View 648 Movember 8 - 14, 2010 (original) (raw)
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Friday, November 12, 2010
Earmarks: there is a case for preserving earmarks. Not as they there are, but with a bit more openness about how they are adopted including an open discussion about how this particular project is useful to the general welfare. There needs to be a way to fund contrarian research, and that will never come from the bureaucracy or "peer review" controlled projects. There are national heritages that ought to be preserved but aren't widely known. I have made that case before, and I will make it again -- but sometime in future. For now, it's a key issue for the new Congress. No earmarks.
The new Congress needs to make some dramatic changes. Actually it will be more a matter of proposing changes which won't get through. The earmarks reform can be imposed by a simple House majority. All money bills have to originate in the House anyway. There are Republican Senators who want to keep earmarks, and they actually have some decent reasons for doing so. At another time I will be glad to defend resurrecting the practice as it was in older times; but for now, there needs to be a visible accomplishment of the New Congress. This is an easy one. There is a reasonable discussion of this under the title "GOP's Earmark No-Brainer" (link) in today's Wall Street Journal.
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The deficit reduction "bi-partisan" report is in, and there was little not predictable in it. It does put the problem in stark terms: the United States is broke. We have not only spent too much money, we have committed ourselves to continue to spend. The money is going to run out -- it has run out -- and something has to be done.
The Wall Street Journal has found some pleasant surprises in the report, and says so in today's editorial "A deficit of nerve" (link).
Before we pound the details, it's important to understand why we have had deficits of 10% and 8.9% of GDP for the past two years, with another 10% or so anticipated in fiscal 2011. The most important reason is the burst of spending from the 111th Congress that has taken federal outlays as a share of GDP to 25% in 2009, 23.8% in 2010 and back to an estimated 25% in 2011. This is unheard of in the modern era, when the average has been under 21%.
The second reason is a revenue shortfall due to the recession and feeble economic recovery. Revenues have averaged about 18.5% of GDP in recent decades, but in 2009 and 2010 they were only 14.9% with little improvement expected this fiscal year. The single least painful way to reduce the deficit is to get the economy growing at a healthy pace again, which would cut the deficit by 3.5% of GDP a year without a dime of spending cuts.
Every one in the nation -- well, all of us not part of the 1% that own 40% of the wealth -- has had to take some austerity measures, learn to live on a bit less. When I was growing up we first had the Great Depression then the shortages caused by war. I learned "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without" in the second grade. Perhaps earlier. But some have had less austerity than others: government workers neither get laid off nor take salary cuts nor have their pension plans changed. The worse that happens is that they don't get raises, and some resent even that. I would think that an actual cut in salary and benefits across the board would be reasonable, given the economic distress of the nation. Of course the service employee unions will go mad on this, but perhaps that is a signal that these times of both union protection and civil service protection have to come to an end. Civil service was intended to insulate government workers from danger of unemployment, and also to prevent them from becoming involved in politics. Under the spoils system -- otherwise known as a system of political responsibility -- the winners of elections got to fire everyone and appoint their own. This resulted in a fair amount of nepotism, and even more of political pressure: work with the machine, because if you don't, you are out of a job when it loses.
Civil service was supposed to end that: you got a steady job at a known salary with known benefits, and you couldn't be arbitrarily fired. You couldn't be asked to donate to political campaigns, in fact you couldn't get involved in politics at all. Civil service protection was a substitute for unionism. Now, union membership is required, and the unions participate in politics. Boss Tweed would have loved this notion: a total legalization of Tammany Hall, and the Tammany people were protected! The goo goos couldn't ever fire them! All the benefits of both worlds.
That's one question the New Congress needs to address.
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There's a more fundamental question that needs debating at some point: to what are people entitled simply because they live in the United States? How much of your neighbor's income are you entitled to for existing? If you are born crippled and stupid and incapable of making a living, does that entitle you to someone else's income? By entitle I mean that an armed tax collector takes the money from someone and gives it to you. I don't mean charity or "brother's keeper" or the various Christian and Jewish requirements to give to the poor ("Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away"). Indeed the courts have held often that the state has no obligation to enforce religious commandments.
We need a fundamentals debate on just what the productive owe to the non-productive. Is it a portion of their income? A portion of their possessions? Is there a limit? Can those in dire need compel you to donate blood? A kidney? Require you to do "community service" although you have done no crime other than not to be handicapped? How much of a handicap converts you from one entitled to receive when you were formerly among those required to give?
Is there anywhere an official discussion of these questions? Have they been debated in Congress? Should they be?
There are two questions here: to what are the needy entitled, and what must the able give? And second, what is the basis for the obligation of those who must give?
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I was just sent this shot of me at the Niven Halloween Party. The costume theme was pirates. I went as a software pirate...
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Everyone take down your flags. They offend the people of Mexican origin in the United States. At least that seems to be the case in one school district. Eventually they reversed the order. http://www.foxnews.com/us/
2010/11/12/school-reverses-
course-ordering-student-remove-flag-bike/ I gather that the local commander of the VFW was involved in getting the bureaucrats to reverse their decision. Perhaps.
American exceptionalism depends on assimilation, which is to say the Melting Pot. The notion that we must defer to "other cultures" and pay for it with public money is a bit bizarre. Apparently one entitlement is for any "culture" or any interpretation of it to be "respected", and that means "diversity." At one time the goal was "tolerance" of views well outside the general American culture; the law requires a degree of tolerance. That is not "respect" or agreement. As for example pacifism in time of war: yes, it is tolerated. There is even a degree of respect for it; but we do not stop honoring our fallen dead because that might offend pacifists.
Of course the liberal notion of diversity is different. Americans are exceptional, but it is an evil exceptionalism for which we ought to apologize. Our President said as much at G20. It is a view of America, and apparently one taught using public money in the public schools, and a view to which we are not merely entitled but required to accept. God save us.
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Stephen Vincent Benet
I have found an online copy of Stephen Vincent Benet's short story "Doc Mellhorn and the Pearly Gates," which I read a a child -- I was much taken by Benet, his stories and his poetry, when I was in grade school. I read everything of his I could find, and I do not regret a moment of it. His best known short story is of course "The Devil and Daniel Webster," but some of his others were well known in his time, and ought to be included in reading programs. This collection includes his "The Last of the Legions" which is a story everyone who wants to understand Roman Britain must read, and his post atomic war story written before anyone ever heard of the atomic bomb. Benet is not much read now, and that's a blasted shame. Patriot, poet, story teller. The formatting is off in both the items linked below but the story is readable. These are collections so you may have problems finding it, but it's in there; the story is worth finding and so are most of the others. Stephen Vincent Benet was one of America's better story tellers, and he consistently sold to the Saturday Evening Post when that was the highest paying market in the country (sort of like being able to sell scripts to the top TV shows). Of course that got him scorned by the literary critics who couldn't sell to the Post.
http://www.archive.org/stream/selectedworks
ofs030023mbp/selectedworksofs030023mbp_djvu.txt
http://books.google.com/books?id=_PdH9Pdc5Zg
C&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=doc+mellhorn+and+
the+pearly+gates&source=bl&ots=6nefGb8Pak
&sig=cDCUim-kmZF0snKSRTw2vVGXltM&hl=
en&ei=ytndTKivO5HEsAO67Iz
zCg&sa=X&oi=book_result
&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCEQ6A
EwAw#v=onepage&q=doc%20mellhorn%
20and%20the%20pearly%20gates&f=false
Incidentally on selling to the Post: Stuart Cloete, (Rags of Glory, Dove Hill) whom I met in South Africa and instantly hit it off with, told me that in 1948 he sold a story to the Post for enough money to let him take a year off to write a novel. It paid something like $4500, which in those days was a good bit of money.
Anyway, I recommend Benet and I suspect he will still appeal to bright kids in Grade School. His poetry is pretty darned good, too. Some of his "nightmares" have images that you'll remember for a long time.
Nightmare With Angels
By Stephen Vincent Benet
An angel came to me and stood by my bedside,
Remarking in a professional-historical-economic and
irritated voice,
"If the Romans had only invented a decent explosion-engine!
Not even the best, not even a Ford V-8
But, say, a Model-T or even an early Napier,
They'd have built good enough roads for it (they knew how to
build roads)
From Cape Wrath to Cape St. Vincent, Susa, Babylon and Moscow.
And the motorized legions never would have fallen,
And Peace, in the shape of a giant eagle, would brood over the
entire Western World!"
He changed his expression, looking now like a combination of
Gilbert Murray, Hilaire Belloc,
and a dozen other scientists, writers,
and prophets,
And continued, in angelic tones,
"If the Greeks had known how to cooperate, if there'd never
been a Reformation,
If Sparta had not been Sparta, and the Church had been the Church
of the saints,
The Argive peace like a free-blooming olive-tree, the peace of Christ
(who loved peace)
like a great, beautiful vine enwrapping the spinning earth!
Take it nearer home," he said.
Take these Mayans and their star-clocks, their carvings and their
great cities.
Who sacked them out of their cities, drowned the cities with a
green jungle?
A plague? A change of climate? A queer migration?
Certainly they were skillful, certainly they created.
And in Tenochtitlan, the dark obsidian knife and the smoking heart on
the stone but a fair city,
And the Incas had it worked out beautifully til Pizarro smashed them.
The collectivist state was there, and the ladies very agreeable.
They lacked steel, alphabet, and gunpowder and they had to get
married when the government said so.
They also lacked unemployment and overproduction.
For that matter," he said, "take the Cro-Magnons,
The fellows with the big skills, the handsome folk, the excellent
scribers of mammoths,
Physical gods and yet with sensitive brain (they drew the fine,
running reindeer).
What stopped them? What kept us all from being Apollos and Aphrodites
Only with a new taste to the nectar,
The laughing gods, not the cruel, the gods of song, not of war?
Supposing Aurelius, Confucious, Napoleon, Plato, Gautama, Alexander -
Just to name half a dozen -
Had ever realized and stabilized the full dream?
How long, O Lord God in the highest? How long, what now, perturbed spirit?"
He turned blue at the wingtips and disappeared as another angel
approached me.
This one was quietly but appropriately dressed in cellophane, synthetic
rubber and stainless steel,
But his mask was the blind mask of Ares, snouted for gasmasks.
He was neither soldier, sailor, farmer, dictator, nor munitions-manufacturer.
Nor did he have much conversation, except to say,
"You will not be saved by General Motors or the prefabricated house.
You will not be saved by dialectic materialism or the Lambeth Conference.
You will not be saved by Vitamin D or the expanding universe.
In Fact, you will not be saved."
In his hand was a woven, wire basket, full of seeds, small metallic and
shining like the seeds of portulaca;
Where he sowed them, the green vine withered, and the smoke and
armies sprang up.
