A CEO recently told Congress about how he was fined for hiring too many people: “I incurred more than $500,000 in legal bills to mitigate a more severe regulatory outcome as a result of hiring too many workers. I have also been prohibited from opening up additional offices. I had a major expansion plan that would have resulted in my creating hundreds of additional jobs. Regulations have forced me to put those jobs on hold.” The testimony from the CEO of Euro Pacific Capital illustrates that “job-killing” regulations are a reality, not just a conservative talking point.
Discussing the job-killing nature of some regulations is a big no-no to liberals, who claim that merely raising the issue is uncivil. The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank wrote a long, sanctimonious editorial devoted almost entirely to the alleged incivility of referring to Obamacare as “job-killing,” which he regarded as rhetorical “poison.” While liberal newspapers were largely silent about death threats made against Republican lawmakers in Florida and in Wisconsin, they feigned indignation about factual references to the health care law as being “job-killing” (a claim based partly on Congressional Budget Office findings that Obamacare would reduce the size of the American labor force by perhaps 800,000 people).
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I forget who I’m paraphrasing here, but the two iron laws of modernity are 1) things are getting better, and 2) people think they’re getting worse. The short video at the bottom of this post is one way to prove the first law to victims of the second law. It’s a rough cut adapted from a recent talk Don Boudreaux gave; I eagerly await the full version.
When I took macroeconomics in graduate school, the professor circulated a Sears catalog from 1900 or so around the classroom. Most of the prices were given in cents, not dollars. Now imagine that you could buy anything you wanted from that catalog today at those low prices. They’re still too expensive. Take these vacuum cleaners pictured below:
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President Obama has implied that his critics don’t understand math, which is odd given his inability to balance a budget (he’s run up the biggest budget deficits in history, after falsely promising a “net spending cut“). But it all depends on how you look at it. As one commenter puts it, “Obama is great at math. He divides the country, subtracts jobs, adds debt and multiplies misery.”
Economically, though, the president’s class warfare doesn’t add up. Even plundering the rich of all their income wouldn’t be enough to plug Obama’s skyrocketing deficits. As David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner notes, “In 2009, the earners Obama is targeting had only $1.5 trillion in income after paying their federal income taxes and before paying taxes to states and municipalities. Were Obama to seize every dime of that money, it would just barely cover the $1.3 trillion deficit he just ran in the fiscal year that ends next week.”
This is not the only kind of class warfare Obama engages in. He also forces middle-class taxpayers to foot the bill for corporate welfare for politically-connected cronies like the owners of Solyndra. Solyndra is the bankrupt solar manufacturer that recently went under, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, after it received preferential treatment in the form of $535 million in federal loan guarantees under the stimulus package.
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Jonah Goldberg praises Ron Paul’s stance on health care, and takes to task the status-quo bias of even many Republicans, recalling the thought experiment by Murray Rothbard:
“So identified has the State become in the public mind with the provision of these services,” Rothbard laments, “that an attack on State financing appears to many people as an attack on the service itself.” The libertarian who wants to get the government out of a certain business is “treated in the same way as he would be if the government had, for various reasons, been supplying shoes as a tax-financed monopoly from time immemorial.”
If everyone had always gotten their shoes from the government, writes Rothbard, the proponent of shoe privatization would be greeted as a kind of lunatic. “How could you?” defenders of the status quo would squeal. “You are opposed to the public, and to poor people, wearing shoes! And who would supply shoes . . . if the government got out of the business? Tell us that! Be constructive! It’s easy to be negative and smart-alecky about government; but tell us who would supply shoes? Which people? How many shoe stores would be available in each city and town? . . . What material would they use? . . . Suppose a poor person didn’t have the money to buy a pair?”
Such a bias toward the status quo similarly infects our thinking and debate on space policy. The highest achievement in the minds of many was landing a man on the moon, and such a feat is viewed as the epitome of a human spaceflight program, and the only model to follow. Ignoring the issue of the pork, such thinking resulted in the Constellation plan (“Apollo on Steroids”) and now it’s giving us the disastrous Senate Launch System (as I discussed over at Pajamas Media yesterday). It’s what I have called the Apollo Cargo Cult — in too many minds, if we don’t have a really big rocket developed and operated by NASA, we don’t have a Real Space Program.
The problem is that, while (fortunately) the government hasn’t always supplied shoes, in the minds of too many, it has always supplied human spaceflight, and when you propose to do it in any other way, no matter how much more cost effective, the same cries arise: “Are you crazy?! Why do you hate space exploration?! Spaceflight is hard! Only NASA knows how to put people into space! Who is going to do it if not NASA? These people are just hobbyists in garages! What if all of the commercial companies fail and go out of business?! (Yes, people really ask that.) What if they can’t hit their cost targets? What material will they use? What if we can’t store propellant in orbit?”
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After two failed attempts at fiscal “stimulus” since the start of the recession (Bush in 2008 and Obama in 2009), the president wants to try more of the same with his $447 billion “jobs” bill. Is the third time the charm? I think not. And that’s before even counting the job-killing tax increases he proposed to pay for it.
President Obama’s persistence in pursuing Keynesian policy rests on the false assumption that government spending is not only as efficient as private spending, but also results in outcomes that are just as sustainable. One needs look no further than the recent bankruptcy of the stimulus’s green energy poster-child, Solyndra, to see just how absurd that assumption is. Yet, Obama and his ilk seem hell-bent on spending more money they don’t have — well, that is unless they can squeeze it out of America’s most successful and industrious through tax hikes.
At its core, the notion that government spending can foster economic growth falls prey to Frederic Bastiat’s principle of “seen and unseen,” in which he explains that advocates of arbitrary spending (I dare anyone to call by any other moniker the $64 million project packed into the ’08 stimulus to connect 136 rural Montana residents to broadband Internet) fail to take into account how those same dollars could have been used more productively. In doing so, they focus only on the seen (cosmetic short-term jobs being immediately created) and fail to realize what could have resulted had they not intervened.
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Planking is an odd, odd trend. Plankers are people who pose for pictures by lying face down on the ground in unusual places, stiff as a plank of wood; hence the name. It isn’t clear how the fad started, but a quick Google image search for “planking” will give results of people planking everywhere from a swimming pool to a camel’s back to the spare tire on the back of an SUV.
Winston Castelo, a legislator in the Philippines, has had enough. That’s why he introduced the Anti-Planking Act of 2011. There is a transportation labor dispute happening in Manila right now, and there have been some strikes. Some groups of protesters have taken to planking in the middle of the street, tying up traffic. Hence the anti-planking bill.
The protesters shouldn’t be doing that, obviously. Not only is it rude, it’s probably illegal. Offenses like jaywalking and disturbing the peace are already on the books.
People all over the world have been poking fun at Congressman Castelo’s odd sense of priorities. Good for them, I say. Threats to freedoms even as trivial as planking should not be taken lying down.
OPINION
Jacob Sullum: “The Broken Planet Fallacy”
“When Solyndra went belly up last month, less than a year after it started making solar arrays in Fremont, California, an Energy Department spokesman insisted that the $535 million the federal government had loaned the company was well spent. [...] That rather short-sighted definition of success exemplifies the loopy logic of President Obama’s “green jobs” agenda, which justifies subsidies based on good intentions and employment opportunities rather than profitability or cost-effectiveness.”
Daniel Indiviglio: “Are Jobs Really Being Held Back by Deficit Uncertainty?
“The behavior of consumers and businesses would be virtually unchanged if, tomorrow, Congress provided a clear, complete explanation of how the U.S. would remain fiscally sound over the next 50 years. This isn’t an obstacle holding back a recovery. You might see a slight uptick in confidence if such a plan were released and agreed upon, but it’s just as likely that confidence could decline: the reality might be worse than the uncertainty. ”
Jonah Goldberg: “Tyranny of the Typical: Just Because the Government Has ‘Always Done’ Something, Doesn’t Mean it Should”
“If everyone had always gotten their shoes from the government, writes Rothbard, the proponent of shoe privatization would be greeted as a kind of lunatic. ‘How could you?’ defenders of the status quo would squeal. ‘You are opposed to the public, and to poor people, wearing shoes! And who would supply shoes . . . if the government got out of the business? Tell us that! Be constructive! It’s easy to be negative and smart-alecky about government; but tell us who would supply shoes?’”
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The Associated Press fact checkers say that President Obama misstated the facts when he erroneously claimed that middle-class people pay higher tax rates than millionaires and billionaires, and that Obama was misleading when he suggested that millionaires are taxed at lower rates than their secretaries.
As the AP notes, “On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government. The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than half of all federal taxes. They pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office.” By contrast, “46 percent of households, mostly low- and medium-income households, will pay no federal income taxes this year.”
Obama’s misleading class-warfare rhetoric seems to be designed to divert attention from his failure to come up with any meaningful plan to trim skyrocketing deficits or wasteful government spending.
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Now that reauthorization of Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) is all but a done deal — a quid pro quo from Republican leadership to President Obama and his union allies to get him to submit three pending trade agreements — it’s useful to look at who the recipients were over the past year to get an idea about how the new monies, to the tune of $1.17 billion per year, will be spent. Remember that TAA provides unemployment payments, retraining, relocation expenses, and other payments to workers who ostensibly lost their jobs because of foreign competition.
First the workers’ group has to be certified by the U.S. Department of Labor that they meet three criteria for eligibility to apply for TAA assistance. DOL has a searchable website with their determinations, and the following random examples are taken from their listings from January 1, 2010, through December 30, 2010.
Here’s one example of a certification for payment eligibility by the U.S. Department of Labor to workers at All American Sports Group Corporation. These workers refurbished football helmets and claimed that they were harmed by the company shifting “the supply of like or directly competitive services to a foreign country.”
Not only were all regular workers certified but also temporary workers from Manpower Staffing Services and Kelly Services. Plus, if one reads closely, even workers “threatened with total or partial separation from employment” are eligible to apply for assistance. And that’s not an uncommon example. Take Solo Cup Operating Corporation, which makes single service cups. Pretty much the same determination was made that regular and leased workers were eligible for TAA. It must be a failing on my part — I thought that temporary workers were, well, temporary.
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Some municipalities have now imposed taxes or restrictions on plastic shopping bags, even though banning or taxing plastic bags has little effect on litter, and does not improve the environment. Plastic bags are less than one percent of all litter. Moreover, alternatives like cloth and paper bags are in many cases worse for the environment than plastic bags, and far worse for public health.
That is confirmed by a recent legal settlement between plastic bag makers like Hilex Poly, and an importer of reusable bags, ChicoBag. The plastic bag makers sued California-based ChicoBag for its use of false claims about the recycling rate and environmental impacts of plastic grocery bags in its promotional materials, misinformation that was used as the basis for municipal bans and taxes on plastic bags. Under the recent settlement, ChicoBag is now required to discontinue its use of its counterfeit EPA website, and make corrections to its deceptive marketing claims, which had included sharing falsified government documents with schoolchildren.
It also is required to disclose to consumers on its website that reusable bags in fact need to be washed. Reusable bags “are a breeding ground for bacteria and pose public health risks—food poisoning, skin infections such as bacterial boils, allergic reactions, triggering of asthma attacks, and ear infections,“ noted a 2009 report. Harmful bacteria like E. coli, salmonella, and fecal coliform thrive in reusable bags, unless they are washed after each use, according to an August 2011 peer-reviewed study, “Assessment of the Potential for Cross-contamination of Food Products by Reusable Shopping Bags.”
Among the inaccurate claims that ChicoBag can no longer make is one that contrasted the environmental impact of plastic versus reusable bags. Contrary to ChicoBag’s previous claims, a study done for the U.K. Environmental Agency shows it would take 7.5 years of using the same cloth bag (393 uses, assuming one grocery trip per week) to make it a better option than a plastic bag reused three times. See “Life Cycle Assessment of Supermarket Carrier Bags,” Executive Summary, 2nd page.
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