January 2012

Obama Justice Department’s Double Standard on Hate Crimes

by Hans Bader on September 14, 2011

in Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty

The Obama administration has a double standard on hate crimes. When the victim is black or Hispanic, they prosecute the alleged offender. When the victim is white, they don’t. This violates constitutional equal-protection guarantees, which forbid discrimination against whites, except for certain bona fide affirmative action programs in employment, education, or contracting.

As a former Justice Department civil-rights lawyer notes, the Criminal Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division does nothing when the victim of a hate crime is white:

when the victims of racial violence are white, nothing happens.

When a mob of blacks savagely attacked random whites at the Wisconsin State Fair earlier this summer, the Section did nothing. When a similar riot occurred at the Iowa State Fair in August 2010 — where bands of black teens organized a “beat whitey night” — the Section once again did nothing. Last month, still another flash mob of blacks beating whites took place in Philadelphia, yet the Section did nothing. The same is true near Pittsburgh and in Ohio.

Just like the outrageous dismissal of the New Black Panther Party case, there is a pervasive hostility in this administration to bringing cases on behalf of white victims.

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Today’s Links: September 14, 2011

by Nicole Ciandella on September 14, 2011

in Odds & Ends

OPINION

Shane Richmond: “Will Copyright Extensions Ever End?”
“It’s now more than a decade since the internet began killing the music industry. The situation is so much worse than the last thing to kill music – home taping – that the industry is enjoying considerable success in getting its business model protected by law.”

MacKubin Thomas Owens: “Obama’s EPA Not a Rogue Agency After All.”
“President Barack Obama recently enraged some of his supporters by issuing an executive order postponing a plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to tighten ozone standards, a step that by the EPA’s own reckoning would incur an annual compliance cost of anywhere from $19 billion to $90 billion and that private sector analysts estimate would result in the loss of 7.3 million U.S. jobs.”

Timothy B. Lee: “America’s Illegal Pioneers”
“Everyone knows that America was settled by immigrants. But few realize how much of this settlement was done illegally. Shortly after winning independence, Congress enacted legislation that called for newly acquired western lands to be divided into large 640-acre plots and sold for a dollar an acre.”

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“Strategic Misrepresentation”

by Rand Simberg on September 13, 2011 · 3 comments

in Economy, Stimulus to Nowhere

Over at National Review‘s The Corner, Mercatus’s Veronique de Rugy has a post on cost underestimates in infrastructure projects:

…here are some striking facts about government run public work projects. The most comprehensive study of cost overruns examines 20 nations spanning five continents. The authors find that:

  • In 9 out of 10 transportation infrastructure projects, costs are underestimated.
  • For rail projects, actual costs are on average 45%higher than estimated costs.
  • For fixed-link projects (tunnels and bridges), actual costs are on average 34% higher than estimated costs
  • For road projects, actual costs are on average 20%higher than estimated costs.
  • For all project types, actual costs are on average 28% higher than estimated costs
  • These same cost overruns exist in all public work projects

Remember the Capitol Hill Visitor Center? This ambitious three-floor underground facility, originally scheduled to open at the end of 2005, was delayed until 2008. The price tag leaped from an estimate of $265 million in 2000 to a final cost of $621 million.

How can we explain these cost overruns? The authors explain:

These cost underestimation cannot be explained by error and seems to be best explained by strategic misrepresentation, i.e., lying.

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Obama Wants More Spending on Failed Federal “Job Training” Programs that Teach Welfare Recipients and Young People Bad Habits

by Hans Bader on September 13, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Stimulus to Nowhere

In The Wall Street Journal, James Bovard, a former CEI Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow, takes aim at some of the billions in waste contained in President Obama’s recent “jobs” proposal, the “American Jobs Act,” which would fund proven government failures in the form of federal job “training.” Federal “job-training” programs, which Obama likes, are so dismally ineffective that they cause “significant earnings losses” for young people who participate in them, and result in participants ending up on food stamps at higher rates:

Last Thursday, President Obama proposed new federal jobs and job-training programs for youth and the long-term unemployed. The federal government has experimented with these programs for almost a half century. The record is one of failure and scandal.

In 1962, Congress passed the Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) . . . A decade after MDTA’s inception, GAO reported that it was failing to teach valuable job skills or place trainees in private jobs and was marred by an “overriding concern with filling available slots for a particular program,” regardless of what trainees actually needed.

Congress responded in 1973 by enacting the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). . . CETA spent vastly more money. .  .[such as] providing nude sculpture classes (where, as the Pharos-Tribune of Logansport, Ind., explained, “aspiring artists pawed each others bodies to recognize that they had ‘both male and female characteristics’”), and conducting door-to-door food-stamp recruiting campaigns.

Between 1961 and 1980, the feds spent tens of billions on federal job-training and employment programs. To what effect? A 1979 Washington Post investigation concluded, “Incredibly, the government has kept no meaningful statistics on the effectiveness of these programs—making the past 15 years’ effort almost worthless in terms of learning what works.” CETA hirees were often assigned to do whatever benefited the government agency or nonprofit that put them on the payroll, with no concern for the trainees’ development. An Urban Institute study of the mid-1980s concluded that participation in CETA programs resulted in “significant earnings losses for young men of all races and no significant effects for young women.”

After CETA became a laughingstock, Congress replaced it in 1982 with the Job Training Partnership Act. JTPA spent lavishly—to expand an Indiana circus museum, teach Washington taxi drivers to smile, provide foreign junkets for state and local politicians, and bankroll business relocations. . .  young trainees were twice as likely to rely on food stamps after JTPA involvement than before since the “training” often included instructions on applying for an array of government benefits.

For years the Labor Department scorned the mandate in the 1982 legislation to speedily and thoroughly evaluate whether the programs actually benefitted trainees. Finally, in 1993, it released a study that showed participation in JTPA “actually reduced the earnings of male out-of-school youths.” Young males enrolled in JTPA programs had 10% lower earnings than a control group that never participated. . .

In his speech to Congress, Mr. Obama called for funding hundreds of thousands of summer jobs for teens, which he labeled “investing in low-income youth and adults.” Yet such programs have been blighting work ethics for decades.

The GAO warned in 1969 that many teens in federal summer jobs programs “regressed in their conception of what should reasonably be required in return for wages paid.” A decade later, it reported that most urban teens “were exposed to a worksite where good work habits were not learned or reinforced.” And in 1985, a National Academy of Science study found that government jobs and training programs isolated disadvantaged youth, thus making it harder for them to fit into the real job market.

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Today’s Links: September 13, 2011

by Nicole Ciandella on September 13, 2011

in Odds & Ends

OPINION

Brad Allenby: “Debating Extreme Human Enhancement.”
“We’ve always had technologies that restructured society, culture, economies, and psychology—the steam engine did, railroads did, cars did, airplanes did, and search engines that increasingly substitute for memory do. But depending on how you count, we have five foundational technologies now—nanotech, biotech, robotics, information and communication tech, and applied cognitive science—all of which are not only evolving in interesting and unpredictable ways; they are actually accelerating in their evolution. Moreover, they’re doing that against the backdrop of a world in which systems we’ve always framed as “natural”—the climate, the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, biology and biodiversity, and others—are increasingly products of human intervention, intentional or not. We are terraforming everything, from our planet to one another … and it’s all connected, of course.”

James Bovard: “What Job Training Teaches? Bad Work Habits.”
“If federal job training efforts worked, Congress would not have thrown out the programs it has created every decade or so and enacted new ones. In reality, government training has always been driven by bureaucratic convenience, or politicians’ re-election considerations. There is no reason to believe the latest round of proposals will be any different.”

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The Lazy Non-Poor People Below the “Poverty” Line Who Get Welfare, and the Hard-Working Poor Above it Who Get Taxed

by Hans Bader on September 13, 2011 · 6 comments

in Legal, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

There are plenty of people below the poverty line who aren’t really poor, and some people above the poverty line who are indeed quite poor. The poverty line is a very arbitrary measure seemingly designed to justify lots of spending on welfare and social services for “disadvantaged” people who aren’t really poor, spending that generates jobs for government employees (and government-subsidized non-profits) who provide welfare and handouts.

Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation explains how many people below the poverty line aren’t really poor at all:

There is a wide chasm between the public’s concept of poverty and “poverty” as it is defined by the Census Bureau. The public generally thinks of poverty as . . . homelessness, or malnutrition and chronic hunger. In reality, the vast majority of those identified as poor by the annual census report did not experience significant material deprivation.

In a recent Rasmussen poll, adults agreed (by a ratio of six to one) that “a family that is adequately fed and living in a house or apartment that is in good repair” is not poor. By that simple test, about 80 percent of the Census Bureau’s “poor” people would not be considered poor by their fellow Americans.

In the same Rasmussen poll, however, 73 percent said poverty was a severe problem. Why the disconnect? The answer: Public perception of poverty in the U.S. is governed by the mainstream media, which invariably depicts the Census Bureau’s tens of millions of poor people as chronically hungry and malnourished, homeless or barely hanging on in overcrowded, dilapidated housing.

The strategy of the media is to take the least fortunate 3 percent or 4 percent of the poor and portray their condition as representative of most poor Americans. . .[But] they are far from typical among the poor. . . a poor child in American is far more likely to have a widescreen plasma television, cable or satellite TV, a computer and an Xbox or TiVo in his home than he is to be hungry. . .In 2009, the U.S. Department of Agriculture asked parents living in poverty this question: “In the last 12 months, were [your] children ever hungry but you just couldn’t afford more food?” Some 96 percent of poor parents responded “no”: Their children never had been hungry because of a lack of food resources at any time in the previous year. . . .

Here are more surprising facts about Americans defined as “poor” by the Census Bureau. . .

Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning. Fully 92 percent of poor households have a microwave; two-thirds have at least one DVD player and 70 percent have a VCR. Nearly 75 percent have a car or truck; 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks. . .Nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite television. Half have a personal computer; one in seven have two or more computers. More than half of poor families with children have a video game system such as Xbox or PlayStation. . . A third have a widescreen plasma or LCD TV. . .

At a single point in time, only one in 70 poor persons is homeless. The vast majority of the houses or apartments of the poor are in good repair; only 6 percent are over-crowded. The average poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Sweden, France, Germany or the United Kingdom. . .Forty-two percent of all poor households own their home; on average, it’s a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio. . . among the lowest-income fifth of households, inflation-adjusted consumer spending actually increased modestly during the recession.

Given these facts, how does the Census Bureau conclude that more than 40 million Americans are poor? They identify a family as poor the family’s cash income falls below specific thresholds. For example, in 2009 a family of four was “poor” if annual cash income fell below $21,954.

But in counting income, the Census Bureau ignores almost the entire welfare state. This year, government will spend over $900 billion on means-tested anti-poverty programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care and targeted social services to poor and near-poor Americans. . .This means-tested welfare spending comes to around $9,000 for each poor or low-income American — virtually none of which is counted by census officials for purposes of calculating poverty or inequality.

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California Wins as Amazon Deals

by Jacqueline Otto on September 13, 2011

in Tech & Telecom

Friday, I wrote for The Daily Caller about the negative impact a tax deal between Amazon.com and the state of California would have the debate over taxing online transactions. Unfortunately, it looks as though that dubious deal was indeed approved by the State Assembly in the closing hours before the legislature adjourned. Below I discuss some of the history of the debate, but you can read the article in its entirety here.

All eyes are on the California statehouse today. On the table is a deal between online retail juggernaut Amazon and California lawmakers to postpone a major tax increase until fall 2012. Unfortunately, the compromise would mark a turning point in the online sales tax wars and pave the way for higher taxes nationwide.

California lawmakers and online retailers have been battling for years. In June, the state enacted a law requiring out-of-state online retailers to collect sales taxes on Californians’ purchases. To avoid the tax collection requirement, Amazon severed ties with its California-based affiliates. The retailer has even been working aggressively behind the scenes on a state ballot initiative to block implementation of the law.

If the compromise goes through, however, Amazon will reportedly drop its ballot initiative in exchange for lawmakers postponing implementation of the sales tax law for twelve months.

This would mark a major shift for Amazon, who has led the opposition among online retailers to tax laws such as California’s. Earlier this year, Amazon published an open letter condemning the law as “unconstitutional and counterproductive,” arguing that retailers with no physical presence in California should not be forced to collect taxes on the state’s behalf. Amazon also argued that the tax would distort the retail market and unfairly punish suppliers worldwide.

H.R. 1909 Brings Competitive Regulation to Small Loan Market

by John Berlau on September 13, 2011

in Agenda for Congress, CEI Projects, Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Features

Post image for H.R. 1909 Brings Competitive Regulation to Small Loan Market

The Summer of 2011 will likely be remembered as a season that overregulation came to a boiling point — at all levels of the U.S. government.

At the federal level, businesses big and small were spending countless hours and resources dealing with the first mandates from from Dodd-Frank and Obamacare and planning for the next ones to be issued.

A visible moment of regulatory overkill was the armed raid on August 24 of the Gibson Guitar factory in Memphis, because of an alleged technical violation in importing non-endangered Indian wood. As September opened, the Obama administration relented on a costly new rule further restricting emissions of ground-level ozone — just four years after a previous limit had been issued — but promised the regulation would be back in 2013.

The laboratories of democracy at the state and local level didn’t fare much better in their treatment of entrepreneurs, especially of those who are literally the smallest business people. All over the country, overzealous authorities shut down children who had the temerity to practice the time-honored tradition of setting up a lemonade stand.

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AMA Calls for Trade Agreements to Exclude Alcohol and Tobacco

by Fran Smith on September 13, 2011

in International, Trade

The American Medical Association is calling for alcohol and tobacco to be excluded in all new U.S. trade agreements. New Zealand’s NZWeek, at the start of the next round of negotiations in Chicago on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, reported that the AMA’s executive vice president wrote to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk saying that TPP and all other trade agreements should exclude those products in the interests of public health.

The AMA’s James L. Madara said in the letter:

“Removing trade barriers may be a desirable objective when the products being traded are beneficial, but tobacco is not a beneficial product. Cigarettes are the only legally available consumer product that kills through its intended normal use.”

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is a regional trade agreement currently being negotiated among the United States and eight other negotiating partners:  Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. They hope to agree on the outlines of an agreement to coincide with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ meeting in Honolulu in November.

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Today’s Links: September 12, 2011

by Nicole Ciandella on September 12, 2011

in Odds & Ends

OPINION

The New Hampshire Union Leader Editorial Board: “Stimulus Jr.: Obama Tries Again.”
“When considering President Obama’s Thursday night jobs speech, forget for a moment that, according to an Associated Press fact check, his plan is not paid for, will increase federal deficits, and will fund some jobs years from now, rather than immediately. All of those things should have been expected anyway. Instead, ask yourself exactly how this plan would work.”

Len Burman: “Why the Tax Code is a Mess, Graphically.”
“It would be nice to think that our legislators are working hard trying to find ways to make our tax code simpler, fairer, and more conducive to economic growth. (One member, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, has worked tirelessly to try to advance the cause of tax reform, but he has few allies in this quest.)  Maybe some are even pondering how to raise enough revenue to pay for the government. But I doubt that’s the prime driver.  The tax code has now become the tool of choice to give away goodies.”

Mary O’Grady: “Canada’s Oil Sands Are a Job Gusher.”
” Canada has recovered all the jobs it lost in the 2009 recession, and Alberta’s oil sands are no small part of that. The province is on track to become the world’s second-largest oil producer, after Saudi Arabia, within 10 years. Meanwhile Mr. Obama clings to his subsidies for solar panels and his religious faith in green jobs. ”

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