We don't need more highway funds because right now, as estimated by the Anti-Planner, about 40% of Federal highway funds go to non-highway projects. In particular:
Over the past fifteen years alone, America has spent well over $100
billion on rail transit construction projects but has little to show
for it. As mobility advocate John Semmens pointed out a few days ago in
a recent Washington Times op ed, transit's share of urban travel has actually declined since 1995.
Wow, money well spent, huh? I have written many times on commuter rail follies in Phoenix and other western cities that are utterly unsuited to rail transit. The most recent news here in Phoenix is that design flaws are appearing, even before the first train is run.
OK, the comment thread in my post on Romney evolved into a good discussion on health care, but I did not get a very good answer on how Romney supporters could possibly consider him the inheritor of the Reagan small-government legacy. Apparently, I am not the only one confused on this, as both Michael Tanner and Jerry Taylor chime in with the same question.
What does it say about the Republican Party when the leading fusionist conservative in the field - Mitt Romney, darling of National Review and erstwhile heir to Ronald Reagan -
runs and wins a campaign arguing that the federal government is
responsible for all of the ills facing the U.S. auto industry, that the
taxpayer should pony up the corporate welfare checks going to Detroit
and increase them by a factor of five, that the federal
government can and should move heaven and earth to save "every job" at
risk in this economy, and that economic recovery is best achieved by a
sit-down involving auto industry CEOs, labor bosses, and government
agents armed with Harvard MBAs to produce a well-coordinated strategic
economic plan? That is, what explains the emergence of economic fascism
(in a non-pejorative sense) in the Grand Old Party at the expense of
free market capitalism?
Unfortunately, 1970-style Nixonian Republicans are back in force. Can "Whip Inflation Now" buttons be far behind?
Update: Apparently William F. Buckley is happily returning to the 70's as well.
And by the title of this post, I don't mean because they are not throwing enough money and mandates at it. Here is what I wrote about the alternative energy mandates in the most recent energy bill:
They want 15% of power generation from renewables by 2020. I am not
sure if this includes hydro. If it does, then a bunch of Pacific
Northwest utilities already have this in the bag. But even if
"renewable" includes hydro, hydro power will do nothing to meet this
goal by 2020. I am not sure, given environmental concerns, if any
major new hydro project will ever be permitted in the US again, and
certainly not in a 10 year time frame. In fact, speaking of
permitting, there is absolutely no way utilities could finance, permit,
and construct 15% of the US electricity capacity by 2020 even if they
started today. No. Way. By the way, as a sense of scale, after 35
years of subsidies and mandates, renewables (other than hydro) make up
... about .27% of US generation.
In an audacious move Sunday, General
Motors demanded that the federal government step in and create a
national ethanol fuel station infrastructure at the same time the
company announced that it has invested in Coskata, a cellulosic ethanol
startup company.
Coming on
the heels of federal legislation that set national mandates for ethanol
production, GM's strategy amounts to federal guarantees for its
investment in the ethanol industry.
"We
need to grow E85 (ethanol) stations," said GM CEO Rick Wagoner at a
Detroit Auto Show news conference. "It is time for the U.S. government
to do it through regulation."
The article goes on to document the strong rent-seeking history of Coskata.
It's great that our politicians have discovered the need for new energy
technologies. But it appears that Washington is determined to put its
money"”our money"”on the wrong horse. Right now, researchers are studying
a host of energy solutions, including hydrogen, high-mileage diesel,
plug-in hybrids, radical reductions in vehicle weight and cellulosic
ethanol (made from cornstalks, switchgrass or other nonfood crops). It
is far too soon to say which of these holds the most promise. But,
instead of promoting experimentation and competition to find the best
solutions, politicians seem ready to declare ethanol the winner. As a
result, our nation could wind up with the worst of both worlds: an
"alternative" energy that is enormously expensive yet barely saves a
gallon of oil.
This is really cool. They recreate the Omaha beach landings with three actors, a camera, a green screen and lots of computer work. Really amazing results. Beware anyone whose business model relies on movies being produced in the traditional manner, with lots of actors and props.
Today, I had to buy gas in Oregon. Usually, I try to gas up just before I enter Oregon, in protest of their anachronistic laws making self-service gasoline illegal. Unfortunately, I had not choice but to stop in a station in Portland. Because of this government mandate, I had to sit in my car for 5 minutes waiting futilely for service. Getting none, I finally got out and gassed up myself. The state-mandated car-fueling employee, who couldn't manage to get to me to fill up my car, was at my car in 5 seconds once he saw that I was impinging on his territory by gassing up my own vehicle. I told him full service was not service at all if I had to wait five minutes, and he could have me arrested if he wanted. For the rest of the time I gassed my car, I was subjected to an ignorant left-coast lecture on how the mandate created jobs. All this lecture took place, of course, while other customers waited for service. I wonder what it would feel like to know with absolute certainty that your job was completely useless and existed only because of a trick of legislation. People who owe their jobs to the government are always a lot more vigilent about protecting their turf than they are about providing service.
Thank God the government and not the private sector is in charge of road design and construction. Because those private sector guys just aren't accountable and might have screwed up.
These kinds of "government financing exernalities" are commonly used
to justify government regulations that restrict individual freedom.
Liberals use these arguments to justify such regulations as mandatory
seat belt laws, smoking bans (because government may end up subsidizing
smokers' medical treatment if they get lung cancer), and most recently
restrictions on morgage terms (because the government may bail out
people who end up defaulting). Conservatives have their own favorite
government financing externality arguments. For example, many argue
that we should restrict immigration because otherwise the immigrants
might collect welfare benefits that are paid for by taxpayers.
Obviously, the greater the role of government in financing a wide range
of activities, the greater the number of potential government financing
externalities. The expansion of government spending facilitates the
expansion of government regulation intended to curb the negative
effects of the spending.
Government financing externality arguments generate their appeal
from the fact that they seem not to be paternalistic. We are willing to
let you hurt yourself, advocates implicitly suggest, but we can't let
your bad behavior hurt the taxpayers.
The libertarian solution to this problem is to eliminate the
government financing that created the "externality" in the first place.
I
But I wanted to share two funny bits with you. First, from the climate crowd who claims to have their science so buttoned down that we skeptics should not even be allowed to talk about it any more, comes this:
Taking into account the new data, they said, seven of the eight
warmest years on record have occurred since 2001
What new data? That another YEAR had been discovered? Because when
I count on my own fingers, I only can come up with 6 years since 2001.
Second, comes this bit of irony: There are many reasons why satellites gives us a potentially better measure for world temperatures than surface temperature instruments. They give us full global coverage (except the poles) and are free of urban and other biases. So I have always wondered if the only reason that climate scientists defend the surface temperature record over satellites is merely because they don't like the answer satellites are giving (they show less warming than do surface temperature records).
But here is the irony: The person who is arguably the strongest defender of land-based measurement over satellites, and who maintains what neutral observers feel is the most upwardly-biased surface temperature record, is Gavin Schmidt, who is ... wait for it ... head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA.
Well, I can't blame this bit of command and control on Mitt Romney, but it is still a great example of politicians doing exactly the opposite of what is needed to making US health care even more convenient and affordable.
In-store health care services offer cheap primary care, ease the
burden on emergency rooms, and help people who can't afford health
insurance"“or who have insurance but can't find a decent primary care
physician. They also boast stratospheric customer satisfaction ratings.
The decision by the state Public Health Council,
"jeopardizes patient safety," Menino said in a written statement.
"Limited service medical clinics run by merchants in for-profit
corporations will seriously compromise quality of care and hygiene.
Allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong."
This is as opposed to doctors in hospitals, who everyone one knows don't make any money off of sick people. Seriously, who in their right mind could possibly oppose a free market solution to cleaning out these non-life-threatening type cases from hospital emergency rooms?
Ezra Levant has posted YouTube videos of his interrogation by an oily little Canadian bureaucrat called "a human rights officer." He has done it in a series of post, so go to his site and keep scrolling. Apparently, in Canada, free speech is not a human right but "freedom from criticism" is, at least for certain politically connected groups (threatening violence at the drop of a hat also seems to help gain one this "freedom from criticism" right. Levant is being hauled in by the government for publication of those Danish cartoons that barely register at 0.1 on a criticism meter that goes to 10.
Officer McGovern said "you're entitled to your opinions, that's for sure."
Well, actually, I'm not, am I? That's the reason I was sitting
there. I don't have the right to my opinions, unless she says I do.
For all of you who left the US for Canada for more freedom from Bush and the Iraq war, have at it. Because Bush will be gone and we will be out of Iraq long before Canada (as well as Europe) catch up to the US in terms of its protection of [most] individual rights, like free speech.
Ms McGovern, a blandly unexceptional bureaucrat, is a classic example
of the syndrome. No "vulnerable" Canadian Muslim has been attacked over
the cartoons, but the cartoonists had to go into hiding, and a gang of
Muslim youths turned up at their children's grade schools, and Muslim
rioters around the world threatened death to anyone who published them,
and even managed to kill a few folks who had nothing to do with them.
Nonetheless, upon receiving a complaint from a Saudi imam trained at an
explicitly infidelophobic academy and who's publicly called for the
introduction of sharia in Canada, Shirlene McGovern decides that the
purely hypothetical backlash to Muslims takes precedence over any
actual backlash against anybody else.
Like the typical Internet geek who reads XKCD, I immediately open Google and search for the exact phrase "Died in a Blogging Accident." Of course, I don't know if the answer was ever "2," but now the search yields 7,900 results, most of which seem to refer to this XKCD cartoon. And now I have added one more.
Update: One suspects that the number was always greater than "2", since filtering out responses that include "XKCD" still yields over 6000 results.
Yesterday I seem to have embedded a quote that included code of an irritating popup that wouldn't go away. Sorry. Thanks for the emails form folks who alerted me to the problem.
I just don't understand the enthusiastic support for Mitt Romney and his description as an heir to the Reagan legacy. In particular, he claims to single-handedly have implemented HillaryCare in Massachusetts, the program that was arguably responsible for sweeping the Republicans into Congress in 1994. My sense is that Hillary in the intervening years has moved on to an even more socialist plan, but everything I see in the Romney plan looks very much like Hillary's original proposal.
The plan is command and control at every turn -- for example, I am a huge believer in high deductible health insurance. My family has saved a ton with it, and it shifts health insurance to be more like, you know, insurance -- meaning it covers catstrophic, bankrupting problems but not day to day expenses. Well, this sort of very reasonable plan, which has the added benefit of bringing some price competition to medicine because people like me now care about prices, was made illegal in Massachusetts by Romney and Company. Romney strikes me as just another 1970's-style big government Nixonian Republican, like nearly every other Republican in the race this time around.
Previous posts on Romney's plan here and here and here.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao
responded Wednesday to growing public anxiety about inflation by
announcing that China would freeze energy prices in the near term, even
as international crude oil futures have continued to surge....
Last November, China raised gasoline and diesel prices by almost 10
percent, partly to appease officials at state-owned refineries.
Refiners had complained that price controls were forcing them to
swallow the difference between higher prices for crude oil on the world
market and regulated consumer prices at home for refined products. So
refineries cut back production of gasoline and particularly diesel,
causing long lines at fuel stations around the country.
I got my driver's license in 1978, just in time to spend the first few months of my driving life sitting in gas lines with the family car, a result of a series of market distorting actions by the US government.
The Economist says,
of the state of economics education in France and Germany, "I
desperately hope it's not really this bad." Unfortunately, I think it's
really that bad. When the 35 hour work week was proposed, I was talking
to someone in the French consulate who did economics and trade. "Aren't
you worried that this will raise employer's costs and lead to business
failures or higher unemployment?" I asked.
"That's just Anglo-saxon economics" was his rather stunning reply. Apparently, in France, demand curves do not slope downwards.
The NFL playoffs are absolutely my favorites sporting event of the year. So of course I have to get on an airplane Sunday afternoon to get to a Monday morning meeting. To get in the spirit, here is one of my favorite NFL spoofs, Peyton Mannings United Way commercial on SNL:
Frequent readers will know that I don't think much of our County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Sheriff Joe gains a ton of PR for himself as the "toughest sheriff in America" and relishes in making jail conditions as miserable as possible. Recognize that this is the jail that holds many people after arrest but before conviction.
Now on to the figure mentioned in the Dickerson piece of 2,150
"prison condition" lawsuits since 2004. Anyone with two licks of sense
can go online at pacer.psc.uscourts.gov, or dockets.justia.com,
enter "Arpaio" into the federal court docket, then count the lawsuits
that name "prison conditions" as the cause. Count back to 2004, and as
of mid-December, that number was more than 2,150.
The same search for
the top jail custodians in L.A., New York, Chicago, and Houston nets a
total of only 43 "prison condition" lawsuits.
Remember, those 2,150
lawsuits against Arpaio are only in federal court. There are hundreds
more listed online with the Maricopa County Superior Court, at superiorcourt.maricopa.gov/docket/civilcourtcases/.....
"For the period January 1, 1993, to [November 29, 2007], the county
has paid $30,039,928.75 on Sheriff Department General Liability
claims," state the docs. "This figure includes all payments, attorney
fees, other litigation expenses, settlements, payments on verdicts,
etc."
Additionally, New Times
asked Crowley how much the lawsuit insurance policy that also covers
the sheriff has cost taxpayers. Crowley croaked, "The county has paid
for General Liability coverage for the period 3-1-95 to 3-1-08 total
premiums of $11,345,609.50."
Keep in mind that this
liability coverage figure is high, in part, because of all those
lawsuit payoffs to relatives of dead inmates.
From 1995 to 1998, the county paid $328,894 a year for an insurance policy with a $1 million deductible.
Today,
Maricopa County pays a yearly premium of $1.2 million for outside
insurance with a $5 million deductible. For any lawsuit that costs $5
million or less, the county foots the entire bill. It's the best policy
the county can buy because of Arpaio's terrible track record.
Russell Pearce is the Arizona legislator who authored the AZ employer sanctions law. Remember, that's the law that requires, among other things, employers to check the immigration status of current employees using an INS system that has federal rules in place that make it illegal to use this system to... check the immigration status of current employees. His plan is to reduce a major source of labor in the Arizona economy which, by the way, has a 3.5%-4.1% unemployment rate over the last year, the lowest level in 30 years.
The newest front in the battle over illegal immigration is dragging health-care workers into the fray.
The Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association is trying to kill a
proposal by Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, that would require its members
to check the citizenship of patients who deliver babies at Arizona
facilities.
If neither of the parents can prove citizenship, the hospital would be barred from issuing a regular birth certificate.
Babies of parents who are here legally but not citizens also would be denied regular birth certificates.
Beyond the obvious concerns about driving moms away from medical care for their deliveries, Mr. Pearce has a teeny-tiny Constitutional issue he must deal with in the 14th Amendment:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to
the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the
State wherein they reside.
Mr. Pearce is hoping that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" can be stretched to say that such persons do not include immigrants. In fact, the Supreme Court does not seem to have ruled on this specific issue (corrections welcome in comments) but historically they have been extremely loath to place limits on this. And no one except Mr. Pearce and perhaps a few of his immediate family members believes that barring citizenship to children of legal immigrants will pass Constitutional muster. And I am pretty sure that no matter how these questions come out, disallowing birth certificates would never survive a court challenge. I don't think the immigrants' home country would issue a birth certificate in such a case so we would be creating people without a country.
A logger cuts and sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of
production is four-fifths of that amount. What is his profit?
1970s New-math
A logger exchanges a set (L) of lumber for a set (M) of money. The
cardinality of Set M is 100. The set C of production costs contains 20
fewer points. What is the cardinality of Set P of profits?
1980s
A logger cuts and sells a truckload of lumber for $100. Her cost is $80, her profit is $20. Find and circle the number 20.
1990s
An unenlightened logger cuts down a beautiful stand of 100 trees in
order to make a $20 profit. Write an essay explaining how you feel
about this as a way to make money. Topic for discussion: How did the
forest birds and squirrels feel?
He goes on to show how reality may have overtaken the joke.
Les Miles will remain as coach of the LSU football team (at least for a while) despite being wooed by Michigan. (LSU must wonder what's wrong with their coaching job - they have won two national championships this decade but can't get a coach to stay).
Should Miles win the BCS championship [ed: which he now has accomplished] his contract states he has to be
among the top three paid college coaches in the nation, which would
bump him to the $3.5 million range.
This is not uncommon language now in sports contracts. For example, players with a franchise tag in the NFL must get a salary equal to or greater than the average of the top five players at that position.
So here is my question. What happens if three other college coaches, say Pete Carrol, Jim Tressel, and Urban Meyer (who have all won national championships in the last 10 years) were to demand that they too should be guaranteed a salary that puts them in the top three coaches? Don't things start getting real recursive at this point? Postscript: Yeah, I know, the language generally says they get bumped to a top X position on the day of a certain event, like winning the BCS or having the franchise tag applied, which circumvents the circularity problem, mostly, by not being an open-ended reset. It is still funny to think about. There is nothing to stop 4 coaches from negotiating a clause with an open-ended reset such that their salaries would spiral to infinity. Even Solomon might struggle with that one when it went to court, though the Gordian Knot solution would be to just run one of the four through with a sword.
I wonder if this has ever happened, say with two CEO's that had contracts that guaranteed that each would, at any given time, be the highest paid CEO in the Fortune 500.
