Minor Thoughts from me to you

It must be an election year. Wisconsin Republicans indicated that they would work with Governor Doyle on a heating bill. Quick recap: Republicans hold a majority in both the state Assembly and the state Senate. Governor Doyle peremptorily summoned the legislature into session after the Republicans had previously refused to increase state heating aid. I have a few questions I'd like to ask about this plan.

Doyle wants to set aside $6 million from an environmental cleanup fund to offer one-time heating assistance to people who do not currently qualify for aid. Some 30,000 families would qualify for $200 to $300 dollars apiece, Doyle's office estimates. The Republicans agreed to work with Doyle after the governor last week called for a special session of the Legislature on Tuesday to take up his plan, which would expand eligibility to a family of four with an income lower than $40,000.

How were these numbers arrived at? How many people four-member families with an income lower than $40,000 are there? How many of them desperately need this aid? How much heat does the Governor want to pay for? A passable 68 degrees or a balmy 75 degrees? One is necessary, one is simply extravagant. Does the Governor's plan take this into account? Is this a true necessity or simply a vote-buying effort by a Governor desperate for good news? Will this money really be taken from the environmental cleanup fund or will Doyle later use the environmental cleanup fund as an excuse to raise taxes further?

Families "are left to worry for another week about how to pay the bills and whether they'll have to choose between heating and eating," [Governor Doyle] said at a news conference.

This statement is extremely misleading. Wisconsin law prohibits heating companies from cutting off the heat if citizens are unable to pay their bills. People can catch up on their bills during the cheaper summer months. If paying large bills during the winter is a worry, most utility companies allow people to pay on a "budget plan" that distributes the payments evenly throughout the entire year. No citizen of Wisconsin need to choose between heating and eating. If money is tight, the state allows them to choose eating now and worry about the heating bills later.

The eligibility expansion could help people such as Deanna Topper of Mount Horeb, a single working mother who was denied heating assistance last year. Topper, a case manager for a social services agency, said her heating bill had doubled since that time and any state aid "would be a huge relief."

I am sure it would be huge relief if the state would help. I would consider it a huge relief if the state of Wisconsin would help pay for my cable bill. That doesn't mean that the state needs to pay for Ms. Topper's bills.

Actually, I wonder if Ms. Topper has cable television? I don't know if she does or not, but let's hypothesize that she does -- just as a thought experiment. If so, I would argue that the state is subsidizing her cable bills. By helping to pay for her heat, they would be allowing her to spend her own money on a cable subscription. I'm not sure what the rates in Mount Horeb are, but here in Madison I would have to spend $45 a month to get cable television. Over the course of a winter, that would be a cool $225. If Wisconsin is determined to give people another $200-300 a month, they should force people to choose between cable television and heating, to pinpoint just one luxury that 62% of all Americans enjoy.

Fitzgerald, co-chairman of the Legislature's budget committee, said he also questioned spending $6 million more because the state and federal government are already spending a record $80 million to help the poor in Wisconsin pay their heating bills this year.

This has been one of the mildest winters on record for Wisconsin. We're already spending a record amount of money to pay for heating bills. A record amount of money in a year that has been very mild. Why do we need to spend even more money on heating? Keep in mind that no one will have their heat cut off this winter. No one will freeze to death if we don't spend this money. Why is it so urgent that we spend it now? Why are Wisconsin's Republicans so eager to help the governor spend even more money?

The Wisconsin Taxpayer Protection Amendment is an amendent to the Wisconsin Constitution that limits the amount of taxes that the state and local governments can raise. If successful, it will protect Wisconsin residents from taxes that seem to rise endlessly. As someone who thinks Wisconsin is already grossly over-taxed, I am very supportive of this bill.

Owen from Boots and Sabers posted a detailed analysis of the Wisconsin Taxpayer Protection Amendment (full text).

Rather than focusing on the amendment itself (I couldn't possibly come close to Owen's efforts), I'd like to focus on the opposition to the amendment. The Wisconsin State Journal ran a story about it this morning.

[Opponents] said the latest proposal still ties the hands of local officials and limits government spending to a formula that doesn't match the needs of government or students, the poor, the sick and the old.

Wisconsin's $1.7 billion in programs for doctors and drugs for the poor, uninsured children and their parents and seniors has grown by an average 7.9 percent a year since 1989, nearly three times the 2.7 percent increase in overall inflation over the same period, according to the state Department of Health and Family Services.

Economist Andrew Reschovsky of UW-Madison's La Follette School of Public Affairs said the measure would likely substantially downsize government over time. If the proposal had been put in place 20 years ago, and without passing any referendum, the $15.5 billion the state collects in annual taxes and fees today would be about 20 percent lower, he said.

"We could eliminate the UW System completely and we would still have to cut more. It's a big number," he said.

The fact is, Wisconsin's taxes don't match the needs of Wisconsin's citizens. No one is helped by having their government help itself to a large portion of their income. These paragraphs are a classic example of FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Government big spenders are trying to frighten everyone into believing that society's weakest members will be shoved out into the snow if taxes are raised more slowly. You can't get any more bleeding heart than mentioning students, grandmothers, and invalids in the same paragraph. Reschovsky would like to create the fear that Wisconsin will have to kill the UW if this bill passes. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is, the amendment would still allow governments to raises taxes by 4% annually. I'd hardly consider that a hardship. My own income increases at a rate of 2-5% per year. My spending increases at a slightly slower rate. (I do have to set aside money for the lean years, after all.) Wisconsin's spending has increased by almost 8% per year. I have a hard time understanding why government should get to take my money faster than I can earn it. And that is exactly what they are doing. If I get a 3% raise and Wisconsin raises my taxes by 6%, the state is now taking 3% more of my money than they used to.

Carefully monitoring income and expenses is something that most Americans do every month. I have to carefully budget all of my income. I look at what I absolutely need to spend money on: housing, food, student loan debt, etc. Then, with the money left over, I have to make some hard decisions: should I help my brother with his college expenses? Should I take my wife out to dinner? Should I buy a new book or CD? Should I put more into my 401(k) or mortgage savings? I only have a limited slice of income to go around. As much as I would like to, I can't dictate my own income and spend whatever I want to.

Why should the Wisconsin legislature, the Dane County Control Board, and the city of Madison be any different? Why should they be allowed to take more and more of my money every year? I'm not trying to cripple the government or destroy it. I'm merely asking (requiring) it to live by the same rules and limitations I do. Prioritize spending. Focus on the most important needs first. Make some hard decisions every once in a while instead of trying to make everyone happy.

If you have any doubts whatsoever about the desparate need for reforming government spending, I'd invite you to read The Great American Pork Barrel from Harper's Magazine. I am disgusted by the manner in which our Congressional "representatives" act when spending the nation's tax dollars.

There was no time to produce a clean copy, so the version of the omnibus bill that Congress voted on was a fourteen-inch-thick clump of papers with corrections, deletions, and additions on virtually every page. Handwritten notes peppered the margins; typefaces varied from section to section and from paragraph to paragraph. First made available to lawmakers at around 12:15 A.M. on November 20 (and only to those who happened to be browsing the House Rules Committee website, where it was posted), the omnibus bill came to a vote before the full House some sixteen hours later, at approximately 4:00 that afternoon, and before the Senate at 8:42 that evening. For the legislators who approved it"”by a margin of 344"’51 in the House and 65"’30 in the Senate"”reading the 3,320-page bill before the vote would have been a mathematical impossibility.

As approved at the November 17 appropriations meeting, the Foreign Operations bill had contained a mere nine earmarks. The omnibus measure, which was completed after two feverish days of work, allocated money for 11,772 separate earmarks. ... In the end, the bill's earmarks were worth a combined total of nearly $16 billion"”a figure almost as large as the annual budget of the Department of Agriculture and roughly twice that of the Environmental Protection Agency. It was the biggest single piece of pork-barrel legislation in American history.

If you still believe that Congress should be in charge of medical care, education, retirement savings, and a host of other issues, I'd love to hear your reasons why. Any business that operated in this manner would find itself facing bankruptcy in short order. That supposedly mature adults would behave in this manner is frightening.

Thanks goes to Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold for co-sponsoring the Pork Barrel Reduction Act along with Senators Coburn, McCain, Bayh, Kyl, Ensign, Graham, Sununu, DeMint, and Cornyn. Pork Busters is asking for you to help get this bill passed. Many people in the Senate (I'm looking at you, Senators Murkoswki and Stevens) will oppose this effort to reign in government waste.

You can read the full text of the Pork Barrel Reduction Act (S.2265) online and track the Senators who support it and oppose it.

Another John Stossel special will be airing on ABC this week. Reason Magazine reprints a summary of Myths, Lies, and Nasty Behavior.

The special will air in Madison on ABC-27 and run from 9pm to 10pm. We have a dinner guest tonight, but I'll be taping it to watch later.

Also worth reading is Stossel's older article Confessions of a Welfare Queen. You may be surprised at who's collecting welfare checks.

The Daily Show and the Colbert Report have become successful by demonstrating just how laughable most of our elected representatives are. This is most true when politicians are responding to press questions. Unfortunately, most press questions tend to be rather laughable themselves. Fortunately, someone who knows what he's talking about managed to slip into a news conference today. Mark Tapscott provides a good summary Senator Durbin's bad day:

Capitol Hill is buzzing with talk of a news conference earlier today in which Powerline's Paul Mirengoff was pushing some hard questions at Sen. Teddy Kennedy, D-MA, and Sen. Richard Durbin, D-IL, about the NSA's anti-terrorist international "eavesdropping" program.

Kennedy apparently got flustered with Mirengoff, so Durbin started fielding the questions and himself became increasingly flustered. Finally, according to one account, Durbin asked Mirengoff what news organization he represented.

Yes, Senator Durbin ran into the buzz saw known as Paul Mirengoff and Power Line. The proprietors of Power Line are best known for their role in forcing Dan Rather to retire, after Rather pushed the false Texas Air National Guard story about President Bush. Paul and the rest of the gang are legal experts, unlikely to be intimidated by Senator Durbin's impressive blustering. Apparently, Senator Durbin was the more intimidated person. I'm looking forward to watching the video once I get home.

The Heritage Foundation has published a new report entitled "Federal Spending: By the Numbers". If you value fiscal conservatism, if you value living within your means, if you wish your government shared your values, you'll find this to be a depressing read. If this keeps up, we'll have nothing to leave our children -- the government will have taken it all in taxes, leaving our children and grandchildren with nothing but debt and memories of prosperity. Courtesy of Captains Quarters:

However, federal spending has kept the pace of the expansion in revenues. Last year's budget came in at $2.472T, and this year we expect to spend $2.77T, according to estimates released this week. Of that money, $969B comes in so-called discretionary spending, up $300B since 2001. But by far and away the worst of the bill comes in entitlement spending, which went to $1.32T last year, up from $1.009 in 2001. As a measure of the rate of increase in both areas, discretionary spending has increased 93% since 1990, but entitlements have gone up 132%, while revenues have increased by 109%.

Where has the increase come? Some of it has gone to national defense, but not all of it. In fact, the federal budget has grown across the board since 2001, outstripping inflation (12% overall) in several categories, such as Education (137%), Community and Regional Development (342%), Medicare (58%), Housing and Commerce (58%), Medicaid (49%), and Water Transportation (46%). Do you like the idea of nationalized health care? We may be heading there by default, as the federal budget for Health Research and Regulation has grown by 78% since 2001 and now consumes $76B of our budget.

While I'm on the subject of the State of the Union, S. T. Karnick had some ideas for making the speech more entertaining:

Another nice effect, and one which would emphasize the President's role as both leader and team player, would be for him to have one of those big, clear plastic boards behind him, on which he could tape photos and write with a dry-erase marker, like a police captain talking to his team as they chase down a serial killer. Viewers would be fascinated as they watched the board fill up with words and pictures, and there would be great suspense as we wondered whether that snapshot on the upper right which is hanging precariously and even fluttering in the breeze from the air conditioning was going to fall down, and whether the President would leave up the phrase about health care expenditures or erase it in order to write something about China. Now that's theater!

Four justices attended the State of the Union address last night: Justices Roberts, Thomas, Alito, and Breyer. It is an interesting thing to be a Supreme Court justice, the world's most non-political job, at a State of the Union, one of the world's most political events. Dana Milbank reports on when the Justices chose to Clap On or Clap Off:

At times, Alito followed the lead of the other three justices who sat with him in the front row. When Bush said "We love our freedom, and we will fight to keep it," Thomas looked at Roberts, who looked at Breyer, who gave an approving shrug; all four gentlemen stood and gave unanimous applause.

At other times, Alito showed independence from his senior colleagues. When Bush delivered the stock line "The state of our union is strong," Alito dissented while the other three robed justices in the front row applauded. When Bush declared that "liberty is the right and hope of all humanity," Alito was the only member of the judicial quartet to provide his concurring applause.

The problem with easy solutions is that they never are. Healthcare is a problem that has no easy solutions, despite what many politicians on both sides of the aisle will tell you. Take a look at The Fix-It Myth:

Here's the paradox: A health care system that satisfies most of us as individuals may hurt us as a society. Let me offer myself as an example. All my doctors are in small practices. I like it that way. It seems to make for closer personal connections. But I'm always stunned by how many people they employ for nonmedical chores -- appointments, recordkeeping, insurance collections. A bigger practice, though more impersonal, might be more efficient. Because insurance covers most of my medical bills, though, I don't have any stake in switching.

On a grander scale, that's our predicament. Americans generally want their health care system to do three things: (1) provide needed care to all people, regardless of income; (2) maintain our freedom to pick doctors and their freedom to recommend the best care for us; and (3) control costs. The trouble is that these laudable goals aren't compatible. We can have any two of them, but not all three. Everyone can get care with complete choice -- but costs will explode, because patients and doctors have no reason to control them. We can control costs but only by denying care or limiting choices.

Growing up, I was upset about Congress's spending. I was convinced that if we only had a Republican President and a Republican Congress we could really cut the fat out of the Federal budget. Well, not so much.

As an incumbent politician, it's easy to protect yourself in re-election campaigns. Your political protection is only three steps away:

1. Convince your constituents that political campaigns are hopeless corrupt
2. Pass a "Campaign Finance Reform Act"
3. Use the new law to stomp on anyone who threatens you

It's not just provocative, it really happened. Read the true story behind the McCain-Feingold Bipartisian Campaign Finance Reform Act.