Coyote Blog

From Radley Balko, this is just staggering:

Federal employees’ job security is so great that workers in many agencies are more likely to die of natural causes than get laid off or fired, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Death — rather than poor performance, misconduct or layoffs — is the primary threat to job security at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and a dozen other federal operations.

The federal government fired 0.55% of its workers in the budget year that ended Sept. 30 — 11,668 employees in its 2.1 million workforce. Research shows that the private sector fires about 3% of workers annually for poor performance . . .

The 1,800-employee Federal Communications Commission and the 1,200-employee Federal Trade Commission didn’t lay off or fire a single employee last year. The SBA had no layoffs, six firings and 17 deaths in its 4,000-employee workforce.

When job security is at a premium, the federal government remains the place to work for those who want to avoid losing a job. The job security rate for all federal workers was 99.43% last year and nearly 100% for those on the job more than a few years . . .

White-collar federal workers have almost total job security after a few years on the job. Last year, the government fired none of its 3,000 meteorologists, 2,500 health insurance administrators, 1,000 optometrists, 800 historians or 500 industrial property managers.

The nearly half-million federal employees earning $100,000 or more enjoyed a 99.82% job security rate in 2010. Only 27 of 35,000 federal attorneys were fired last year. None was laid off.

Forgetting for a minute the adverse selection and incentive problems from preferentially attracting folks who want to work in an environment without any accountability for performance, how can an institution that is running $1 trillion over budget not have any layoff either?

As you probably know, Minnesota is in the midst of a government shutdown due to lack of a budget.  My daughter is doing a project for me putting together the names and contact information for all 50 state parks directors.  It turns out the MN parks web site is shut down.

LOL.  I am the only one in my company with access to or capable of updating our web site, but I can go away for weeks, even months, and have the web site stay up.  This strikes me as either stupid, or a gratuitous effort to purposely make the shutdown more dramatic than it needs to be.

To the latter point, our company operates many Federal parks.   Since we take no money from the government and use no government personell in doing so, the parks we operate typically stay open in a Federal shut down.  Except for the last threatened shut down several months ago, when our contract managers seemed to be getting guidance from their higher ups in the administration to shut the parks down, even when they did not need to be.  I presume this was for the purpose of making the shut down seem worse to the public.  After all, we would hate to have a government shut down and have nobody notice.

It will be interesting come about August 2 to see if we remain open.

Update:  Make sure to see bottom of post, I have run the numbers from the source and the chart below is proven to be totally BS.

In an effort to paint the current budget deficit as a tax shortfall (ie we don't take enough of others people's money) rather than a spending problem, Kevin Drum offers this chart:

OK, I was going to talk about how they cherry-picked the start date (which is the peak of spending at that time since WWII) and the end date (the left off the ugly 2011).  But I just can't bring myself to talk about anything else except those trendlines.  Not sure what algorithm Drum uses to create the trendlines -- they seem suspicious but surely someone in the science-based, reality-based community would not just draw them on by eye!

It is just incredibly disingenuous (and ballsy) to try to portray 2009 and 2010, which represented the highest numbers since WWII, as a declining trend line falling faster than revenues.

Postscript: Here is the longer view, from here, with projections which I presume come from the Obama budget.  I think if I took 1950 as a start point I would get pretty different trend lines.

Update: Here is the data right from the Federal web site with Excel adding a linear trend.  Sure looks like Drum is wildly exaggerating.  Just as in Drum's chart, red is outlays as a percentage of GDP, blue is collections.

So lets look at the longer trend.  WWII was obviously an anomaly, so we will jump to 1950 to make sure we are well past it.  And we will go through 2012, because those projections are probably pretty good (though optimistic on the spending side).

Here is Drum's chart, with the longer trend and actual mathematically rather than politically calculated trend lines.

Hmmmm.  Revenue or spending problem.  You make the call.

Apparently the newest pro-tax meme out of the Left is that millions of dumb Americans don't already know that they are benefactors of social spending programs and that if they understood this, they would surely support government expansion.  Such programs they highlight include:

• 529 or Coverdell savings deduction
• mortgage interest deduction
• hope or lifetime learning tax credit
• student loans
• child and dependent tax care credit

etc. etc.  Whole list here.  I don't want to spend too much time on this silliness, but two immediate responses come to mind

1. If tax credits, ie the ability to keep more of your money and be taxed less, is a government social program, then the implication is that all your money belongs to the government, and the very fact you keep any of it is a gift or benefaction of the government for which you should be grateful.  The fact the Left cannot understand the simple difference between, on the one hand, keeping more of your own money, and on the other, getting money that has been taken by force from others, explains a lot about the current budget fight.
2. In many cases, Americans "benefit" from government programs because the government does not allow any alternative.  Or, if it allows an alternative, the government provides heavily subsidized services or pre-paid services (e.g. public education which you pay for whether you use it or not) that crowd out private alternatives.  Just because roads and schools and home loans have heavy government involvement does not mean that they require that government involvement to exist.

More analysis here.

Several times in the past I have posited that folks in power simply hate buses.  How else to explain light rail and high speed rail projects that are both substantially more expensive and substantially less flexible than buses.  Some of the reasons for this include:

• Politicians like rail better because it is sexier.  Period.   They are trying to spend taxpayer money to support their own re-election talking points.
• Unions and city workers like rail because it is more expensive.  More money gets spent, either creating more union jobs or giving transit leaders bigger budgets which translate into higher salaries and more prestige for themselves.  And the lack of flexibility is good for them because it makes their job immune to budget cutting.  Just too many sunk costs.
• Middle and upper-middle class folks in the public have a deep disdain for buses, which they associate with poverty and blue collar labor.  Riding buses hurts their self image, even if the service is no worse than trains.  Rail is the Louis Vuitton handbag of transit.

In Phoenix, light rail requires a subsidy of $3.82 center per mile (that is the government spending above and beyond the fare), which is nearly 10x what we spend on buses.  And light rail uses more energy per passenger mile here than driving.

Anyway, this story from Iowa seems to support my point -- the government is proposing to spend tens of millions of dollars to create a rail service that is slower and more costly than existing private bus service.

The latest in lunacy in high-speed rail lunacy: at Joel Kotkin’s newgeography.com Wendell Cox reports that the U.S. Transportation Department is dangling money before the government of Iowa seeking matching funds from the state for a high-speed rail line from Iowa City to Chicago. The “high-speed” trains would average 45 miles per hour and take five hours to reach Chicago from Iowa City. One might wonder how big the market for this service is, since Iowa City and Johnson County have only 130,882 people; add in adjoining Linn County (Cedar Rapids) and you’re only up to 342,108—not really enough, one would think, to supply enough riders to cover operating costs much less construction costs.

Oh, one other thing. Cox reports that there is already luxury bus service, with plus for laptops and wireless Internet, from Iowa City to Chicago. It’s part of a larger trend for private companies to offer convenient and inexpensive bus service. A one-way ticket on the bus costs $18, compared to a likely train fare of more than $50. And the bus takes only three hours and 50 minutes to get from Iowa City to Chicago. That’s one hour and 10 minutes faster than the “high-speed” train.

The city of Glendale, Arizona (a 250,000 population suburb of Phoenix) continues to pour money into its NHL Hockey Team.  The city has already spent $200 million on a stadium and is trying to find a legal way to hand $100 million to a private individual to buy the team and keep it in Glendale.  But that is not even the end of it:

The Phoenix Coyotes are expected to stay in Glendale at least one more season, with or without a permanent owner, if the City Council pledges another $25 million to the National Hockey League.

The cash would go to offset team and arena losses.....

The pledge is the second financial promise in as many years.

Glendale this week paid $25 million it pledged the league a year ago in hopes of keeping the Coyotes in town until a permanent owner was found.

The city paid this year's $25 million from a utilities-repair account.

It's unclear whether that same fund would be used again and when the city would have to pay.

The NHL says the team and arena lost $37 million last season.

Just to give you a sense of scale, $25 million a year is larger than the city's fire department budget.  It is over $100 for every man, woman, and child in the city, each of the last two years.  Residents of the town are subsidizing a money-losing team mainly enjoyed, to the extent it has fans, by people outside of the city of Glendale.  It is a $25 million city annual expenditure that mainly helps three or four bars and restaurants next to the facility.  Just paying off those obviously politically connected retail owners a few hundred thousand each would be cheaper.

My column this week in Forbes is a response to yesterday's Presidential budget speech.  An excerpt:

President Obama is working from the assumption that the political leader who suggests painful but necessary budget cuts first, loses.   He had every opportunity to propose and pass a budget when he had Democratic majorities in Congress.   But Democrats feared that showing leadership on the hard budget choices they faced would hurt them in the November election, so they punted.

Even when Obama did produce a budget, it was the closest thing to a non-entity as could be imagined.   A budget that doubles government debt over 10 years and raises interest costs (under optimistic assumptions) to a trillion dollars a year would likely be controversial in any year, but is a non-starter given fresh memories of debt crises in Greece, Ireland and a number of other countries.

Of course there is an 800-lb gorilla in the room that no one wants to acknowledge:  Three programs —  Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — grow in the next 10 years under current rules to at least $2.7 trillion dollars a year.  Recognize that this figure excludes all the other so-called non-discretionary payments (unemployment, food stamps, etc.) as well as everything else the government does including the military and Obamacare. The 2021 spending on just those three programs is 25% higher than the total revenue of the federal government from all sources in 2011.

Later in the article, I suggest ten principles that should be the foundation of a budget deal.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio constantly gets a pass for some of the most outrageous hijinx from Phoenix's conservative population that sees him as the last bastion between them and brown-skinned people.  Tell someone he is above the law, and he is going to act above the law

​As Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio crows this morning about how his agency busted a total of six illegal immigrants for using fake IDs so they could work at a Mesa dry cleaner, county budget officials unveiled the results of a six-month investigation into how his office is misspending your money.

If you pay taxes in Maricopa County, it's not pretty.

In total, the county finds that Arpaio and his cronies misspent $99.5 million over the last eight years, the majority of which came from the sheriff's detention fund.

"For eight years, you have been signing paperwork that says your budget is balanced, but it's not," County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox reportedly told sheriff's officials at this morning's meeting of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.

Budget officers reviewed payroll records for 5,700 sheriff's employee salaries from February 2004 to February 2011 and found that much of what employees were actuallydoing was not what they were getting paid to do.

via Maggies Farm

For all the criticism by the Left of corporate corruption, nothing that goes on in even the most dysfunctional corporations matches business as usual budgeting in Washington.  This week in my column at Forbes I present a few vignettes imagining Washington budget logic in a corporate board room.  A sample:

Board Member: Let’s get started.  After an absolutely disastrous year, financially, we’re now five months into our fiscal year and you still have not presented us with a budget for this year.  Why?

CEO Obama: My staff was waiting until their employment contracts were renewed before we presented a budget.

Board Member:  Excuse me?

CEO Obama: You remember — many of my associates in the company had their contracts up for review in November.  They were afraid they might lose their job if you did not like their budget work, so they delayed introducing any budgets until after you renewed their 2-year employment contracts.

Board Member: That seems unbelievably deceptive and feckless.  But let’s leave that aside for a moment.  November was still several months ago, why have we seen no budget since then?

CEO Obama: Well, as you know, I have a number of rivals for my job in this company.  I want to force one of them to suggest a budget first.

Board Member: Why is that?  It seems to me it is your job as leader of this organization to define the budget, particularly given the unprecedented fiscal challenges we face.

CEO Obama:  If I propose a budget first, everyone will just shoot holes in it.  If I let someone else come forward with the budget, I can snipe at it and make my rivals look worse.  In particular, I think that Ryan guy down in Finance may be dumb enough to create a plan.  If he does, I can spend so much time making him look bad you will forget I never submitted a plan of my own.

I have been told that the first person in a negotiation that mentions a number will lose.  Something similar is at work with the US federal budget.  When they controlled Congress, Democrats never even proposed a budget for this fiscal year (which began last October, months before they lost control of the House).  Obama's budget is simply a bad joke, a non-effort,  that simply extrapolates current trends without any real change or exercise of control.

Its amazing to me that all the news reports today are about the "risk" Republicans are taking by actually proposing a plan into this vacuum.   It is amazing to me that actually trying to exercise adult supervision when everyone else is voting "present" could be "political suicide," but I have to accept that the political experts know their stuff.

This situation is in fact exactly what Democrats have been hoping for -- they have purposefully hoped to avoid suggesting any solutions in order to force the Republicans to be the first and only ones to the table with suggestions.  Democrats have zero desire to actually close the multi-trillion dollar deficit;  rather, they see it as a huge opportunity that traps Republicans into trying to actually, you know, solve the problem.  These proposed solutions can then be demagogued against to electoral victory.  Or so goes the theory.

So, I want to thank the Republicans for actually producing a budget plan that actually attempts to bring some fiscal sense to the government.  I would have like to see other changes (less defense spending, elimination of Dept. of Education in favor of block grants, zeroing out of all farm and ethanol subsidies, etc) and Ryan's numbers seem screwy, but let us be happy there is at least one adult in Washington.

Obama budget director Jacob Lew, who wrote this lucid statement about the Social Security "Trust Fund" back in 2000

"These [trust fund] balances are available to finance future benefit payments and other trust fund expenditures—but only in a bookkeeping sense. These funds are not set up to be pension funds, like the funds of private pension plans. They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures. The existence of large trust fund balances, therefore, does not, by itself, have any impact on the Government's ability to pay benefits." [bold added]

Needless to say, he has changed his tune now that he is being paid to shout "all is well" as enabler-in-chief of Obama's spending habit.

Via Reason

The baseline takes state government budgets and grows them by population growth and inflation.  In other words, baseline spending in 2007 would be the same real level per capita as in 2002.  The Total Revenue line is the actual revenue collections by state governments.  Actual collections grew about 4 times faster than population and inflation in this period.  And states still did not balance their budgets or pay down debt in this period.  Nick Gillespie writes

Had the states kept their outlays constant while allowing for inflation and population growth, they would have been sitting on $2 trillion in reserves when the recession hit. Instead, they were broke heading into the recession and are in even worse position now.

Revenue is IRRELEVANT to fixing state budget problems.  No matter how much money is collected, governments will spend all the money and more.  The only solution I can see is imposition of statutory, perhaps Constitutional, spending caps in each state.

This is the response from the Left to a proposed 1.6% cut in the Federal budget, that would reduce the annual deficit by a whopping 6%.  Greece here we come!

The Senate is expected to vote this week on alternative plans to approve spending for the rest of this year.  They will vote on whether to agree to the extreme cuts passed by the House (H.R. 1) - $65 billion less than last year's spending for domestic programs.  The House bill will deny vital services to millions of people, from young children to seniors. Please tell your Senators to VOTE NO on H.R. 1 and to vote FOR the Senate alternative. The proposed Senate bill cuts spending $6.5 billion below last year's levels, compared to more than $60 billion in cuts in H.R. 1.  Most of the extreme cuts in the House plan listed below are not made in the Senate bill.

Call NOW toll-free 888-245-0215 (the vote could be as early as Tuesday)
Please call both your Senators and tell them to VOTE NO on H.R. 1 and FOR the Senate full-year FY 2011 bill.  Tell them to vote NO on harsh and unprecedented cuts that will deny health care, education, food, housing, and jobs to millions of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, while at the same time jeopardizing the economic recovery for all.

Many of you may know that my business is engaged in private management of public recreation.  We get a lot of pushback from certain sectors who believe access to government lands or services should be free -- ie already paid for by their income taxes.

I often argue that this notion of discretionary services (like parks and campgrounds) being run with high cost government labor and funded by general revenue taxes is a dead one - in fact it has been dead for at least 10 years.  Just look around at public parks organizations.  Odds are that your state is facing parks closures and is very likely not fully funding park maintenance. I wrote about this failed model here.

In the future, anything discretionary government program that can charge use fees or be privatized or both will do so.  Or else it will be provided at terrible quality with long queues and frequent closures.  Don't believe me?  Lets look at the US government budget data from last year. This chart has been making the rounds -- I have not checked the data source but I presume it is correct (as usual click for larger version)

I have some interest in the science of chartmanship.  McKinsey & Company did a great job teaching me how to make a presentation, a skill I have honed somewhat in way too many planning and strategy jobs that seemed to revolve around Powerpoint  (one of the criteria for my current job is that it did not involve Powerpoint).

This chart is a case where the author used the wrong chart type.  The pie chart is not appropriate to show a changing total (as the author does with the size of the pie).  The eye has trouble assessing volumes.  I have taken the same data and put it in a slightly different form.  I did not take time to make it pretty, but I think it works better in this format:

Now do you see my point about discretionary spending?  Last year government taxes just about covered entitlements and interest on the debt.  Had we not borrowed, there was no money left over for any discretionary spending, including all of the Defense budget!  Now, even without action, the picture will improve in 2011 as taxes go up with a rising economy and some of the unemployment spending goes down.  But this might just get us to still having a defense department.  Either large swaths of discretionary spending is going to have to be zeroed out, or some sort of entitlement restructuring is necessary.

Of course, tax increases will likely be part of the mix as well, but look at the individual income tax bar.  Even doubling it would not close the budget gap!

OK, I know there are lots of strong competitors for the title of worst Federal spending, but transfers to state governments is, to my mind, among the very worst (from here)

Specific problems with this spending include:

• Terrible accountability, even worse than for most of Federal spending.  Feds appropriate the money but have only limited ways to enforce accountability and almost no ability to track its use
• Awful incentives, as much of this money is given as matching funds that simply encourage more spending at the state level and create, in difficult budget times, the almost impossible problem of having to cut $2 of spending to save $1 of state appropriations.  Makes matching fund programs almost impossible to cut, though kudos to Wisconsin and Florida for doing the right thing with Federal matching funds for high speed rail
• Frequently used to undermine the 10th recommended.   Seat belt laws and 55-mile-per-hour speed limits enforced by threats of withdrawal of Federal funds.  Ditto Title IX in state schools.   The Feds are like narcotics pushers, getting the states hooked early on easy money and then using their addiction to these funds in all kinds of abusive ways.

Last week I showed the Obama-proposed cuts as an almost invisible, except under extreme magnification, portion of the total budget.  Unfortunately, proposed Republican cuts (which according to the NY Times and other voices of big government will lead to the end of the world as we know it) are not much better

via Tad DeHaven

I was listening on the radio today the brouhaha that is occurring up in Wisconsin.  Basically the Democratic legislators have all left the state en mass (to deny a legislative quorum) and progressives are being bussed in from all other the Midwest to participate in increasingly confrontational protests.

All to protect benefits of government workers.  I understand that many progressives don't accept that taxes cannot be increased infinitely.  But to the extent there are really some reality-based (lol) progressives out there, who actually understand that there is a limit to how much can be spent in a given government budget, they are going to need to do some soul searching to decide how much education or Medicaid spending they are willing to give up to support the pay packages and fat retirements of government workers.

My new column, second in a series, is up at Forbes.  It is the second of a three-part series, and looks at incentives issues with Obamacare.  A few excerpts:

In the late 1960s, as part of the Great Society program, the US government constructed huge government housing complexes, with the goal of guaranteeing that everyone, no matter how poor, would have access to housing.  By the turn of the century, most of these complexes had succumbed to the wrecking ball  -- the era of large public housing complexes was over.

Why?  Well, there were a lot of reasons the program failed, but a big one was faulty incentives.  By getting free housing, recipients had no "skin in the game," no ownership, no financial participation in their housing.  As a result, many treated their taxpayer-funded abodes with contempt.  Why not?  They weren't paying for it.  And if the property was in good shape at the end of the lease, they didn't get any extra money.

I often compare Obamacare to the great failed public housing projects by warning folks that government health care is going to be much worse.    With the housing projects, we taxpayers paid large sums of money but only a few actually had to live in the horrible government apartments -- at least most of us were able to keep our own homes.  With Obamacare, it is going to cost us even more money, and we are all going to have to move, figuratively, into the projects.

If we are all forced to have the same, low deductible, first-dollar health plans, what incentive is one going to have to stay out of the health care system, even for something minor?

I also talk about the incentive for drug development

Look around the world today -- not one country with a government health care system pays drug reimbursement rates at a level that provides any incentive for new drug development.  In fact, almost all of the world's health care R&D is paid for by Americans.  What happens when politicians, trying to close an exploding health care spending hole in the Federal budget, do exactly what every other country in the world has done and use their power to drive drug prices down to marginal cost?

In fact, to be confident that there will continue to be health care innovation in the future at all, one has to believe that the US Government will act completely differenlty in running its government health care system than does every other government in the world, despite the fact it will have the incentives to behave identically to all of them.  Is this a bet you feel good about?

I thought this a good commentary on the whole Tiger mom thing.  Via Insty [Note I added some paragraph breaks -  sorry Mr. Smith, but I simply cannot abide by paragraphs as long as yours]

But here's the thing.  And here the point has been made easier to make by the curious fact that Tiger Mom is a Yale Law School professor and as Professor Bainbridge has pointed out, it seems almost an epidemic among faculty parents in New Haven.

My fear is that little tiger kittens are not being groomed to make things that you and I can buy if we feel like it.  I'm afraid, call me paranoid if you like, that those little achievers will want to grow up to, well, rule.  Not in the imperial Chinese way, though I take it that is the ultimate inspiration for this model of child rearing.  If my high school understanding of Chinese history is correct, that Empire used to be ruled by a giant bureaucracy into which one got by passing extraordinarily difficult exams, competing against other fanatically hopeful parents who saw it as one of the few ways to get the young persons out of a life of horrible drudgery.  But rather in something more like the imperial Chinese way than my ideal, which is more like Thomas Jefferson's, without the antique and misguided dislike of commerce.

So, if I'm sitting in the middle of my Jeffersonian space, able to order whatever I want, within my budget of course, from Amazon, working at something I like, not taxed to death or harassed by officious officials;  if I can provide for my family and hope to provide a similarly independent life for my offspring, then what's it to me if some mom somewhere wants to drive her children so that someday they will produce a recording or a pill I might want to buy?  Only good.

But if we are sliding toward a world like the one that is, to exaggerate only a little, like that I was taught we should be sliding toward when I restlessly roamed the hallowed halls the The Yale Law School many years ago, then I am not so sanguine.  Then I worry that all this fierce intelligence, all this ambition, all this work are going toward the building of world in which my children will be mere, well, what do you call the people who support those who so intelligently manage things from on top.  Not to mention the unbelievably well educated 35 year old who will tell me someday I didn't score well enough in some algorithm I can't even understand to get my arteries bypassed or my prostate cancer treated.

I want to live in a world, and I want my children to as well, where we are free individuals, and geniuses can sell us stuff if we want to buy it.  When I suspect the little elites of tomorrow are just being made more formidable still, it excites not my admiration as much as my anxiety.

University of Arizona President Robert Shelton absolutely berates the state legislature as a bunch of Neanderthals for slashing his budget:

During this period, we have seen our state appropriation cut by nearly one-quarter, going from approximately $440 million to $340 million. The impact of these cuts has been amplified because they have come at a time when we have been asked to grow our enrollment substantially, and indeed we have done just that, setting records for enrollment in each of the past four years.

So the sound bite for this year is that we are being asked by the state to do much, much more, while being given much, much less....

The sad thing, though, with some of these legislators is that they have no idea how much they risk our state's future (and the quality of life for people who live here) when they try to lay waste to the single greatest engine of economic mobility that has ever been created. Because that's what public higher education in this country is.

Here he gets over the top -- look at the words he uses for the state legislature

When malevolent people talk about wanting to dismantle and destroy great universities, all they achieve is dire consequences for the human condition.

I am sure for the children shows up in there somewhere.  But is he right.  Well, technically, the legislature did cut his general fund appropriation.  But then they gave it back to him, and more, in different budget categories.  As it turns out, Shelton is being unbelievably disingenuous about this, and only the fact that most of his students went to public high schools and therefore can't do math lets him get away with such an address.  Greg Patterson tracks down the facts:

I contacted the Joint Legislative Budget Committee and asked for UA's total funding.Here's the response:

Mr. Patterson

UA's originally enacted FY 2008 General Fund appropriation was $362.4 million, and their current year (FY 2011) General Fund appropriation is $271.3 million, which is a decrease of $(91.1) million.

UA was appropriated $117.7 million in Other Appropriated Funds in FY 2008 and $219.3 million in the current year, which is an increase of $101.6 million.

UA's Non-Appropriated and Federal Funds budget was $786.7 million in FY 2008 and $911.3 million in FY 2011, which is an increase of $124.6 million.

In total, UA's FY 2008 budget was $1,266.8 million and their FY 2011 budget was $1,401.9 million, which is a total increase of $135.1 million.

So the University of Arizona's total budget has increased by $135.1 million--over 10%--during the period in which the "malevolent" state leaders have been "slashing" the funding.

Unbelievable.  I am so sick of statists crying budget cut when in fact their budgets are increasing.  Mr. Shelton goes on for thousands of words of drivel about the poor state of public discourse in Arizona while simultaneously dropping this turd in the punch bowl.  How is public discourse supposed to improve when the president of one of our two state universities is spewing out what he must know are outright fabrications and misrepresentations.  Pathetic.

I thought this Federal budget proposal by TJIC was interesting for a couple of reasons.  Not the least of which is the sight of TJIC trying to be reasonable and compromising.  Libertarians (as with other political extremists, and make no mistake we are extremists) tend to skew between those who want anarcho-capitalism and will accept no less and those who seek for improvements at the margin, believing that the world is only going to change so much.  I would normally put TJIC in category 1 but it is interesting to seem him delve into category 2.  Even I, normally a category 2 guy, can't totally get behind this plan as there are just two many programs, in the words of David Stockman, that need to be zeroed out.

A couple of stories really drive the title of this post home to me.  First, flash back to any number of these type of stories

To Protest Hiring of Nonunion Help, Union Hires Nonunion Pickets

Billy Raye, a 51-year-old unemployed bike courier, is looking for work.  Fortunately for him, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters is seeking paid demonstrators to march and chant in its current picket line outside the McPherson Building, an office complex here where the council says work is being done with nonunion labor.

"For a lot of our members, it's really difficult to have them come out, either because of parking or something else," explains Vincente Garcia, a union representative who is supervising the picketing.

So instead, the union hires unemployed people at the minimum wage"”$8.25 an hour"”to walk picket lines. Mr. Raye says he's grateful for the work, even though he's not sure why he's doing it. "I could care less," he says. "I am being paid to march around and sound off."

So we follow that up with this story of a union employee who was fired for... wait for it ... trying to unionize his fellow employees

In a move of stunning hypocrisy, the United Federation of Teachers axed one of its longtime employees -- for trying to unionize the powerful labor organization's own workers, it was charged yesterday.

Jim Callaghan, a veteran writer for the teachers union, told The Post he was booted from his $100,000-a-year job just two months after he informed UFT President Michael Mulgrew that he was trying to unionize some of his co-workers.

"I was fired for trying to start a union at the UFT," said a dumbfounded Callaghan, who worked for the union's newsletter and as a speechwriter for union leaders for the past 13 years.

Callaghan said he personally told Mulgrew on June 9 about his intention to try to organize nonunionized workers at UFT headquarters.

"I told him I want to have the same rights that teachers have," said Callaghan, 63, of Staten Island. "He told me he didn't want that, that he wanted to be able to fire whoever he wanted to."

The UFT has long strenuously resisted city efforts to make it easier for school administrators to fire teachers.

"This is the exact antithesis of what they preach, and Michael Mulgrew is the biggest hypocrite out there," Callaghan fumed.

As it turns out, when unions like the UAW get an ownership position in a company, they tend to act exactly like management

You could also entitle it "meet the new boss, same as the old boss". What I'm talking about is a recent meeting between UAW bosses and GM workers. To say it didn't go well would be a vast understatement)(via Sweetness and Light):

Workers at a General Motors stamping plant in Indianapolis, Indiana chased United Auto Workers executives out of a union meeting Sunday, after the UAW demanded workers accept a contract that would cut their wages in half.As soon as three UAW International representatives took the podium, they were met with boos and shouts of opposition from many of the 631 workers currently employed at the plant. The officials, attempting to speak at the only informational meeting on the proposed contract changes, were forced out within minutes of taking the floor.

The incident once again exposes the immense class divide between workers and union officials, who are working actively with the auto companies to drive down wages and eliminate benefits.

Actively working with the auto companies? They are part owners now of the auto companies "“ they're "management" for heaven sake.

In each situation, when the tables are turned, union leaders suddenly discover the economic realities those of us who run businesses have always understood, ie

• You don't pay more for labor than you have to.  That is what markets are about.  If good people are running around unemployed who are grateful to make $9 an hour, then hiring them is a win-win for both of you.  Setting an arbitrary price floor out of some notion of fairness merely leaves more people unemployed.  From the first story, this is a position the union never takes with any business but itself, but is certainly correct

The union's Mr. Garcia sees no conflict in a union that insists on union labor hiring nonunion people to protest the hiring of nonunion labor.

He says the pickets are not only about "union issues" but also about fair wages and benefits for American workers. By hiring the unemployed, "we are also giving back to the community a bit," he says.

• Its nearly impossible to run a business if one can't hire and fire at will.  If, once hired, it becomes impossible (e.g. through a tangle of grievance processes) to fire people, then no business can operate well
• Contrary to certain progressive notions, corporations do not have some sort of infinite treasury full of horded Nazi gold that can pay for any possible wage level.  Given product pricing in a particular industry as well as productivity levels, the labor budget is finite.  At GM, the reasonable labor budget is both finite and likely lower than its current level.  It is admirable at some level to see UAW officials dealing with this hard fact of fiscal responsibility (better, in fact, than are most government officials).  But one wonders how incentives could have been structured better in the past so that this epiphany could have been reached 30 years ago before the golden goose was already killed.

I have written before about carbon offset scams -- even well intentioned programs are unlikely to achieve their promised benefits because

• The projects they fund are typically not incremental -- many likely would have proceeded without the offset funds, so that the benefits are effectively double counted.
• I have never seen any of these programs submit themselves to 3rd party offset of their supposed CO2 reductions.  In most cases, these are faith-based programs where it is impolite to ask if the promised reductions actually occur.

Randal O'Toole has a good example of a program that makes all these mistakes, and compounds them with absurdly high administrative costs.  One is left to wonder whether the Oregon state-run program is actually reducing CO2 or simply making sure a number of government salaries get paid.

In 2006, Climate Trust spent about two-thirds of its funds on carbon offsets, while most of the rest went for payroll and professional fees. In 2007, the share going to carbon offsets declined to 64 percent. By 2008, as near as I can tell, none of Climate Trust's money went for carbon offsets. Instead, 73 percent of its $1.65 million budget went for salaries, fees, and other compensation. It also spent more than $120,000 on travel and conferences and $95,000 on rent and office expenses. In 2008, Climate Trust paid its executive director $154,000, not counting health insurance and other fringe benefits. At least one other staff member whose title was "director of offset programs" was paid more than $100,000 and a third one received $88,000.

Some Federal agencies are able to maintain their mission over many decades without much change from administrations that come and go.  The National Park Service is a good example.

Other agencies, in the desire to get funding, constantly recast their mission based on whatever flavor of the month is hot.  Here was one example I cited before, from the NIH, which, amazingly, managed to recraft its mission in the context of climate change to make itself more immediately relevent to the Obama folks:

Remember, the point of this all is not science, but funding.  This is basically a glossy budget presentation, probably cranked out by some grad students over some beers, tasked to come up with scary but marginally plausible links between health issues and climate change.   Obama has said that climate is really, really important to him.  He has frozen a lot of agency budgets, and told them new money is only for programs that supports his major initiatives, like climate change.  So, every agency says that their every problem is due to climate change, just as every agency under Bush said that they were critical to fighting terrorism.  This document is the NIH salvo to get climate change money, not actual science.

I have worked with the US Forest Service for years as a private operator of many of their recreation sites (for whatever faults they might have, they have been an early innovator on privatization -- without it, they could never have kept all their recreation sites open given their budget constraints).  The USFS has always had a mission challenge.  They are specifically tasked with balancing five missions -- Environmental preservation, timber, minerals extraction, recreation, and ... I can't remember the other one.  Grazing maybe.

In practice, this has meant of late that whatever interest groups among these five who are willing to spend the most time in court are able to shape the USFS mission in their direction, and in practice this has meant environmental groups.  As a result, Timber, the main source of USFS funding (from private timber fees) has pretty much been killed in the USFS, creating a funding crisis.  With their very logical timber mission gone, the only thing the USFS is unique at is recreation, as it is (surprising to many people) the largest recreation organization in the world.  However, this seems to be next on the environmentalists' target list.

So I suppose it is no surprise that the US Forest Service has decided to abandon any sense of long-term mission and simply glom onto whatever is the pet issue of the current administration.  For this year, they have latched onto climate:

The Forest Service has issued a national road map for responding to climate change, along with a performance scorecard to measure how well each individual forest implements the strategy.The new blueprint outlines a series of short-term initiatives and longer-term projects for field units to address climate impacts on the country's forests and grasslands.

"A changing global climate brings increased uncertainties to the conservation of our natural resources," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement. "The new roadmap and scorecard system will help the Forest Service play a leadership role in responding to a changing climate and ensure that our national forests and grasslands continue to provide a wide range of benefits to all Americans."

The last sentence could be rewritten as "we will continue to do everything we have done in the past but relabel as much as we can as having to do with climate change."

I can only speak to the recreation component, but this is the largest recreation organization in the world.  In some sense this new mission is roughly equivalent to the National Park Service hypothetically announcing in the Bush administration that it was going to focus on the war on terror.  In many areas of the USFS they, at their own admission, have years or decades of deferred maintenance.  From watching them at close range, they very clearly don't have the resources to handle the missions they have already taken on, and so it is going to dedicate its resources to this:

Immediate assessment actions include providing basic and applied science to help managers respond to climate change, conducting workshops, utilizing national monitoring networks, furnishing more predictive information, developing vulnerability assessments, tailoring monitoring and aligning service policy and direction.

Longer-term assessment will focus on expanding the agency's capacity for assessing the social impacts of climate change, implementing a genetic resources conservation strategy and fortifying internal climate change partnerships.

To the extent that some of this means "monitor forest health," I thought the organization was already doing that.  As to the value of the rest of this stuff?  Forgetting for a minute if the work should even be undertaken, under what possible allocation of expertise in the Federal bureaucracy does "assessing the social impacts of climate change" fall under the purview of the Forest Service?