Buffett’s Secretary, Romney’s Return, and the Crushing Double Taxation on Investment Income

The Silver Platypus

Obama’s False Claims about Outsourcing and Corporate Taxes in the State of the Union Address

California’s Condom Mandate: Some Things Shouldn’t Be Up for a Vote

Obama, Scientific Integrity, and the State of the Union

January 2012

George McGovern on Binding Arbitration

by Ivan Osorio on May 7, 2009

in Economy, Employment, Labor

With Democrats just shy of the 60 votes they need to end a filibuster, the fate of the so-called Employee Free Choice Act remains in the balance in the Senate. While the current version of the bill seems unlikely to pass, EFCA supporters are likely to try alternative versions. One such option is EFCA without its controversial card check provision, which would allow unions to circumvent the secret ballot in organizing elections, and has been the bill’s most controversial provision to date.

However, EFCA-minus-card check would still be economically toxic. Specifically, its binding arbitration provision would put businesses at the mercy of the federal government. In today’s Wall Street Journal, former U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, who recently has spoken out against EFCA’s card check provision, explains binding arbitration’s danger:

Currently, labor law maintains a careful balance between the rights of businesses, unions and individual employees. While bargaining power differs depending on individual circumstances, the rights of the parties are well balanced. When a union and a business enter negotiations, current law requires that both sides bargain “in good faith.”
In a contract negotiation, each party typically perceives the other as too demanding. But no one loses their right to contract willingly or suffers being forced to agree to anything. Employees can strike if they feel that they have been dealt with unfairly, but it is a costly option. Employers are free to reject labor demands they find to be too difficult to accept, but running a business without experienced employees is itself difficult. Both sides have an incentive to press their demands, but they also have compelling reasons not to press their demands too far. EFCA would disrupt that balance by enabling government-appointed lawyers to decide what they believe is fair or reasonable.
A federally appointed arbitrator cannot be expected to understand the nuances specific to each business dispute, the competitive market position of the business, or the plethora of other factors unique to each case. Yet fundamental decisions on wages and benefit costs, rules for promotions, or even rules for exiting an unprofitable line of business could fall to federal arbitrators under EFCA.

For more on EFCA, see here, here, and here.

New York State Jumps on Anti-Bottled Water Wagon

by Angela Logomasini on May 7, 2009 · 1 comment

in Environment

New York Gov. David A. Paterson has jumped on anti-bottled water bandwagon by issuing an executive order halting state-agency purchases of bottled water—claiming to save significant amounts of money and landfill space. Agencies may no longer provide bottled water to workers either via five-gallon jugs for coolers or single serving containers. It’s good if lawmakers want to save money, but these policies won’t do much for the environment.

New York follows the lead of several other states and cities that have suddenly deemed bottled water a new “sin” industry. Chicago imposed a tax, Toronto banned it in government buildings, and Salt Lake has denied it to firefighters—at fires! Learn more here.

New York lawmakers are promising more than they can deliver. At least some of the water found in government agencies is delivered in large five-gallon plastic bottles, few of which ever enter the landfill. These bottles are reused on average, 35 to 50 times or more. Once these bottles are retired, they are recycled. They actually represent a private-sector environmental/recycling success story. Banning them in government agencies won’t save landfill space.

The replacement products—which demand the use of filters—will send waste to the landfill. It should also be noted that the water filtering devices require regular maintenance and repairs. And failure to change filters can produce quality problems with tap water too.

Finally, it is silly to claim that banning government purchases of them would matter significantly in terms of solid waste. Plastic water bottles amount to a measly 0.3 percent of trash nationally. In fact, absent bottled water as an option, many workers will likely bring their own or drink other bottled drinks. In fact, much of the increase in bottled water consumption over the past decades has replaced drinking of sugared or caffeine-containing drinks rather than tap water.

You can speak out against such silly bans and taxes on bottled water here.

Another Postage Hike on Monday

by Ryan Young on May 7, 2009 · 1 comment

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Odds & Ends

On Monday, postage rates will go up from 42 to 44 cents. Thanks to the forever stamp, most of us won’t have to bother with those infernal 2-cent stamps this time around.

As so often happens, this convenience has a trade-off. Lowering the transaction costs associated with rate increases means there will be more of them, at least in theory. Sure enough, for the first time in history, rates have gone up four years in a row.

Forever stamps make price hikes so painless that many people probably won’t even notice for months to come. Monday’s increase has barely made a dent in the news.

The forever stamp is a great idea. But frequent rate increases are a serious drawback. This is especially dangerous given the monopoly status USPS enjoys; competition is the only reliable form of price control. Unfortunately, an anti-trust investigation remains less than likely.

Cockroaches Win

by Angela Logomasini on May 7, 2009

in Environment, Features, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Zeitgeist

Growing up in Long Island in a nearly 100-year old wooden house meant there were innumerable opportunities for bugs to enter–everything from stinging, buzzing, and blood-sucking creatures found their way in. We did have one really good weapon against them. Periodically, we would vacate the house for the day, and my mother would set up the “bug bomb”—the pesticide fogger that would penetrate the hiding places of all those nasty pests. It worked miracles. The bugs cleared out, and we returned to a home that would be clear of pests for quite a while. We never had a problem because my mother followed the directions on the label.

But because some people don’t bother to follow label directions, New York State nanny regulators are considering taking this option away from New Yorkers. And the New York City Department of Health has recently petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to restrict use elsewhere.

It is true that some people have had problems with these products because they disregard the directions, and some do really stupid things. Directions include turning off pilot lights and appliances and only using the number of foggers suited to treat your space. Potential dangers of misuse are noted right on the container. Snopes reports, one person actually set off 19 bug bombs in a 470 square foot home, and yes, it exploded! Surprise, surprise.

But lots of products have risks that we tolerate because they have important value. We don’t ban perishable foods because some people get sick by ignoring the “refrigerate after opening” direction. We don’t ban automobile coolants because they are poisonous if consumed. Instead the directions tell us to keep them away from children and pets who might consume them. We don’t ban gasoline used in our lawn mowers because its causes fires when stored improperly. And so on.

While New York city officials raise all the prospects for misuse of this product, they don’t weigh that against the benefits. In places like New York City, insects, such as cockroaches are the sources of disease and allergens. And for many kids with asthma, those are very serious risks—life and death risks in some cases. See CEI’s briefs here and here on this topic for more information. These affordable foggers are a solution for many low-income communities where cockroach allergens are a particularly serious problem for many kids.

What are the regulators in New York suggesting as an answer to people who need these products? Caulk up the places where the bugs come in! Good luck caulking up 50-story, hundred year-old apartment buildings in places like New York City!

If New York regulators get their way, the only other option will be for people to hire an exterminator. So basically, if your income is too low and your kid has allergies and asthma related to cockroaches, you will be out of luck. The cockroaches win, you loose.

Eco-sailors rescued by oil tanker

by Marlo Lewis on May 6, 2009 · 3 comments

in Global Warming

“An expedition team which set sail from Plymouth [England] on a 5,000-mile carbon-emission free trip to Greenland have been rescued by an oil tanker,” BBC News reports. The crew’s solar and wind powered vessel capsized three times in stormy weather (68 mph winds). So far, at least, nobody has blamed global warming for the bad weather.

The irony of an oil tanker rescuing anti-fossil fuel crusaders was of course not lost on the BBC. The moral of the story should be obvious. Environmentalism is a luxury made possible by the comparative wealth and safety of a civilization powered predominantly by coal, oil, and natural gas. Restricting and, ultimately, prohibiting fossil energy use is a recipe for disaster and death.

So, have any of the eco-sailors had a change of heart or even second thoughts about the alleged evils of fossil fuels? The BBC report does not say, which probably means none did.

So, Mr. Waxman, how much global warming will your bill avert?

by Marlo Lewis on May 6, 2009 · 2 comments

in Features, Global Warming

The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade (energy tax) bill aims to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 20% below 2005 levels by 2020, 42% below by 2030, and 83% below by 2050. The cumulative cost in reduced GDP would likely total trillions of dollars. How much bang would we get for the buck?

Today, on Masterresource.org, climate scientist Chip Knappenberger shows by the numbers that the Waxman-Markey bill “will have virtually no impact on the future course of the earth’s climate.”

To calculate the climatic effects of the bill, Chip uses the MAGICC* climate model developed by the National Center for Climate Research, and assumes a climate sensitivity of 3°C (in other words, a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations above pre-industrial levels is assumed to produce 3°C of warming).

MAGICC reveals that an 83% reduction in U.S. emissions “will only produce a global temperature ‘savings’ during the next 50 years of about 0.05ºC.” Translating a bit, the temperature reduction is nine hundredths of one degree Fahrenheit, or two years of avoided warming.

* Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change

Destabilizing Afghanistan: the Quagmire Expands

by Hans Bader on May 5, 2009 · 1 comment

in Agriculture, Economy, Features, International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Trade

The anti-American Taliban extremists are resurgent not only in Afghanistan, where they once sheltered Osama Bin Laden, but also in neighboring Pakistan (which has nuclear weapons) as well. Thousands of Pakistanis are fleeing the Swat Valley, which is dominated by the Taliban.

But the Obama Administration stubbornly refuses to learn from the Bush Administration’s mistakes in Afghanistan. It’s stepping up efforts to wipe out the mainstay of the Afghan economy, by eradicating the opium poppies that Afghan farmers cultivate. Afghans are so poor that the poppies are 60 percent of their economy: a bigger fraction of their economy than agriculture and manufacturing combined are of the U.S. economy. Many Afghans have little choice but to grow opium: the Soviet invasion and occupation destroyed their irrigation works (and roads), making large-scale food production and transport extremely difficult. And when food prices went up in 2006 and 2007 as a result of ethanol mandates and rising demand for food in India and China, thousands of Afghan children starved to death. The Bush Administration’s attempts to eradicate the poppies turned many Afghans against America, and helped fuel the Taliban’s resurgence.

Jacob Sullum gives a number of reasons why the Administration’s anti-opium campaign will backfire and is probably doomed to failure, such as:

2. “The terrain is a guerrilla’s dream. In addition to acres of shoulder-high poppy plants, rows and rows of hard-packed mud walls, used to stand up grape vines, offer ideal places for ambushes and defense.”
3. “The opium is tilled in heavily populated areas…The prospect of heavy fighting in populated areas could further alienate the Afghan population.”
. . .
5. Opium poppies are “by far the most lucrative crop an Afghan can farm.”
6. “The opium trade now makes up nearly 60 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, American officials say.”
7. “The country’s opium traffickers typically offer incentives that no Afghan government official can: they can guarantee a farmer a minimum price for the crop as well as taking it to market, despite the horrendous condition of most of Afghanistan’s roads.”

Some will argue that the U.S. supported drug-eradication programs in Colombia, despite its civil war, so why not in Afghanistan. But the two countries are vastly different. Colombia was and is a much more prosperous country, with income levels ten times greater, and life expectancies 30 years longer, than in Afghanistan, which is one of the world’s poorest (and most warlike) countries. There are viable alternatives to growing drugs in Colombia, unlike in arid, impoverished Afghanistan.

In a war, you can’t be too fastidious about local customs. In World War II, the U.S. fought the Japanese with the assistance of Naga headhunters. We didn’t give them lectures about their practice of collecting the heads of their enemies (not that I would suggest that growing drugs is as bad as killing people). In the Vietnam War, the U.S. allied itself with tribesmen in Laos and Vietnam who grew opium and other drugs. We didn’t try to destroy their drugs. That would have made them kill us rather than support us.

If you want to win a war in a country you are occupying, sometimes you have to try to win the hearts and minds of the local people, rather than telling them what to do.

For those who think that tolerating drug cultivation is somehow an extraordinary measure: is it remotely as extraordinary as using torture, as the Government did in the aftermath of 9/11 (producing false information and bogus orange alerts in the process)? Keep in mind that for most of American history, there were no bans on drug cultivation (the federal government did not regulate marijuana until the 1930s), but torture to obtain confessions has always been illegal in the U.S.

If we can do something like torture (which I opposed) to win the War on Terror, why not something far less extreme and less historically-unprecedented, like allowing Afghan farmers to keep cultivating opium poppies?

And for those of you bleeding-heart liberals who objected when the phone companies were given protection against lawsuits for assisting the federal government in its antiterror surveillance programs (something I supported; such surveillance would be perfectly legal in many countries, like Sweden): is it not far worse to make Afghan families starve by destroying their crops?

LibertyWeek 41: SCOTUS Scurry

by Richard Morrison on May 5, 2009

in CEI Projects, Podcast

Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist team up with special guest co-host Jeremy Lott to bring you Episode 41. We begin with a farewell to famed quarterback, Republican Congressman and former CEI Distinguished Fellow Jack Kemp. We then move on to China’s flu-related roundup of Mexican nationals, the race to replace Justice Souter and the new opportunity to SuperPoke the President of the United States. We round out the show with Andrew Cuomo’s allegations of scandal and a modest helping of Olympic News.