Coyote Blog

JD Tuccille has a roundup on the state boondoggle that won't die, the proposed 3/4 of a Billion dollar state subsidy for an amusement park. 

Now, this seems like an awful lot for an amusement park, particularly considering that the Arizona desert has been the death of many theme parks.  The reason is that no one wants to be outside for extended periods of time in June-Sept in the Phoenix or Tucson areas.  Because it is freaking hot.  The average daily forecasts is generally for 108-112F for these summer months.  But theme parks live and die in the summer, when kids are out of school.  Even though they have milder weather and a large population base at Magic Mountain in LA, they still only open for weekends and holidays during the non-summer months.  My guess, from running a similar seasonal business, Magic Mountain loses money most of the year and make 100%+ of their profit in the summer.

So spending $750 million of taxpayer money on a theme park in the Arizona heat would be a bad idea if located in Phoenix.  But what happens when we put it in Eloy, Arizona?  Eloy is just as hot, but is in the middle of nowhere, as shown below at the point of the "A" balloon.

People will come here, from where?  Tucson folks in the summer will want to go someplace even hotter than Tucson?  Phoenix folks will want to drive 2 hours to spend their time in the hot sun, when the same distance north puts them in the cool mountains?  And here is beautiful downtown Eloy, brimming with wealth enough to repay over a billion dollars of principal and interest.

This project is absolutely guanteed to fail, leaving the bill with taxpayers.  I mean, seriously.  Never have I seen such a lock.  I wish there was a way to short this.

This is only the most eggregious of a laundry list of proposed government pork being pushed under the banner of "job creation" at a time when the state budget is over a billion dollars in deficit.

Via Michael Tanner:

• Slightly less than half of Massachusetts' uninsured population
  actually complied with the mandate. True, the number of people without
  health insurance was reduced from 13% of the state's population to 7%,
  but when the bill was passed, advocates promised that "all Massachusetts citizens will have health insurance."  Perhaps it depends on your definition of "all."
• Most of those who are signing up are low-income individuals, whose
  coverage is fully or partially subsidized, proving once again that if
  you give something away for free people will take it. It certainly
  appears that it is the expensive and generous Massachusetts subsidies
  (up to 300% of the poverty level), not the unprecedented individual
  mandate that is responsible for much of the increased coverage.
• Adverse selection remains a big problem, with the young and healthy
  failing to comply with the mandate. The state refused to change its
  community rating laws which drive up the cost of insurance for young,
  healthy individuals. Not surprisingly, they don't find this a good deal.
• The program is far exceeding its projected costs, with at least a 33% budget overrun in its first year.
• The program has increased demand for health care services without
  increasing the supply of providers. As a result, patients are having
  trouble finding providers and waiting lists (Canada here we come) are
  beginning to develop.

Todd Zywicki has a nice post on the The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke by Professor Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi. 

In his writings on the tactics for engineering the communist state, Karl Marx talked a lot about the need to "proletarianize the middle class."  This has been a very popular tactic among leftish writers and politicians today, attempting to convince the middle class that they never had it so bad.

I won't repeat Zywicki's whole post, but the books author's argument revolve around examples which purport to show that as families go from one to two earners, their costs (health care, child care, cars, mortgage, etc.) go up by more than the additional income, making them poorer on a discretionary spending basis.

Zywicki first points out the same thing I immediately thought of when I read a summary of the book:

It is not clear what to make of all of this, except that it is hard to
see how this confirms the central hypothesis of "The Two-Income Trap"
that "necessary" expenses such as mortgage, car payments, and health
insurance are the primary draing on the modern family's budget. And
again, this unrealistically assumes that all increased spending on
houses and cars is exogenously determined, ignoring the possibility
that an increase in income leads to an endogenous decision by some
households to increase their expenditures on items such as houses and
cars.

While the assumption seems crazy, it makes sense in the context of leftish ideology, which holds that the middle class have only limited free will and tend to have their decision making corrupted by advertising and other corporate pressures.

But Zywicki goes further, and actually digs into the author's numbers.  He finds that the authors are surprisingly coy about addressing changes in taxation in their numbers.   Zywicki then uses the authors' own numbers, this time with taxes factored in using the authors' own assumptions, and gets these two charts:

As Zywicki summarizes:

As can readily be seen, expenses for health insurance, mortgage, and automobile, have actually declined
as a percentage of the household budget. Child care is a new expense.
But even this new expenditure is about a quarter less than the increase
in taxes. Moreover, unlike new taxes and the child care expenses
incurred to pay them, increases in the cost of housing and automobiles
are offset by increases in the value of real and personal property as
household assets that are acquired in exchange.

Overall, the typical family in the 2000s pays substantially
more in taxes than in their mortgage, automobile expenses, and health
insurance costs combined. And the growth in the tax obligation
between the two periods is substantially greater the growth in
mortgage, automobile expenses, and health insurance costs combined. And
note, this is using the data taken directly from Warren and Tiyagi's
book.

In a previous post, I observed that there did indeed seem to be two Americas:  the one productive people want to live in, and the one productive people are trying to escape because the local government is so controlling and confiscatory.  I further observed that, unfortunately, both Democratic candidates appeared to be from the latter.

This is an interesting follow-up:

"When California faced a Mount Everest-sized $14 billion deficit in
2003, one of the major causes for the red ink was the stampede of
millionaire households from the state," says a report called "Rich
States, Poor States" by economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore.
"Out of the 25,000 or so seven-figure-income families, more than 5,000
left in the early 2000s, and the loss of their tax payments accounted
for about half the budget hole."

I am not sure how they got to this number, but holy crap!  20% of the wealthiest families left the state?  I'm not sure even Hugo Chavez is doing that poorly.

Update:  Even more here, comparing inward and outward migration rates of states vs. a state-by-state economic freedom index.

I have always wondered why the Denver airport has so much goofy modern art all over the place.  Even the subway tunnels have art on the walls (I must admit I am kind of partial to the little fans on the outbound train trip).  There are replicas of paper airplanes hanging from the ceilings, a fountain that is supposed to model the Front Range, and a fake Mayan temple in one terminal concourse.  It turns out that Colorado has a law that says that 1% of the budget for public building construction has to go for art.  Given that the airport costs overran to $4.8 billion, that was a $48 million boondoggle for every goofy public artist that could pull up to the trough.

Letter I sent to Governor Schwartzenegger in response to his plan to close a number of California State Parks due to budget problems:

I know many people are
probably contacting you to oppose proposed closures of state parks to help meet
budget targets. My message is a bit
different: Closing these parks is
totally unnecessary. 

I own and manage one of the
larger concessionaires in the California State Park (CSP) system. We are the concessionaire at Clear Lake and Burney Falls. At Burney Falls, for example, we have invested over a million dollars
of our money in a public-private partnership with the state to revamp to the
park. We also operate parks for the
National Park Service, the US Forest Service, Arizona State Parks, Texas State Parks, and other public authorities.

Traditionally, CSP has
engaged concessionaires to run stores and marinas within parks, but not to run
entire parks. However, in many other
states, our company runs entire parks and campgrounds for other government
authorities, and does so to the highest quality standards. 

So, I can say with confidence
that many of the California State Parks proposed for closure would be entirely
viable as private concessions. For
example, we operate the store and marina at Clear Lake State Park but
could easily run the entire park and make money doing so, while also paying
rent to the state for the privilege.

I know that there are some
employees of the CSP system that oppose such arrangements with private
companies out of fears for their job security. But it would be a shame to close parks entirely when an opportunity
exists to keep them open to the public, and improve the state budget picture in
doing so. 

Even if California decides to keep these parks open, I would encourage
you to have your staff investigate the possibility of expanding private
operation of state parks. CSP already
has one of the best and most capable concession management programs in the
country, a success you should seek to build on. The infrastructure is already there in CSP to solicit bids for these
projects and ensure that management of them meets the state's quality and
customer service standards.

Even though everything I said here is true, it probably is a non-starter because most state organizations are dead set against such private management.  They would rather close services to the public than establish the precedent of private management. 

Besides, the whole parks closure may well be a bluff.  Unlike private company budget discussions, where it is expected that managers offer up their marginal projects for cuts, the public sector works just opposite:  Politicians propose their most popular areas of spending (parks, emergency services) for cuts in a game of chicken to try to avoid budget cuts altogether.  As I wrote here:

Imagine that you are in a budget meeting at your company.  You and a
number of other department heads have been called together to make
spending cuts due to a cyclical downturn in revenue.  In your
department, you have maybe 20 projects being worked on by 10 people,
all (both people and projects) of varying quality.   So the boss says
"We have to cut 5%, what can you do?"  What do you think her reaction
would be if you said "well, the first thing I would have to cut is my
best project and I would lay off the best employee in my department". 

If this response seems nuts to you, why do we let politicians get
away with this ALL THE TIME?  Every time that politicians are fighting
against budget cuts or for a tax increase, they always threaten that
the most critical possible services will be cut.  Its always emergency
workers that are going to be cut or the Washington Monument that is
going to be closed.  Its never the egg license program that has to be cut.

Update: Here is the form letter the governor's office sent out in response to my letter:

A weakened national economy and auto-pilot state spending has created a projected budget shortfall of $14.5 billion for fiscal year 2008-09. Although state government revenues this coming year are actually forecast to hold steady, the problem is that every year automatic spending formulas increase expenditures.  Left unchecked, next year's budget would need to grow by 7.3-percent, which is $7.6 billion; even booming economies can't meet that kind of increase.  To immediately combat this crisis, the Governor has proposed a 10-percent reduction in nearly every General Fund program from their projected 2008-09 funding levels.  While these reductions are unquestionably painful and challenging, this across-the-board approach is designed to protect essential services by spreading reductions as evenly as possible.

To achieve this difficult reduction, State Parks will be reducing both its permanent and seasonal workforce.  As a result, 48 park units will be closed or partially closed to the public and placed in caretaker status.  By closing parks and eliminating positions, remaining resources can be consolidated and shifted to other parks to provide for services necessary to keep those parks open and operating.  While 48 parks are affected by closures, 230 parks-or 83% of the system-will remain open.

We must reform our state budget process.  Government cannot continue to put people through the binge and purge of our budget process that has now led to park closures.  That's why the Governor has proposed a Budget Stabilization Act.  Under the Governor's plan, when revenues grow, Sacramento would not be able to spend all the money.  Instead, we would set a portion aside in a Revenue Stabilization Fund to stabilize the budget in down years.  If a deficit develops during the year, instead of waiting to accumulate billions of dollars of debt, the Governor's plan would automatically trigger lower funding levels already agreed upon by the Legislature.  Had this system been in place the past decade, we would not be facing a $14.5 billion deficit. 

As Governor Schwarzenegger works with his partners in the Legislature, he will keep your concerns in mind.  With your help, we will turn today's temporary problem into a permanent victory for the people of California.

I thought this from Adam Schaeffer at Cato was pretty hilarious:

At Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, parents fear cuts in
Montgomery County's proposed $2.1 billion budget will threaten the
math-science magnet program.

Schaeffer puts this in perspective:

The desperate schools of Montgomery County will need to find some way
[to] stretch the $15,246 they have to spend on each of the 137,745 students
in their schools.

This is simply hilarious.  Sometimes it is hard to compare per-pupil spending on an apples to apples basis since each grade tends to be progressively more expensive than the last (high school is more expensive than middle school which is more expensive than elementary school).  Recognize that this is only partially because the education per se is more expensive at each step -- it is more because the expectation of extra-curriculars (sports, theater, etc.) go up at each level. 

However, taking 8th grade as a mean, I can say that my 8th-grader's tuition in a for-profit private school that receives no donations or outside scholarship money is less than half $15,246.  And the education he gets is generally considered the best in the city  (though his school is lighter than some rich-suburb public school on extra-curriculars).

If you have any doubt that local media generally act as cheerleaders for increased public spending, look no further than this.  Note the newspaper quote (from the Washington Post) and then Schaeffer's context:

I have saved the most touching story for last . . .

In Loudoun County, School Board members approved a
budget 14 percent higher than last year's to accommodate an expected
3,000 new students. The county faces a projected $250 million
shortfall, and the 54,000 student system will probably have to look for
new places for savings.

My heart goes out to the Loudoun County administrators. I can't see
how anyone can be expected to educate a child with just $15,000 or to
cover a 6 percent enrollment increase with just a 14 percent increase
in the budget.

The Seattle Supersonics have finally admitted what rational folks have known for a long time:  Billion dollar municipal stadiums are just taxpayer subsidies for already-rich players and owners, and do nothing for local economic development. Here is what the Sonics ownership stated in court papers (part of a case where they are trying to break their lease in Seattle):

"The financial issue is simple, and the city's analysts agree,
there will be no net economic loss if the Sonics leave Seattle.
Entertainment dollars not spent on the Sonics will be spent on
Seattle's many other sports and entertainment options. Seattleites will
not reduce their entertainment budget simply because the Sonics leave,"
the Sonics said in the court brief.

...Rodney Fort, a
professor of sports management at the University of Michigan, who has
criticized the economic-impact claims made by pro-sports teams, called
the Sonics' latest argument "the best chuckle" he's had in a long time.

Municipal stadium funding and team relocation blackmail as a prisoners dilemma game here.

My son learned of one additional downside this year to subsidizing an expensive stadium for the hapless Cardinals.  He is a huge Cowboys fan, and there was to be a really good matchup in regular season this year that would be televised nationally (I can't remember which game, maybe the Packers regular season game).  We did not get to see the game, because the local network was obligated to show the Cardinals game instead.  If you have no team, you always get the best game on TV.

The WSJ ($) has an article on California showing the growth of expenditures and the budget deficit.  I took the expenditures numbers and converted them to 2007 dollars and put them on a dollar per state resident basis, to correct both for growing population and inflation.  Here are California government general fund expenditures on a 2007 dollar per person basis:

1990-1991: $2,755
1995-1996: $2,470
2000-2001: $3,558
2005-2006: $3,416
2007-2008: $3,767

From these figures, we can learn a couple of things.  First and foremost, the state of California demonstrates itself to be just as financially incompetent as any condo-flipping doctor who now finds himself stuck with a bunch of mortgages he can't pay.  Lured by the false prosperity of the Internet bubble, California increased real government spending per resident by nearly 50% in the latter half of the nineties, and has done nothing to reign this spending in (thus the deficits).  The only place where the analogy with the person caught short by the housing bust falls apart is that the person with expensive mortgages is probably not out buying a new Mercedes and big screen TV, whereas that is exactly what California is doing, passing a $14 billion a year health care plan that will whose price tag can only rise.

In my previous post on urban planning, I mentioned the increasingly popular idea of sustainability through poverty.  Don Boudreaux responds to the currently hip idea that somehow we need to revert to a more local economy with local food production.  This is absolutely absurd, for any number of reasons.  I'll just list three:

• It doesn't work.  The total energy used for transport, say of food products, is a small percentage of the total energy used in the total production process.  The energy transportation budget is generally smaller than efficiency gains from scale or from optimizing location.  For example, a wheat farm in Arizona on 50 acres is going to use a lot more energy (and water, and fertilizer, and manpower) than a wheat farm on a thousand acres in North Dakota.
• It leads to poverty.  Our modern society, our lifestyles, our lifespans all are a result of the fantastic increases in efficiency we have reaped from the division of labor.  A push to localize all production reverses the division of labor.  Many products, such as semiconductors, become outright impossible on a local scale.
• It leads to starvation.  It is hard for us to imagine famine in the wealthy nations of the world.  Crop failures in one part of the world are replaced with crops from other parts of the world.  But as recently as the 19th century, France, then the wealthiest nation on earth but reliant on local agriculture, experienced frequent crop failures and outright starvation.

More on the food-miles stupidity here.  And an interesting study that shows that processed foods greatly reduces waste and trash to landfills was here.

Update: More on food miles here at Reason

Romney-care, which looks surprisingly like v1.0 of Hillarycare, is over-budget by $135 million (and counting*) in Massachusetts.  TJIC is stunned.

* must be pronounced in that deep eastern European voice from the early James Bond films, where in the bad guy's lair the PA system kept saying "one minute, and counting."

From my daily email from the Goldwater Institute:

In only five years, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System budget is slated to more than double.

When double-speak government agency names meet reality!

Because the government has put itself in the job of redistributor-in-chief, and there is just too high of a financial return from influencing who are to be the beneficiaries, and who are to be the sacrificial lambs.  This is particularly the case when Congress can aim dollars at a small group who will give back generously in return, and where the costs are dispersed across large numbers of people, generally consumers or taxpayers or both:

Dan Morgan has another excellent Washington Post report
on our tangled web of farm subsidies, tariffs, government purchases,
and so on. This time he examines the sugar industry's political
contributions"“"more than 900 separate contributions totaling nearly
$1.5 million to candidates, parties and political funds" in 2007 alone.
Most of the money went to Democrats, apparently, which might explain
why Democrats opposed more strongly than Republicans an amendment
to strike the sugar subsidy provisions from the bill. Morgan delights
in pointing out members of Congress such as Rep. Carolyn Maloney of
Queens and Manhattan and Rep. Steven Rothman of bucolic Hackensack and
Fort Lee, New Jersey, who received funds from the sugar magnates and
voted to protect their subsidies despite the fact that they would seem
to have more sugar consumers than sugar growers in their districts....

So $1.5 million is a lot of money, and it seems to have done the trick.
But . . . is it really so much money? According to Morgan, the sugar
provisions in the farm bill are worth $1 billion over 10 years. That's
a huge return on investment. In what other way could a business invest
$1.5 million to reap $1 billion?

The real campaign finance reform that is needed is to get the government out of the business of naming winners and losers.

Update:  More on the sugar fiasco here.

Under the current system, the government guarantees a price floor for
sugar and limits the sugar supply "” placing quotas on domestic
production and quotas and tariffs to limit imports. According to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, sugar supports
cost American consumers "” who pay double the average world price "” more
than $1.5 billion a year. The system also bars farmers in some of the
poorest countries of the world from selling their sugar here.

The North American Free Trade Agreement is about to topple this
cozy arrangement. Next year, Mexican sugar will be allowed to enter the
United States free of any quotas or duties, threatening a flood of
imports. Rather than taking the opportunity to untangle the sugar
program in this year's farm bill, Congress has decided to bolster the
old system.

Both the House bill, which was passed in July, and the Senate
version, which could be voted on as early as this week, guarantee that
the government will buy from American farmers an amount of sugar
equivalent to 85 percent of domestic consumption "” regardless of how
much comes in from abroad. To add insult to injury, both also increase
the longstanding price guarantee for sugar.

The bills encourage the government to operate the program at no cost
to the budget, by selling the surplus sugar to the ethanol industry.
That's not likely. Ethanol makers will never accept paying anywhere
near sugar's guaranteed price. According to rough estimates from the
Congressional Budget Office, supports for sugar in the House bill could
cost taxpayers from $750 million to $850 million over the next five
years.

I have argued on numerous occasions that government-funded health care is a Trojan Horse for detailed regulation of how we treat our bodies.  The Economist Blog has a great post on this topic:

Why exactly is obesity a public health issue? Well, when,
by force of law, you externalise responsibility for providing a good,
such as health care, then the effects of all individual choices that
affect the cost of providing that good for the individual are thereby
transformed from internal to external effects. If you, like
Mr Dubois, are in the grip of the blithe assumption that reducing
negative externalities by raising the cost of the behaviour that causes
them is simply what government does, then obviously my gluttony and sloth are public problems. Because public policy made them public problems! So, obviously,
it's up to the government to fiddle with prices to manipulate our
behavior in order to minimise its impact on the tax-financed national
budget.

This sort of thing drives me crazy because it's just so
thoughtlessly arbitrary -- intellectual empty calories. Why
specifically a tax on junk food? Yes, one
of the causes of obesity is "the consumption of too many calories."
Another is the failure to burn the calories one consumes. So why not
levy huge fines on people for not showing up at "voluntary"
government-funded yogalates classes? Or if people are consuming too
many calories, then just put a tax on calories. Why tax some calories
but not others? You can get fat eating steak, too. Maybe a national
"cap and trade" system of calorie credits would do the trick. Hey, do
you know who's healthy? Mormons are. Maybe the government should
provide giant tax credits for being Mormon. Or perhaps it would be
easier if the national health care system could just deny services for
ailments it judged to be obesity-related.  You could even decide not to
have a national health care system at all and allow insurance premiums to reflect the actuarial risk of individual behavior! But that would be crazy. 

Hat tip to TJIC, who has more.  I think this would be a great anti-universal-coverage T-shirt:

Ironically, this shirt is produced by the National Organization of Women, who are strong government health care supporters.  Go figure.

This is an interesting study of the intersection of politics and science at NASA:

The new dramatic invention of the inventor of the Internet was to place
a satellite so far that the whole Earth can be observed 24 hours a day.
Isn't it fascinating? Why didn't you think about that? :-) Some
scientists refined the details for him - for example that the satellite
should be located in the L1 Lagrange point. The price? Well, the first
modest estimate was USD 135 million.

If you think about it for a
while, the scientific content of this project is next to nil. It is a
typical idea of a crackpot who has no tools to determine whether a
project is scientifically interesting or not. Already in 1999, during the Clinton-Gore administration, the project - nicknamed GoreSat or Gore's Screensaver - was more or less doomed. NASA Inspector General has also determined that the project is driven by politics, not science. It was found that the budget estimate was underestimated, too.

How
did they ever justify to study that project at all? Did they just tell
NASA that it has appeared in a dream of a prophet? Well, Al Gore wanted
the fresh picture of the whole Earth (well, just one-half, but it's OK)
to be constantly available as a source of inspiration: people could
finally see through the Internet, his other invention, that the Earth
is a little vulnerable child who has a fever. ;-) NASA added some
survey tasks, including measurements of the albedo every fifteen
minutes, that were not really needed and that are effectively performed
by existing devices, for example by CERES.

Boy, I totally missed this, and I live in Arizona.  Not until Reason highlighted the case was it even brought to my attention.  Apparently, Arizona is going to collect DNA samples from many of the people they arrest:

State lawmakers voted Tuesday to expand the state's DNA database
dramatically by requiring all people arrested for certain crimes to
provide DNA samples for state records whether they are convicted or not.

Conservative and liberal lawmakers alike raised alarms that the measure
would violate the civil liberties of people never convicted of a crime
and set a dangerous precedent for government collection of sensitive
genetic information.

"I think it is egregious," Rep. Eddie Farnsworth, a conservative
Republican from Gilbert and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee,
said on the House floor Tuesday. "It tramples on the liberties and
freedom of the people."

Apparently, the change is sneaking through buried in a budget bill.  And there are people our there who still trust the government?

Brink Lindsey reminds me it is the anniversary of the release of the original Star Wars.  I happened to be staying in Century Plaza in LA with my family on the day the movie was release, though I had never heard of it.  It was actually a pretty low-budget movie, and was only released on a few screens.  I got dumped off by my family, who was going shopping, in some theater near UCLA and Century City I can't even remember the name of.  Anyway, I and about 20 other people were in the theater that first day, partly I guess because it was daytime and mid-week.   It is the first and only movie I stayed and watched a second time.  I know this makes me a geek, but it really was a transcendent experience for me, though sadly an experienced unmatched in any of the follow-on movies.

Being one of an extremely small cadre to have seen the first one on opening day (really by accident) I felt compelled to see all the others on opening day, a cycle I completed successfully.

I would argue that for its time, against expectations of its day, the opening 30 seconds after the words stop scrolling may be the most amazing and powerful opening of a film ever (starts at about 2:00 into the clip below).  And don't miss that fine exhibition of Stormtrooper shooting at about 4:31.  Enjoy it again:

And don't miss how Star Wars should have ended.  Priceless:

And if you are not Star Wars'd out, try the Stormtrooper Training Video:

Seldom do I plagiarize editorial titles - I usually try to make up my own post title, even if mine is not as good as the original.  But how can you not give kudos to an MSM editorial like this:

An iPod for every kid? Are they !#$!ing idiots?

The Detroit News

We have come to the conclusion that the
crisis Michigan faces is not a shortage of revenue, but an excess of
idiocy. Facing a budget deficit that has passed the $1 billion mark,
House Democrats Thursday offered a spending plan that would buy a MP3
player or iPod for every school child in Michigan.

No cost estimate was attached to their hare-brained idea to "invest" in education. Details, we are promised, will follow.

It is good to see a MSM outlet treating this type of stupid populist government proposal with all the seriousness it deserves.  I wish they would cry foul more often.  Via Hall of Record.

Well, we libertarians must be losing the battle, if these are all the rights I have left as a taxpayer:

Today at 10am the Republican Study Committee will
introduce a Tax Payers Bill of Rights with the aim of getting
bi-partisan support for the principles of such a bill of rights and
incorporating them in future legislation. The principles are:

1 Taxpayers have a right to have a federal government that does not grow beyond their ability to pay for it.
2 Taxpayers have a right to receive back each dollar that they entrust to the government for their retirement.
3 Taxpayers have a right to expect the government to balance the budget without having their taxes raised.
4 Taxpayers have a right to a simple, fair tax code that they can understand.

This is pretty thin soup, particularly from the party that once hailed itself as the party of small government.  I can't really disagree any of this stuff, but it really constitutes a low bar, and it is even scarier that this will probably be controversial.  In particular, #2 is a joke.  Getting all your principal back from forty year old retirement investments basically means that all your retirement income was invested by the government at a 0% rate of return.  Unfortunately, as I ran the numbers a while back, a 0% rate of return would actually be an improvement for Social Security.

This is really, really pathetic.

I am with TJIC when he says that while colonizing space is a cool thing to do, it doesn't justify government coercion.

For a while now, I have been wanting to post on some of my positions that have changed since I was 18, as I have morphed from a secular conservative to a full fledged libertarian anarcho-capitalist.   One such issue is on space.  I used to be a supporter of government space programs (it was hard not to be such, watching moon landings and Tang commercials in my formative years).  My logic was that the government wastes trillions on all kind of stupid stuff, and the space program was kind of interesting.  I supported it as one of the government's least-bad things.

Unfortunately, I have realized that if you add up every person in the United States's list of least-bad government programs you get ... the totality of the US budget.  Each program has a supporter that thinks that program is a kind of cool exception in the morass of government waste.  I have also, by the way, come to the conclusion that the space program is a direction-less mess, and is not really as interesting as I once thought it was.  The planetary probes are still cool (and probably have the most bang for the buck) but the ISS just seems like a UN building in space and the current plans for Moon and Mars missions appear to be NASA full-employment programs rather than realistic missions.

This is so wrong.  When possessing cash is a crime:

A federal appeals
court ruled yesterday that if a motorist is carrying large sums of
money, it is automatically subject to confiscation. In the case
entitled, "United States of America v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency," the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit took that amount of cash
away from Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez, a man with a "lack of significant
criminal history" neither accused nor convicted of any crime.

I know what you are thinking -- there must be some other facts Coyote is leaving out that explain why a man should have his money confiscated for no other reason than he chose to keep it in cash.  Read the whole thing, because you won't find anything that makes this sane.  I do a lot of business down on the border, and get many Mexican customers (legally) visiting as a tourist.  Almost to a one, they show up with large rolls of cash.  Our preference for key fob credit chips and ubiquitous Visa cards is not shared by every other culture, and the desire to keep one's assets in cash should not be a crime (it may not be smart, but not a crime).  Hell, murderers have more protection under the law than this person carrying cash.

I would be interested to hear more about this from folks with a legal background, but I am surprised that an appeals court even has the purview to find that a crime exists when lower courts found none.  The problem here, I think, is that the cash can (legally, which is nuts) be seized and kept without a trial, just on the say-so of the police, who have the incentive to decide that the cash is seizable because they get to drop it into their budget pool.  So I guess the trier of fact is the police (?) and the lower court reversed the police decision and then the circuit court is reinstating it. 

This is just one example of the incredibly high price we pay in civil liberties for the war on drugs.  See this post to measure the countervailing benefits of the war on drugs.  Hat tip:  Catallarchy.

Update: Via Hit and Run, here is another nice feature of the war on drugs:

Tim takes one 24-hour Claritin-D tablet just about every day. That
puts him just under the legal limit of 75-hundred milligrams of pseudo
ephedrine a month. The limit is part of a new law that Quad Cities
authorities are beginning to strictly enforce.

The law limits the
amount of pseudo ephedrine you can buy. Pseudo ephedrine is an
ingredient in medicines like Sudafed and Claritin-D, and it's also a
key ingredient in methamphetamines.

"It's the only allergy medicine that works for me "“ for my allergies," Tim explained.

The only problem is, Tim has a teenaged son who also suffers from allergies. And minors are not allowed to buy pseudo ephedrine.

"I bought some for my boy because he was going away to church camp and he needed it," he said.

  That decision put Tim over the legal limit. Two months later, there was a warrant for his arrest.

And off to jail he went, with no apologies:

But even if you're not making meth, if you go over that limit "“ of one maximum strength pill per day "“ you will be arrested.

  "Does it take drastic measures? Absolutely. Have we seen a positive result? Absolutely," Sandoval stressed.

Do you see the similarity in these two stories.  Two different people, both punished by the state for taking legal actions similar to those taken by drug dealers (holding cash and buying Claritin) with absolutely no evidence they in fact had anything to do with illegal drugs.  Next up:  Anyone driving a Porche 911 will be arrested since those cars are favored by drug dealers. 

This is an offer to other bloggers out there.  I still have some marketing budget left, and would be happy to send out a few more free review copies of my book BMOC.  Just email me at Coyote -at- CoyoteBlog -dot- com with your name and address and the web address of the blog you write for and I will send you a copy.  I reserve the right to cut the list off if it gets too expensive long.  I would especially love to hear from bloggers who have supported this site from the early days.

All I ask is that you actually think you might read the thing if you ask for one.  I don't require that you write about the book as a pre-condition.  You will write about it or not just like you have linked this site -- if there is something worth talking about, I am sure you will do so.  If not, well I'm a live-and-let-live libertarian, so that's cool too.

By the way, I am going to serialize the first several chapters on the blog in the coming days and weeks, so everyone can get a taste.

I thought this was amazing, from an article by John Fund on the activist group ACORN.  Most of the article is about allegations of election fraud, but this caught my eye:

Founded by union organizer Wade
Rathke in 1970, Acorn boasts an annual budget of some $40 million and
operates everything from "social justice" radio stations to an
affordable-housing arm. Still run after 36 years by Mr. Rathke as
"chief organizer," it is best known for its campaigns against Wal-Mart,
and for leading initiatives in six states to raise the minimum wage....

Acorn is vulnerable to charges
it doesn't practice what it preaches. Its manual for minimum-wage
campaigns says it intends "to push for as high a wage as possible." But
it doesn't pay those wages. In 2004 Acorn won a $9.50 an hour minimum
wage in Santa Fe, N.M., for example, but pays its organizers $25,000 a
year for a required 54-hour week--$8.90 an hour. This year Acorn had
workers in Missouri sign contracts saying they would be "working up to
80 hours over seven days of work." Mr. Rathke says "We pay as much as
we can. If people can get more elsewhere, we wish them well."

In 1995 Acorn unsuccessfully sued
California to be exempt from the minimum wage, claiming that "the more
that Acorn must pay each individual outreach worker . . . the fewer
outreach workers it will be able to hire." Mr. Rathke acknowledges
higher wages can cost some jobs but that the raises for other workers
are worth it.

I am not sure this hypocrisy even requires further comment.  It is particularly hilarious that he argues that economic arguments against the minimum wage (e.g. that they reduce jobs) apply to a non-profit but not to for-profit companies.

This is also hilarious, for a group that is at the forefront of trying to unionize Wal-Mart:

One of them, Sashanti Bryant of
Detroit, Mich., was a community organizer for Acorn....Ms. Barton
alleges that when she and her co-workers asked about forming a union
they were slapped down: "We were told if you get a union, you won't
have a job." There is some history here: In 2003, the National Labor
Relations Board ordered Acorn to rehire and pay restitution to three
employees it had illegally fired for trying to organize a union.

As a follow-on to this post on public vs. private schools, I saw this via Neal McCluskey at Cato:

District officials, as well as the president of the
teachers union, bristle at assertions by the Charter Schools
Association that middle and high school charters are significantly
outperforming their district counterparts.

A fairer comparison would be with the district's magnet schools,
which outperform charters, school board member Jon Lauritzen said.

"I think it's basically unfair to compare an entity that is able to
take their entire budget and focus it entirely on their own schools,"
he said. "They have some real advantages over our schools in the
flexibility of actually providing the type of education that a
particular community wants, whereas we are trying to provide a
curriculum that works for everyone all across the school district."

This last paragraph is hilarious on its face.   The average parent must wonder what Mr. Lauritzen is doing with the public school funds in contrast to focusing his entire budget at, you know, the schools, like those evil competitors do.  And what government official would ever be caught dead providing the type of serves that a particular community actually wants.  And this is all in the context that charter schools are, in McCluskey's words, a "pale shade of choice."

So, what does the teachers union and school board members do in the face of competition that they acknowledge works better?  Do they demand the same flexibility in spending and rules in their own schools?  No!  Of course not!  They demand that the schools that work better be eliminated:

It's no wonder that, a few months ago, Mr. Lauritzen proposed a
moratorium on charter schools, and that public schooling's defenders
fight even harder against reforms like vouchers and tax credits. After
all, who could just sit by and watch parents get schools they want when
an old, hopeless system is suffering?

From Marginal Revolution:

The FASAB has asked
that the United States government start including future Medicare and
Social Security liabilities in current budget deficit figures:

Monday,
the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board released a proposal in
which the government would have to account for the cost of future
Social Security payments year by year as people build up entitlements.

Seen in advance of its release by the Financial Times, the switch in
accounting practices would be an international accounting anomaly, as
most other governments treat social insurance as a political commitment
to pay future benefits rather than a financial liability, the newspaper
said.

The FASAB is made up of six independent members who support the
proposal and three opposing members from the U.S. Treasury, the White
House Office of Management and Budget and the Government Accountability
Office.

I support this change despite the fact it may result in what I consider bad outcomes (e.g. big tax increases) as the magnitude of future liabilities become clear.  Tyler Cowen also argues it may make these programs harder to scale back, since it shifts the future payments from a political promise to a financial commitment.  But just like free speech, one has to be consistent in one's support for transparency.

If this all seems arcane to you, let me give you some perspective.  Today, Jeff Skilling was given over 30 years in jail for various accounting-related frauds, supposedly hiding losses and liabilities from shareholders's view.  But what Skilling was convicted of doing were minor, subtle accounting tricks involving penny-ante sums of money compared to the egregious games Congress plays with accounting for the federal government's future liabilities.  Skilling was accused, for example, of booking future liabilities in certain joint ventures where they were hard to find; the feds, in contrast, do not book future liabilities at all.