North Coast Online

Much Ado About Nothing

George Will highlights a couple days of our do-nothing Congress.

So the Senate took Friday off, wasted Monday in the predictable futility of failing to pass a nonbinding nullity (a resolution expressing constitutionally irrelevant lack of confidence in the attorney general), then debated lowering gasoline prices - or cooling the planet; or something - by spending taxpayers' money to raise food prices. It took up legislation to quintuple the mandated use of mostly corn-based ethanol, which already has increased Americans' food bills $14 billion in the last 12 months. For such silliness, Reid scuttled the bipartisan attempt to improve the eminently improvable immigration status quo.

Not that a Congress which does nothing bothers me particularly.

Everything Would Be Fine If 'We' Were In Charge

Coyote Blog comments on the phenomenon whereby politicians of one party or the other create an institution that seems wonderful to them -- until the other party gains control.

I am reminded of all this because the technocrats that built our regulatory state are starting to see the danger of what they created. A public school system was great as long as it was teaching the right things and its indoctrinational excesses were in a leftish direction. Now, however, we can see the panic.  The left is freaked that some red state school districts may start teaching creationism or intelligent design.  And you can hear the lament - how did we let Bush and these conservative idiots take control of the beautiful machine we built?  My answer is that you shouldn't have built the machine in the first place - it always falls into the wrong hands.  Maybe its time for me to again invite the left to reconsider school choice.

Read the whole thing. He also mentions the FDA decision to disallow over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill.  The lust for power is too great to convince modern politicians that they'd be better off removing control from these institutions rather than constantly expanding them.

Thank You, Sir. May I Have Another?

Don Boudreaux has a letter in USAToday.

USA TODAY reader Otis Howard complains that "senators who got millions of dollars in contributions from the pharmaceutical companies over the years should be ashamed of themselves" ("Drug bill sham," Letters, Wednesday).

Alas, blaming politicians for taking campaign contributions from parties affected by legislation is akin to blaming polar bears for eating seals. It's in the nature of both beasts to behave in these ways.

Truly shameful people are those who condone open-ended regulation by government. Officials possessing the power to destroy billions of dollars of wealth with the strokes of their pens will inevitably be feted, seduced, bribed and otherwise lobbied by those whose wealth is at stake. Persons who expect otherwise should be ashamed of themselves.

Limiting the power of the politicians would be the surest and most effective means of campaign finance reform.  Less reason for the rest of us to have to beg to be left alone.

Alas, blaming politicians for taking campaign contributions from parties affected by legislation is akin to blaming polar bears for eating seals. It's in the nature of both beasts to behave in these ways.

Truly shameful people are those who condone open-ended regulation by government. Officials possessing the power to destroy billions of dollars of wealth with the strokes of their pens will inevitably be feted, seduced, bribed and otherwise lobbied by those whose wealth is at stake. Persons who expect otherwise should be ashamed of themselves.

Corporate Welfare

Government Industrial Development Agencies (IDA's) waste a lot of money.

MONEY doesn't grow on trees, but that hasn't stopped Dollar Tree Stores from generating forests of revenue. In 2006, sales at the retail chain, where every item costs a buck, were $4 billion. That's up 17 percent from the year before. The company now operates more than 3,200 stores around the country, as compared with just over 2,900 a year ago--an increase of more than one per weekday last year.

So this capitalist success story is an obvious candidate for a taxpayer subsidy, right?

That's what Virginia thinks. On February 12, Democratic governor Tim Kaine announced his plan to award $200,000 in state money to Dollar Tree for an expansion of its corporate headquarters in Chesapeake. The cash comes out of something called the Governor's Opportunity Fund, which spends more than $15 million per year on companies that seek financial help. "We view it as a deal-closing fund," says Christie Miller of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, a state agency. "It's for attracting business to Virginia and keeping it here, too."

Giveaways to flourishing companies may not sound like a discount-store bargain for taxpayers, but they're standard operating procedure just about everywhere. Even local governments are getting in the act: The city of Chesapeake agreed to inject $200,000 of its own money into Dollar Tree's project. Around the country, this marriage of Big Government and Big Business carries a price tag of $50 billion each year, according to an estimate by Alan Peters and Peter Fisher of the University of Iowa. For the most part, however, these so-called business incentives "don't accomplish much of anything," says Peters.

That's not entirely true. They can accomplish quite a bit for politicians such as Kaine, who wasted no time in issuing a boastful press release about his Dollar Tree deal: "Governor Kaine Announces 100 New Jobs for Chesapeake." Yet these little exercises in industrial policy rarely drive economic growth. And sometimes they aren't so little: Last summer, then-governor George Pataki of New York, a Republican, approved a $1.2 billion package of grants and tax reductions for AMD to build a microchip factory in Saratoga County. The project is supposed to create 1,200 jobs, which works out to a price of $1 million apiece for New York taxpayers--a deal that might make even George Steinbrenner blush.

Perhaps these corporate-welfare schemes would be worth it if they created more jobs, helped depressed areas, or expanded a region's tax base. Evidence suggests that they don't accomplish any of these goals. "After decades of policy experimentation and literally hundreds of scholarly studies, none of these claims is clearly substantiated," wrote Peters and Fisher in their exhaustive analysis. "Indeed ... there is a good chance that all of these claims are false."

IDA's are good for generating favorable headlines for politicians.

The Race

Tony Blankley looks at the front runners for upcoming presidential race and is not reassured.

If it is Rudy and Hillary, and now Bloomberg, we could be looking at a three-way race between three moderately liberal to leftist New Yorkers running for president in a right-of-center country with no even moderately conservative candidate. And should Sen. Obama surprisingly get the Democratic nomination, then we would substitute for the secret leftist publicly centrist Hillary Milhous, a completely inexperienced African-American possibly former Muslim, partially Indonesian-raised, Harvard-trained Kennedyesque candidate.

Therein, lies the three-party freak show that is likely to produce the next president of the United States during this early period of the Age of Islamist Terror in which we live. And yet, we live in hope that ours is a providentially guided country.

Beating A Dead Gonzales

Well, well, well.  After weeks of hemming and hawing, feigning of confusion and general indignation the Buffalo News editorial board has come out with it -- the Bush administration (maybe) fired those U.S. attorneys just because they wanted to help black people.

As members of Congress, the press and just plain Americans are left to fill in the gaps left by Gonzales’ incredible cluelessness, a chilling theory becomes more and more difficult to resist. And that is the concern that at least some of the fired prosecutors were let go because they refused to lower the boom on those guilty of the crime that’s come to be known as VWB — Voting While Black.

Well, welcome to reality -- where the hell have you been, anyway? 

The Bush administration wanted to focus its investigations of voting irregularities on outright fraud and not on what it (and those of us who voted for it) considered to be spurious allegations of attempts to suppress black voter turnout.   But that's a topic near and dear to Democrats' hearts especially since the blue part of Florida proved unable to cast valid ballots for Al Gore lo, those many years ago, so it's not terribly surprising that they'd want to pursue it.

And interestingly enough, the alleged disenfranchisement of black voters always seems to involve Republicans while the type of voter fraud that interests Republicans (usually involving inappropriate bribes or unexplainable extensions of polling hours) tends to be concentrated in large cities run by Democrats.  Is it politics?  Yes, of course it is, by definition.

The firings of the U.S. attorneys were political.  Everyone knows it including the congressional Democrats.  There's nothing illegal or unconstitutional about it and certainly nothing new.  No one expects more or less.  The editorial board should either take a pill or graduate from college and grow up.  One grows weary from the drama.

Must Be Team Player

Sam Brownback learns that sports analogies in politics, aside from being clichéd, are often fraught with danger.

Political Pandering -- Y'all

Arnold Kling on political pandering.

Russ Roberts, in this speech, offers a theory of political pandering. He suggests that politicians know that they are exaggerating problems, because the solutions they offer are so pathetic. If you really thought that all the gains in the economy over the past 30 years had gone to the top 1 percent, Roberts says, then you would advocate something more radical than an increase in the minimum wage or a way to make it easier for workers to form unions.

Or easier rural access to high-speed Internet.

Campaign Finance Deform

Don Boudreaux explains why campaign finance reform is so foolish in a letter to USAToday.

To the Editor:

Drummond Drew writes that "We need to find a way to get money out of politics" (Letters, April 26).  He mistakenly supposes that carts push horses. Money is in politics only because politicians confiscate and control so much of our money.

The only way to free politics from the influence of money is to free our money from the influence of politics.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux

He's correct, of course.  We have every right to support candidates who will reflect our own positions on the matters they will debate and pass laws on.  It's our lives and livelihoods they're potentially harming or helping after all.  But campaign finance reform has turned into little more than protecting incumbents against bad publicity from constituents opposed to them.

Have you noticed that campaign finance reform is a lot like lobbyist reform?  It's supposed to help us, but never seems to. When politicians set about to regulate lobbyists, they inevitably impose all sorts of rules on -- the lobbyists!   The lobbyists cannot take a Congressman to dinner and the lobbyists must not give him tickets to a football game.  The lobbyists may not fly her to the Bahamas and the lobbyists dare not . . . you get the idea.

Well, why not just create a rule that members of Congress can't accept anything of monetary value from a lobbyist or they'll be punished?  The reason that John McCain doesn't stand a chance in hell of getting the Republican nomination is his benighted campaign finance reform bill.  It's well-recognized now that it didn't deprive political candidates of a single dime -- it just limited the rights of the rest of us to support whom we wish, when we wish and how we wish without hiring a lawyer and an accountant to do it.

Now Governor Spitzer's proposing campaign finance reform for New York.  Well, when his proposal comes out, take some time and read it.  Decide for yourself whether it will limit the politicians' access to money or just the New York electorate's ability to influence elections.  I'll bet on the latter.

"Regionalism" Is Overrated

Thoughts on regionalism and planning from Pennsylvania.

Bigger government isn't necessarily better government.

For decades, Lehigh Valley regionalists have been promoting their agenda as the solution to our ills. Generally good intentioned people, regionalists look to create valleywide government efficiencies. However, some of them have morphed this idea into an anti-suburban, pro-city agenda.

While we all want to see the Valley cities prosper, pitting urban vs. suburban residents in the regionalism debate is not the way to go. Recently, it was reported that an Allentown official wished the city's crime out to suburbia. This isn't helpful or acceptable as a way of promoting Valley regionalism.

Many regionalists point to a 2003 Brookings Report study as their creed. The report, whose basic premise is that bigger centralized government is better government, blames the problems of the cities on too much suburban growth and too much local control.

But many would argue the opposite, that smaller government is more efficient and responsive to resident needs.

Instead of municipal regionalization, let's first look at better inter-municipal cooperation.

Treating suburbanization as a "problem" that must be fixed isn't particularly constructive.