MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Administrative Bloat, Astronomical Tuition, And What To Do About It.
Archive for 2014
February 18, 2014
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 285.
GROWTH CHART: How Right-To-Carry Has Become The American Norm. “It is interesting to compare the above chart to the map showing the demise of laws against ‘sodomy’ (oral or anal sex), between 1970 and 2003. On the eve of Lawrence v. Texas, there were still 13 states which had sodomy statutes.”
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Lefty Meltdown Leads Latin Revival.
Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina are languishing in differing shades of turmoil, steadily losing ground to regional underdogs. The Pacific Alliance, an historic trade agreement between Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Colombia (and coming soon: Costa Rica), has the potential to recolor Latin America’s economic map and introduce some new regional powerhouses to the world stage. . . .
The newly formed bloc is made up of Latin America’s fastest growing economies. These states boast the region’s most competitive, business-friendly economies and the lowest inflation rates. Current transactions between these countries represent a mere 4 percent of their total trade; the potential for increased financial cooperation is immense. They have already eliminated 92 percent of trade tariffs.
The Latin Lefties are none too pleased with the new arrangement. Bolivian President Evo Morales called the alliance a Washington-led conspiracy. Brazil’s Lula and Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa decried the Alliance as a neoliberal takeover.
But while these leaders sulk, their countries continue to disintegrate. Mass unrest continues to roil Venezuela; protestors are fed up with government corruption, media censorship, and a failing economy. An Argentinian inflation crisis threatens economic disaster. Brazil, which the WSJ called a “wilting giant”, faces yet another year of economic contraction. On top of that, the country’s 2014 World Cup preparations are foundering and civil unrest is growing more belligerent (and then there’s Brazil’s upcoming summer Olympics preparation to worry about).
Yes, their performance has been poor. A free-market approach would do better, but — as with here in America — a free-market approach offers less in the way of graft and self-importance to the political class.
KNOW YOUR PLACE, PEASANT: After comment to Gov. McCrory, Reid’s cook fired.
SUPER-SAFE ORANGE COUNTY well-stocked with paramilitary SWAT trucks. “Irvine police can’t be blamed for taking what was given them. A terrorist attack or an unusual bank heist like the one in Heat could theoretically happen anyplace, and a police chief offered military-grade hardware isn’t going to turn it down. But the folks higher up the chain who facilitate transactions like this are behaving irresponsibly. Municipal officials are militarizing their communities, and the dispensers of homeland-security dollars are squandering them. It is highly unlikely that this vehicle will prove indispensable before it wears out from age and dust, and if it does, blind luck will be more responsible that sound planning.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student debt may hurt housing recovery by hampering first-time buyers.
The growing student loan burden carried by millions of Americans threatens to undermine the housing recovery’s momentum by discouraging, or even blocking, a generation of potential buyers from purchasing their first homes.
Recent improvements in the housing market have been fueled largely by investors who snapped up homes in the past few years. But that demand is waning as prices climb and mortgage rates rise. An analysis by the Mortgage Bankers Association found that loan applications for home purchases have slipped nearly 20 percent in the past four months compared with the same period a year earlier.
First-time buyers, the bedrock of the housing market, are not stepping up to fill the void. They have accounted for nearly a third of home purchases over the past year, well below the historical norm, industry figures show. The trend has alarmed some housing experts, who suspect that student loan debt is partly to blame. That debt has tripled from a decade earlier, to more than $1 trillion, while wages for young college graduates have dropped.
The fear is that many young adults can no longer save for a down payment or qualify for a mortgage, impeding the housing market and the overall economy, which relies heavily on the housing sector for growth, regulators and mortgage industry experts said.
Do tell. Someone should write a book on this phenomenon.
MICHAEL GURFINKIEL: Is France Going National-Socialist? Well, they’ve always been nationalist, and they’ve become increasingly socialist, so it’s not entirely implausible.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: New York Gets Cold Feet On Common Core. It’s an out-of-date idea, badly executed.
OBAMA’S STIMULUS, FIVE YEARS LATER: “The $830 billion spending blowout was sold by the White House as a way to keep unemployment from rising above 8%. But the stimulus would fail on its own terms. 2009 marked the first of four straight years when unemployment averaged more than 8%. And of course the unemployment rate would have been even worse in those years and still today if so many people had not quit the labor force, driving labor-participation rates to 1970s levels.”
NONSENSE. REPEAL THE HOLLYWOOD TAX CUTS! Hollywood asks California to cut taxes — for the film industry.
ED DRISCOLL: Crimes and Misdemeanors and the Dachau Gift Shop.
ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER: New IRS threat to political expression. “It’s true that the confluence of money and politics can prove dangerous, but the greater danger surely stems from empowering those who govern to restrict the manner in which those who are governed can express their political viewpoints. That’s the reason that liberal and conservative groups alike are opposed to the proposed IRS rules. A free people deserve the right to voice their political opinions without state interference – a task made immensely more difficult by the IRS’ new proposal. For that reason, the proposed rules deserve to be abandoned with haste.”
WES PRUDEN: Hillary Clinton’s War On Women.
Kathleen Willey, who was a prominent Democratic volunteer in the first Clinton campaign in 1992, has resurrected her accusation — never refuted — that when she accepted an invitation to call on Bubba at the White House she got no help in getting a job, but “nothing short of serious sexual harassment.”
Mrs. Willey told interviewer Aaron Klein on WABC radio in New York that she’s bringing up the story now because Hillary was Bubba’s enabler, and manipulated the response to the sexual scandals that defined the Clinton years. Hillary, she says, has never been the friend of women she pretends to be.
Nope. She smeared and intimidated ’em whenever they got in the way.
Hmm. Nobody minded talking about Mitt Romney’s much more distant past.
Related: Byron York: Why Hillary Clinton’s past is fair game in presidential race.
Of course Clinton’s recent experiences are relevant to a presidential run. But so are her actions in the 90s, the 80s and even the 70s. It’s not ancient history; it reveals something about who Clinton was and still is. And re-examining her past is entirely consistent with practices in recent campaigns.
In the 2012 presidential race, for example, many in the press were very interested in business deals Mitt Romney made in the 1980s. In the 2004 race, many journalists were even more interested in what George W. Bush did with the Texas Air National Guard in 1968, as well as what John Kerry did in Vietnam that same year. And in 2000, a lot of journalists invested a lot of time trying to find proof that Bush had used cocaine three decades earlier.
So by the standards set in coverage of other candidates, Clinton’s past is not too far past.
That’s especially true because there will be millions of young voters in 2016 who know little about the Clinton White House. Americans who had not even been born when Bill Clinton first took the oath of office in 1993 will be eligible to vote two years from now. They need to know that Hillary Clinton has been more than Secretary of State.
Those voters need to know, for starters, that Mrs. Clinton once displayed incredible investment skills. In 1978 and 1979, when her husband was attorney general and then governor of Arkansas, she enlisted the help of a well-connected crony to invest $1,000 in the highly volatile and risky cattle futures market. Several months later, she walked away with $100,000 — a 10,000-percent profit. Cynics thought the well-connected crony who executed the trades might have paid her the profits from good trades and absorbed the losses from bad ones, but Mrs. Clinton insisted that she developed her investing acumen by reading the Wall Street Journal.
New voters also need to learn about Mrs. Clinton’s checkered history as a lawyer and the game of hide-and-seek she played with federal prosecutors who subpoenaed her old billing records as part of the Whitewater investigation. After two years of defying subpoenas and not producing the records, she suddenly claimed that they had been in a closet in the White House residence all along.
New voters also need to learn about Mrs. Clinton’s purge of the White House travel office, which was done to steer business to another Clinton crony. There’s no doubt she directed the 1993 firings of long-time White House employees although she testified under oath that she did not. Years later, prosecutors concluded that “Mrs. Clinton’s sworn testimony … is factually inaccurate.”
And the Lewinsky scandal, in which Hillary helped attack Lewinsky, and numerous other women like Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones, in order to protect Bill. War on women? On the inconvenient women, certainly.
Also: Why Monica Lewinsky is relevant: Liberals have redefined sexual harassment. “Rand Paul has cagily been reminding us of the fact that Bill Clinton is a sexual predator. That DOES matter now, because it demonstrates just how painfully hypocritical democrats are with regard to the treatment of women. Clinton is a sexual predator and Hillary was his enabler.”
Plus: The Vetting of Hillary Already Labeled ‘Sexist’ in the Media. Makes sense. After all, vetting Obama was supposed to be racist, or something.
UPDATE: Limbaugh: Dems Can ‘Attack Palin’s Whole Family,’ But GOP Won’t Dare Target Hillary.
INCEST IS BEST: Roll Call: Former Clinton Aide Announces Bid for Waxman’s Seat. “Matt Miller, a former aide to President Bill Clinton and current Washington Post columnist, announced a bid for the seat of retiring Rep. Henry A. Waxman on Friday. With his announcement, Miller becomes the third Democrat to announce a bid for the district, located in the heart of Los Angeles County.”
THE HILL: Republicans open investigations into ObamaCare’s disaster sites.
Republicans are launching investigations into three state-run ObamaCare exchanges that are failing disastrously.
Lawmakers are setting their sites on exchanges in Oregon, Maryland and Massachusetts where Democratic governors embraced the healthcare law, and are demanding to know why their expensive online portals remain useless more than four months after launch.
On Wednesday, four Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) requesting a review of the $304 million in federal grants that Oregon received to build its broken website.
“The catastrophic breakdown of Cover Oregon is unacceptable, and taxpayers deserve accountability,” wrote the group of lawmakers led by Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.).
The scrutiny of the state enrollment portals is a shift from October, when the federal site HealthCare.Gov was out of service but state-run exchanges in California, New York and even red Kentucky appeared to be humming along.
But several states are having major problems with their ObamaCare sites.
In Oregon, not even one person has yet to enroll online, leaving the state completely reliant on paper applications.
Wow. Not one person after all these months.
WELL, THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN EVERY DAY: Mom expecting triplets gives birth to identical quadruplets.
February 17, 2014
SO, PRETTY MUCH LIKE HIS OTHER STATS ON GUN VIOLENCE, THEN: Bloomberg’s latest stats on school gun violence ignore reality.
HUGO CHAVEZ IS DEAD, BUT HIS LEGACY LIVES ON. And that means that Venezuela is in a heap of trouble. “It is easier to destroy than to build. Much easier. That’s true whether destruction is your goal or not. And if you’re blinded by the need to stick to your ideology and declare it a success no matter what the truth is, you may not even know what’s going on until Humpty Dumpty finally takes that tumble.” Good thing that could never happen here.