January 2012

NASA’s Costly Risk Aversion

by Rand Simberg on September 7, 2011 · 5 comments

in Culture, Nanny State, Precaution & Risk, Space

Over at Pajamas Media this past weekend, I describe the current travails of the International Space Station in the wake of the dual Russian launch failures a couple weeks ago, and how it is an indication that (as always) actually accomplishing things in space for the billions that we spend on it is relatively unimportant.

As I note over there, we may be about to abandon, at least temporarily, a hundred-billion dollar facility (in cost to date at least, if not in value) because we don’t want to gamble the lives of astronauts, on which we seem to place such an inordinate value that they are too precious to risk on actual spaceflight:

We don’t really have to abandon the ISS — NASA has several options. The safest solution would be to simply load up a fresh crew module with payload, and deliver it to replace the one that is going stale, extending the stay of current crew. Or, while it wouldn’t be prudent, if they don’t discover what the problem was on time, we could hope that what happened last month was just an anomaly, and go ahead with the next Soyuz as planned. Or the astronauts could take the risk of a winter landing.

Or (and this would be the gutsiest, but highest payoff thing to do), we could throw together a rudimentary life-support system for the Dragon, put in some couches, and send crew up on it in December. After all, Elon Musk said last year after its maiden flight that if someone had been in it, they would have had a nice ride. In so doing, they would have eliminated the need for the Russians, and immediately have a lifeboat capable of carrying seven people with a designed orbital lifetime of a year, allowing them to immediately increase crew size and perhaps increase the productivity of the facility. And when the launch abort system is completed in a couple years, the safety would be improved, but its absence wouldn’t have prevented us from continuing to boldly open the frontier.

That NASA doesn’t seem to be considering any of these things, and is instead contemplating abandoning our only orbital outpost on which we’ve spent tens of billions over decades, even if only temporarily, speaks eloquently about our national perceptions of its importance, and trivializes it. It would say that unlike commercial fishing, coal mining, construction, and liberating peoples, opening up frontiers, even the harshest one, isn’t worth the risk of a human life. But I’ll bet that there are plenty of people in the astronaut office who’d be willing to take that risk, and in the unlikely event that there aren’t, there are plenty of people fully qualified who are. It’s what our ancestors would have done and how they created this great nation that once put men on the moon. What has happened to us?

This is just one more example of our apparent inability to make sensible economic trade-offs, whether in space policy, or in more literally mundane matters, such as environmental impact assessments that prevent the rapid implementation of infrastructure improvements for “shovel ready” jobs. But it’s also a symptom of our continuing to pretend that we understand why we are sending people into space at all with federal money. Until we have a grown-up national discussion about that, shed of nostalgia for Apollo and “national greatness,” not to mention the white-collar welfare aspects and myths about technology spin-off, the vast majority of taxpayer funds spent on this endeavor will be wasted.

Obama Infrastructure Stimulus: Union Payoff Filled with Rail Boondoggles and Pork

by Hans Bader on September 7, 2011

in Economy, Labor, Mobility, Regulation, Stimulus to Nowhere

Obama’s proposed infrastructure stimulus is a payoff to Big Labor, as economist Ronald Utt explains. It “represents tens of billions of dollars in high, federally mandated, Davis–Bacon wages for unionized construction workers.” Costly, wasteful rail boondoggles will consume much of the money: “more rail infrastructure spending will be a key component of Obama’s new spending proposal.”

We explained earlier why Obama’s proposal is ironic, belated, and unaffordable, and will do little if anything to stimulate the economy. Earlier, Marc Scribner pointed out that the Obama administration’s “high-speed” rail projects aren’t high-speed, and are monumentally wasteful and costly, in addition to the fact that they would duplicate existing modes of transportation, would leave local governments on the hook for huge operating costs, and would be used by only a tiny percentage of the population.

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Stimulating Language

by Ryan Young on September 6, 2011 · 2 comments

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Features, Stimulus to Nowhere

Post image for Stimulating Language

I’ve argued for a long time that stimulus bills are poorly named; it implies that they stimulate the economy. “Spending bill” is a non-loaded term that has the added advantage of being accurate. Both parties have passed spending bills over the years in the hopes of stimulating the economy. Intentions being different than results, Democrats are finally starting to agree with me on this misuse of language, as The Hill reports:

Democrats are now being careful to frame their job-creation agenda in language excluding references to any stimulus, even though their favored policies for ending the deepest recession since the Great Depression are largely the same.

The article continues:

Recognizing the unpopularity of the 2009 package, however, Democratic leaders have revised their message with less loaded language – “job creation” instead of “stimulus” and “Make it in America” in lieu of “Recovery Act” – in hopes of tackling the jobs crisis.

Spending bills work by taking some money out of the economy and then putting it back in, minus transaction costs and political malfeasance; one can see why they don’t have much effect. The thinking is that Congress can invest money more wisely than private investors. If Solyndra is any indicator, that isn’t true.

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Today’s Links: September 6, 2011

by Nicole Ciandella on September 6, 2011

in Odds & Ends

NEWS

ALCOHOL – Wine Tax Linked to Glut of Two Buck Chuck
“The Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation says that the way Australia taxes wine is feeding a glut and is rewarding poor quality production. The group says cheap cask wine is all too often associated with the most harmful aspects of alcohol abuse and it is calling on the Government to impose a volumetric tax similar to the one on beer.

TSA – Janet Napolitano: Shoes-on Flight in Sight
“Air travelers will eventually be able to keep their shoes on to pass through security, but the restrictions on carrying liquids on board are likely to remain in place for some time, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a POLITICO Playbook breakfast Tuesday.”

CLIMATE CHANGE – Gore’s Dire Weather Warning
“The stability of governance arrangements in many strategically important regions of the world is threatened by the multiple assaults of climate change, as budgets are drained, competition for resources is enhanced, and populations suffer.”

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Dear Labor, Don’t Fear the Robot

by Michelle Minton on September 6, 2011 · 3 comments

in Employment, Features, Labor, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation

Post image for Dear Labor, Don’t Fear the Robot

In California, a war is quietly being fought: workers versus technology. And the war has materialized in the form of a bill that seeks to ban the sale of alcohol by automated checkout machines at grocery stores. You may have seen them, those machines that allow customers to scan and bag their own items, which can speed up the process and keep lines smaller. Those machines also allow grocery store owners to reduce their costs by employing fewer workers. Herein lays the problem: workers fear that they are slowly being replaced by machines and that increased reliance on automatic check out machines threatens their jobs.

The legislation, AB 183, would ban the sale of alcohol at self-checkout aisles. The bill’s proponents drag out the old “save the children” argument, claiming that minors can easily purchase alcohol without the human oversight a traditional checkout process offers. Of course, the robots aren’t completely automated and require a worker to authorize any purchase that contains an age-restricted item such as alcohol. Additionally, the numbers of “sales to a minor” violations submitted by the state’s alcohol control board seem to indicate that most of these sales do not occur at grocery stores, but rather at liquor stores and in restaurants.

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Obama’s Ironic, Belated, and Unaffordable Infrastructure “Stimulus”

by Hans Bader on September 6, 2011 · 3 comments

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Stimulus to Nowhere

In a Labor Day speech to an AFL-CIO rally in Detroit, President Obama said that “roads and bridges nationwide need rebuilding and more than 1 million unemployed construction workers are itching to ‘get dirty’ making the repairs. He portrayed Congress as an obstacle to getting that work done.” But it’s Obama who was the obstacle to road and bridge repair. He blocked such repairs when the federal government still had the money for it, in order to pay for welfare and social spending instead. Now, the money just isn’t there, thanks to the Obama administration running up trillions in debt through record spending, resulting in a fiscal crisis and the downgrading of America’s credit rating.

A logical place to have financed road and bridge repairs would have been Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package. But the stimulus package was purged of most investments in roads and bridges, and filled instead with welfare and social spending, out of political correctness, after feminist leaders complained that building and repairing roads and bridges would put unemployed blue-collar men to work, rather than women.

Christina Hoff Sommers points out that “of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men,” because men “predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007.” But when some administration officials floated the concept of “an ambitious . . . stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams” as a way of “reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy,” “Women’s groups were appalled,” asking “Where are the New Jobs for Women?” and denouncing what they called “The Macho Stimulus Plan.”

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Fannie-Freddie’s Hypocritical Suit Against Banks Making Loans that GSEs Helped Create

by John Berlau on September 2, 2011 · 5 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy

“U.S. is set to sue dozen big banks over mortgages,” reads the front-page headline in today’s New York Times. The “deck” below the headline explains that that the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is “seen as arguing that lenders lacked due diligence” in the loans they made.

A more apt description would probably be that Fannie and Freddie are suing the banks for selling them the very loans the GSEs helped designed and that government mandates encourage — and are still encouraging them to make. These conflicted actions are just one more of the government’s contributions to the uncertainty that is helping to keep unemployment at 9 percent.

Strangely the author of the Times piece, Nelson Schwartz, ignores the findings of a recent blockbuster book by one of his colleagues that Fannie and Freddie took the lead in creating the shoddy loans. “Reckless Endangerment” by Pulitzer Prize-winning Times reporter and columnist Gretchen Morgenson and financial analyst Joshua Rosner write that the GSEs “led both the private and public sectors down a path that led directly to the financial crisis of 2008.”

In the Times, Morgenson has written that Fannie and Freddie were the “biggest and most steadfast collaborators” of the notorious Countrywide Financial. Fannie “assiduously … pursued Mr. Mozilo and 14 of his lieutenants to make sure the company continued to shovel loans its way,” according to Morgenson. In 2004, Countrywide “sold 26 percent of the loans Fannie bought,” she reported.

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Massive Justice Department Attack on Banks?

by Hans Bader on September 2, 2011 · 15 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Legal

A monumentally-destructive Justice Department attack on banks may soon occur. Earlier, I wrote about how the Obama Justice Department is now forcing banks to make risky loans (in the name of “fair lending”), thus planting the seeds of a future financial crisis. In response, I received an e-mail from a former Justice Department lawyer who told me that the Justice Department’s HCE (Housing and Civil Enforcement Section, Civil Rights Division) is planning to block foreclosures across America (“across the whole [banking] sector”), even for irresponsible deadbeats who deserve to be foreclosed upon, citing racial disparities in foreclosure rates (which generally exist between black and white borrowers due to causes unrelated to intentional discrimination — as the Supreme Court has observed, racial disparities often occur for reasons completely unrelated to racist decision-making, as it has noted in cases like Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., Watson v. Fort Worth Bank & Trust,  and United States v. Armstrong).

He wrote that “there is a unit in the HCE section headed by a nut running this. They are next going to BLOCK foreclosures based on this theory. It is part of an administration wide-strategy to stop foreclosures.  I’ve heard from people who have participated in the internal meetings.” He also asked that I not print his name yet, but allowed me to pass on the content of his e-mail.

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Regulation Roundup

by Ryan Young on September 2, 2011

in Regulation

Here are some regulatory bloopers I’ve uncovered recently:

  • Burping in church is illegal in Nevada unless it’s accidental.
  • In Arkansas, it is illegal to spend more than five minutes voting.
  • Los Angeles city regulations place a limit of one rooster per household.
  • If you buy a burger on a Sunday in Oklahoma, you are legally required to eat it in the restaurant. No takeout or drive-through allowed.
  • In Texas, “No person may possess, manufacture, transport, or sell an illicit beverage.” Licit beverages are allowed.
  • Reptile sellers in Illinois are required by law to advise customers to not “muzzle or kiss your pet reptile.”
  • The Texas House of Representatives once unanimously passed a resolution honoring the Boston Strangler. The resolution’s sponsor wanted to point out to his colleagues that they should read bills before voting on them.
  • In 2008, the city of Brighton, Michigan, made it illegal to be annoying.

Alcohol Regulation Roundup: September 2, 2011

by Michelle Minton on September 2, 2011 · 2 comments

in Features, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Regulation

Post image for Alcohol Regulation Roundup: September 2, 2011

I’m back from the West Coast with another (hoppier) edition of the Alcohol Regulation Roundup, a collection of stories about our nations constantly changing, sometimes angering, but always entertaining politics of booze.

Colorado: Once again Colorado beer lovers are pushing for “real beer” sales in grocery and convenience stores. Currently, the only “beer” that can be sold in grocery stores is 3.2 percent beer. Surprisingly, craft beer supporters are opposing the measure as they believe it will close “Mom and Pop” liquor shops leaving craft beer without any shelf space (they assume grocery stores will choose to stock only macro beer). I wrote about the folly of that logic in an article titled, “Small Brewers Big Mistake in Colorado.”

Maryland: State legislators are considering a change to Maryland’s liquor laws that would allow for “growler” sales in 2012. Growlers are re-usable jugs that customers bring into a brewpub or liquor store to have filled and then they can bring the contents home. In this case, licenses would be issued to restaurants with adjacent breweries.

New Jersey: A bill proposed in the legislature would revamp the rules governing brewpubs, which are restaurants that serve beer made on-premise. The bill would also rework laws regarding microbrewers, which produce beer primarily for off-premise sales, do not offer food, and have a smaller output than “macro” brewers whose products can be found throughout the country. The new law would raise the limits they would be allowed to produce and still be considered “small brewers.” For brewpubs the cap would be raised from 3,000 barrels a year to 10,000, and for microbreweries the limit would jump to 500,000 barrels where now they are limited to 300,000 barrels a year. The bill also allows microbreweries to open up to 10 salesrooms where customers would be able to buy directly from the brewer.

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