the Obama administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were telling us when they were rushing to force a Friday vote on Waxman-Markey. We were given the impression that unless we passed this cap-and-tax fiasco, polar bears would be extinct by the Fourth of July.
We have noted frequently the significance of solar activity on earth's climate and history. This EPA draft report not only confirms our reporting but the brazen incompetence of those "experts" that have been prophesying planetary apocalypse.
"A new 2009 paper by Scafetta and West," the report says, "suggests that the IPCC used faulty solar data in dismissing the direct effect of solar variability on global temperatures. Their report suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68% of the increase in Earth's global temperatures."
The report was the product of Alan Carlin, senior operations research analyst at the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE). He's been with the EPA for 38 years but now has been taken off all climate-related work. He is convinced that actual climate observations do not match climate change theories and that only the politics, not the science, has been settled.
Thomas Fuller, environmental policy blogger with the San Francisco Examiner, wrote Thursday in a story developed in conjunction with Anthony Watts' Web site wattsupwiththat.com: "A source inside the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed many of the claims made by analyst Alan Carlin, the economist/physicist who yesterday went public with accusations that science was being ignored in evaluating the danger of CO2."
All this is particularly interesting because of the charges by Al Gore, NASA's James Hansen and others that the Bush administration and energy companies actively suppressed the truth about climate change.
One of the e-mails unearthed by CEI was dated March 12, from Al McGartland, office director at NCEE, forbidding Carlin from speaking to anyone outside NCEE on endangerment issues such as those in his suppressed report.
Carlin replied on March 16, requesting that his study be forwarded to EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, which directs EPA's climate change program. Carlin points out the peer-reviewed references in his study and points out that the new studies "explain much of the observational data that have been collected which cannot be explained by the IPCC models."
For saying the climate change emperors had no clothes, Carlin was told March 17: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office."
In other words, the administration and Congress had their collective minds made up and didn't want to be confused with the facts. They certainly didn't want any inconvenient truths coming out of their own Environmental Protection Agency, the one that wants to regulate everything from your lawn mower to bovine emissions and which says the product of your respiration and ours, carbon dioxide, is a dangerous pollutant and not the basis for all life on earth.
The problem the warm-mongers have is they now are in a position of telling the American people, who are you going to believe — us or your own lying eyes? Forget the snow in Malibu, the record cold winters. Forget that temperatures have dropped for a decade.
In April, President Obama declared that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over." Apparently not, for as he spoke those very words his administration was suppressing science to advance a very pernicious ideology.
4. High school graduates can’t pass basic U.S. citizenship test
RIDER COMMENT: Only 3.5% of Arizona high school graduates can get just 60% of the basic civics questions right on the citizenship exam. Augghhhhh!
It is indeed important to remember just how uneducated today’s electorate is. Perhaps that was always true, but I think it has deteriorated since, well, since I graduated from high school in 1963 (the world revolves around me). The other bit if info to keep in mind is that all these folks’ votes count every bit as much as yours.
Previously I published another study showing that college graduates know even less about U.S. civics than high school graduates – college grads forget what little they learned in K-12, or are mistaught in college. Couple this second study with the survey described below, and that is VERY bad news.
GOLDWATER INSTITUTE
Why aren't Arizona high schools teaching civics?
by Matthew Ladner, Ph.D.
Just in time to celebrate Independence Day, the Goldwater Institute will release its new report, "Freedom from Responsibility: A Survey of Civic Knowledge Among Arizona High School Students." It reveals that only 3.5 percent of Arizona high school students have learned the basic history, government and geography necessary to pass the U.S. Citizenship test.
To conduct the survey, we hired a firm to interview 1,140 Arizona high school students and ask 10 questions drawn at random from the exam given to applicants for United States citizenship. Applicants for citizenship must get six out of 10 questions correct to pass. A recent trial found that 92.4 percent of citizenship applicants passed the test on the first try.
Below are the survey questions, the correct answers, and in parentheses the percentage of public school students providing the correct answer for each question.
1. What is the supreme law of the land?
Answer: The Constitution (29.5%)
2. What do we call the first 10 amendments to the Constitution?
Answer: The Bill of Rights (25%)
3. What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?
Answer: Senate and House (23%)
4. How many Justices are on the Supreme Court?
Answer: Nine (9.4%)
5. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
Answer: Jefferson (25.3%)
6. What ocean is on the East Coast of the United States?
Answer: Atlantic (58.8%)
7. What are the two major political parties in the United States?
Answer: Democratic and Republican (49.6%)
8. We elect a U.S. Senator for how many years?
Answer: Six (14.5%)
9. Who was the first President of the United States?
Answer: Washington (26.5%)
10. Who is in charge of the Executive Branch?
Answer: The President (26%)
Only 3.5 percent of traditional public high school students passed the test. That's 40 students out of a sample of 1,134 district high school students.
Arizona's 8th grade social studies standards require that students learn about everything from John Locke to the Mayflower Compact to the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution before high school. It isn't clear what, if anything, Arizona students are learning in these classes, but it is abundantly clear what they are not learning--U.S. civics, history and geography.
In the report, I recommend that all Arizona high school students be required to pass a version of the U.S. Citizenship exam in order to graduate. Since then, one of our supporters came up with an even better idea: Make the exam a requirement for receiving a driver's license. Interesting thought...
Dr. Matthew Ladner is vice president for research at the Goldwater Institute.
5. To provide free Internet, subsidize Internet cafes, not libraries
RIDER COMMENT: One of the many rationales for a new monster central San Diego downtown library is more free computer access for the “poor” – and particularly the pungent homeless. The progressives won’t be happy until all folks not only have Internet access for free, but they must be using it regularly. If they are NOT using the Internet, then somehow that’s the taxpayers’ fault for not making it attractive/easy/accessible enough.
It’s just another in the ENDLESS subsidies liberals mandate from taxpayers. Redistribution is the name of the game – one small bite at the time.
That being said, IF we want taxpayers to pay for widespread free Internet access for the disadvantaged (in case it’s not obvious from my rants, I oppose this goal), then we should look to – of all places – the US Post Office for guidance. The post office contracts with local stores to serve as mini post offices, making such service far more convenient to the public.
Similarly the city could contract with cafes, coffee shops, etc. to provide such service -- paying maybe $15,000-$20,000 per year per location (including buying and maintaining perhaps 10 basic computers). These small struggling businesses benefit from the steady core revenue, plus the ancillary revenue from the computer users making other purchases.
The computers can be geographically positioned in the areas where such service is most needed -- not housed in a giant central library building that only relatively few can get to.
The results? FAR cheaper, and FAR better service. At $20K per coffee shop, a million dollars would provide 40 such locations. Furthermore, this business model would entail little in the way of operating costs or liabilities – unlike the library, where overpriced city employees are expected to help patrons navigate the Internet (or play games, view porn, or whatever).
The downside? No ribbon-cutting photo op for the politicians comparable to the grand opening of a quarter billion dollar library.
6. An analysis of Supreme Court Ricci decision overturning firefighter affirmative action – and Sotomayer’s ruling
RIDER COMMENT: The US Supreme Court’s Ricci decision that disparate racial results on firefighter written tests not being grounds for affirmative action bodes well for limiting further racial preferences (a.k.a. quota systems). Here’s a good article on the decision, and how Sotomayer’s overridden ruling can be viewed.
The article is prefaced by cogent comments from Thomas E. Wood, moderator of AADAP, a free email service on affirmative action. Wood is quite interesting, as he is a liberal opposed to affirmative action.
It has been suggested that New Haven could have certified the test results and found "alternative ways to deal with these issues in the future." Does this mean that every test that does not achieve the desired demographic result should be tossed out?
At some point, in some cases, the liberal argument places diversity above the skill level of a workforce. It is exactly this thinking that contributes to the decades of distance between Democrats and working and middle class whites.
For Sotomayor in particular, her role in the Ricci case is hardly radical. She upheld precedent. So-called "judicial activism" is not a tool exclusive to the right or left. Sotomayor's view on affirmative action was in the mainstream of liberal thought. But on this policy, liberal thought is not in the mainstream.
A Quinnipiac University poll recently detailed the Ricci case and found that seven in ten Americans, including 53 percent of blacks, believed the Court should compel "the city to promote" the firefighters even if no blacks "scored high enough to qualify."
Blacks overwhelmingly support affirmative action. But when given a specific example of the negative side of the policy, even a majority of blacks changed their mind.
Yet the liberal justices hid from these moral issues. The minority opinion sought to stay within the safe confines of precedent. It focused on defending the city's effort to avoid a civil rights lawsuit. The deeper issues that liberal justices ache to confront on other occasions, questions of fairness and equality, went ignored.
The liberal justices sought sanctuary in the legalese of the case. They argued for the continued use of unequal actions to attain an equal outcome and thereby undercut the roots of liberalism, the right to equal opportunity. Those who once fought for equality, and stood on the shoulders of that fight, are reduced to justifying inequality to combat inequality. In this era of Obama, it's the measure of what remains unchanged that is sometimes most striking.
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www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/30/left_dodges_moral_debate_on_ricci_case.html
June 30, 2009
Left Dodges Moral Debate on Ricci Case
By David Paul Kuhn
It took the story of one firefighter to expose the tension between fairness and affirmative action.
The nation's four most prominent liberal justices ignored that tension Monday. By consequence, the liberal justices decided that equal outcome should trump equal opportunity, when the two values compete. And in that decision, supported by a chorus of liberal analysts, American liberalism continued decades of thinking that places diversity, not fairness, as its first principle.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that white and Hispanic firefighters were unfairly discriminated against when the city of New Haven discarded a promotional exam because no blacks, or not enough minorities in the city’s view, earned a sufficient score to be promoted.
The ruling concludes one of the most widely debated discrimination cases of the past decade. Much of that attention is based on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's involvement in the case. Sotomayor, as an appellate judge, upheld the initial decision siding with New Haven.
In the end, the Court's conservative majority prevailed in yet another 5 to 4 vote. But it's the minority's dissent--a view supported by the Obama administration in its brief submitted to the Court--which stirs up liberalism's ongoing avoidance of affirmative action's "real-world" negative consequences.
The uniform liberal Court view on affirmative action takes on a heightened resonance today. Democrats hope President Obama marks the beginning of an enduring political majority. A primary aim of either party, when seeking sustained dominance, is to shift the Court to their side. Had today's Court been left leaning, liberals should be troubled to know, it would have almost certainly upheld a policy that denied a promotion based on the color of those promoted.
The Ricci case gets to the core of the American ideal of "the pursuit of happiness" as an "inalienable right." This right was most egregiously denied to blacks through slavery. It was not until the 1960s that the nation finally confronted and outlawed discriminatory practices. Affirmative action was instituted to correct past inequality.
Nearly a half-century later, liberalism faces new questions. In the time of the first black president, when white men's unemployment rate increases at twice the rate of black women in this recession, liberal thought has remained hinged to an earlier era.
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination based on disparate treatment or disparate impact. In 1960s and 1970s America the tension between the two principles was mitigated by the need to right history.
The liberal opinion, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on behalf of all four left-leaning justices, argued Monday that the "purpose" of Title VII's disparate-impact provision "is to ensure that individuals are hired and promoted based on qualifications manifestly necessary" and "do not screen out members of any race."
The liberal justices refused to reckon with the instances when the desire for "manifestly necessary" skills creates an unequal racial outcome, as was the case in New Haven.
The conservative majority addressed this tension Monday. It decided New Haven's actions amounted to disparate treatment, what the rest of us call overt discrimination.
An Illiberal Argument
Liberals now find themselves bunkered down beneath illiberal logic. Conventional affirmative action supporters effectively back discrimination for the sake of diversity. The driving role that class and culture play in endemic inequality is ignored. Affirmative action has become an entitlement supported despite consequence or context.
Whites overwhelmingly support a move toward class-based affirmative action that would still disproportionately aid minorities. But liberals remain seemingly vested in defending affirmative action as it was conceived, in a time far different than today.
The liberal opinion on the Ricci case upheld the city's effort to find any means to hold fast to conventional affirmative action. The city, after extended deliberation, decided that it was legal to discard the test results if no one was promoted.
Ginsburg echoed earlier decisions when she wrote that the city policy was "race-neutral in this sense" because "‘[A]ll the test results were discarded, no one was promoted, and firefighters of every race will have [the opportunity] to participate in another selection process to be considered for promotion.'"
The liberal argument feels like the cold legal judgment opposed by Barack Obama, in his criteria for nominating new liberal justices.
"She understands that upholding the rule of law means going beyond legal theory to ensure consistent, fair, common-sense application of the law to real-world facts," the White House wrote when Sotomayor was nominated.
Consider the well known details of the case's lead plaintiff, Frank Ricci. He gave up a second job and spent a third to half of his days studying over a period of months. He paid an acquaintance more than $1,000 to read textbooks onto audiotapes to overcome his dyslexia. He passed the test. Earned the promotion. But he was denied that promotion because diversity took precedent over qualification.
As I wrote in an earlier article on Ricci and concepts of "white male privilege," Ricci personifies the negative impact of so-called "positive discrimination." It's precisely this impact that liberalism must confront. The liberal argument ignored issues of harm, the loss of time or additional income suffered by Ricci and his fellow plaintiffs.
Ginsburg wrote that the majority opinion ignores firefighters' "long history of rank discrimination against African-Americans." It's an important consideration. But Ginsburg ignored the decades of distance from that history.
The liberal opinion goes on to write of the city's "unlikely" desire to exclude white firefighters from promotion because "a fair test"--fair, in this sense, meaning equal outcome--"would undoubtedly result in the addition of white firefighters to the officer ranks." This line of argument would have us believe that a “fair” system would promote some deserving white applicants while denying other white applicants. This illiberal liberal reasoning places disparate impact over disparate treatment. It argues, at best, that subtle discrimination is preferable over its more overt form. This is the inverse of our common hierarchy of justice. Common sense dictates that intentional harm is worse than accidental.
The test was created by a firm specializing in employment exams and met legal requirements, such as a review by independent experts. It was not the test but the color of those who passed it that led the nation’s top liberal legal minds to determine it was not "fair." This view defines quality by demographic result. It consequently upholds the outdated use of quotas.
The city claimed that it trashed the test only because it was afraid of being sued for discrimination by the minority applicants. But practical consequences also matter in law, as Obama has said.
Liberals continue to argue today that affirmative action is the result of employers impeding the progress of minorities. But the Ricci case captures how affirmative action improves the position of minorities often by impeding the progress of whites. And it's the most vulnerable whites who often pay the price of affirmative action, those men who lost blue-collar jobs and know nothing of privilege.
Mistaking Cure for Disease
Sotomayor has commendably acknowledged that affirmative action played a critical role in her admittance to Ivy League universities. And to be sure, diversity has its practical benefits. One needs Spanish speaking social workers or black police officers patrolling black neighborhoods. Whites can be ill served by a homogenous education. But when diversity is emphasized solely for its own sake, the cure becomes the cause rather than the true cause--curing the disease of discrimination.
It has been suggested that New Haven could have certified the test results and found "alternative ways to deal with these issues in the future." Does this mean that every test that does not achieve the desired demographic result should be tossed out?
At some point, in some cases, the liberal argument places diversity above the skill level of a workforce. It is exactly this thinking that contributes to the decades of distance between Democrats and working and middle class whites.
For Sotomayor in particular, her role in the Ricci case is hardly radical. She upheld precedent. So-called "judicial activism" is not a tool exclusive to the right or left. Sotomayor's view on affirmative action was in the mainstream of liberal thought. But on this policy, liberal thought is not in the mainstream.
A Quinnipiac University poll recently detailed the Ricci case and found that seven in ten Americans, including 53 percent of blacks, believed the Court should compel "the city to promote" the firefighters even if no blacks "scored high enough to qualify."
Blacks overwhelmingly support affirmative action. But when given a specific example of the negative side of the policy, even a majority of blacks changed their mind.
Yet the liberal justices hid from these moral issues. The minority opinion sought to stay within the safe confines of precedent. It focused on defending the city's effort to avoid a civil rights lawsuit. The deeper issues that liberal justices ache to confront on other occasions, questions of fairness and equality, went ignored.
Imagine the opposite of the Ricci case. A test is tossed out because not enough whites earned a promotion and too many blacks did. Would liberals support the city's action then?
"We are not unsympathetic to the plaintiffs' expression of frustration," Sotomayor and her fellow appellate justices wrote last year. The Supreme Court liberal justices wrote in their opinion that the firefighters denied a promotion "understandably attract this Court's sympathy."
Sympathy is exhibited not in words but actions. The liberal justices sought sanctuary in the legalese of the case. They argued for the continued use of unequal actions to attain an equal outcome and thereby undercut the roots of liberalism, the right to equal opportunity. Those who once fought for equality, and stood on the shoulders of that fight, are reduced to justifying inequality to combat inequality. In this era of Obama, it's the measure of what remains unchanged that is sometimes most striking.
7. The climate change climate change – global warming scientist proponents are changing their minds
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124597505076157449.html#mod=rss_opinion_main
•
• OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH
• JUNE 29, 2009
The Climate Change Climate Change
The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.
• By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
• Comments (537)
Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.
If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.
Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.
In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)
The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.
Credit for Australia's own era of renewed enlightenment goes to Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published "Heaven and Earth," a damning critique of the "evidence" underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist -- and ardent global warming believer -- in April humbly pronounced it "an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence." Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.
The rise in skepticism also came as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, elected like Mr. Obama on promises to combat global warming, was attempting his own emissions-reduction scheme. His administration was forced to delay the implementation of the program until at least 2011, just to get the legislation through Australia's House. The Senate was not so easily swayed.
Mr. Fielding, a crucial vote on the bill, was so alarmed by the renewed science debate that he made a fact-finding trip to the U.S., attending the Heartland Institute's annual conference for climate skeptics. He also visited with Joseph Aldy, Mr. Obama's special assistant on energy and the environment, where he challenged the Obama team to address his doubts. They apparently didn't.
This week Mr. Fielding issued a statement: He would not be voting for the bill. He would not risk job losses on "unconvincing green science." The bill is set to founder as the Australian parliament breaks for the winter.
Republicans in the U.S. have, in recent years, turned ever more to the cost arguments against climate legislation. That's made sense in light of the economic crisis. If Speaker Nancy Pelosi fails to push through her bill, it will be because rural and Blue Dog Democrats fret about the economic ramifications. Yet if the rest of the world is any indication, now might be the time for U.S. politicians to re-engage on the science. One thing for sure: They won't be alone.
Write to kim@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A15
8. Media doing more data mining – great news for the public
RIDER COMMENT: The SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE is spearheading the establishment of a nonprofit to do “data based investigative journalism.” See the article below.
As I’ve pointed out often in the past, most journalists are poorly prepared to do such analysis, so they avoid it, or get it wrong because they cannot analyze government propaganda releases. But I think that some of the media is discovering that this data area is a treasure trove waiting to be mined.
Media people are usually poorly armed when it comes to number crunching, but they are NOT stupid. They can learn, and some ARE back-learning about this neglected aspect of their liberal arts education.
Here are my comments to the U-T staff – an open letter praising the effort.
Perhaps more important, I present two potential areas for data mining.
FROM: RICHARD RIDER
TO: SD U-T STAFF
Interesting new venture -- data based investigative journalism. Kudos to the U-T for spearheading this effort.
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2009/06/30/this_just_in/053loriehearn062909.txt
GREAT IDEA! It's been the neglected area of reporting. It's often a daunting area in which to drill, but with Pulitzer Prize results awaiting the drillers.
Here's my suggestion for two difficult projects that can provide critical information the public desperately needs to understand. These projects are easy for me to suggest, but difficult to do -- especially the first suggestion.
A. Look at public vs. private sector pay.
The stereotype of public employment is that it's a tradeoff -- low pay and modest benefits in exchange for solid job security and a stately work pace. The public employee unions perpetuate this myth.
It might have been true 30-40 years ago, but not today. Most of today's public employees receive salaries considerably HIGHER than the equivalent jobs in the private sector. The benefits are literally unbelievable. Meanwhile the job security is as good as ever. The work pace comparison is harder to define.
What is missing in this data comparison is a current, accurate comparison of public vs. private sector salaries for the same work. NO ONE has yet done this work -- and it's a Herculean task.
Police and firefighters are hard to compare with the private sector, but most of the rest of government work is indeed comparable.
The trick is to compare NOT just with other government agencies. This is the public employee unions favorite gambit -- where every government jurisdiction is the opposite of Lake Woebegone -- every government's pay is below average.
Instead the comparisons should be with the local PRIVATE sector. And not just with the big rich corporations and utilities (the usual comparison by government bureaucrats). A full range of private firms should be surveyed, down to the small businesses which are be primary employers in San Diego.
I'll tell you what I'm confident that you'll find: The pink and blue collar government jobs (the vast majority of the public sector jobs) pay 25%-50% higher than the average private pay of sector workers doing the same tasks -- and that's not counting the opulent public employee benefits, health care and early retirement. The technical and professional jobs will be closer to parity, and in some specialty areas the private sector pays more -- while the companies are still in business.
Managerial jobs are not equivalent. Private sector managers are supposed to MAKE the company money. Public sector managers are tasked only with SPENDING taxpayer funds. It's a huge difference in responsibility and accountability.
B. Look at the percentage of government employees who take disability retirement.
One old study I recall noted that public employees become disabled 28 times more frequently than private sector employees. And no area is more prone to disability than police and firefighters.
It's not just the "chief's disease" scandal of recent years. For instance, many and perhaps most firefighters try to go out with some sort of disability, yet they are healthier than the general population of similar age.
The city of San Diego has made some effort to rein in this problem, but it's an area ripe for further investigation -- for the city, the county and the other cities in the county.
9. Canooks come to U.S. for timely medical care – where will we be going for ours if ObamaCare passes? Plus comments on the bogus reports of high U.S. infant mortality rates.
RIDER COMMENT: The following column describes where the Canadians go who need timely health care. They go South!
More and more, perhaps the same will be true for U.S. citizens if ObamaCare is implemented (and I think it will be). Maybe we won’t go South. Perhaps East – like to India. Indeed, this overseas treatment trend is already growing at a brisk clip.
One aspect of the story deserves more attention. It completely debunks one canard by the single payer plan supporters – the claim that the infant mortality rate in the U.S. is high compared to a lot of countries. But these are not apples to apples comparisons. Many other countries have decided that if a baby dies within 24 hours, it was never born. Not so in the U.S. However weak, premature or deformed a newborn is, if it dies, it’s a death on our records.
And there is another factor. Cuba ranks well in health care. But how do we acquire the stats from Cuba? Why, the Cuban government tells us! Simply put, they lie.
Cuba has a handful of showcase hospitals (“showcase” by THEIR standards), but the rest of the country’s medical care is appallingly bad. The health numbers they report are literally unbelievable, yet are taken as fact by the U.N. and socialized medicine supporters.
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=331254362316405#
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Canada's Single-Prayer Health Care
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, June 30, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Health Reform: A critically ill premature baby is moved to a U.S hospital to get the treatment she couldn't get in the system we're told we should emulate. Cost-effective care? In Canada, as elsewhere, you get what you pay for.
________________________________________
IBD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For Failure
________________________________________
Ava Isabella Stinson was born last Thursday at St. Joseph's hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. Weighing only two pounds, she was born 13 weeks premature and needed some very special care. Unfortunately, there were no open neonatal intensive care beds for her at St. Joseph's — or anywhere else in the entire province of Ontario, it seems.
Canada's perfectly planned and cost-effective system had no room at the inn for Ava, who of necessity had to be sent across the border to a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital to suffer under our chaotic and costly system. She had no time to be put on a Canadian waiting list. She got the care she needed at an American hospital under a system President Obama has labeled "unsustainable."
Jim Hoft over at Gateway Pundit reports Ava's case is not unusual. He reports that Hamilton's neonatal intensive care unit is closed to new admissions half the time. Special-needs infants are sent elsewhere and usually to the U.S.
In 2007, a Canadian woman gave birth to extremely rare identical quadruplets — Autumn, Brooke, Calissa and Dahlia Jepps. They were born in the United States to Canadian parents because there was again no space available at any Canadian neonatal care unit. All they had was a wing and a prayer.
The Jepps, a nurse and a respiratory technician flew from Calgary, a city of a million people, 325 miles to Benefit Hospital in Great Falls, Mont., a city of 56,000. The girls are doing fine, thanks to our system where care still trumps cost and where being without insurance does not mean being without care.
Infant mortality rates are often cited as a reason socialized medicine and a single-payer system is supposed to be better than what we have here. But according to Dr. Linda Halderman, a policy adviser in the California State Senate, these comparisons are bogus.
As she points out, in the U.S., low birth-weight babies are still babies. In Canada, Germany and Austria, a premature baby weighing less than 500 grams is not considered a living child and is not counted in such statistics. They're considered "unsalvageable" and therefore never alive.
Norway boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world — until you factor in weight at birth, and then its rate is no better than in the U.S.
In other countries babies that survive less than 24 hours are also excluded and are classified as "stillborn." In the U.S. any infant that shows any sign of life for any length of time is considered a live birth.
A child born in Hong Kong or Japan that lives less than a day is reported as a "miscarriage" and not counted. In Switzerland and other parts of Europe, a baby is not counted as a baby if it is less than 30 centimeters in length.
In 2007, there were at least 40 mothers and their babies who were airlifted from British Columbia alone to the U.S. because Canadian hospitals didn't have room. It's worth noting that since 2000, 42 of the world's 52 surviving babies weighing less than 400g (0.9 pounds) were born in the U.S.
It must be embarrassing to Canada that a G-7 economy and a country of 30 million people can't offer the same level of health care as a town of just over 50,000 in rural Montana. Where will Canada send its preemies and other critical patients when we adopt their health care system?
As we have noted, in Canada roughly 900,000 patients of all ages are waiting for beds, according to the Fraser Institute. There are more than four times as many magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) units per capita in the U.S. as in Canada. We have twice as many CT scanners per capita.
Expensive? Wasteful. Just ask the Jepps or the parents of Ava Isabella Stinson.
10. Amid budget mess, CHP could get raise
RIDER COMMENT: Thank goodness the government keeps reminding us why tax increases are NOT needed. When the politicians and their labor unions refuse to control public employee cost but rather provide raises, that puts the dagger in the heart of liberal claims that tax increases are needed. Indeed, that gives new meaning to the term “bleeding heart liberals”!
http://tinyurl.com/lsz3hn
The Buzz: Amid budget mess, CHP could get raise
Published: Wednesday, Jul. 1, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 3A
While rank-and-file state employees face as much as a 14 percent pay cut through furloughs, California Highway Patrol officers could well get a raise. The CHP contract adjusts pay based on salary levels at five local law enforcement agencies in the state. The results of this year's survey are expected out soon.
11. Obama blowing hot air concerning California energy efficiency policies
RIDER COMMENT: The following is from the WS JOURNAL’s James Taranto 1 July blog http://online.wsj.com/article/best_of_the_web_today.html :
President Obama was touting California, with its decades-old "energy-efficiency policies," as an example to the nation. After all, the president noted, "Californians consume 40 percent less energy per person than the national average."
As Harvard's Edward Glaeser pointed out in an April New York Times blog post, the "primary reason" California's energy consumption is low is the weather:
January temperature does a terrific job of explaining carbon emissions from home heating and July temperature does almost as well at explaining electricity usage. California has the most temperate climate in the country and as a result, homes use less heat in the winter and less electricity in the summer. In hot, humid Houston or frigid Minneapolis, people use plenty of energy to artificially recreate what California has naturally.
Obama also claimed that California's paucity of power plants is evidence of its success. But California uses more electricity than it generates--some 53 terawatt-hours more in 2007, or just over 20% of total consumption, according to the federal Energy Information Administration--which means it has to import power from other states not subject to California's environmental restrictions.
Moreover, also according to the EIA, Californians pay an average of 14.42 cents a kilowatt-hour of electricity, the sixth-highest rate in the contiguous U.S. and more than the average of any region except New England. Obama, it seems, would like to make the rest of the country pay California prices for energy. It might be worth it if he could guarantee us California weather.
12. Case study of a bloated pension -- complete with details
RIDER COMMENT: This well researched article details how a 51 year old “public servant” making a paltry $221,000 can walk away with a $284,000 pension. Your blood should boil.
The details of this case may NOT apply to your specific local and county jurisdictions, but it’s only the details and degree of taxpayer largesse that change. ALL government employees have extra gains that factor into their pensions over and above just their “highest base salary” – and nowhere is the abuse more rampant than in the public safety jobs.
The one thing that is probably universal is that public safety employees are ALWAYS surprised and sometimes stunned at the total pension they end up receiving.
For instance, in many jurisdictions covered under CalPERS, the taxpayers pay part or all of the employee’s share of the pension contribution. Only when the pension is actually issued does the employee discover that the employer contributions boost their “salary” off which the pension is calculated. Locally cities such as La Mesa and Chula Vista pay the public employee’s 9% contribution. That means that instead of getting a “90% of salary” pension after 30 years, the employee gets 98.1% of salary.
Again, most employees do not know this, and it does not show up in their annual CalPERS statement about their pensions. ONLY when they retire does this come up – and the reckoning comes for the taxpayers footing the bill.
Remember, this unknown windfall is only one of many such windfalls for public employees – especially police and firefighters. Even the folks in the California State Controllers office are usually unaware of many of these giveaways.
Just to repeat my admonition – get a government job. Especially a local government job. And ideally a public safety job – firefighter is best. This is the most lucrative financial advice I can dispense.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/danielborenstein/ci_12265599
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
Daniel Borenstein: Guide to bad pension policy
By Daniel Borenstein
Staff columnist
Posted: 05/02/2009 10:00:00 PM PDT
Updated: 05/03/2009 10:23:02 PM PDT
CRAIG BOWEN'S SALARY during his final year as chief of the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District was about $221,000 a year. So how did he end up retiring in December with a tax-advantaged annual pension of $284,000?
The answer provides an amazing case study that highlights problems with public employee compensation and reveals tricks that allow workers to spike their pensions at the expense of their fellow employees and taxpayers.
The Bowen story has some similarities to the case I examined last month of Peter Nowicki, the chief of the Moraga Orinda Fire District who was able to turn his $185,000 annual salary into a $241,000 yearly pension. While each public agency has different rules that provide new ways to take advantage of retirement systems, many of the lessons can be applied across the board.
In Bowen's case, residents of the fire district serving Danville, San Ramon, Alamo, Blackhawk and Diablo should pay close attention because they got shafted. The San Ramon district's flawed compensation system and generous rules for pension calculations allowed Bowen to increase his starting pension from about $193,000 to $284,000 a year — a 47 percent increase. The pension will be increased in future years for inflation.
Bowen was only 51 years old when he retired at the end of 2008. If he or his wife lives another 30 years, that bump-up alone would add $2.7 million in today's dollars to his pension. His total retirement payout for the next 30 years would be worth about $8.5 million in today's dollars — far more than most taxpayers have in their 401(k)s when they hit the half-century mark.
Bowen is a beneficiary of a system that merits closer scrutiny. His devotion to the job is not at issue. By all accounts, he was a hardworking guy during his 29-year career. Indeed, it apparently took a toll on his health.
As he told a reporter in December, a medical condition influenced his decision to retire. In March, the board of the Contra Costa County Employees' Retirement Association, which administers the fire district's pension plan, approved Bowen's request for a service-connected disability.
As a result, under state and federal laws, much of his pension payment is exempt from income tax. Moreover, under state rules, if his wife survives him, she will be entitled to 100 percent of his pension for the rest of her life.
The spousal benefit is part of a public employee retirement system that creates pension payments unmatched in the private sector — a system that is financially unsustainable and is excessively sucking away dollars that could otherwise be used for providing public services.
With that in mind, let's look at the factors that make Bowen's pension so lucrative — and the changes that could be made locally to fix the system in the future.
The fire district, like most police and fire agencies across the state, has adopted the retirement calculation known as "3 percent at 50" — meaning that a worker can receive a pension starting at age 50 equal to 3 percent of his highest 12 months' salary multiplied by the number of years of employment. For example, someone who worked 30 years would be entitled to a pension equal to 90 percent of his salary.
While those pension benefits seemed like a good idea to some people in better fiscal times a decade ago when local governments across the state started implementing them, the time has come to reconsider whether taxpayers can afford to fund them.
There are two key variables in the "3 percent at 50" equation: the number of years worked and the highest 12 months' salary. Here are some of the factors that go into each and some rough estimates of how much they increase Bowen's pension annually:
Unused sick leave ($10,700 a year): In addition to work credit for his 29 years on the job, Bowen received credit for more than a year of unused sick leave. As a result, his pension was calculated as if he had worked 30.3 years. The difference means Bowen will receive an additional $10,700 in his annual pension.
The idea of receiving retirement credit for unused sick leave is generally peculiar to the public sector. It's a benefit public agencies could, and should, end. Sick leave is supposed to serve as insurance to provide compensation when a worker is ill; it shouldn't be a tool to bolster retirement.
Standby and management pay ($14,500 a year): In the San Ramon Valley district, managers don't just receive a salary. They have add-ons. There's "standby" pay that adds roughly 5 percent to the salary. This is extra compensation for carrying a pager and being available 24/7 for emergencies. Also, there's "management" pay that adds another 2 percent. This is for a manager to be ... well, to be a manager.
It seems odd that a fire chief would be paid extra to perform duties that are basic to his job. What makes it worse is that the extra money is added to the salary figure used for pension calculations. In other words, even after the chief retired, he continues to benefit from these perks. They live on for the rest of his, or his wife's, life, adding at the start roughly $14,500 a year to his pension.
Auto allowance ($7,600 a year): A couple of years ago, the fire district offered managers the option of a flat monthly stipend in lieu of a car for the job. Bowen chose the stipend, which was $700 a month when he retired. But the salary figure used to calculate Bowen's pension includes the auto allowance, which adds nearly the full amount to his actual retirement check. He received the auto allowance for only two years while on the job — and now he's going to get it in retirement for the rest of his and his wife's lives.
If the standby pay, management pay and auto allowance seem excessive, that's because they are. What makes them worse is that once the district offers them to employees, it must, under state law, include the amounts in the salary figure used for pension calculations. There is, however, a simple solution: Stop offering the benefits. Then they need not be factored into the retirement calculations.
Administrative leave ($17,000 a year): The chief, like other managers, was entitled to administrative leave — time off in exchange for having to work outside normal business hours. In other words, he was paid extra for the additional hours through standby and management pay, and then offered time off in exchange for them as well.
If the chief didn't use his administrative leave of 80 hours a year, he would receive cash payment for the hours at the start of the following year. Bowen, however, played the system well. In January 2008 he received payment for all 80 hours of administrative leave he didn't use in 2007. And then, when he retired on Dec. 31, 2008, he immediately received payment for nearly 80 hours of administrative leave he didn't use in 2008. In other words, he got two years' worth of administrative leave paid in the same 12-month period, the period that was used to calculate his salary for pension purposes.
Timing here was critical. By waiting until the last day of the year to retire, instead of, say, leaving during the summer, he added thousands of dollars to his annual pension payments. All told, by not taking administrative leave those two years and cashing it out instead, Bowen added about $17,000 annually to his pension.
Administrative leave is a costly and unjustified benefit to begin with, especially considering all the other compensation managers receive. In Bowen's case, doubling it up for the pension calculation just adds insult to the taxpayer's injury. Fire district directors should eliminate administrative leave. Then there will be no need to include it in the pension calculation.
Selling back vacation time ($17,000 a year): The fire district allows employees to sell back unused vacation time up to 80 hours a year. The new policy, implemented for the first time to apply to the 2007 calendar year, requires the sell-back to take place in December of each year.
But for the first year, because of delays implementing the contract, the sell-back took place in April 2008. Bowen sold 80 hours then, and 80 more in December 2008. The proceeds from those sales, in turn, were added to the salary used to compute his pension. Because he was able to sell back twice within the final 12 months of his employment, he doubled the effect on his pension. All told, the vacation sell-back boosted his pension by about $17,000 a year.
Vacation buyback is another unnecessary benefit that should be eliminated. Workers should be told to take their time off. Like in most of the private sector, limits should be set on the amount they can accrue. Once those limits are reached, the worker should, as is the case in most of the private sector, be blocked from accruing more vacation.
Cashing out vacation time upon retirement ($25,500 a year): Finally, there's the unused vacation Bowen had remaining when he took retirement. District policy allows employees to cash out up to a year's worth of unused vacation when they leave. That's what Bowen did. The extra income in his final 12 months had the effect of bumping up his annual pension by about $25,500.
This is the single biggest spike to Bowen's pension. It's also the easiest item to fix for future retirees. The state Court of Appeal has been clear that termination payments need not count toward pension calculations. Public agencies should stop giving away this money.
Let's be clear. Bowen deserves a pension. He worked hard and, by all accounts, he performed well. The question is how much is fair for him and the others who come behind him.
There's nothing the San Ramon fire district's board can do to reduce Bowen's pension now. But his case can serve as a road map for fire district directors, and board members of other agencies across the state, looking to end unjustified spiking and bring some sanity to the public pension system.
13. The NEW YORK TIMES bloviates on CA budget problems
RIDER COMMENT: The NEW YORK TIMES Magazine is running a numbing 8,000 word story on California government’s travails.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05California-t.html?pagewanted=10&_r=1&ref=magazine
You need not read this tripe. I’ll summarize it for you. The writer’s conclusion is what you’d expect – in a state that consistently ranks in the top four highest tax rate states, California’s problem is that politicians are not easily able to raise taxes even higher and faster (as they can and just did in NY state where “simple majority” literally rules – and both taxes AND spending are now soaring). http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034073.html
Even more fascinating – in the entire 8,000 word article, there is not a SINGLE mention of our state and local public employee overcompensation, bloated pensions, or government labor union lock on the legislature. NOTHING!
The U-T’s Chris Reed covers this well in his blog:
http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/weblogs/afb/archives/034678.html
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