A new ordinance in San Luis Obispo, California makes it illegal to feed ducks. The solons of San Luis Obispo claim that feeding the animals increases pollution.
One wonders what political intrigues and backroom deal-making went into the duck feeding ban. It was not a stand-alone ordinance; it was tucked into a bill updating the city’s storm water management regulations.
Was the duck language tucked in to guarantee a wavering council member’s vote? If so, it was a lot cheaper than the “Lousiana Purchase” and “Cornhusker Kickback” that enabled the health care bill to pass.
Joking aside, one is still left wondering what would cause a politician to hold such a grudge against ducks. Of all the sources of pollution in San Luis Obispo, ducks would have to be pretty low on the list.
The U.S. tax code stands at well over 100,000 pages. All but the hardiest of souls hire professionals to do their taxes for them. Cries for simplification grow every year.
How does Congress respond? By introducing legislation to “amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to classify automatic fire sprinkler systems as 5-year property for purposes of depreciation.”
CEI Weekly is a compilation of articles and blog posts from CEI’s fellows and associates sent out via e-mail every Friday. Also included in the Weekly newsletter is a brief description of CEI’s weekly podcast and a feature on a major CEI breakthrough made during the week. To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters. CEI Weekly April 9, 2010 >>Chris Horner Publishes new Book on Green Policies CEI’s Chris Horner, author of Red Hot Lies, has just finished his new book Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America. The book will be available on Amazon on April 19th. Read more about the book at CEI. >>Iain Murray Pays Respect to Coal Miners CEI’s Iain Murray, in his op-ed in the Investor’s Business Daily, paid respects to the coal miners killed in West Virginia this weekend by writing about the experiences of coal mining towns that exist in the United States and the United Kingdom. Read his op-ed, God Bless the People of Coal Country, here. >>Shaping the Debate How can Obamacare be Truly Fixed Gregory Conko’s op-ed in the Washington Times The Deadly Price of the Auto Mileage Mandate William Yeatman’s op-ed in the AOL Times A Community Activist With No Regrets CEI cited in the Wall Street Journal The Other Individual Mandate John Berlau’s op-ed in the Daily Caller EPA’s Ginormous Power Grab Iain Murray’s op-ed in the Washington Times Canadian Defense Against Climategate Chris Horner’scitation in the American Spectator What Would Reagan do About Climate Change Myron Ebell’s quote in the Los Angeles Times >>Best of the Blogs Rent Seekers Keep it Phony by Angela Logomasini Why does industry sometimes (all to often) support government regulation? You would think they would prize their freedom. But think again. Many businesses are willing to use the government to get a competitive advantage, an activity economists call rent seeking. And, unfortunately, some will even work in tandem with unscrupulous activists to spread misinformation about a competitor’s product and then call for government bans.
How Wisely is Stimulus Money Being Spent by Ryan Young Not at all, to be honest. For starters, the very notion of stimulus violates basic economics. Taking money out of the economy and then putting it back in has no net effect. But it gets worse. Much worse.
When that money is put back into the economy, it goes to the weirdest places — $3.4 million is going to Florida to build a tunnel under U.S. Highway 27, so turtles can cross safely. The Story of Leftist Propaganda in Schools by Ivan Osorio At BigHollywood.com, Anne McIlhinney critiques the anti-industrial environmental propaganda film, The Story of Stuff. The film’s narrator, Annie Leonard, argues that modern civilization uses too many resources to produce too many things. The film is so idiotic (I’ve seen part of it) that it ordinarily wouldn’t merit a response–except for the fact that it’s being shown in schools around the United States. >>LibertyWeek Podcast Episode 87: Digital Due Process Richard Morrison, Jeremy Lott, Marc Scribner and Ryan Radia bring you episode 87. We take on politics in the land of Lincoln, the chances of a union pension fund bailout, the fallout from Climategate and the strange bedfellows of electronic privacy. >>Support CEI
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Not at all, to be honest. For starters, the very notion of stimulus violates basic economics. Taking money out of the economy and then putting it back in has no net effect. But it gets worse. Much worse.
When that money is put back into the economy, it goes to the weirdest places — $3.4 million is going to Florida to build a tunnel under U.S. Highway 27, so turtles can cross safely. A fish hatchery in South Dakota is getting $20,000 for new light fixtures. $50,000 is being spent to resurface a tennis court in Bozeman, Montana.
And so on.
These boondoggles aren’t getting nearly enough press. To help fill the vacuum, the good folks at Citizens Against Government Waste have put up a new website, MyWastedTaxDollars.org. Click on over and check it out. The best feature is an interactive map that shows just how unwisely stimulus funds are being spent all over the country.
Stimulus is worse than a zero-sum game. It is actively harmful. It is government saying that it knows how to spend your money better than you do; stimulus is the ultimate act of hubris. Kudos to CAGW and MyWastedTaxDollars.org for providing hundreds of examples of why government hubris should be replaced with government humility.
With Brazil poised to retaliate against the U.S. for its cotton subsidies that were deemed unfair by the World Trade Organization, the two countries announced on April 6 that they had reached an agreement to forestall Brazil’s announced actions to slap tariffs on about 100 U.S. products imported by Brazil, including several products relating to intellectual property. The tariffs and countermeasures were to go into effect today.
In making the announcement U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said that the agreement takes steps to recompense Brazil over the shorter-term while continuing discussions regarding how to eventually resolve the cotton dispute through further negotiation and the 2012 Farm Bill. Under the WTO’s finding in the cotton dispute brought by Brazil, that country was entitled to impose about $820 million in countermeasures.
The USTR press announcement detailed that the U.S. will establish a fund of approximately $147.3 million per year on a pro rata basis to provide Brazil with technical assistance and capacity building. The U.S. will also modify its Export Credit Guarantee Program, and make a risk-based determination whether fresh beef can be imported from Brazil while preventing the introduction of foot-and-mouth disease in the U.S.
One can only hope that the fix the U.S. found itself in as a result of giving in to cotton producers and other special interests in the 2008 Farm Bill will make policymakers realize that providing subsidies and hand-outs to special groups can be costly for other producers and consumers. But don’t bet on that. Farm bills are one of the worst examples of bi-partisan lawmaking, with politicians ever ready to provide pork for their farm constituents – with taxpayer money that they think of as their own.
International trade lawyer and free trade blogger-libertarian, Scott Lincicome, outlines the ups and downs of President Obama’s stance on trade in yesterday’s Daily Caller.
Lincicome applauds the administration’s early free trade stance in spring 2009, but his tone quickly changes as he reviews more recent events. He claims that “[t]he White House abandoned overt free trade actions and speeches in order to secure needed health care votes from anti-trade Democrats.” Lincicome hits the nail on the head. It is clear that over the past year, the Obama administration has prioritized insider politics over the creation of sound trade policy.
Lincicome argues that Congress and the president need to pass pending free trade agreements, resolve current trade disputes with Mexico and Brazil, and pass the three pending free trade agreements, instead of focusing narrowly on the export only initiative (aka National Export Initiative, or NEI) which is currently floating around Capitol Hill. According to Lincicome, the NEI is “a one-sided, non-controversial program which seeks to expand US exports through a timid combination of margin-tweaks that most economists believe will have little effect on US trade flows.”
As noted last week, an export-only approach like the NEI ultimately hurts the U.S. and global economy. Read more about NEI here.
Last week the Tax Foundation called attention to state initiatives to expand the lottery system. To cover lost revenues from the recession many states have turned to expanding state owned gambling and lottery services (while simultaneously cutting funding for organizations that treat gambling addicts).The most notable example was Pennsylvania, a state in which gambling had been illegal until recently, which is planning to offer wagers on the outcomes of federal, state, and local elections.
Contrast that with this article from the Financial Times covering a potential grand jury investigation into Full Tilt Poker. The Financial Times article erroneously labels online poker as illegal. This claim is highly dubious at best–and likely to be untrue, as noted here by CEI’s Michelle Minton.
Full Tilt is one of the larger Internet poker sites currently serving players in the United States. The structure of Full Tilt Poker is interesting–Chris Ferguson and Howard Lederer (two U.S. poker professionals well known to poker enthusiasts) own the Full Tilt software and license it out to a foreign company which manages and operates the service. The software itself is worth very little. The market share and popularity of these players is what attracts users to this site over others.
The Department of Justice is attempting to link Ferguson and Lederer to charges of money laundering. The charge is interesting–the company itself is obviously not laundering money though it isn’t impossible for the DoJ to provide evidence that individuals have used the service for money laundering purposes. The DoJ might be hoping that Full Tilt will settle out of court and remove itself from the U.S. market. As an aside, it is interesting to note that the Department of Justice has refrained from testing the legality of online gambling via the court system–a potential sign that even they believe courts would rule in favor of legality.
The disparity between state policy and the actions of DoJ officials is humorous, but unsurprising. States are so reliant on gambling revenue that they encourage its expansion even as the federal government seeks to limit it.
The next few months are crucial to the future of Internet gambling. The long awaited enforcement of the UIGEA is set to begin in June, while another bill to regulate Internet gambling (being touted for its ability to bring in revenue) was recently introduced to Congress.
I have an article today on both NRO and NPR about the environmental establishment’s continued war on science as it relates to the chemical BPA. An excerpt:
California provides a good example of how the environmentalists have waged their war. On July 15, 2009, the state’s Developmental and Reproductive Toxicant Identification Committee voted not to list BPA as a reproductive toxicant under the terms of California’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986 (Proposition 65). The very same day, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) submitted a 327-page petition to the California Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment to begin a different process by which BPA could be listed as a reproductive toxicant.
The NRDC petition is pathetically weak. It includes as evidence a 2008 National Toxicology Program (NTP) report that showed no harm to humans from BPA, but called for further study. That study is now under way at the federal level, with the National Institutes of Health spending $30 million on research over the next two years. Neither the petition or the NTP report provides any reason for California to ban the substance before the results of the study come in.
Other evidence favors keeping BPA on the market. A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report published in the scholarly journal Toxicological Sciences in October 2009 also showed no harm to humans from BPA.
The state — which is mired in budget crisis — is wasting public funds to indulge the whims of a single special-interest group. Yet it is not just taxpayer money that is at stake. NRDC is sending a message to businesses nationwide: If you use BPA — whether to make toys, eyeglasses, or medical equipment — don’t invest here. For no company will invest in a state — and thus create jobs and expand facilities in that state — if the state is threatening to stop manufacturing in the near future. NRDC’s whim is helping to prolong California’s recession.
I also point out the environmental groups’ double standards in attacking the substance that the EPA found safe while ignoring the one that the EPA found dangerous. Nanny can be very selective at times.
Jeffrey Miron comments on state officials’ claim that increasing the use of unpaid (or barely paid) interns might run afoul of minimum wage laws.
Your first reaction to this story might be, “Well that’s just ridiculous: how can it make sense to prevent employers and interns from engaging in a mutually beneficial interaction?”
It does not. But that is exactly what minimum wages laws are meant to do: prevent a willing employer and employee from engaging in mutually beneficial interaction at a wage below the legal minimum.
Indeed, it’s so wrongheaded, that the entrepreneurial libertarian video documentarian Jan Helfeld once decided to confront a famous intern employer and supporter of the minimum wage just on this topic. See video below.
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