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Gov. Rick Perry has famously called Social Security a ponzi scheme, a monstrous lie. The Economist magazine, in covering the story has now told its own monstrous lie. It is lying via a graph it included with the story.

The legally mandated 2011 Social Security Trustee Report lays out the actual fund exhaustion date as 2023 on page 3 of the report. So, 2023, 2037, what’s the difference? Electorally, it’s a very big deal. If you’re a current beneficiary today at age 66, you would be 78 in 2023, right at the edge of your life expectancy but more likely than not you would be alive. You would be 92 in 2037 and more than likely dead. If a senior is going to be alive when the big Social Security benefit cut kicks in, it is within their planning window and consequently the chances that they will be a Perry voter go up. Up to now, attempts at reforming Social Security were done so early that the crisis was only going to affect somebody else. Now, every senior who grasps when the crisis will hit knows it will hit them when they are going to be older, weaker, and even more unemployable than they are now. By putting out a pretty, lying graph, the Economist gives ammunition to the left-leaning mass media to write their own stories that also minimize the number of seniors who grasp the truth.

In short, the Economist is putting false numbers out there, ones that will have an effect of lulling seniors into a poorer financial state right when they will be old and frail and unable to do anything about it. What happened to their editors, their fact checkers, their sense of decency? Is everybody to be sacrificed for the electoral convenience of US Democrats in the 2012?

Had my plans, or the jihadists’ plans, been altered just a bit, I could have been up on the WTC tower when it was struck and then fell. I would have been a tourist with my wife and infant daughter stopping in NYC on our way to visit my in-laws in Europe. We could have been part of the death roll. Had my parents rolled out of bed a few hours earlier to take our cousin on a more ambitious tour of Battery Park, they could have been on the death roll, crushed in a subway car passing under the site. I would have been getting a yearly invitation to come to NYC and mourn. How do those who actually get the invitations ever put their lives back together? I can’t imagine the yearly ritual of publicly ripping your emotional scabs off as the world watches.

I suspect that there are tens of thousands just like me. People who visited the area just a bit before or who had been planning to be there but for random chance, fortunate circumstance. Such things change you forever but nothing actually happened to you. Fate hands you the cruelest of brushback pitches and you don’t know what to do with it. It’s deadly chin music but not deadly for you. Do you step back from the batter’s box or crowd in even tighter, daring fate for a repeat? Neither attitude seems right. I claim no special insight or wisdom.

Year after year, people gear up for 9/11 memorials. They’re not for me. They shouldn’t be for me. But they could have been for me. And my heart is still unsettled every year around this time when I look at my older boy who might have been an orphan and my youngest who never would have been.

How to stimulate the economy without inflating the currency or borrowing any more money.

Step 1:
Assemble all requests for federal permits.

Step 2:
Sign them for final approval (as in if they’re interim permits, they are approved for final status as if all other interim applications had been filed and been approved as well). Use auto pens if needed.

That’s it, no step 3 required.

There is now, and always is, a backlog of projects that have funding, are ready to go, and only wait the approval of the various administrative arms that they have complied with this or that regulation. If those projects go forward, the economy will be in better shape. So why not just sign the permits, let construction proceed, and mitigate the bad decisions on the back end when the economy has recovered?

Edit:
Just to make things clear, there are 51 executives in the USA who can do this. The President would likely have the biggest effect but certainly governors would be able to do this on their own as well.

The government of the United States has a large number of assets. Some of them we use. Others we leave idle. Of the idle ones, some of them have people lined up, right now, willing to pay good money to buy or lease them. For political reasons the Obama administration is turning down a portion of that money every day. Instead, they would prefer to increase our taxes and have bumped us up against our debt ceiling and are threatening default rather than lease assets for oil exploration, mining, or timber production.

When our executive is in the midst of an unofficial and arguably illegal campaign to leave certain productive assets idle and not permit the logging, oil drilling, and other natural resources exploitation leases that Congress has authorized to take place, it is obscene to insist that increased tax rates must occur to protect these revenue limiting policies.

Let’s be clear. These permit slowdowns cost the Treasury money, are not authorized by any statute, and if they would stop would both increase employment and revenue. The NIMBY and environmentalist interests who disproportionately supported this President in 2008 and are poised to do so again in 2012 are making our fiscal crisis worse in a misguided attempt to create idle assets.

We can increase revenue by maximizing our leases. This does not take any act of Congress. Congress long ago did its part of the job. This is a problem created by, and wholly solvable by the President and his political backers who have their people appointed to the posts approving those leases.

We are not maximizing our revenues. We are leaving money on the table and this administration’s explicit policy is to take money out of ordinary american’s pockets in higher tax rates and keep them unemployed rather than allow the creation of resource extraction jobs. Shouldn’t clearing the lease and permit backlog and putting americans back to work be the first priority in these times?

From Strategypage, evidence that lawfare leads to more enemy dead, fewer prisoners.

Iraqi security forces have had a growing impact on terrorist operations. This largely goes unreported, but the Iraqi police and soldiers, especially the elite counter-terror units, have interrupted many terror attacks, and arrested many terrorists. Aware of the corruption of the courts and regular police, the counter-terror units will often just kill key terrorists during raids, rather than risk the prisoner bribing his way to freedom. This is also an unofficial policy in some American operations, and official policy when missile armed UAVs are used.

We get enough intel and the risk of further friendly casualties is far enough above zero that we’re just killing people out of hand when in the past we might have sought to capture them. Congratulations lawfare participants in the media and legal professions. Their blood is on your hands.

cross posted @ Flit-TM

Peonage is a form of involuntary servitude that is undertaken to pay off a debt. Realistically, peonage is what we in the US are facing if we do not get our spending under control.

Today, when politicians propose to continue the spending train with unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky spending cuts that will never happen, they are proposing decades of peonage for us and our posterity. This is worse than wrong policy, it is viscerally offensive to everyone who understands the situation.

The norms of political correctness in the US do not normally permit a white to accuse a black of working to violate the 13th amendment. We do not live in normal times. President Obama is dancing on the edge of a precipice and if he persists in going over the edge, he will be taking the country with him. We must have serious proposals from both parties to step back and restore sustainable government finances. The Republicans have stood and delivered. President Obama and his party have prettied up debt peonage for the nation.

In these times of fiscal insanity, the US desperately needs as many moments of clarity as it can get. One way to get an institutionalized moment of clarity on federal spending is to explicitly state which programs are paid for by our own tax monies and which programs we pay for by borrowing money. The most important programs go into the paid for budget and the stuff that’s nice to have goes into the borrowing budget.

There is little cost associated with this process. All the same spending will happen except that instantly all the incentives change. Getting a spending item into the paid for budget makes it secure. It is a statement that we are willing to pay taxes to do this activity. Getting a spending item into the borrowing budget means that if there is a fiscal crisis (and at this point that’s more a when than an if) we would all have a first order screen that we could instantly use to focus our cuts on the stuff that Congress determined was not as important.

Another very good effect on our politics is identifying where do interest payments go, in the paid for or borrowing budget. Every US consumer knows in their bones that if you’re paying off your debts with borrowed money, you’re in deep, deep trouble. So where would Congress put debt interest payments? By putting them into the paid for budget, they inspire confidence but at the same time this decision would push many more programs onto the borrowing budget.

As a separate process, a bipartisan committee (similar to the successful BRAC committees that cut defense spending in the 1990s) could take the borrowing budget and provide a yearly fiscal sanity bill that took the borrowing budget and identified cuts to distribute fairly across the nation and across all the low priority programs in an intelligent way.

But even without an institutionalized spending cut process, this change would improve things by setting priorities and getting the spending conversation where it should be, is program x, y, or z worth borrowing money to fund.

Right now, the USA needs adults who are capable of cutting spending in order to save the republic. Children are incapable of cutting budgets. Adults prioritize and cut what is least needed, even when the cuts are painful, because they know that they face ruin if their expenditures exceed their income over the long haul.

As citizens it is our duty to find out if our representatives are adults or children and to replace the children with adults.

Our country currently faces ruin if we do not cut spending. This economic ruin will most impact the poor and the economically vulnerable as well as robbing our children of their future. It does not matter so much which government expenditures are cut as it matters that our spending stops exceeding our revenues.

Let the left make a list of gold plated DoD expenditures they want to eliminate. Let the right come up with its list of programs and departments it wants to do away with. And pick some from column A and some from column B and do this thing. We can survive getting the mix wrong of which programs we cut. We cannot survive not cutting.

Cross posted at Flit-TM

Wretchard has a good article on the Left’s habit of indulging in deniable intimidation. The use of left-anarchists as street troops to signal that one part or another of the Left is not sufficiently militant is real and well taken. It isn’t the whole story as there’s a mirror image effect on the Right. There, the less militant in the GOP use the threat of waking up the beasts on the Left to reign in more militant factions.

I have personally been warned multiple times to avoid being too strident in my own political activities with tales of past political assassinations of reformers who went “too far”. Of the ones I recall (and can anonymize), two were delivered by town chairmen, one by a committeeman. These are not generally hysterical people yet my little attempts at stirring up small-government activism were viewed with real alarm. Even though they did not show it under most circumstances, these people are terrorized.

The terrorizing of GOP party officials is a generally hidden reason why the GOP often doesn’t take full advantage of its opportunities and generally acts in more of a squishy fashion than you would otherwise expect. If retribution comes, they reason, it will come to them, personally or to their families.

I just appeared before the Lake County, Indiana Board of Elections. My message was for them to reconsider their policy to not permit electronic copying of voter registration data via disk or tape and to now allow electronic copies to flow.

Electronic copies of voter registration data are one of those baseline issues that you never even think about until you run up against a situation where you don’t have them. Then everything gets slow, more error prone, and expensive.

At that point you get knee-bone-connected-to-the-thigh-bone secondary effects and the end result is poorer, less effective oversight and a persistent suspicion that something funny’s happening with the vote in Lake County. As a practical matter, until you can regularly check, there’s no way to fix that distrust of the system.

Once electronic copies become available, a lot of secondary analysis becomes trivial. Accusations of Democrat suppression of the military vote are very common in GOP circles. So what was the comparative rejection rate of military vs. civilian ballot? A few FOI requests and you have the data you need to figure out if our military is being disenfranchised.

There’s a mini scandal brewing over whether south county voters are having their vote suppressed because their precincts are so large that people just give up at the sight of the long lines that inevitably build up. It’s a simple thing to rank 561 precincts by registered vote totals and convert that to minutes needed to process one voter across the critical path to identify the county’s most vulnerable precincts for long lines and lowered turnout. It’s simple to target early voting/absentee voting calls to those vulnerable precincts (in Lake they’re all likely to be strong GOP areas) but only if you can get electronic copies of the records as the early vote comes in so you can adjust daily to trim down the vote you think is vulnerable to suppression due to inadequate voting machine provision.

Cross posted at Northwest Indiana Politics

Wikileaks randy revolutionary, Julian Assange, cannot be a traitor to the US, we are told, because he is an Australian citizen. This leaves him with a vulnerability in releasing documents that involve the Australian government.

Since it is highly unlikely that in the 250,000 cables there are none that involve the government of Australia there is no doubt a legal team examining Australian law for the proper way to proceed when Mr. Assange’s traveling roadshow comes to Canberra. So how many Australian related State Department cables have been released? So far as I can tell, exactly zero. That’s very nice for Mr. Assange but doesn’t do so much for Wikileaks’ reputation as an honest broker or any of Wikileaks’ non-Australian collaborators who do not get that little legal benefit.

Update: The Guardian newspaper, who has all the cables, has a CSV file which includes cable metadata from Canberra, the US’ embassy in Australia. It also has a nice cable source graphic. Australia is one of the few countries not listed as having any cables from there. This is passing strange.

Get ready for a lot of stories bemoaning the coming period of political gridlock in the federal government. Jacob S Hacker and Paul Pierson offer up a typical sample of the genre in The American Prospect. But it doesn’t have to be that way if the GOP in the House acts in a pro-government/small-government way.

A united GOP in the House could insist on a new paradigm for passing legislation, passing all the good stuff first. Yes, it gets less passed, but isn’t that the point? The House can, legitimately, say that it’s not shutting down the government. It can bang out funding for the essential programs in each department in the spring, pass (or not) the middle tier popularity programs in the summer, and then present the real stinkers in the fall, right before elections.

There would be no government shut down. The Parks people could not shut down Mt. Rushmore and the George Washington Monument because their operations would be funded. Programs that could not get a majority to vote for them would be shut down but that happens every year. It’s how the system is supposed to work.

The political choices for Democrats would be very unattractive. Their attempts to stuff in budget stinkers into the must-pass bill will be turned back with the reasonable explanation that the program is funded in a different bill and that it will get a vote, but not here. Once the early bills pass, government shutdown is averted.

Is the GOP going to be smart enough to create a better way to fund the government? I hope so. What concerns me is that nobody else seems to be talking about appropriation sequence passage reform.

Update:
Thanks to Bastiches in the comments who gave a pointer that led me to a September 30 speech by John Boehnor which I had not seen to now. The relevant section:

While the culture of spending stems largely from a lack of political will in both parties to say ‘no,’ it is also the consequence of what I believe to be a structural problem. As Kevin McCarthy often says, structure dictates behavior. Aided by a structure that facilitates spending increases and discourages spending cuts, the inertia in Washington is currently to spend — and spend — and spend. Most spending bills come to the floor prepackaged in a manner that makes it as easy as possible to advance government spending and programs, and as difficult as possible to make cuts.

Again, this is not a new problem. But if we’re serious about confronting the challenges that lie ahead for our nation, it’s totally inadequate.

I propose today a different approach. Let’s do away with the concept of “comprehensive” spending bills. Let’s break them up, to encourage scrutiny, and make spending cuts easier. Rather than pairing agencies and departments together, let them come to the House floor individually, to be judged on their own merit. Members shouldn’t have to vote for big spending increases at the Labor Department in order to fund Health and Human Services. Members shouldn’t have to vote for big increases at the Commerce Department just because they support NASA. Each Department and agency should justify itself each year to the full House and Senate, and be judged on its own.

It isn’t exactly what I’m talking about (the level of granularity is different and the sequencing idea is entirely absent) but it’s a very close cousin and that is much appreciated. This speech helps the tea party because even if Boehnor is not serious about the proposal now (tough to tell without actual reform legislation text), focused public pressure to support this would lead him and the rest of the GOP to run to the front of the parade. And if he is serious? We might end up with an actual small government party again under this kind of leadership. We certainly could use one.

In either case, this remains a good pressure point between now and January for small government activists to press for reform. And now it has the advantage that soon-to-be-speaker Boehner has come out on the right side.

I do love Opensecrets.org, a good government site that makes campaign finance reports not only available but truly accessible on the web. For example, IN-1 Congressman Pete Visclosky (my congressman) raised $762,537 in this 2 year cycle (2009-2010), $290,988 from individuals according to his latest campaign contribution form. In the expenses tab, you find payments to the law firm Steptoe & Johnson. This is the firm busy keeping Congressman Pete out of jail due to that little mishap with the PMA lobbying group. Their payments totaling $353,355, added to the $22,200 of disgorgement to the Treasury (which is what you do with illegal campaign contributions) is over 40% of Pete’s total campaign expenditures. It also far exceeds the individual donations the Congressman received.

So if you’re thinking about donating to Congressman Pete Visclosky or you recently have, now you know your money’s destination, direct to the lawyers. It just gives you a nice warm feeling, doesn’t it?

originally posted NW Indiana Politics

crossposted from Northwest Indiana Politics

There are two, and only two, reasons why somebody should get a raise. The first reason is that the money that is being used to pay the salary is being devalued (inflation). But that sort of raise is just getting you to tread water in a rough sense. You’re not really getting ahead because inflationary price rises eat up the entire salary increase and usually more. The second thing is that productivity has risen and you’re creating more goods or services for the same inputs. This is labor productivity. It is the one thing that allows for real sustainable rises in wages.

An increase in labor productivity means we have to work less to get the same lifestyle or the same work earns us a better one. The initial gain goes to the capitalist. He’s the risk taker who made a bet to pay wages in advance of production and he’s gotten a better deal than he bargained for. But if he doesn’t quickly distribute those gains, he’ll lose out because his competitor capitalists can offer better wages and disrupt his operations by hiring away his best, most productive workers.

For workers, a fluid labor market that makes worker poaching easy is vital to distributing labor productivity gains and helps keep the balance between labor and capital healthy. But there are forces that have been hardening the labor markets, and it’s costing us all.

While unions sense the importance of increasing labor productivity to some extent by creating training and certification programs their approach to labor contracts does not take it into account. Instead of promoting labor fluidity, rigid classifications are in vogue. This makes it easier for the union to negotiate salaries because they’re negotiating categories, not people. But it doesn’t serve the workers well.

Another productivity problem is that there’s a persistent gap between public productivity and private productivity growth. Private sector productivity growth has persistently exceeded public sector productivity growth. This creates a growing gap between what an individual worker can accomplish in each sector and a drain of talent away from the public sector.

This persistent gap in labor productivity improvement rates is a key reason why socialism doesn’t work and capitalism does. Literally billions of people have worked over the course of the 20th century to fix this. Nobody’s come close. That’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

The cure for this is to try to get as much as possible into the faster improving private sector and keep as little as possible in the slow improving public sector. If the public sector is small enough, public spirit/public service in the population will be enough to get the small jobs that can’t be privatized done in a reasonable fashion. But stuff too much into the public sector and look out.

One of the basic pre-requisites of seriously dealing with government competency in a large, multi-sovereignty federal state is to possess an updated list of all the various governments. It can be quite a big list. In the US it includes
50 state governments
3000+ county governments
tens of thousands of municipal governments
intermediate government institutions like Indiana’s township governments.

I have been looking for such a list in the US for some time and have come up empty. There are a lot of sources that do part of the job but nobody seems to be doing the full list.

So here’s an offer. $20 for a maintained source of all US governments. That should be simple enough. At least I thought so when I started looking for it myself…
Edit:I apologize for omitting that the offer is good for the first submission only.

One of the things that even the right seems to have forgotten about 9/11 is that these attacks, all of them, are the enforcement of judgments of religious courts. The US came to grips with the Taliban, ejected Saddam from power, reworked world finance to track terrorist finance but we’ve never seriously come to grips with the Islamic judges who condemn us to death and invite all Muslims to enforce those judgments by way of violent jihad.

Nine years after 9/11/2001 do we even have a list of who are these judges? How many of them have condemned us? Which ones of those have followings of sufficient size as to be a problem?

For all the good that the Bush administration did, it shrank away from doing this basic analysis and educating the public how Islamic courts are a serious problem. The Obama administration is no better and, in fact, considerably worse.

This is depressing.

Instapundit’s got a great challenge for his readers:

Staggering deficits. Exploding national debt. Grossly underfunded public pensions. Aging populace. Social Security on track for insolvency. Investors running for precious metals. Higher education bubble. Stagnant economy. Massive new government healthcare program. Words like “unsustainable” in CBO reports.

I have racked my brain and debated with anyone who was willing. I can’t come up with a way out of this that doesn’t involve printing vast amounts of cash, double-digit inflation and interest rates, and the end of the dollar as a global currency because we “soft default” trillions of the national debt. What productive capacity we have left would be gutted by the tax increases needed to honestly pay what we are going to owe. And the people we owe (China, seniors, public pensioners, etc) aren’t going to just write off the debt like a bank short-selling a beach house.

So my challenge to your readers is this: “How do we get out of this WITHOUT printing money?”

Too much national debt can be cured by more national income (GDP). If we had an economy that was four times our present size, the current level of spending would be sustainable. While it’s unrealistic to fix it all through economic growth, we certainly can make it better so that the necessary spending cuts don’t bite so hard or have to come so fast.

We need to identify and reduce our outflow and maximize economic growth. If we do this better than any other 1st world nation, we remain the world’s premier flight to quality country and we will have the money needed to get our fiscal house in order. Our interest rates will stay low because all the rich members of the rest of the 1st world will want to continue to park a good chunk of their money with us.

The top priority is to understand that we’re in this mess because collectively we’re misinformed. The wrong amount of money’s being created, spent, and it’s being spent on the wrong things. The next big priority to realize is that nobody knows the answers and that nobody, individually, will ever know the answers. We have a great system for relatively efficiently getting the answers. They emerge from the interplay of the free market. This system is currently working sub-par because we’ve used the law in complex ways that nobody understands to “tweak” things and the system’s gotten away from anybody’s control.

The people of the USA need to (yes, starting with me) take inventory of all the institutions that they’re supposed to be overseeing and start taking the job seriously.
1. Undo the tweaks (and yes, this one line could be expanded out to book length)
2. Create a fair deal for everybody instead of special deals for the politically connected
3. Promote entrepreneurship by getting out of the way
4. Pursue public sector productivity. It will never match private sector productivity but we certainly can do better.

I have found a lot of confused thinking on the right lately regarding how to pay for health care. The left is hopeless but items like this, complaining about the FDA taking Avastin off label for stage four breast cancer don’t get to the heart of the matter. What is the right process to figure out whether you’re going to undergo a medical treatment?

Even if you are independently wealthy and have no insurance to complicate things you would not limit your consideration of treatment to just the medical discussion with your doctor. Your financial team would come into play as questions of bankruptcy, how much this is going to impact your estate, etc. are going to affect your decision. And in that discussion, if your sole heir starts getting creepy and talking down all the expensive treatments, you have a problem.

Putting insurance into the equation doesn’t change the conversation. It just adds a large cast of characters to the discussion and some extra money that you don’t control. The possibility of somebody going creepy and acting in their own best interests but not yours is still there. In fact, the more distant the 3rd parties, the more likely it’s going to happen. Add in the government and the chance explodes.

The FDA and Medicare are acting like the creepy heir on the make and there are a lot of people who sense it without being able to articulate it. Nobody can *prove* anything, but the vibe is not good.

If we were more inefficient about passing spending legislation, the government would shrink and Congress would grow more powerful at the expense of the bureaucracy. States would also benefit as federalism is renewed. Take your average spending bill, let’s say the defense bill. In the interests of efficiency there are a number of programs that go on autopilot and just ride along, largely unexamined. These program lives are largely determined by the executive.

Instead of 1 bill, why not make it a thousand bills all dealing with much smaller subjects, ideally single line items? The system would have many advantages, not least of which the end of the disgusting practice of having vital spending held hostage, conditioned on passage of dubious items. Presidential vetoes would become meaningful threats.

A further advantage would be that the system would force Congressmen and Senators to prioritize. You pass important spending up front and the also-rans end up at the rear. When you run out of time at the end of the year, the least important spending automatically is zeroed out.

Executive departments end up having their very existence depending on the timely production of documents demanded by Congress. Stonewall Congress and you’re likely to find your program’s appropriation held up, perhaps to the end of the year and your own program’s budget death. Since the bills are pinpoint accurate, neighboring programs are not affected at all.

The system would also tend to push spending down to the state and lower levels. If there’s an issue that could possibly be handled by the states, it’s much safer there under this system. But 50 state competition provides its own check on state level socialism as some states refuse to go along and reap the benefits of increased in-migration and booming economies.

The only real challenge is how to elect a Speaker who would make the rule changes necessary to implement the system, forcing each Congressman to lay out their priorities, and illegalizing the practice of grouping spending items in mammoth bills that hide all sorts of chicanery.

A few questions that I haven’t seen answered, even by the right-wing blogosphere:

Who made the decision to not parallel prepare multiple solutions for stopping the oil leaking into the Gulf?

Who was the Coast Guard officer who decided to stop those 18 barges in Louisiana because he couldn’t get in touch with the owner?

Who stole Alabama’s booms?

Who stamped the denial on each foreign offer of cleanup aid?

Who mis-exercised their discretion and rigorously enforced the Jones Act?

For each incident, who stopped a bright, promising local initiative for cleanup?

Is there any doubt at all that if we took the whole Rules for Radicals thing seriously that we would know the names of the people who are making all these dumb decisions on the Gulf oil spill? But we don’t know them. The right wing should have personalized each one of these bad decisions and made it clear that if you get in the way of the people cleaning up, you are personally going to pay a price for it. That price is not being paid and the spill cleanup is being further hindered.

The blogosphere, and yes that includes me, bears some blame for that. We took a look at Alinsky but are showing now that we weren’t serious about it. We should start.