Rail Still the Fashion?

Economist Randal O’Toole is upfront about government planning, and he’s written all about it in his book The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

I’ve realized all government planning is bad. Government planning... always does more harm than good because the planners don’t have an incentive to make sure that their plans are the right plans.

Real planning in the real world is an adaptive business.  You plan and adjust, day to day, as conditions change.  But government doesn’t have the will or the bandwidth for that kind of planning.  So government simplifies.  And doesn’t often update the plan.

Also, governments follow fads and right now the fad is Smart Growth, pushing light rail transit and infilling of urban areas,  building up not out.

Then there are the unanticipated outcomes.  Rail transit usually costs a lot more than anticipated.  So transit agencies have to cut back on bus service.  The result: lower transit ridership.  In Los Angeles:

They were sued by the NAACP for building rail lines into white, middle-class neighborhoods at the same time they were cutting bus service in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

But at least they were trying to save the planet!

The transit guys had a setback in Seattle yesterday, according to Andrew Garber. A big transit proposal to extend the expensive light rail system, sweetened with road projects (they called it a road-and-transit proposal), went down to defeat.

"People like roads, people like transit, people don’t like taxes," said state Rep. Fred Jarrett, R-Mercer Island, the ranking Republican on the House Transportation Committee and a Proposition 1 supporter.

Amazingly the Sierra Club opposed the plan because they thought it had too much road and not enough transit.   What is with those guys!

We Should Thank the Socialists

Dear old lefty Guardian columnist George Monbiot has suddenly woken up to an international nightmare of injustice.  It’s lefty-trendy “biofuels,” fuels made from crops like sugar cane, corn, and even, in Swaziland, cassava.  But all is not well in the Brave New World of Swazi biofuels.

Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava.

Well bust my buttons.  Nobody, but nobody could have seen that coming.  Why the Guardian never warned us.  The mainstream media never put it on the nightly news.  Maybe if good old Mike Wallace were still in his prime he could go on 60 Minutes  and say: “You mean to say...”

Let’s not get into the prediction that to convert the whole economy to biofuels we’d have to convert all the cropland in the world to fuel production.

While we are all rocking back in shock, let’s look at another brewing crisis.  Oil.

Did you know that most of the oil reserves in the world are owned by government-owned oil companies?  You didn’t?  Richard W. Rahn thought so.

Most people do not realize that about 90 percent of the world’s liquid oil reserves are controlled by governments or state-owned companies.

Little old Exxon Mobil only owns 1.08 percent of world reserves. 

And, of course the government-owned oil companies are badly run.  Mexico’s Pemex is corrupt and inefficient.  Venezuela’s dictator Chavez has completely bollixed up his national oil company.

Well, don’t despair.  There is plenty of oil in the world.  And a lot of it is in Canadian tar sands and Colorado oil shale.  And with oil prices way above $30 to $40 per barrel, they are becoming economic.

That means that they will be competing with the government oil companies and bringing prices down.

So the socialists always help us in the end.  They screw things up so badly that their foolish plans always end in disaster. 

The sooner government gets separated from business and enterprise the better for the people.

Maybe the sensitive George Monbiot will eventually come to realize that government-owned oil companies, like government-owned biofuels, make people poorer.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Fixing the mortgage crisis, but how?

Now that the mortgages are well and truly melting down the experts are gathering to offer advice.

Here’s Josiah Baker, professor at George Mason University, with his ideas.

The mortgage crisis requires legislation that supports punishing existing lenders for poor or misleading businesses practices. Specifically, enforcement must focus on originators and brokers.

But you could look far and wide to find regulators actually cracking down on abusive lenders, he writes.

The government does not need additional regulations — they just need to enforce the existing regulations.

Well, yes.  That all sounds fine.  And Barney Frank wants to lift the loan limits on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But let’s step back a bit.

The reason that abusive lenders (and listening to their voices on the mortgage radio ads, you knew you’d heard that guy before—maybe on a used car lot?) were flourishing was that money was sloshing around, and anyone with a pulse could set up a mortgage company and sell mortgages.  That’s where the problem started.  Tons of money sloshing around looking for a borrower.  And of course, when we are talking about money sloshing around we are usually talking about the government.

For instance, there are the government’s mortgage giants, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginny Mae, all in the business of throwing money at housing.  When you subsidize things like that you are going to get distortions in the market.

It’s not too surprising that the downmarket end of the business was up to some nasty shenanigans.  It usually is.  In the downmarket mortgage business the government has been pressuring lenders to lower standards for years.

But why should the politicians complain.  When things go wrong it creates splendid opportunities for politicians to posture and to blame other people for things that they initially set in motion.

So the best we can hope for is to get out of the mortgage mess without the politicians really screwing things up.

Give them a chance and they will create a royal mess.  Remember the Great Depression?

Who Needs ID Anyway?

For ordinary Americans the flap over illegal aliens and drivers licenses is a no-brainer.  Nobody should get a drivers license or state ID unless they can prove their bona fides.

It’s hard therefore to figure out why presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was waffling about drivers licenses for illegal aliens in New York State at the presidential debate earlier this week.  Writes John Fund:

At first she seemed to endorse the idea, then claimed, "I did not say that it should be done, but I certainly recognize why Governor Spitzer is trying to do it."

In case you are wondering what the flap is about,  Fund has the answer.  It’s about making it easier to vote.

Remember the Motor Voter bill back in 1993?  It was a Clinton wheeze.

It required all states to offer voter registration to anyone getting a driver’s license. When renewing a drivers license you simply fill out a form and check a box stating that you are a citizen; you are then registered to vote and in most states do not have to show any ID to vote.

That sort of loosey-goosey attitude towards the law brings back the thrill of the Clinton years.  Presumably it arises because Democratic leaders feel that many of their rank-and-file supporters are not the kind of people who proactively get registered to vote when they move.

Maybe they get riled up by a campaign, or maybe they get up on election day and decide to vote.  Either way, the Clintons wanted them to be able to vote.  And why not catch them when they go by the DMV to get their drivers license renewed?

(But, these days, do Democratic voters even bother to get a drivers license?)

The answer is that a loosey-goosey system like Motor Voter is an invitation to voter fraud.

The answer is that 80 percent of Americans want photo ID at the polling place.

The answer is that 8 of the 19 9/11 hijackers had registered as voters.

The question we might all ask Mrs Clinton and Gov. Spitzer of New York is this.

If you guys want to be so loosey-goosey about drivers licenses and voter ID, why bother about ID at all?  Let anyone drive.  Let anyone vote.  It’s the American thing to do.

And let’s save some money by laying off all those unimportant DMV clerks.  Then we can spend they money on programs that help people.

Larry Elder on Race in America

Radio talk-show host Larry Elder belongs to the Cosby-Sowell-Thomas wing of the black community.

So he was not that impressed with the young black woman trainee at a San Francisco airport car rental counter.  Not when she said:

"You know, I should have finished my training program some time ago, but because I’m black, they’re making me stay longer."

That’s a new one.  Training while black.

Still, Elder got his two cents in, telling her:

"You know, given your people skills and your drive, whatever obstacles others place in your way, you’ll be able to overcome them."

When you are sending a message like that, you ought to send it Western Union.

But he also told the story of Stanley O’Neal, recently ousted black CEO of Merrill Lynch.  The company lost billions on his watch in the mortgage meltdown. And so he had to go.

O’Neal is a rags-to-riches story, a meteoric rise from picking cotton in the South to the executive suite via a General Motors assembly line.

And the way that we make progress on race in this country is that when a guy like O’Neal can cut the mustard he gets to be CEO of Merrill Lynch.  When he messes up he gets fired.  It’s the American way.

No need for comment from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

You've Got to be Kidding, Girls

A decade or so ago we all laughed about political correctness.  It was so stupid that nobody could have been taken in by it.

But here we have, in 2007, a program of deliberate indoctrination of college students, political correctness run wild at the University of Delaware, according to Mike S. Adams.

The University of Delaware has just become one of the most Orwellian campuses in America. Students in its residence halls are now being subjected to a re-education program that is actually dubbed - in the university’s own tax-payer funded materials - as “treatment” for students who have incorrect attitudes and beliefs.

You know what those incorrect attitudes are.  And you know the penalty.

One student was identified in a write-up as the “worst” one-on-one session stating that she was tired of “having diversity shoved down her throat.”

Now we have Congress working on another major problem, writes Allison Kasic.  It’s the underrepresentation of women in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—in the university. In the first day of hearings conducted by Congressman Brian Baird (D-WA),

[n]o Committee Member or panelist challenged the presumption behind the hearing—that discrimination is the primary cause of women’s underrepresentation among science and engineering academics[.]

I’m sorry, girls, but this doesn’t pass the smell test.  Do you really think that, in 2007, there is a male faculty member in the university who would dare to discriminate against a woman, for any reason whatsoever?

Oh sure, there may be some men around who might sneer behind a woman’s back.  But no academic today in America would dare to risk a career in such a way.

Anyone who has the kind of cojones you need to buck the system like that is in finance or a technology startup, not in the university.

But let us suppose that women do suffer discrimination in STEM.  Is it really a problem that rises to the level of legislation?  Is this egregious discrimination that amounts to a civil rights matter?  Or is it just an annoyance?  Should important solons be taking time out from other important educational matters, such as the abysmal state of K-12 education, for instance, to solve this problem?

Come on, girls, you’ve got to be kidding.

We conservatives could take a Leninist view of this: The Worse The Better.  Or we could take a Rhett Butler view of it: Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

After all, conservatives have been run out of the university and marginalized in academe to an extent that must certainly exceed any discrimination that women suffer in STEM.

But the fact is that we do care.  The universities do matter.  And it matters that liberals are running the universities into the ground as they slowly ratchet up the level of compulsion and as they force every student, every faculty member, every building, and every ivied wall to conform to their belief system. 

Just as they have ruined everything else in the government by an excessive faith in the power of rational compulsion.

But really, what can we do?

Stuck on Stupid? Dems Want Carter Era Tax Rates

The central idea of the Reagan revolution was that punitive tax rates, like the 70 percent top rate on “unearned” income, was a jobs killer.  Greedy entrepreneurs just won’t go out and risk capital when the government is going to claw back up to 70 percent of their earnings.

Liberals sneered at the Laffer Curve and called it “trickle-down” economics.  But they pocketed their TIAA-CREF pensions swollen with the gains from a stock market that went from 1,000 to 10,000 in 20 years with nary a squeak.

Now Democrats like the sepuagenarian Charles Rangel want to return to those days, last seen in the Carter administration, by raising tax rates for high-income Americans.   James Pethokoukis explains.

[Rangel’s 4.6 percentage-point surtax on high incomes] only looks like a restoration of [Clinton’s tax rates]. But if the Bush tax cuts expire, the four-and-a-half points stays on top of the 39.6 [top Clinton tax rate]. So they are taking the rate to 44 percent. Then you add on 1.3 points ... another 2.9 points on top of that for the Medicare tax. So we are back to the 50 percent marginal rate under that plan.

But that’s just the beginning.  In addition, the Democrats are talking about raising the cap on FICA taxes.  So that’s another 7 1/2 percent.  Now we are talking about 60 percent marginal taxes.  On wages.

Let’s not forget, by the way, that the top 1 percent of taxpayers already pay 37 percent of federal income taxes, and that the top 50 percent of taxpayers pay 97 percent of federal income taxes.  Check it out at RushLimbaugh.com (truth in taxes) or the IRS(xls).

It’s just like the 1930s when for ten years, the United States was Stuck on Stupid.