Quotulatiousness

November 22, 2011

Another case where “spending cuts” still mean increased spending

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

No, not the US government, even though the media will be talking up the “savage” spending cuts coming because of sequestration (which will only reduce the rate of increase, not actually reduce spending). In this case it’s Britain:

Why is Britain growing more slowly than other developed nations? Why have we been outperformed over the past 12 months by every EU state except Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Romania?

Let’s start by dismissing the Labour-Guardian-BBC explanation: the idea that the economy is shrinking because of ‘the cuts’. As this blog never tires of pointing out, net government expenditure is higher now than it was under Gordon Brown. We are set to borrow at least £122 billion this year. Spending is above 50 per cent of GDP. How much more ‘stimulus’ do critics want?

What the international league tables show is that the countries which decreed the biggest bailouts experienced the sharpest contractions. Far from ‘stimulating’ the economy, these various programmes have taken money out of the productive sector. If stimulus spending worked, the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War.

November 20, 2011

How is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff like a used car salesman?

Filed under: Government, Military, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

Answer: when he uses the latest technology to get the Defense Secretary to a meeting on time.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta shoved his head into a snug aviator helmet topped with goggles one September morning and swooped into Lower Manhattan on a V-22 Osprey, a $70 million aircraft that Marines use for battlefield assaults in Afghanistan.

“How’d you like that gizmo?” Mr. Panetta said after landing at the Wall Street heliport in the Osprey, which takes off like a helicopter, flies like an airplane — and has been responsible for the deaths of 30 people in test flights.

Defense Department officials say the hybrid aircraft was the fastest way to get Mr. Panetta and his entourage to New York that day. But anyone who has followed the tortured history of the Osprey over the past quarter-century saw the persistent, politically savvy hand of the Marines in arranging Mr. Panetta’s flight — and another example in what has become a case study of how hard it is to kill billion-dollar Pentagon programs.

“At a car dealership, what the salesman wants to do is get you inside the vehicle,” said Dakota Wood, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel and defense analyst. “You take the test drive and wow, it’s got a great stereo, it feels good, it has that new-car smell.”

That flight with Mr. Panetta, he said, is “an insurance policy against future defense cuts.”

November 19, 2011

Three reasons not to bail out student loan borrowers

Filed under: Economics, Education, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:16

November 16, 2011

Stop the attempt to nationalize the internet (for the US government)

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:17

If you don’t already associate SOPA with evil, Michael Geist explains why you should:

The U.S. Congress is currently embroiled in a heated debated over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), proposed legislation that supporters argue is needed combat online infringement, but critics fear would create the “great firewall of the United States.” SOPA’s potential impact on the Internet and development of online services is enormous as it cuts across the lifeblood of the Internet and e-commerce in the effort to target websites that are characterized as being “dedicated to the theft of U.S. property.” This represents a new standard that many experts believe could capture hundreds of legitimate websites and services.

For those caught by the definition, the law envisions requiring Internet providers to block access to the sites, search engines to remove links from search results, payment intermediaries such as credit card companies and Paypal to cut off financial support, and Internet advertising companies to cease placing advertisements. While these measures have unsurprisingly raised concern among Internet companies and civil society groups (letters of concern from Internet companies, members of the US Congress, international civil liberties groups, and law professors), [. . .] the jurisdictional implications demand far more attention. The U.S. approach is breathtakingly broad, effectively treating millions of websites and IP addresses as “domestic” for U.S. law purposes.

The long-arm of U.S. law manifests itself in at least five ways in the proposed legislation.

The gender wage gap won’t go away

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Kay Hymowitz explains that even with the best will in the world, the wage gap — often referred to as the 75-cents-on-the-dollar phenomenon — between men and women will persist:

Let’s begin by unpacking that 75-cent statistic, which actually varies from 75 to about 81, depending on the year and the study. The figure is based on the average earnings of full-time, year-round workers, usually defined as those who work 35 hours a week or more.

But consider the mischief contained in that “or more.” It makes the full-time category embrace everyone from a clerk who arrives at her desk at 9 a.m. and leaves promptly at 4 p.m. to a trial lawyer who eats dinner four nights a week — and lunch on weekends — at his desk.

I assume, in this case, that the clerk is a woman and the lawyer a man for the simple reason that — and here is an average that proofers rarely mention — full-time men work more hours than full-time women do. In 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 27 percent of male full-time workers had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 15 percent of female full-time workers; just 4 percent of full-time men worked 35 to 39 hours a week, while 12 percent of women did. Since full-time men work more than full-time women do, it shouldn’t be surprising that the men, on average, earn more.

The other arena of mischief contained in the 75-cent statistic lies in the seemingly harmless term “occupation.” Everyone knows that a CEO makes more than a secretary and that a computer scientist makes more than a nurse. Most people wouldn’t be shocked to hear that secretaries and nurses are likely to be women, while CEOs and computer scientists are likely to be men. That explains much of the wage gap.

But proofers often make the claim that women earn less than men doing the exact same job. They can’t possibly know that. The Labor Department’s occupational categories can be so large that a woman could drive a truck through them. Among “physicians and surgeons,” for example, women make only 64.2 percent of what men make. Outrageous, right? Not if you consider that there are dozens of specialties in medicine: some, like cardiac surgery, require years of extra training, grueling hours, and life-and-death procedures; others, like pediatrics, are less demanding and consequently less highly rewarded. Only 16 percent of surgeons, but a full 50 percent of pediatricians, are women.

Don’t expect China to save your economy

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent along this link which should pour cold water on the notion that China will step in to save the economies of other countries:

China’s economy has a reputation for being strong and prosperous, but according to a well-known Chinese television personality the country’s Gross Domestic Product is going in reverse.

Larry Lang, chair professor of Finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said in a lecture that he didn’t think was being recorded that the Chinese regime is in a serious economic crisis — on the brink of bankruptcy. In his memorable formulation: every province in China is Greece.

The restrictions Lang placed on the Oct. 22 speech in Shenyang City, in northern China’s Liaoning Province, included no audio or video recording, and no media. He can be heard saying that people should not post his speech online, or “everyone will look bad,” in the audio that is now on Youtube.

In the unusual, closed-door lecture, Lang gave a frank analysis of the Chinese economy and the censorship that is placed on intellectuals and public figures. “What I’m about to say is all true. But under this system, we are not allowed to speak the truth,” he said.

Despite Lang’s polished appearance on his high-profile TV shows, he said: “Don’t think that we are living in a peaceful time now. Actually the media cannot report anything at all. Those of us who do TV shows are so miserable and frustrated, because we cannot do any programs. As long as something is related to the government, we cannot report about it.”

China, for all its amazing growth and rising economic prospects for (some of) its population, is still not a modern economy. The government — specifically the military — is too deeply involved at far deeper levels than other governments and the reported economic figures may or may not have any relationship with reality. When your boss is a general, he has ways of ensuring that you report the “right” results that a civilian CEO cannot match. It’s not just your job you risk by reporting unwelcome results.

I’ve ridden this hobby horse, as Jon calls it, many times over the years.

November 13, 2011

Stephen Harper’s government is not small-c conservative

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:44

The National Post editorial board surveys the federal government’s economic record and discovers it’s really the old Liberal party in disguise:

There is no question the Harper government has been profligate and could easily cut federal spending dramatically without doing further damage to the economy. Since 2006, the Tories have increased nominal federal spending from about $175-billion to just over $250-billion. That’s a shocking rise of almost 43%. Even after accounting for inflation and population growth, plus factoring out the money the Conservatives have spent on anti-recession stimulus (over $75-billion), the real growth in federal spending since 2006 has been nearly 10%.

The size of the federal civil service has increased rapidly, too, as has its composition. The Tories have added 13% to the rolls of the bureaucracy in just five years. Some of this is the result of their expansion of the military, police and border service, but much of it has nothing whatever to do with national security. Health Canada, for instance, has seen a nearly 50% increase in its staff under the Tories, the largest percentage increase of any department.

Mr. Flaherty would not have to be motivated by ideology to pare some of that spending and hiring back. If the Tories simply reversed federal spending to the levels they were at when the worldwide financial crisis hit in the fall of 2008, Ottawa’s budget would be balanced this year. Even if the Tories wanted to hold off on any cuts in transfers to individuals — such as pensions and GST credits — and preserve provincial transfers, they could still find enough cuts to non-essential spending to return to balance in two years.

November 9, 2011

Federalism does not mean “do what the Feds say”

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:41

The US government is actively undermining California law when it comes to medical marijuana:

When you get a new car, you start noticing the same model all over the highway. It’s the same way when you figure out what California’s marijuana dispensaries look like — green crosses and signage about “medicine” and “420” start popping up all over the City of Angels: On your commute to work, in your neighborhood, around the corner from your favorite restaurant. To put it bluntly, it’s not hard to find weed in California.

But that all might be about to change. The state’s four U.S. Attorneys are gamely trying to alter the broadly popular status quo with arrests and threats of prosecution and property seizure for landlords who rent to dispensaries, a campaign announced in a rare joint press conference in October. Medical marijuana advocates call it an “intense crackdown” and have launched a lawsuit claiming the federal attorneys’ tactics violate California’s tenth amendment rights (Rick Perry, call your office).

State and local officials, meanwhile, are divided in their reactions to the influx of dispensaries in California, but many say that overly eager federal intervention is undermining the state-regulated medical marijuana system that they have taken pains to set up. In other words, as long as the federal crackdown contained itself to targeting egregious offenders of state law, it was hard for anyone to object; many applauded. But by raising the prospect of a federal assault on city mayors and town councils, Obama’s Department of Justice could be making more enemies than friends in California.

November 7, 2011

Occupy Winter Park!

Filed under: Business, Football, Government, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:35

Minnesota is blessed with some particularly colourful legislators, but all of them must take second place to State Representative Phyllis Kahn. She has a long history of, shall we say, “imaginative” legislative proposals, and this one is a doozy:

Throw in one more idea for a new Minnesota Vikings stadium: Have the public buy shares in the team, enabling them to own a piece of the Vikings and help finance a stadium.

The community ownership idea has been floated before but Rep. Phyllis Kahn, DFL-Minneapolis, said Monday she would introduce legislation to require Gov. Mark Dayton and the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission to work with the National Football League to make it happen. The commission owns the downtown Minneapolis Metrodome, the team’s home for nearly 30 years.

“Dayton asked for all ideas to be put on the table and that’s exactly what I’m doing here,” said Kahn. “No single idea [for funding a new stadium] has gained enough traction to pass the Legislature.”

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.

However, Rep. Kahn’s proposal won’t fly because the NFL itself forbids public ownership of teams (the grandfathered-in exception being the Green Bay Packers). What’s even more interesting about her plan is that the proceeds of selling shares in the team would be put directly towards building a new stadium:

The funds from selling stock in the Vikings, said Kahn, could go toward helping the team build a new stadium. She added that, under her plan, Vikings owner Zygi Wilf and his family could retain a 30 percent controlling interest in the team.

So the Wilfs will be allowed to retain a minority share, but wouldn’t be compensated for the proportion of the stock that was being sold? Isn’t that just expropriation? I didn’t realize the DFL was a modern-day successor to Mussolini’s Fascist Party.

November 6, 2011

Redefining “anarchism” to mean “statism”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:41

Mark Steyn in the Orange County Register:

I don’t “stand with the 99%,” and certainly not downwind of them. But I’m all for their “occupation” continuing on its merry way. It usefully clarifies the stakes. At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement’s aims: They’re anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life — just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth. What’s happening in Oakland is a logical exercise in class solidarity: the government class enthusiastically backing the breakdown of civil order is making common cause with the leisured varsity class, the thuggish union class and the criminal class in order to stick it to what’s left of the beleaguered productive class. It’s a grand alliance of all those societal interests that wish to enjoy in perpetuity a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. Only the criminal class is reasonably upfront about this. The rest — the lifetime legislators, the unions defending lavish and unsustainable benefits, the “scholars” whiling away a somnolent half-decade at Complacency U — are obliged to dress it up a little with some hooey about “social justice” and whatnot.

[. . .]

America is seizing up before our eyes: The decrepit airports, the underwater property market, the education racket, the hyper-regulated business environment. Yet, curiously, the best example of this sclerosis is the alleged “revolutionary” movement itself. It’s the voice of youth, yet everything about it is cobwebbed. It’s more like an open-mike karaoke night of a revolution than the real thing. I don’t mean just the placards with the same old portable quotes by Lenin et al, but also, say, the photograph in Forbes of Rachel, a 20-year-old “unemployed cosmetologist” with remarkably uncosmetological complexion, dressed in pink hair and nose ring as if it’s London, 1977, and she’s killing time at Camden Lock before the Pistols gig. Except that that’s three-and-a-half decades ago, so it would be like the Sex Pistols dressing like the Andrews Sisters. Are America’s revolting youth so totally pathetically moribund they can’t even invent their own hideous fashion statements? [. . .]

At heart, Oakland’s occupiers and worthless political class want more of the same fix that has made America the Brokest Nation in History: They expect to live as beneficiaries of a prosperous Western society without making any contribution to the productivity necessary to sustain it. This is the “idealism” that the media are happy to sentimentalize, and that enough poseurs among the corporate executives are happy to indulge — at least until the window smashing starts. To “occupy” Oakland or anywhere else, you have to have something to put in there. Yet the most striking feature of OWS is its hollowness. And in a strange way the emptiness of its threats may be a more telling indictment of a fin de civilization West than a more coherent protest movement could ever have mounted.

November 4, 2011

Opening moments of the G20 in Cannes

Filed under: France, Government, Greece, Italy, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:01

From the tone of the article, even the Guardian is finding it hard to take the politicians seriously this time:

The red carpet was drenched and sodden, the palm trees battered by a storm and even the trumpet fanfares of the French Republican Guard were muffled by the wind.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s glittering G20 summit at Cannes was supposed to be a showcase for his skill as the caped crusader: Super Sarko, fighting his way through the markets and eurozone crisis to rescue his personal damsel in distress, France’s endangered AAA-credit rating.

Instead, the opening hours on the French Riviera seemed more like a muted crisis-gathering of head-scratching politicians, some staring into the jaws of political death, fearing being punished at the ballot box or hung out to dry by their own governments.

Even without the specially summoned whipping boy, the Greek prime minister George Papandreou — who had a constantly furrowed brow and clasped hands, as pressure was heaped on him over his resignation-referendum ping-ping — the red-carpet arrivals ceremony often looked like a roll call of doom.

Silvio Berlusconi arrived in the rain with a huge black overcoat perched on his shoulders, shoulder pads visible from space, likened by his own press corps to a mafia boss from the Sopranos.

November 3, 2011

Fleming: Obama takes off the gloves, warns of danger if he’s not re-elected

Filed under: Government, Humour, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:52

Frank J. Fleming reports on the warning President Obama gave during a speech last week:

At a San Francisco fund-raiser last week, President Obama warned the audience that if he’s not re-elected, it will bring a new era of self-reliance in America.

In this dystopian future, people wouldn’t be able to rely on the government to give them health care or college or anything else we now consider a need. That’s just an awful, scary thought these days. Which begs the question: Are we too sissy for freedom anymore?

Not everyone acknowledges how scary true freedom is. Sure, you get to make your own choices, but then government won’t be there to catch you when you fall.

[. . .]

But we’re a different kind of people now. All the federal government did back then was basically keep an eye on Canada and make sure it didn’t invade. Today, more than half of the federal government’s budget is spent on entitlements and safety nets. In fact, a fifth of federal spending is devoted to making sure we have crummy retirement savings that no one can live on.

If the Founding Fathers ever found out about that, they’d probably shoot us with muskets. But the fact is they’re dead, and we’ve decided we have other needs as a people.

Right now, getting rid of any entitlements is unthinkable. If left to our own resources, we’d be too worried about starving to death or not having access to broadband.

“It’s easy to give up a liberty that is unimportant to you”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

Lorne Gunter explains why giving government the power to limit one liberty inevitably leads to the government limiting other liberties:

My interest in guns is purely philosophical: I can’t trust any government that doesn’t trust my law-abiding fellow citizens to own whatever guns they want. It’s the instinct to ban — rooted in the notion that governments or “experts” know better than we ourselves what is best or safest for us — that scares me far more than the thought of my neighbour owning a sniper rifle. The banning instinct is never slaked. Once it has succeeded in prohibiting guns, it will turn itself to offensive speech or unhealthy food.

[. . .]

But above all, it always worries me when the concept of “need” enters the debate, as in (to quote one of my colleagues): “Why do farmers and hunters need sniper rifles?”

The concept of “need” is antithetic to freedom in a democracy where the citizens are sovereign. No one needs a car that goes more than 110 km/ hr, because that is the highest speed limit in the country. So should any of us who want to drive more than a Smart Car or Fiat have to go cap in hand to a government official and explain our “need” for, say, a sports car, before we are granted the right to buy one? Many more Canadians — thousands more — are killed by speeding automobiles each year than by high-powered rifles that are beyond what ranchers “need” to kill coyotes.

If you are guilty of no crime, what you “need” is none of my business, or the government’s. In fact, it is the reverse. Any government that seeks to restrict the liberties of law-abiding citizens should have to prove it needs to do so, and that it is not just pandering to popular emotions and political sentimentality.

A “fat tax” would not improve anyone’s health or the healthcare sector

Filed under: Government, Health, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

Politicians and “food celebrities” in many western countries are calling for a tax on obesity, either on the foods that “make people fat” or on obese people themselves. Other than being incredibly regressive (poor people in the west tend to be fatter than well-off people), such a tax would do nothing to address the problem it is supposed to solve:

The regular calls for a fat tax — whether on the ‘wrong’ foods or on fat people themselves — are symptomatic of two regressive trends in society. The first is the view that experts know best, that these latter-day sages can come to an impartial view based on The Science, then guide government about the appropriate policy action. The new, evidence-based policy usually involves some kind of manipulation of our individual behaviour from gentle ‘nudges’ and increasing taxes through to criminalisation, as in the case of the smoking ban.

But this is not evidence-based policy, but policy-based evidence, with preconceived ideas being pushed through in the name of science at a time when those at the top of society have lost the ability to convince the electorate on the basis of a moral or political argument. This style of policymaking rarely solves social problems, but it does distort both politics and science.

The second worrying trend is the sheer intolerance towards obese people. Being very overweight has always attracted a certain amount of moral opprobrium. But Hatton’s outlook reflects a sea-change. Once, the NHS reflected a progressive outlook that disease was a misfortune that could strike any of us at any time and that the best thing to do was to share that burden across society. Now it’s every man and woman for themselves. In the worldview of Hatton and Coren, some morally weak individuals are costing them money and must be punished.

Ironically, this flows from a left-wing view of disease as having social causes. In the late Seventies, left-wingers correctly saw that some ill-health was the result of poverty, poor housing, polluted air, and so on rather than infection or bad luck. Unfortunately, this has morphed into the idea that disease is caused by individual behaviour — and so health professionals have taken to camping out in our private lives, demanding we stop smoking, drinking and eating the wrong things. Every naughty little pleasure must now be sacrificed to the god of longevity. If we don’t play ball, this intolerance suggests we should lose our right to treatment.

The disease of intolerance is likely to have a far more detrimental effect on society than obesity ever could.

November 2, 2011

History pop quiz

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:12

Tim Black wants you to identify how long ago a certain communication to the royal family was written:

‘I write to formally request the consent of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to provisions to be included in the . . . Bill.’

So, history fans, in which democracy-forsaken year did a member of the Houses of Parliament open a letter to an heir to the throne with this line? Not sure? Perhaps this sentence will help: ‘Granted that these proposed changes . . . will apply to . . . contracts entered into by or on behalf of the Duchy of Cornwall, we should be very grateful to receive the consent of the Prince of Wales.’ There are plenty of clues there: the cowering, creeping tone; the excessive, almost fearful formality; and, of course, the sheer palpable deference towards the Crown. Surely this particular parliamentarian’s request must originate from some time before parliament began to forcibly assert its interests against those of the Crown during the seventeenth century? Perhaps it was even earlier: 1590 or maybe even 1565.

This is a follow-up to a post from earlier this week.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress