Quotulatiousness

April 25, 2012

Why fly?

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Amy Alkon on yet another blatant attempt by the TSA to lord it over passengers, especially the young, weak, and vulnerable:

Chris Morran on Consumerist excerpts a Facebook post from a Montana mom, Michelle Brademeyer, who was flying home from Kansas with her two young children and their grandmother. Grandma apparently triggered some alarm at the checkpoint, and was forced to have a seat and wait to be groped by an agent. That’s when the 4-year-old ran over to give Granny a hug. Sweet — until the TSA went all police state on them. The mother writes:

[. . .]

First, a TSO began yelling at my child, and demanded she too must sit down and await a full body pat-down. I was prevented from coming any closer, explaining the situation to her, or consoling her in any way. My daughter, who was dressed in tight leggings, a short sleeve shirt and mary jane shoes, had no pockets, no jacket and nothing in her hands. The TSO refused to let my daughter pass through the scanners once more, to see if she too would set off the alarm. It was implied, several times, that my Mother, in their brief two-second embrace, had passed a handgun to my daughter.

My child, who was obviously terrified, had no idea what was going on, and the TSOs involved still made no attempt to explain it to her. When they spoke to her, it was devoid of any sort of compassion, kindness or respect. They told her she had to come to them, alone, and spread her arms and legs. She screamed, “No! I don’t want to!” then did what any frightened young child might, she ran the opposite direction.

That is when a TSO told me they would shut down the entire airport, cancel all flights, if my daughter was not restrained. It was then they declared my daughter a “high-security-threat”.

[. . .]

The TSO loomed over my daughter, with an angry grimace on her face, and ordered her to stop crying. When my scared child could not do so, two TSOs called for backup saying “The suspect is not cooperating.” The suspect, of course, being a frightened child. They treated my daughter no better than if she had been a terrorist…

A third TSO arrived to the scene, and showed no more respect than the first two had given. All three were barking orders at my daughter, telling her to stand still and cease crying. When she did not stop crying on command, they demanded we leave the airport. They claimed they could not safely check my daughter for dangerous items if she was in tears. I will admit, I lost my temper.

Finally, a manager intervened. He determined that my child could, in fact, be cleared through security while crying. I was permitted to hold her while the TSO checked her body. When they found nothing hidden on my daughter, they were forced to let us go, but not until after they had examined my ID and boarding passes for a lengthy amount of time. When we arrived at our gate, I noticed that the TSOs had followed us through the airport. I was told something was wrong with my boarding pass and I would have to show it to them again. Upon seeing the TSO, my daughter was thrown into hysterics. Eventually, we were able to board our flight.

Terrorize ’em young and they stay terrorized, pliable, and afraid to confront authority. It won’t be long before the TSA is Tasing ’em before they can run away (if they don’t already have that power).

April 24, 2012

The Hunger Games as a fictionalized version of the UN’s “Agenda 21”

Filed under: Books, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:25

In a letter published in the most recent issue of Libertarian Enterprise, David Walker points out the quite notable similarities between the fictional world portrayed in The Hunger Games and the United Nations’ Agenda 21:

The Hunger Games “universe” is the inevitable result at the attempt to implement Agenda 21.

  • Herding the population into tightly controlled resource production “districts”.
    While there are no “arcologies/super cities” as forwarded by Agenda 21, I don’t think such things could possibly be created by such a system anyway. The Agenda 21 structure is simply too anti-technological and too government heavy. The “Hunger Games” police state “Districts” is a much more believable result of enforced population reduction & control.
  • In the “country” of “Panem” no one is allowed out into “the wild”. Agenda 21 demands “rewilding” of all space outside of habitation districts. In the Hunger Games, crossing the electrified fence can get you shot. Killing wild game (poaching the government’s animals) will get you shot. Pristine Earth policed with heavy weapons. Sound familiar?
  • Travel is largely by High Speed Rail, and solely by High Speed Rail between Districts. Cars/trucks are only mentioned in the Capitol. The more poor the district, the more likely you are to be forced to walk everywhere. Only the Military has anything resembling air travel and even that is curtailed (one character dreams/reminisces about winged flight vs. hovercraft).
  • The utter disdain for Carbon Based Fuels.
    The Heroine from Hunger Games comes from the Coal Producing District (District 12). As described, there simply could not be enough coal produced by that district to have coal be a viable energy source, therefore the coal must be being used for other non-energy-related tasks. Likewise, “District 12” is the pariah of the Districts. Nobody loves Coal, and nobody loves the people who produce it. “Power” is produced by a nameless “District 5” by nameless means, though Nuclear is suggested on the website.
  • There is no Religion in the Hunger Games world.
    Agenda 21 specifically declares non-pantheistic/non-“natural” religions (particularly Judaism, Islam & Christianity) as something that must be eliminated. “Nature worship” is apparently OK.
  • The Government is Hollywood/Hollywood is Government.
    Hollyweirdoes love Agenda 21. The 3 books of the series are not kind to Hollywood and the kind of government the majority of those weirdoes would create. It presents “The Capitol” as a cross between San-Francisco Body Modification, Hollywood & Rome where nonproductive decadence, self importance, absurd vanity and utter banality are the rule. Any wonder the Movie(s) (will) suppress this aspect of the books?

Other Themes, late in the series: Revolutions aren’t always led by noble causes.

Corruption in Afghanistan reaches new heights

Filed under: Asia, Government, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:33

From Strategy Page:

A major obstacle to improving security in Iraq and Afghanistan was not equipment, training or leadership, but corruption. No matter how well led, trained and equipped the troops were, if they could be bought they were worse than useless. But the corruption went beyond the troops themselves. Government officials had to be carefully monitored to prevent the money for equipment, training and pay from being stolen before it got to the troops. More fundamentally, corruption was the reason Iraq, Afghanistan and so many other nations are poor and full of unhappy, and often violent, people. Corruption is why these places are chaotic and so often in the news. Corruption is the major cause of Islamic terrorism. Corruption does not get the recognition it deserves.

But in Afghanistan corruption has recently risen to new heights; literally. Several recent attacks in Kabul have made use of unfinished high-rise buildings, where terrorists used the height advantage to do more damage. American advisors noted that there were a lot of unfinished tall buildings in Kabul, and many had apparently been abandoned. The Americans asked the local government who owned these high-rise structures and was told that the government didn’t know. Kabul has undergone a construction boom in the last decade, and many of the builders (or their backers) didn’t bother with getting construction permits. If the cops or officials came around asking questions they were offered a bribe, or a death threat, or both. Inquisitive journalists were handled the same way.

April 23, 2012

French presidential voting: on to the second round

Filed under: Europe, France, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

For the first time, a sitting French president did not win the plurality of votes in the first round:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is wooing far-right voters after losing narrowly to his Socialist rival in the presidential election’s first round.

Francois Hollande came top with 28.6% and Mr Sarkozy got 27.1% — the first time a sitting president has lost in the first round.

Third-place Marine Le Pen took the largest share of the vote her far-right National Front has ever won, with 18%.

Referring to her voters, Mr Sarkozy said: “I have heard you.”

“There was this crisis vote that doubled from one election to another — an answer must be given to this crisis vote,” he said.

Pollsters say Mr Hollande is the clear favourite to win the second round on 6 May, a duel between him and Mr Sarkozy, who leads the centre-right UMP.

If Mr Hollande wins he will become the first Socialist president in France in 17 years

[. . .]

Nearly a fifth of voters backed a party — the National Front — that wants to ditch the euro and return to the franc.

Reacting to the Front’s success on Monday both the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that populist politics was a threat to Europe.

Mrs Merkel said the Front’s “alarming” rise would probably be “ironed out” in the second round. She said she would continue to support Mr Sarkozy.

More from the Bahrain protests

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:25

Marc Lynch on what he terms as Bahrain’s “Epic Fail”:

This week’s Formula One-driven media scrutiny has ripped away Bahrain’s carefully constructed external facade. It has exposed the failure of Bahrain’s regime to take advantage of the breathing space it bought through last year’s crackdown or the lifeline thrown to it by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry. That failure to engage in serious reform will likely further radicalize its opponents and undermine hopes for its future political stability.

Bahrain’s fierce, stifling repression of a peaceful reform movement in mid-March 2011 represented an important watershed in the regional Arab uprising. Huge numbers of Bahrainis had joined in street protests in the preceding month, defining themselves as part of the broader Arab uprising and demanding constitutional reforms and political freedoms. Bahrain’s protest movement began as a reformist and not revolutionary one, and the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry found no evidence that the protests were inspired or supported by Iran.

[. . .]

A ferocious battle over how to understand the events in Bahrain has unfolded in the months since the crackdown, as anyone who has attempted to report on or discuss it can attest. Supporters of the regime have argued that they did what they must against a dangerously radical, sectarian Shi’a movement backed by Iran, and fiercely contest reports of regime abuses. The opposition certainly made mistakes of its own, both during the protests leading up to the crackdown and after. But fortunately the facts of Bahrain’s protest movement and the subsequent crackdown have been thoroughly documented by Bahrain’s Independent Commission of Inquiry.

The BICI report established authoritatively that the Bahraini regime committed massive violations of human rights during its attempts to crush the protest movement. Hundreds of detainees reported systematic mistreatment and torture, including extremely tight handcuffing, forced standing, severe beatings, electric shocks, burning with cigarettes, beating of the soles of the feet, verbal abuse, sleep deprivation, threats of rape, sexual abuse including the insertion of items into the anus and grabbing of genitals, hanging, exposure to extreme temperatures, forced nudity and humiliation through acts such as being forced to lick boots of guards, abuse with dogs, mock executions, and being forced to eat feces (BICI report, pp.287-89). Detainees were often held for weeks or months without access to the outside world or to lawyers. This, concluded the BICI, represented “a systematic practice of physical and psychological mistreatment, which in many cases amounted to torture, with respect to a large number of detainees in their custody” (Para 1238, p.298). And then there was the demolition of Shi’a mosques, widespread dismissals from public and private sector jobs and from universities, sectarian agitation in the media, and so much more. No political mistakes made by the opposition could possibly justify these acts.

April 21, 2012

The French presidential election candidates

Filed under: Europe, France, Government, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:49

Conrad Black provides a thumbnail sketch of the first round of the French presidential election:

There are five principal candidates, arrayed very symmetrically, from right to left: The reactionary anti-Europe and anti-immigration National Front’s Marine Le Pen, espousing petit bourgeois know-nothingism, though less rancorously than her father, the party’s founder, did. Next on the ideological compass is the centre-right Gaullist Sarkozy, who believes in the omnipotent French state of Richelieu, Colbert and Napoleon. He has lengthened the work week and boosted the retirement age. He has also raised taxes, and now wants to impose a heavy exit tax, as the wealthy French are again fleeing the country, as they often have before. The French call Sarkozy “the water-bug” and “President Bling-bling” because of his frenetic behaviour and garish tastes.

Then there is the radical centrist Francois Bayrou, who doesn’t really have a party, and departs his farm every five years to take 10%-12% of the presidential vote for a median platform of moderate tax increases and spending reductions.

Moving to the left, there is M. Hollande, who casually repeats: “I don’t like the rich,” and wants to raise their taxes to 90%.

The piece de resistance in every respect is Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the Leftist Bloc, a coalition of Trotskyites, orthodox Communists, dissident socialists, militant environmentalists, vegetarians, nudists and anarchists. Melenchon wants a 100% tax on incomes above 360,000 euros a year, a 20% increase in the minimum wage, and the inability of any profitable company to lay off anyone.

April 20, 2012

Confused about the F-35 program? Scott Feschuk will help you

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Humour, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:51

No, really:

What exactly is an F-35?

It’s a new fighter jet being manufactured by Lockheed Martin. Its full name is the Joint Strike Fighter F-35 Lightning II. We probably shouldn’t be at all concerned that this sounds like something a little boy would name his tricycle.

What’s this got to do with Canada?

All the cool countries are getting F-35s, so we’re buying some too. In fact, our Department of National Defence wanted this hip new toy so badly that it structured the procurement process to ensure no other jet could win. In 2010, the Conservative government dutifully announced plans to purchase 65 F-35 fighters, at a cost of $9 billion. On one hand, that sounds like a lot of money, but on the other hand, why do you hate our troops, first hand?

[. . .]

Doesn’t $9 billion seem like a reasonable price for basically a whole new air force?

Did the government say $9 billion? It meant $15 billion, by which it actually meant $25 billion.

Wait — why have the numbers changed?

That meddling Auditor General of ours happened to notice that National Defence low-balled the total cost of the F-35 program by the teeny-tiny amount of ten thousand million dollars.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay said this was “a matter of accounting.” What he meant was that he and his cabinet colleagues were “a-counting” on Canadians not catching on to the fact they were concealing some $10,000,000,000 in costs.

That’s a lot of zeroes.

I’ll thank you not to refer to members of the federal cabinet that way.

The stadium issue for the Minnesota Vikings

Filed under: Economics, Football, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

It’s been a big issue in Minnesota for the entire off-season, but I haven’t been following too closely (not living in the state, I don’t know anything about the issue other than what the StarTribune and the Pioneer Press have been reporting, leavened with some angst and bile from the various Viking fan blogs).

In a nutshell, the Vikings have been playing at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis for 30 years. Their lease on the building expired at the end of the 2011 season and they’ve been trying to get political support for a new stadium for the last ten years. The stadium debate has gone over the same ground repeatedly, but even when the site is agreed upon and the team and the city appear to be happy with the compromise, it still required the state to provide additional funding … lots of additional funding.

That’s where what appeared to be a done deal went off the rails earlier this week. The state legislature voted down the state’s share of the funding for the stadium, which appears to have been a rude surprise to both Minneapolis and the team.

The NFL is now warning Minnesota that the Vikings could move out of state (Los Angeles has been hoping for a team for years now, although given California’s dire financial straits, it’s hard to imagine them putting up any more money than Minnesota might be willing to offer).

As I wrote back in November,

The Vikings are hoping to get a new stadium built, and the state legislature has been doing what they can to kick the issue down the road every time it’s come up. I don’t have a say in the matter, as I’m not located in Minnesota and I’d probably still cheer for the team even if it moved elsewhere (though it would be a sad thing to see it move after half a century in Minnesota).

In general, I don’t think governments should build stadiums for professional sports teams, as it’s using tax money to subsidize private profits. If a new stadium is going to generate a profit, the team’s ownership should bear the costs themselves. The fact that they generally don’t — mostly because politicians don’t want to deal with angry sports fans after the team leaves town — doesn’t make it right.

It is quite noteworthy that the question has never actually been asked of the voters — the folks whose taxes will have to subsidize the team’s new stadium — if they are willing to pay. I have to assume that this is because they have indicated in other ways that they are not willing. If that’s the case (and I can’t blame them in the slightest if that’s true), then the Vikings should either pony up enough money to build a stadium without taxpayer assistance, or go looking for a city or a state foolish enough to pour more money into the pockets of the team’s ownership. Here once again are Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch on why public funding for professional sports facilities are a bad idea:

Zoning: what it is and why it fails

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:05

Jonathan Rothwell in The New Republic on the palpable failure of zoning:

While most political economists think of institutions operating at the national or even state level, there is one essential but overlooked institution operating at and within the metro scale: zoning.

In a new report I argue that its impacts are destructive. Zoning laws are keeping poor children out of high-scoring schools, degrading education, and weakening economic opportunity.

Anti-density zoning — embodied in lot-size and density regulations — is an extractive institution par excellence. Through the political power of affluent homeowners and their zoning boards, it restricts private property rights — the civic privilege to freely buy, sell, or develop property — for narrow non-public gains. Property owners in a jurisdiction benefit from zoning through higher home prices (because supply is artificially low) and lower tax rates (because population density is kept down, as school age children are kept out), while everyone else loses.

[. . .]

Dragging down the quality of education available to poor children is not only unjust, it hobbles national economic gains and therefore harms even affluent people. Young black and Latino adults earn thousands of dollars more each year, and are far more likely to obtain a college education, if they grow up in metro areas where blacks or Latinos attend high-scoring schools — like in Raleigh or San Jose — compared to their counterparts in metro areas with low-scoring schools — as in Philadelphia or New Haven. Impressive research from Raj Chetty and other economists has also found that the quality of one’s school environment — measured by teacher or peer performance — causes large long term gains in earnings and labor market performance.

Previously, my work has found that zoning laws inflate metro-wide housing costs, limit housing supply, and exacerbate segregation by income and race. Other work faults these laws for their damaging effect on the environment, since they make public transportation infeasible and extend commuting times. With a few possible exceptions (see Michelle Alexander), it’s hard to think of an existing political institution in the United States that is more destructive of human and social capital.

April 19, 2012

“Ontario is on track to have the highest electricity prices … in North America”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

Scott Stinson explains why Ontario consumers are facing huge price hikes for electricity over the next 18 months:

It’s no secret that Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals have placed a huge bet on growing a green-energy sector by subsidizing the production of renewable energy. Although energy bills have been steadily rising since the party took power in 2003 — the average cost of a kilowatt of electricity was more than 30% higher last year than it was five years ago — the Liberals have somewhat masked this fact by handing a 10% rebate back to consumers with the euphemistically named Clean Energy Benefit, which also happens to utterly contradict the conservation incentive that should be part of a switch to a greener grid.

Electricity costs, though, are set to spike.

“Ontario’s power system is fuelled by consumers to the tune of about $16-billion a year,” says Tom Adams, an energy consultant who has written extensively on electricity and environmental issues. “That number is headed for $23-billion or $24-billion soon, by 2016,” he says in an interview.

[. . .]

Mr. Adams notes that when the Green Energy Act, with its guarantees of above-market rates for wind and solar electricity known as feed-in-tariffs (FIT), was introduced in 2009, the Liberals said electricity costs would only be impacted by about 1% annually. We now know that rates for consumers are rising by 9% a year. “The government says about half of that is due to Green Energy, but if they were being honest it would be more than that,” Mr. Adams says.

The coming increases, meanwhile, which can partly be attributed to locked-in contracts for renewable energy, are also a result of a host of other factors, from new generation capacity being introduced to phase-out costs of existing facilities to new transmission capacity being added to the energy grid.

April 18, 2012

Reason.tv: The Space Shuttle Era is Over (Thank God!)

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Space — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

So the space shuttle Discovery has flown its last mission; it’s been towed over the nation’s capital like a bruised Chevy after a demolition derby before being deposited at the Udvar-Hazy air and space museum in northern Virginia.

Other space junkers — Atlantis and Endeavour — are being retired like Brett Favre in a pair of Crocs, too, bringing to end an underwhelming three decades of fruitless and tragic exploration of low-earth orbiting patterns.

Let’s face it: Once we beat the Russians to the moon, the national rocket grew limper than Liberace at a speculum convention. NASA has been dining out on a single 1969 hit longer than Zager and Evans.

The good news is that amateur hour is now over and the private space race has begun. Where two Cold War superpowers failed, let a thousand business plans bloom!

Why do we even bother calling them “life sentences”?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:13

According to a recent Globe and Mail article, among the civil service jobs at risk in the government’s cutbacks are 26 convicted murderers who’ve been paroled and are paid to minister to another 2,280 paroled murderers (numbers from the 2010-11 report).

The Globe and Mail has learned that one of the many federal programs that will be cut in its entirety is LifeLine, a program aimed at helping people with life sentences — or “lifers” — successfully re-integrate into society once they’ve been paroled.

At a starting salary of about $38,000, the program hires and trains successfully-paroled lifers to mentor other lifers who are still incarcerated or who have been recently released on parole.

[. . .]

Under the Criminal Code, offenders serving a life sentence for murder may be considered for parole after serving 15 years of their sentences. Offenders serving life sentences for first-degree murder can be eligible for day parole after 22 years and full parole after 25 years.

April 16, 2012

“This sort of investment pays for itself ten-fold over a very short period of time”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

You see? This is what’s wrong with private enterprise, especially in California. Those wimps aren’t willing to invest in something that will “pay for itself” ten times over in a “very short period of time”. That’s why all the greatest economic advances have come from over-aged students, business council speechifiers, bureaucrats, and career apparatchiks!

If you believe calling your opponents names is a sign that you have lost the argument, then this new high-speed rail commercial from the California Alliance for Jobs — in which unexpectedly macho proponents of the $41 billion, $110 billion, $98.5 billion, $68.4 billion high-speed rail project deride skeptics as “wimps” — is pretty much the end of the line […]

What reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of the high-speed rail project is not the insults but that what is supposed to be a rousing propaganda piece comes off like an orientation video for new hires at a failing company.

The video’s cast includes hacks respected citizens from Operating Engineers Local 3, including Alliance for Jobs Executive Director Jim Earp, along with leaders from what’s usually referred to as the “business community” whose skill sets cluster around serving on business councils rather than doing any actual business. There’s also a career apparatchik and the founder of the “I Will Ride” Student Coalition, who is apparently a UC Merced senior but looks at least a decade too old.

[. . .]

Again, why not just claim the Fresno-Bakersfield line will end up carrying 38 million people, the entire population of California, every day? It would be no less accurate than the current claims, which have been made with no data on ticket costs, no comparative studies of existing bullet-train ridership, or anything else that can reasonably pass for due diligence.

Oh, and nobody actually knows where the bullet train will go to or from. (Past, present and possibly future candidates include Corcoran, Borden, Fresno, Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and some guy named Dave’s rec room.) You wouldn’t build a patio with the amount of planning that’s gone into the high-speed rail project.

To put the headline into a bit of perspective, note that only one high speed rail line in the world is profitable. This is an old hobby horse of mine and I’ve posted about High Speed Railways a few times before.

Update: And to answer the question about why parts of Europe, Japan, and China have high speed rail systems and neither Canada nor the United States do, here’s a brief overview I wrote last year:

The best place to build a high speed rail system for the US would be the Boston-New York-Washington corridor (aka “Bosnywash”, for the assumed urban agglomeration that would occur as the cities reach toward one another). It has the necessary population density to potentially turn an HSR system into a practical, possibly even profitable, part of the transportation solution. The problem is that without an enormous eminent domain land-grab to cheat every land-owner of the fair value of their property, it just can’t be done. Buying enough contiguous sections of land to connect these cities would be so expensive that scrapping and replacing the entire navy every year would be a bargain in comparison.

The American railway system is built around freight: passenger traffic is a tiny sliver of the whole picture. Ordinary passenger trains cause traffic and scheduling difficulties because they travel at higher speeds, but require more frequent stops than freight trains, and their schedules have to be adjusted to passenger needs (passenger traffic peaks early to mid-morning and early to mid-evening). The frequency of passenger trains can “crowd out” the freight traffic the railway actually earns money on.

Most railway companies prefer to avoid having the complications of carrying passengers at all — that’s why Amtrak (and VIA Rail in Canada) was set up in the first place, to take the burden of money-losing passenger services off the shoulders of deeply indebted railways. Even after the new entity lopped off huge numbers of passenger trains from its schedule, it couldn’t turn a profit on the scaled-down services it was offering.

Ordinary passenger trains can, at a stretch, share rail with freight traffic, but high speed trains cannot. At higher speeds, the actual construction of the track has to change to deal with the physical problem of safely guiding the fast passenger trains along the rail. Signalling must also change to suit the far-higher speeds — and the matching far-longer safe braking distances. High speed rail lines cannot be interrupted with grade crossings, for the safety of passengers and bystanders, so additional bridges and tunnels must be built to avoid bringing road vehicles and pedestrians too close to the trains.

In other words, a high speed railway line is far from being just a faster version of what we already have: it would have to be built separately, to much higher standards of construction.

Getting back to the California HSR line; it goes from A to B on this map:

Okay, you think, at least Fresno will get some snazzy slick rail service . . . except this section will be built but not operated until further connecting sections are built . . . at a later date. Maybe. It will be the track, including elevated sections through Fresno, and the physical right-of-way, but no electrical system to power the trains; but that’s fine, because the budget doesn’t include any actual trains.

April 15, 2012

Sarkozy reaps media benefit from video conference with Obama

Filed under: Europe, France, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:24

It’s often said that there’s no such thing as bad media exposure during an election campaign, and Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to take advantage of this in the run-up to the first round of voting:

Nicolas Sarkozy has been accused of using a video conference with Barack Obama to boost his election campaign. In an unprecedented move in French diplomacy, newscasts on several TV channels showed the first few minutes of a video link-up between the French president and his Washington counterpart.

Days before the 22 April first-round vote in the French presidential election, the rare glimpse of banter between world leaders shows Obama saying of the campaign, “It must be a busy time.” He adds: “I admire the tough battle you are waging.” Sarkozy replies, grinning and with arms folded: “We will win, Mr Obama. You and me, together.” The cameras leave before the presidents talk about Syria, Iran and oil.

The benefits to Sarkozy are quite clear: it allows him to appear presidential (always a trick the incumbent can use and the ambitious opponent is denied) and gives a subtle boost to French pride — their president is clearly on good personal terms with the American president. France’s representative is seen as being the equal of the superpower’s representative (it doesn’t have to be stated, but it’s a useful subliminal message in an election).

It’s not quite as beneficial to Obama, although this may be a marker put down to be redeemed later in the US presidential cycle. The same trick can be played for the benefit of Obama’s east coast voting base: look how well he deals with foreign dignitaries.

Increasing taxes on the “1%” won’t close the gap — and might make it worse

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:13

Joseph Brean in the National Post:

That the rich should contribute more than their current share to the common good is a proposal with popularity. From Paris and London to Nova Scotia and Alberta, “tax the rich” has become a dominant theme in budget debates and elections around the world.

In Ontario, for example, NDP leader Andrea Horwath’s proposal to create a new tax bracket for people who make more than half-a-million dollars a year, illustrates the persistent attraction of such schemes for governments in deficit.

“The issue really is one of perceived fairness,” said Robin Boadway, a taxation expert and professor of economics at Queen’s University, who notes that the income of the highest earners has been increasing much faster than the middle and lower ranks. Taxation, to a great degree, relies on the goodwill and trust of citizens, he said, and inequality in tax codes can violate that trust.

Governments acting like Robin Hood, however, have tended to provoke unforeseen problems, most recently in Britain, where an effort to tax the rich ended up — quite literally — costing the government deeply.

It always seems to be a surprise when people respond to incentives in creative ways … and this applies especially to creative ways to avoid paying higher taxes. People will adjust their behaviour to minimize their tax burden — both legally and not-as-legally. This is after all one of the reasons that there are so many tax provisions: the government wants to encourage certain kinds of behaviour (and so gives a tax credit) and discourage other kinds of behaviour (and so levies a specific tax on it). Flexibility occurs on both the tax-levying and tax-paying sides of the fence.

One of the complaints of middle-class taxpayers is that there are few mechanisms they can use to legally reduce their tax burden, while the wealthy have lots of ways to do this. This isn’t going to change if the government increases the top rate of tax — in fact it will encourage more creative use of the tax-lowering provisions of the law (and lawyers and accountants will benefit by helping their wealthy clients ot take advantage of those provisions).

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