The View from Right Field

Government Subsidies – Programs That Never End

There is a saying that the only things certain in life are death and taxes.  And the only thing permanent is a government program.  The inability of the federal government, and state and local governments, to terminate programs that don’t work is proof of the latter.  Instead of getting rid of the old programs that don’t work, governments just set up a new program – again and again.  Which results in four or five (or more) programs all trying to solve the same problem, and none of them doing it well (if at all).

Overseas, the forever programs are often subsidies: for food, fuel, etc.  In theory, the subsidies are set up for good purposes: to help the poor.  (Of course, they are also set up to help politicians – get votes.)  The problem is that, over time, the subsidies become more and more expensive, as costs go up and prices don’t.  And corruption seeps in: subsidized fuel, for example, is sold to neighboring countries where prices are subsidized.

Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court, and Roe v. Wade

With the hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court starting,¹ one of the questions will be about women’s right to choose/abortion.  Will a Justice Brett Kavanaugh vote to take away a woman’s right to choose by overturning Roe v. Wade?  While Judge Kavanaugh told Senator Susan Collins that Roe v. Wade was settled law, settled law can be overturned. 

What people are missing, however, in talking about whether the Supreme Court might overturn Roe v. Wade, is that overturning Roe v. Wade is not going to take away a woman’s right to choose.  The Equal Rights Amendment was never adopted, but over the last 30+ years all, or at least almost all, of what the Equal Rights Amendment was supposed to accomplish has happened anyway.  It has been done by laws, regulations, and the general agreement of society.  Women are heads of Fortune 500 companies.  Female soldiers are going into combat as members of our military.  Women are as equal today as they would have been if the Equal Rights Amendment had been adopted 35 years ago.

Ending Net Neutrality Pushes Us Back to the Dark Days – of 2015

Those opposing the repeal of the “Net Neutrality” rules adopted by the FCC in 2015, which were adopted at the direction of the White House¹ (so much for the FCC being an independent agency), have warned of consequences for the Internet almost as bad as those coming from climate change.  Internet service providers will control what we are allowed to see; they’ll favor their own content over others; the Internet as we know it will end.

Except, all the FCC’s repeal of the net neutrality rules does it to put us back where we were before February 26, 2015, when the FCC adopted the rules that Barack Obama wanted.  It’s a little hard to see how going back to where we were less than three years ago is as horrible as net neutrality proponents are saying.

Paying for Harvey

Hurricane Harvey has been mind-boggling, and the costs for the people in Texas, and beyond as Harvey moves east, will be massive.  Now is probably not the best time to talk about flood insurance, but Congress’s failure to address it when there wasn’t a national emergency means we have to deal with it now.

Because private insurance companies have been unwilling to provide flood insurance, or at least have been unwilling to provide flood insurance at prices people are willing to pay and/or at prices state governments are willing to approve (in those states where the state has the right to approve insurance rates), the federal government provides flood insurance.  Unfortunately, there are two problems with the federal government’s flood insurance program.  First, it is set to expire at the end of September. 

Energy Subsidies for Those Who Don’t Need Them – Paid for By Those Who Can’t Afford Them

Green energy is all the rage.  We have to save the planet, after all, and green energy is the way to do it.  It may cost money, but it’s worth it – especially when you don’t have to pay for it yourself.

Robert Bryce wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week about his contribution to the green energy movement – and our contribution to him:

“[I]t’s only appropriate that I express appreciation for the generous subsidy you provided for the 28-panel, four-array, 8,540-watt photovoltaic system I installed on my metal roof last year.  Thanks to the investment tax credit, I slashed my 2016 federal tax bill by $7,758. …

Big Business. Big Labor. Big Government. Now, Big Regulation.

In December, The Wall Street Journal noted that the presidents of J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs have both come out against repeal of Dodd-Frank.  In 2015, Lloyd Blankenship, head of Goldman Sachs, explained that, far from being a problem for Goldman, the huge regulatory costs of Dodd-Frank were actually a plus.  Dodd-Frank set up barriers to entry, making it harder for banks that are not already huge, to compete with the likes of Goldman.   

While it may be counterintuitive, the Journal noted that the Independent Community Bankers of America, which represents small banks all over the country, has also come out against repeal of Dodd-Frank.  Though small banks complain about the burden of regulation, the Journal suggests that small banks see Dodd-Frank regulation as a weapon they can use against finance companies and tech start-ups, to keep them out of their business.

Do They Ever Learn Anything in Washington?

Donald Trump.  Bernie Sanders.  Occupy Everywhere.  The Cubs winning the World Series.  So many things have happened that nobody ever expected that the Tea Party has become a distant memory.  An even more distant memory is what started the Tea Party.  It wasn’t Obamacare or the bailout of the Wall Street bankers, though both of those added to the Tea Party’s fury.  Rather, the Tea Party started on February 19, 2009 on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange when CNBC reporter Rick Santelli unleashed a rant, on air, against an Obama administration plan to bailout homeowners facing foreclosure and help them refinance their mortgages”:

“Do we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages?  This is America!  How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?” 

Democrats/Progressives Need to Relax. Good Things Can Happen in Spite of the President.

As President-elect Donald Trump fills out his cabinet, and progressives/liberals exhibit signs of mass hysteria, it might be a good idea to sit back and reflect on the extent of the president’s power to actually affect things – and how many things happen that the president has nothing to do with.

Consider a report in last Monday’s Wall Street Journal.  According to the article, in November, the U.S. exported more natural gas than it imported.  It has been almost 60 years since the U.S. exported more natural gas than it imported on an annual basis, but that is where we are headed – and soon.  Further, the Energy Department predicts that, by 2020, the United States will be the third largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, behind Australia and Qatar.  And President Obama has had almost nothing to do with any of this.

The “Freedom Caucus” Is Missing the Point: You Have to Win Elections to Get Stuff Done

According to Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal, John Boehner is resigning as Speaker of the House of Representatives “in large part because of opposition to his leadership from 40 to 50 House members called the Freedom Caucus.”  Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) says, “[T]he heartland hasn’t seen us fight” for conservative ideas and policies.

It may be true that the so-called “base” hasn’t seen Republicans “fight” President Obama, but that may be as much because they haven’t been paying sufficient attention as for the lack of fighting.  The sequester is limiting government spending.  (It is doing in a terribly inefficient, meat cleaver-like way, but it is doing it.)  We got a decent estate tax law and income tax law passed permanently.  Affirming John Boehner’s idea, courts have said that Congress has standing to sue the Obama administration for the way it is, in the view of House Republicans, spending money without a proper Congressional authorization to do so.

But the main problem is that the kind of “fighting” the Freedom Caucus seems to want to see, i.e., government shutdowns, etc., are actually going to help keep in place the very policies that the Freedom Caucus opposes.

Spending Versus Accomplishing

I don’t know if it’s his liberalness (progressivity-?) or his lack of real world experience, but President Obama, like many (most-?) Democrats (and too many Republicans, unfortunately), confuses what government accomplishes with what it spends.  If the sequester, or whatever, cuts the amount government spends, President Obama, and those who think as he does, seem to assume that government will accomplish less.  The idea that good management might be able to reorganize how things are done in order to accomplish the same things, at a lower cost, isn’t something that would occur to him. 

Just as bad, he assumes that, if the government spends more, then it necessarily accomplishes more, which is not true, either.  In fact, it’s not true in any organization, private or public.  And the bigger the organization, the less likely it is to be true, which is why it is so far from true in government.  Except in the world of those who believe that the measurement of accomplishment is spending and that what counts is not what is actually done but what is spent doing it.