Category Archives: Government

In Case You Were Wondering Why the US is Running a Deficit

3 Replies

I know it’s peanuts in the grand scheme of things, but I think this article in the Washington Post is indicative of what’s wrong with our government these days.  It’s all about farm subsidies being paid to people who live in sub-divisions built on old farmland.  Here’s an excerpt:

Nationwide, the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all, according to an analysis of government records by The Washington Post.

Some of them collect hundreds of thousands of dollars without planting a seed. Mary Anna Hudson, 87, from the River Oaks neighborhood in Houston, has received $191,000 over the past decade. For Houston surgeon Jimmy Frank Howell, the total was $490,709.

"I don’t agree with the government’s policy," said Matthews, who wanted to give the money back but was told it would just go to other landowners. "They give all of this money to landowners who don’t even farm, while real farmers can’t afford to get started. It’s wrong."

The checks to Matthews and other landowners were intended 10 years ago as a first step toward eventually eliminating costly, decades-old farm subsidies. Instead, the payments have grown into an even larger subsidy that benefits millionaire landowners, foreign speculators and absentee landlords, as well as farmers.

Most of the money goes to real farmers who grow crops on their land, but they are under no obligation to grow the crop being subsidized. They can switch to a different crop or raise cattle or even grow a stand of timber — and still get the government payments. The cash comes with so few restrictions that subdivision developers who buy farmland advertise that homeowners can collect farm subsidies on their new back yards.

The payments now account for nearly half of the nation’s expanding agricultural subsidy system, a complex web that has little basis in fairness or efficiency. What began in the 1930s as a limited safety net for working farmers has swollen into a far-flung infrastructure of entitlements that has cost $172 billion over the past decade. In 2005 alone, when pretax farm profits were at a near-record $72 billion, the federal government handed out more than $25 billion in aid, almost 50 percent more than the amount it pays to families receiving welfare.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; both political parties bear responsibility for building our "nanny government" but the Republicans have been getting away with pointing the finger at the Democrats for their support of entitlement programs like welfare.  I’d love to see someone call the Republicans on their support of corporate subsidies like this and watch them squirm.  It kills me that the Republicans’ staunchest supporters are the same people who are being screwed by Republican economic policies, and it kills me even more that the Democrats are so ineffective that they can’t get that point across to the electorate.  Helps explain why I’m neither!

Better Safe Than Sorry?

2 Replies

There’s a pretty long and important article from the New Yorker about David Addington, Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff and the purported architect and chief-defender of the Bush administration’s legal strategy in the "war on terrorism."  Reading this piece reminded me of Benjamin Franklin’s famous and oft-quoted statement that "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."

The article isn’t important just because it highlights a head henchman in the current regime, but also because it exposes exactly how far past historically established bounds our President has pushed his power.  Most astonishing to me is how quickly these incursions occured because in my mind a lot of what had happened seemed to be incremental over the years since 2001.  That was decidedly not so; the administration moved quickly and aggressively to exert expanded executive powers in 01-02 and most frighteningly did not seem to care whether or not is was legal.  Bush, Cheney and their confidantes seemed to say "it’s legal because we say it is so, no matter what anyone in Congress thinks or for that matter what some of our own lawyers think."

The article was written well before the Supreme Court ruling last week that declared Bush’s military commission system illegal, so it will be interesting to see if this is just the first in a series of events that will reassert the balance of power between the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government or if it’s merely a hickup in the Bush/Cheney march to extreme executive power.

I’ve heard many of the administration’s supporters say that this is a time of war and extraordinary circumstances require the president to assert extraordinary war-time powers.  This quote from Bruce Fein, who as an associate deputy attorney general at the Justice Department during the Reagan Administration I think best refutes that argument:

This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. He’s said that there are no restraints on his ability, as he sees it, to collect intelligence, to open mail, to commit torture, and to use electronic surveillance. If you used the President’s reasoning, you could shut down Congress for leaking too much. His war powers allow him to declare anyone an illegal combatant. All the world’s a battlefield—according to this view, he could kill someone in Lafayette Park if he wants! It’s got the sense of Louis XIV: ‘I am the State.

Scary ain’t it?  Hopefully the Supreme Court ruling signals that the balance of power is truly beginning to be corrected.

Thankfully He’s Not From Ohio

2 Replies

We the people in Forsyth County, NC have a new director for our elections office.  His name is Rob Coffman and he headed the elections board in Genesee County, Michigan.  Thankfully he isn’t from Ohio as, according to this article in Rolling Stone, the folks in the Buckeye state had elections in 2004 that made the elections in Chicago in the old days look positively pristine by comparison.

Hopefully the Ohio stink didn’t rub off on Mr. Coffman since Ohio and Michigan aren’t that far apart.  Of course with the well known hatred that Michigan and Ohio State fans have for each other I’m thinking that he would probably do the opposite of whatever they do in Ohio anyway.

Welcome Mr. Coffman and good luck!

Lawyers of the World Unite?

Leave a reply

You know you’ve trod on some serious toes when you motivate a bunch of lawyers to get together and decide to question your authority.  That’s what the American Bar Association is doing to President Bush and his administration.  Next thing you know Congress might even stand up to these jokers (the Bushies).  Well that might happen if congressmen ever showed the moral fortitude of lawyers…oh, Lord we’re in trouble.

IRS Outsourcing Its Archives? Your Shredder Might Be Useless

4 Replies

I found this interesting little item via Boing Boing.  Supposedly the writer works for the IRS in the document retention unit and allegedly they were just out-bid (low balled) for the work by a private company.

What with all the security breaches that have occured lately I’m not sure I like this.  Of course the government has had its own share of breaches, but still this would make me a whole lot more nervous.  Nervouser even.

Now if the contractor lets out our personal data can we sue it?  If so then that would be more attractive than suing the IRS itself.  See, there’s a silver lining to every dark cloud.

An Argument for Keeping the AMT

1 Reply

An economist from the University of Maryland has written a piece in the Washington Post that argues for keeping the alternative minimum tax (AMT).  His argument, in a nutshell, is that if the AMT is allowed to stay in place, and if the temporary raise in the standard exemption is allowed to return to $45,000 for a couples and $33,750 for individuals (the new tax bill raises the standard exemption to $62,550 and $42,500 respectively for one year) with inflation there will eventually be a flat tax in place.  So for once we would have gradual tax reform without Congress having to do anything. The result:

If the present AMT rates were applied as a universal flat tax — and especially if the AMT exemption were reduced and certain remaining AMT exclusions eliminated — the resulting federal revenue might even come to exceed current expenditure levels. The solution would then be to reduce the flat tax rate (the AMT rate) so that revenue and expenditures were brought back into balance.

In the longer run, the AMT could open the way to more radical reforms that might even change the basic nature of Washington spending habits. One option would be as follows: Each year the president would submit his budget proposal, and Congress, in response, would enact final appropriations. A neutral expert commission would then estimate the resulting federal revenue requirements, and a new flat tax rate, calculated to balance the budget, would be set for the forthcoming tax year. If Congress wanted to go on a spending spree, taxpayers would see the consequences directly and immediately in their pocketbooks.

The Social Security system is another area in which the AMT might facilitate radical change. Social Security taxes could be abolished and the flat tax adjusted upward to compensate for the lost revenue. The Social Security trust fund is largely an accounting fiction, and it is time to integrate the Social Security tax with the income tax system. Alternatively, Social Security tax payments could become a deductible credit from the required AMT payment.

Should We Have to Pay Taxes if Government Doesn’t Deliver the Basics?

Leave a reply

An elderly woman in England is refusing to pay taxes until the city (Derby) gets the prostitutes and drug dealers out of her neighborhood.  In thinking about it I wondered what your legal standing would be if you refused to pay taxes if you could prove that the government did not deliver on the basics.  I’m not talking entitlements here; I’m talking about basic health, safety and infrastructure.

For instance what if I could prove that my water service was inadequate and had been for a year, even after I complained?  Or that the police did not provide enough services to my neighborhood as compared to comparably sized neighborhoods across town?  Or that the roads and sewers were not maintained properly leading to polluted waterways, flooded roads, roads that caused severe damage to vehicles, etc.?

Can the government be held responsible for not providing basic services?  Can we refuse payment until said services are delivered?  Or, if after paying can we petition (i.e. sue) to get a refund?

Just wondering.

We Can Trust Them, They’re Working for National Security

Leave a reply

Here’s an interesting tidbit from BusinessWeek:

President George W.
Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad
authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded
companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure
obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the
Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained
eye.

Unbeknownst to almost all of Washington and the financial world, Bush
and every other President since Jimmy Carter have had the authority to
exempt companies working on certain top-secret defense projects from
portions of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. Administration officials
told BusinessWeek
that they believe this is the first time a President has ever delegated
the authority to someone outside the Oval Office. It couldn’t be
immediately determined whether any company has received a waiver under
this provision.

Honestly if I’d read this a week ago I probably wouldn’t have paid attention, but since I just finished reading “Conspiracy of Fools“, which is a detailed look at the Enron/Andersen debacle, I have to say I find this development disturbing.  You see I used to assume that for the most part if you were a c-level executive at a Fortune 50 company you’d at least be smart and pretty good with management and financial basics.  I also assumed that their auditors would catch on to any really serious malfeasance. This book cured me of those delusions.

I also always assumed that every company had its crooks, and that every company does whatever it can to jack up its financials, but I never imagined that the crooks, especially the stupid ones, could climb so high and not be caught. 

So we only have to look back five years to see a spectacular example of how bad companies can behave, and how lax the oversight can be in the higher reaches of corporate America, and yet now we have the administration potentially providing a cloak of secrecy  to these  guys?  Why give an exemption?  Why not just get some auditors with top-secret clearance?  And why delegate the authority to your chief spy?

Who am I kidding asking these questions?

NC Rep. Compares Himself to Jesus, Kind Of

Leave a reply

The North Carolina legislature is working on reforming its ethics rules (I know, it’s an oxymoron) and they raised the reporting threshold for gifts from nonfamily members to $1,000 and gifts from anyone who does business with the state to $500.  Those that support the higher threshold said that they wouldn’t be influenced by less money than that, and in the best quote of the day Rep. Drew Saunders (D) of Mecklenburg County said:

“Even the baby Jesus accepted gifts, and I don’t think it corrupted him.”

Huh.  I think someon needs to remind Rep. Saunders that he’s no Jesus.

Is Your Daughter’s Boyfriend’s Roommate a Terrorist? or Thinking About This Whole ‘Privacy’ Thing

2 Replies

As I posted last week there’s been a slight uproar about the NSA’s efforts to aggregate all the phone call data in the US.  Simply put the NSA is trying to distinguish who is calling whom and how often in an effort to track terrorists by said patterns.  I also said that I didn’t think this would be such a contentious issue if the government had been transparent or forthcoming in its efforts.

Today I read this item on Boing Boing and another aspect of this argument crept into my dim little brain.  First an excerpt:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources. “It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Here’s the question that this item caused to flicker in my head: if the government isn’t listening the contents of calls as they claim then how do they know who is making the call and who is receiving it?  If you call my house you could be talking to any one of five people who live here or any number of guests we have over.  If you call my cell phone you may not talk to me;  if the phone is lying around the house any one could pick it up and say hello.

While looking at cell phone records gives you an idea of who is probably talking to whom you just can’t know for sure unless you’re listening to the actual contents of the call.  But because our government has created an environment of guilty until proven innocent we are instictively loathe to give them even that level of access to records of our activities.

As a follow up to the NSA story the results of a survey were released showing that about two thirds of Americans had no problem with this kind of data collection if it helped fight terrorism.  I suspect that is becuase most people don’t feel they have anything to hide.  But how would they feel if they knew there was a possibility that their daughter, who was home for the summer from college, had a boyfriend living in a group home and unbeknownst to him he had a roommate who had links to a terror cell (however tangential).  The daughter’s numerous calls to a number with known terrorist connections raises a red flag and all of the sudden mom and dad have to deal with federal agents calling their employers with some very pointed questions.

I have a feeling their opinions might change.