Coyote Blog

Yours Truly, on July 16, 2009:

It is totally clear to me that Obama and Pelosi will spend any amount of money to pass their key legislative initiatives.  In the case of Waxman-Markey, the marginal price per vote turned out to be about $3.5 billion.  But they didn't even blink at paying this.  That is why I fear that some horrible form of health care "reform" may actually pass.  If it does, the marginal cost per vote may be higher, but I don't think our leaders care.

Barbara Hollingsworth, 11/4:

The Heritage Foundation's Dennis Smith says that a "manager's amendment" to Pelosi's controversial 1,900 "“page health care bill includes new provisions that will allow back-door payoffs to specific members of Congress, such as more favorable Medicare reimbursements to particular doctors or hospitals and lower taxes on medical device manufacturers in certain congressional districts.

One such earmark - which Smith says "suddenly appeared" after the Energy and Commerce Committee had already completed its work - creates a new $6 billion Medicaid slush fund for nursing homes to be doled out by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, with no input from the states, ordinary rulemaking or administrative review.

This is nothing but a blatant attempt to buy off wavering Blue Dog Democrats. Just when you thought this bloated behemoth couldn't get any worse, it does.

I usually use Google search ads for my business, but I decided to try Yahoo! in parallel for a while.  After some admittedly brief and narrow experience, I think the various metrics of search engine market share are understating Google's lead (supposedly Google has about 50% and Yahoo 20%).  Here are the number of impressions I got for roughly the same 2 days and same set of search terms and maximum bids:

Yahoo:  175

Google:  3132  (search only)

Google:  74,000 (search + content network)

Neither account hit a budget limit on these days.  Of course this might change with the nature of the search given different demographics in the user bases.  An academic term would likely get more on Google than Yahoo, proportionately.

No point here, just interesting.  I really was kind of shocked how pathetic the Yahoo numbers are.

The civil courts of Maricopa County (which includes Phoenix) are being overwhelmed by photo-radar cases from state photo-radar trucks on state highways.

In the 2008 fiscal year, ending June 2008, the total annual filings in the justice courts amounted to 435,014, which included DUI, traffic, misdemeanor and civil cases, according to the county. Since November 2008, speed-camera cases have flooded the justice courts, averaging 42,326 cases a month, accounting for 50 percent of the filings. Administrators for the justice courts expect the total might reach 600,000 this fiscal year.

Of course the solution proposed is not to get rid of the photo radar but to raise fees to cover the administration.  But you could have guessed that without me telling your, couldn't you?

Because when they defend this practice, they put themselves on record that they have absolutely no integrity in the process:

About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren't saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren't saved....

But officials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs.

"If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job," HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said....

More than 250 other community agencies in the U.S. similarly reported saving jobs when using the money to give pay raises, to pay for training and continuing education, to extend employee work hours or to buy equipment, according to their spending reports.

Uh, right.  So does this mean that the Administration's pay Czar is destroying jobs by reducing salaries?  Seems like one would have to take this position to be consistent.  And wasn't, by the same logic, AIG actually creating jobs with the now-infamous bonuses earlier this year?

And by the way, it seems like those ACORN-like community organizers are returning the favors Obama has extended them by applying to the jobs reporting system their famously rigorous accounting standards they bring to their own finances as well as to voter registration .

Other tidbits from the article are also priceless:

President Barack Obama's economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success story for the stimulus plan. Trouble is, only 508 people work there.

There is also another impression one gets from the article, other than seeing all the fraud, they is not highlighted by the reporter -- all of the jobs created seem to be government bureaucrat jobs or community group jobs.  Not one example of jobs actually producing something someone is willing to buy.  Except maybe for this example:

How did Kentucky shoe store owner Buddy Moore save nine jobs with just $889.60 in federal stimulus money? He didn't, and that's turning into a big headache for him.

Moore's store in Campbellsville, Ky., filed one of 156,614 reports from recipients of stimulus dollars designed to show how money from the $787 billion program is being spent, and how many jobs the funds have created or saved.

Moore's slice of the stimulus came in an $889.60 order from the Army Corps of Engineers for nine pairs of work boots for a stimulus project....

Paula Moore-Kirby...couldn't work out how to answer the question about how many jobs her father had created or saved. She couldn't leave it blank, either, she said. After several calls to a helpline for recipients she came away with the impression that she would hear back if there was a problem with her response, and have a chance to correct it. So with 15 minutes to go before the reporting deadline, she sent in her answer: nine jobs, because her father helped nine members of the Corps to work.

Kevin Drum makes a good point about the Italian rendition trials.  While it is good to see some pushback on the horrible practice of kidnapping people and dumping them in countries that have no qualms about torture (sort of an outsourcing of ethics), the Italians stopped well short of showing any real backbone:

Let me get this straight: the Italian judge was happy to convict a bunch of Americans who he knew would never pay a price since they'll never be extradited, but he wasn't willing to convict the Italians involved in all this, who would have paid a price.  You'll excuse me, I hope, if I don't exactly see this as a triumph of judicial independence.  Convicting a bunch of foreigners is easy.  It's holding your own people to account that's hard.  Wake me up when either of our countries starts doing that.

Via Anthony Watt, from the UK Telegraph:

An executive has won the right to sue his employer on the basis that he was unfairly dismissed for his green views after a judge ruled that environmentalism had the same weight in law as religious and philosophical beliefs.

"¦

In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that "a belief in man-made climate change "¦ is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations".

The ruling could open the door for employees to sue their companies for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel.

"¦

John Bowers QC, representing Grainger, had argued that adherence to climate change theory was "a scientific view rather than a philosophical one", because "philosophy deals with matters that are not capable of scientific proof."

That argument has now been dismissed by Mr Justice Burton, who last year ruled that the environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore was political and partisan.

The decision allows the tribunal to go ahead, but more importantly sets a precedent for how environmental beliefs are regarded in English law.

Wow!  Its a  religion, not a scientific position.  I probably should be laughing, but I'm not.

This may see obvious to those of you in the rest of the country, but there are real problems with treating a man uniquely allowed to use force against the citizenry like a rock star.  And that is how certain segments of the local population treat Sheriff Joe Arpaio.   As one abuse of power after another is revealed, his supporters respond  "Isn't he so colorful, just like an old-time western sheriff."

For the rest of us his schtick gets old.  The county has spent millions defending lawsuit after lawsuit against him.  The INS has stripped him of his power to track down illegal immigrants, but he still ventures out on sweeps to arrest folks for driving while Mexican, arresting more people of Mexican decent than I though even existed in certain neighborhoods.  He has arrested reporters who criticized him, and arrested people who applauded a speaker who criticized him.  He even launched a mini-coup attempt against the County which employs him, invading the County offices and taking over a computer system that contained emails he had been unable to subpoena.  In the latter case, the County had to seek a restraining order against its own Sheriff!

Unfortunately, Arpaio's indifference to due process and individual rights obviously has percolated to the entire staff.  Here is the most recent craziness -- during  a trial, a Sheriff's deputy starts going through the defendant's attorney's papers, and takes some of them  (all of which were attorney-client privileged).

The explanation was that the documents had not been screened for contraband and weapons, so the deputy had to take (what looks like a couple of sheets of paper) away to study them to make sure there was no gun  stapled to them or something.  This so lame I am not sure how they can even say it with a straight face, but true to form the Sheriff's office is rallying around its own.  More in the AZ Republic.

Why is it the organizations (ie police departments) whom we entrust with uniquely scary power to use force on us citizens tend to have the least well developed internal checks and accountability processes?

Update: Random example of police not getting prosecuted for abuse of power, from today's news.  Folks like Miller and Radley Balko can fill their blogs with these type cases every day and not get them all.

In Europe, economies are run by a troika of politicians, leaders of large corporations, and major unions.  These groups run the economy to their benefit and against entrepeneurs, nwe competitors, foreign competition, low-skilled workers, upstart competitors, and (most of all) consumers.   Q&O discovered someone on the HuffPo of all places starting to see what is going on:

When I heard the word "corporatist" a couple of years ago, I laughed. I thought what a funny, made up, liberal word. I fancy myself a die-hard capitalist, so it seemed vaguely anti-business, so I was put off by it.

Well, as it turns out, it's a great word. It perfectly describes a great majority of our politicians and the infrastructure set up to support the current corporations in the country. It is not just inaccurate to call these people and these corporations capitalists; it is in fact the exact opposite of what they are.

Capitalists believe in choice, free markets and competition. Corporatists believe in the opposite. They don't want any competition at all. They want to eliminate the competition using their power, their entrenched position and usually the politicians they've purchased. They want to capture the system and use it only for their benefit.

This applies to workers as well as employers -- just replace capitalists with "free workers" and corporatists with "unions" in the above paragraph.  This helps to explain why Obama is not actually pro-labor, but pro-union.  Via TJIC:

Workers in Barack Obama's new economic order fall into two categories "” those who are worthy of the president's energies, and those who aren't. You may be surprised to learn where you rank.

Obama doesn't weigh the value of workers based on their paychecks, what they do or whether they slip their feet into wingtips or steel-toed boots in the morning. His sole interest is in whether they have a union card in their wallet.

If they do, the president is in their corner, working hard to make sure they don't get the short end of any stick. But if they are among the 88 percent of American workers who don't belong to a union? Ask Delphi's salaried employees what Obama thinks of them.

As part of Delphi's restructuring in bankruptcy court, the Troy-based auto parts maker dumped its pension plan onto the federal Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp.

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That usually means a continued pension check, but one that is much smaller. And for Delphi's salaried workers, that's what they can expect.

Delphi's union-represented workers, however, will dodge that bullet. The Obama administration swooped in and, in an extraordinary deal, is forcing General Motors to make the 46,000 union workers and retirees whole. GM used to own Delphi, and relies on the supplier for much of its parts.

"The U.S. government is taking care of a select group of people and tossing the rest of us under the bus," Peter Beiter, a retired financial manager for a Delphi plant in Rochester, N.Y., told the New York Times.

And it's doing so with the tax dollars of those like Beiter who aren't in the favored class of workers. GM is operating with more than $50 billion in government bailout money.

That gives Obama the freedom to force GM to subsidize the pensions of union workers it has no legal obligation to, and who are employed by an entirely different company.

If you want to see where we are going, read this (and this) about the National Industrial Recovery Act, which FDR modelled after Mussolin-style fascism, whose economic system he greatly admired.

I almost never comment on horserace politics, so I had just three thoughts this morning:

1. Who are these 20% or so of the voters who slew back and forth in as little as a few months between the two parties?  What goes on in their head -- "The Republicans are threatening my freedoms, I better vote Democrat.  Oh no, the Democrats are now threatening my freedoms, I better vote Republican."  At what point do folks wake up and say "both these parties threaten my freedoms whenever they are in power - I wonder if there is an alternative?"
2. The spin put on the election by everyone is both predictable and hilarious.  We will soon see what lessons the Democrats really took from the election by what legislation they bring to a vote this year and what they delay.
3. One thing I am surprised Republicans did not mention today --  A Republican was more succesful in getting a Democrat elected with her endorsement (NY23) than was Democrat Obama with his support and endorsement of the Democratic candidate in New Jersey.  Though of course Corzine was a sleazebag, so its unclear if there are any real national messages in that election.

A social science study that has something good to say about TV.  I agree with Miller that it seems a stretch to call this economics.

Via Phil Miller

Tennessee police said a mechanic was drumming up business by tampering with parked cars, then charging to help start them. Police arrested 41-year-old Christopher Walls of Johnson City on Thursday night.

Investigators said Walls disabled cars parked at restaurants, waited for the owners to try to start them and then offered his services as a mechanic. Police said Walls charged between $40 and $200 to get the vehicles running again.

He's charged with two counts of theft under $500, but police suspect there are other victims. They're urging anyone else who thinks they were scammed to call them.

I was familiar with the dynamics of the all-pay auction (I always called it the Wargames auction -- the only winning move is not to play).  I had never thought of it as a good analog for lobbying expenditures, but it makes a lot of sense once David Zetland made the point.  Good video at the link.

This was sent to me by a reader, something called the "Environmental Justice Small Grants Program."  Over the last 20 years, socialists who realized their message wasn't selling anymore remarketed themselves under the green "global warming" banner.  Coincidentally, all the exact same things socialists wanted 20 years ago are what we need to do to fight global warming.

It appears that ACORN may be getting a second life using this same strategy.  I can't bear to read all this leftish public policy psychobabble in the document, but did note this early on:

The primary purposes of proposed projects should be to develop an understanding of environmental and public health issues and to identify ways to address these issues at the local level, and educate and empower the community. The long-term goals of the EJSG Program are to help build the capacity of the communities with environmental justice concerns and create self-sustaining, community-based partnerships that will continue to improve local environments in the future.

There is a well-established scientific consensus that climate change will cause disproportionate impacts upon vulnerable populations. [1] Thus, the program is adding emphasis this year on addressing the disproportionate impacts of climate change in communities with environmental justice concerns. The goal is to recognize the critical role of grassroots efforts in helping shape climate change strategies to avoid, lessen, or delay the risks and impacts associated with climate change. An overarching goal of including this emphasis is to help increase the number of underrepresented communities and ensure equitable green economic development in ways that build healthy sustainable communities.

This translates to "we have found a way to hand out government money to leftish groups like ACORN to do things that are impossible to measure and thus bear little accountability by calling it all "Green."

By the way, the little footnote to prove the statement above is this:

[1]  As stated in the Technical Support Document for the Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (April 2009), "Within settlements experiencing climate change, certain parts of the population may be especially vulnerable; these include the poor, the elderly, those already in poor health, the disabled, those living alone, those with limited rights and power (such as recent immigrants with limited English skills), and/or indigenous populations dependent on one or a few resources. Thus, the potential impacts of climate change raise environmental justice issues."

Given that cap-and-trade is almost certainly going to impose a very large regressive tax disproportionately on the poor, I wonder why no one ever discusses environmental-solution justice issues?  Maybe it really has nothing to do with the poor, but just with power.

...except when we do.  I think everyone pretty much assumed that Obama's promise of treating GM like a real business and not as a political plaything was BS from the start, particularly when Congress started intervening in dealer-closure decisions about 5 seconds after the promise left Obama's lips.

Henry Payne has a roundup of Congressional micro-management at GM.  One example:

Chrysler and GM have moved aggressively to cut their transportation costs, effecting Teamster jobs and riling the union's political friends. Chrysler, for example, will save 25 percent of its $111 million annual hauling budget by transferring to lower-cost carriers. But Michigan reps from both sides of the aisle are unimpressed, reports the Detroit News. "Relatively minor short-term cost savings generated by shifting this work to non-unionized companies is greatly outweighed by the elimination of good-paying, union middle-class jobs," complains Michigan Republican Thaddeus McCotter.

What do "good-paying" trucking jobs have anything to do with GM's health?

From the Tax Foundation via Bruce McQuain, I don't think this needs any comment:

Via Anthony Watt, from the Oregonian

State officials deliberately underestimated the cost of Gov. Ted Kulongoski's plan to lure green energy companies to Oregon with big taxpayer subsidies, resulting in a program that cost 40 times more than unsuspecting lawmakers were told, an investigation by The Oregonian shows.

Records also show that the program, a favorite of Kulongoski's known as the Business Energy Tax Credit, has given millions of dollars to failed companies while voters are being asked to raise income taxes because the state budget doesn't have enough to pay for schools and other programs....

According to documents obtained under Oregon's public records law, agency officials estimated in a Nov. 16, 2006, spreadsheet that expanding the tax credits would cost taxpayers an additional $13 million in 2007-09. But after a series of scratch-outs and scribbled notes, a new spreadsheet pared the cost to $1.8 million. And when energy officials handed their final estimate to the Legislature in February 2007, they pegged the added cost at just $1.2 million for the first two years and $4.1 million for 2009-11.

The higher estimates were never shown to lawmakers. Current and former energy staffers acknowledged a clear attempt to minimize the cost of the subsidies.

"I remember that discussion. Everyone was saying, yes, this is going to be a huge (budget) hit," recalled Charles Stephens, a former analyst for the Energy Department who left in 2006. "The governor's office was saying, 'No, we need a smaller number.'"

Hmm, sounds eerily like what is going on with the health care bill in Congress.

Update: It turns out that all of the "green" companies so far have sold their tax credits for cash to companies like Wal-Mart and US Bank.  This is no enormous problem (though the optics are terrible for the state) but it is yet another reason why the Oregon budget gets busted by this program -- a startup solar company won't use tax credits for years as it will take some time to be profitable (if they ever are) but Wal-Mart can use them right now.

Here is the question:  In estimating the number of net jobs created by the stimulus package, how many jobs did the Administration assume were lost when hundreds of billions of dollars were pulled out of private hands and distributed by public authorities?

And the answer to that question is just one reason the analysis is absurd.  I have seen a lot of good critiques about accounting in the jobs numbers.  But the biggest single problem is that it is assumed that the trillion dollars Obama has pulled out of private capital markets (via deficit spending) wasn't really doing anything productive, so that redirecting it into pork-barrel programs chosen by Congress based on their campaign donor lists and run by government bureaucrats would use the money much better.

Anyone believe this?  So why have I not seen a single reporter ask the question, "But how many jobs were lost from where these funds were taken?"  Just because they are invisible or hard to count does not mean they don't exist.

Cash for clunkers has raised used car prices, particularly for the poor looking for cars under $5000

In her search for a cheap, used minivan for her and her husband, Krissy Dieroff has visited seven dealerships across Berks and Schuylkill counties in the last week, but to no avail.

"There's not much to pick from, and the ones we do find are overpriced," said Dieroff of Auburn, Schuylkill County, while browsing the lot of a city dealership on Monday.

Dieroff blames the shortage of inexpensive used cars on the federal cash-for-clunkers program, in which almost 700,000 used vehicles were traded in for newer, more fuel-efficient vehicles, and then scrapped.

Some local used car dealers specializing in vehicles priced $5,000 and under agreed that there are fewer inexpensive vehicles available.

The trend is occurring nationally as well.

The Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index reported that prices reached record highs in September. The consulting firm that publishes the index blamed low inventories.

That's bad news in Berks, where many shoppers seek inexpensive, used vehicles, especially during difficult economic times, said George Tabakelis, general manager of Perry Auto Service & Sales on Route 61 in Perry Township.

"Customers used to be able to find a good car for their son or daughter to take to college for $2,000 or $3,000, but now that same car may cost $5,000," Tabakelis said. "It's sad."

Via Maggies Farm

The media in the 1970's was filled with Club-of-Rome, the world is over-populated and running out of everything, Paul Ehrlich Population Bomb, end of the world stuff.  We know they were wrong on resources and pollution, but it turns out they were wrong on population too.  Again, the power of growth and wealth:

"When people got richer, families got smaller; and as families got smaller, people got richer. Now, something similar is happening in developing countries. Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places"” such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India"”that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less"”the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called "˜the replacement rate of fertility'. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world's fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate."

Wow, who would have predicted this (other than everybody)?

The latest French utopia (Vélib', Paris's bicycle rental system) has met a prosaic reality: Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped.

With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program's organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche, as not everyone shares the spirit of joint public property promoted by Paris's Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë.

At least 8,000 bikes have been stolen and 8,000 damaged so badly that they had to be replaced "” nearly 80 percent of the initial stock. JCDecaux must repair some 1,500 bicycles a day. The company maintains 10 repair shops and a workshop on a boat that moves up and down the Seine.

It is commonplace now to see the bikes at docking stations in Paris with flat tires, punctured wheels or missing baskets. Some Vélib's have been found hanging from lampposts, dumped in the Seine, used on the streets of Bucharest or resting in shipping containers on their way to North Africa. Some are simply appropriated and repainted.

I guess I can understand why there might be some confusion. After all, it only has been for about 200 years or so that we have really understood this kind of problem in economic terms and about 4000 years that we have understood it in practical terms. Maybe the French have not heard of it because they are still debating what French word to use for "the tragedy of the commons.'

My vote:  mandatory income tax withholding.  Taxpayers never see most of the money they pay the Feds.   They don't have the shock of seeing the amount of money going to the government in one big check.  Since most formulas lead to over-withholding, people are actually eager to file their tax returns to get refunded the money that was withheld in excess of liability (e.g. interest-free loan to government).  Employers, who live in fear of violating one of a hundred thousand different labor rules, are more than willing to withhold whatever the government asks - they certainly aren't going to stand in front of the tanks to protect their employees' money.

California is taking this law to the next logical level of abuse:  Increasing the interest-free loan that citizens must give the state.  If free credit markets won't lend you money at a rate you can afford, force your citizens to lend it for free:

Starting Sunday, cash-strapped California will dig deeper into the pocketbooks of wage earners "” holding back 10% more than it already does in state income taxes just as the biggest shopping season of the year kicks into gear.

Technically, it's not a tax increase, even though it may feel like one when your next paycheck arrives. As part of a bundle of budget patches adopted in the summer, the state is taking more money now in withholding, even though workers' annual tax bills won't change.

Think of it as a forced, interest-free loan: You'll be repaid any extra withholding in April. Those who would receive a refund anyway will receive a larger one, and those who owe taxes will owe less.

I am starting to feel a sort of anti-irredentism for California.

We sometimes forget the good news.  Growth is not the enemy.  Growth, technology, trade, markets, capitalism -- these have improved the lives of more people more quickly than any number of Irish rock stars putting on benefit concerts.  Via Carpe Diem

Frequent readers know I almost never call statements "a lie."  I try to take the position that reasonable people can disagree without either lying.  I hate all the "Lying liars and the lies they tell their lying supporters" type books.

But I simply can find no other way to explain this statement:

"There isn't anything we could do to satisfy them in this health care bill. Nothing," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said. "They are so anti-competitive. Why? Because they make more money than any other business in America today. . . .What a sweet deal they have."

I have written about this any number of times, but Carpe Diem also has the numbers at the link - health care insurers are well below average both in profit margin and return on capital, the two most common measures of profitability.  For the last couple of years, most large health care companies have made less than 5% return on sales.

The only other explanation is the neither the House Majority Leader, his staff, President Obama, or Nancy Pelosi and her staff (all of whom have echoed this same meme) have never once spent the 12 seconds going to Google finance or the Wall Street Journal to look the number up.

Nancy Pelosi once said:

I'm very pleased that our Chair of our Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and member of the leadership will be talking too about the immoral profits being made by the insurance industry and how those profits have increased in the Bush years. We all believe in the profit motive; we all want to reward success.  But having that success come at the expense of America's working families "” have that success come by withholding care, when a person becomes ill, is just not right and we're going to take this issue in a new direction.

Liberal pundit Kevin Drum, who really should know enough to look it up, once said:

It means the health insurance industry is scared that we might actually do something in 2009 and they want to be seen as something other than completely obstructionist. That means only one thing: they've shown fear, and now it's time to bore in for the kill and gut them like trouts. Let's get to it.