Archive for December, 2011
Sen. Coburn’s 2011 Wastebook
The office of Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has released the 2011 edition of its annual “Wastebook.” The document spotlights 100 particularly ridiculous expenditures of taxpayer money from the past year. From an entertainment standpoint, it’s pure gold. But it’s also infuriating, depressing, and a painful reminder of what happens when politicians and bureaucrats spend other people’s money.
Here are my five “favorites”:
- $10 million for remake of “Sesame Street” for Pakistan (U.S. Agency for International Development). Osama bin Big Bird?
- $350,000 for an international art exhibit in Venice, Italy (State Department). To really appreciate this one, check out the pictures on page 21.
- An additional $175,587 to the University of Kentucky to study how cocaine enhances the sex drive of Japanese quail (National Institutes of Health). My guess: American quails couldn’t be used because the females are prone to getting a headache at the most inconvenient time.
- $592,527 for a study on why chimpanzees throw feces (National Institutes of Health). Perhaps NIH can fund a study on how cocaine affects the chimps’ aim.
- $150,000 for the American Museum of Magic in Michigan (Institute of Museum & Library Services). It ought to be relocated to Washington given the city’s unrivaled ability to make money disappear.
Yes, the money involved here amounts to pocket change in comparison to the $3.7 trillion the federal government spent last year. But as Coburn asks in the introduction, “Do these initiatives match your understanding of the role of the federal government as outlined by the Enumerated Powers of the U.S. Constitution?” Worthy or not, very little of what the federal government spends money on comports with the Founders’ vision of a national government that was to be strictly limited in its scope. That the money is often poorly spent is proof that their intentions were wise.
Check out DownsizingGovernment.org for more information on many of the agencies and programs cited in the Coburn report.
Richard Branson: Time to End the War on Drugs
Entrepreneur Richard Branson has just blogged about his recent trip to Portugal where he was investigating that country’s drug policies. Branson cites Cato’s landmark study, “Drug Decriminalization in Portugal,” several times in his post. Here’s an excerpt:
I will set out clearly what I learned from my visit to Portugal and would urge other countries to study this:
In 2001 Portugal became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines.
Jail time was replaced with offer of therapy. (The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is much more expensive than treatment).
Under Portugal’s new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker, and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.
Critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to “drug tourists” and exacerbate Portugal’s drug problem; the country has some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. The recently realised results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, suggest otherwise. …
Portugal’s 10 year experiment shows clearly that enough is enough. It is time to end the war on drugs worldwide. We must stop criminalising drug users. Health and treatment should be offered to drug users – not prison. Bad drugs policies affect literally hundreds of thousands of individuals and communities across the world. We need to provide medical help to those that have problematic use – not criminal retribution.
Read the whole thing. Check out the recent Cato conference on the Global War on Drugs here.
The Iraq War: 20 Years, Not 9
Here are two newspaper accounts about the conclusion of the Iraq war:
The New York Times: “Almost nine years after the first American tanks began massing on the Iraq border, the Pentagon declared an official end to its mission here, closing a troubled conflict that helped reshape American politics and left a bitter legacy of anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world.”
The Washington Post: “Nearly nine years after American troops stormed across the Iraq border in a blaze of shock and awe, U.S. officials quietly ended the bloody and bitterly divisive conflict here Thursday, but the debate over whether it was worth the cost in money and lives is yet unanswered.”
There is a problem with those accounts. The United States has been at war in Iraq for twenty years, not nine! George Orwell warned us not to confuse war with peace, but we are clearly falling into that trap. More here.
Big Government Causes Crime, the Norwegian Version
I’ve written several times about the foolish War on Drugs, which has been about as misguided and ineffective as the government’s War on Poverty.
So when I saw a news report about a couple of Swedes getting busted for smuggling 200-plus kilos of contraband into Norway, and then another story about a Russian getting caught trying to sneak 90 kilos of an illicit substance into the country, I wondered whether these were reports about cocaine or marijuana. Or perhaps heroin or crystal meth.
Hardly. Norway’s law enforcement community was protecting people from the horrible scourge of illegal butter.
Sounds absurd, but there’s been an increase in the demand for butter and high import taxes have created a huge incentive for black market butter sales. Here’s a video on this latest example of government stupidity.
I guess the moral of the story is that if you outlaw butter, only outlaws will have butter. Or perhaps butter is the gateway drug leading to whole milk consumption, red meat, salt, and other dietary sins. Surely Mayor Bloomberg will want to investigate.
By the way, the United States is not immune from foolish policies that line the pockets of criminals. Here’s a video from the Mackinac Center revealing how punitive tobacco taxes facilitate organized crime.
House Transparency Slated to Improve
Perhaps my mean grading has contributed to nascent competition between the Republican House and the Democratic administration for the transparency prize. Last Friday, the House Administration Committee adopted standards that “require all House legislative documents be published electronically in an open, searchable format on one centralized website.”
At a September Cato Capitol Hill briefing, I rated Congress on the quality of the data it publishes reflecting its membership, activities, documents, and decisions. Its grades weren’t that good. At a briefing last week, I graded the data about federal budgeting, appropriations, and spending, which is largely an executive branch responsibility. Those grades weren’t very good either.
Able and dogged transparency advocate Daniel Schuman at the Sunlight Foundation has a good write-up up the House’s move to produce good data—he and Sunlight certainly did their part to encourage it—though I’ll quibble with one particular. The adoption of the document—a two-page outline of what should be standardized, and not a standards document itself—was not really “a tremendous step into the 21st Century.” It was an outline of a course to improved transparency. 21st-Century transparency.
What is required to produce that transparency? My recent paper “Publication Practices for Transparent Government” sought to establish guideposts for publication of data that will foster public access to meaningful information about what happens in Washington, D.C. The practices, in ascending order of importance and difficulty, are: authority, availability, machine-discoverability, and machine-readability.
Putting all documents on a single site will enhance authority. People will know where to look, and what source to trust. In our rough grading system, we weighted the simple practice of authoritative publishing at 10% of the total grade.
The second practice, availability, means ensuring that the data is complete, that it remains permanently in the same location, that it is not proprietary itself, and that it is not in a proprietary format. This is likely to be fulfilled by adherence to the Committee’s language and basic good practices. Availability we weighted at 20% of the total grade.
Machine-discoverability is when data is identified and located consistent with a variety of good practices going to the naming and locating of Internet resources. It’s weighted at 30% of the total grade in our system for rating data publication. It is likely that the House will develop good practices, but it will be important to watch and see that it does.
Machine-readability is the most important part of transparency. It means publishing data so that the logical relationships among elements are clear, and so that computers can automatically detect the semantic meaning of the documents and data they examine.
This is where the House Administration Committee’s release is least clear. Documents like bills and committee reports could be published so that each reference to existing law, to federal agencies, bureaus, and programs, to newly authorized spending, and to a variety of other items and entities are automatically discoverable in the document.
You should be able to do a quick search, rather than labor for hours, to see what bills affect the Labor Department. You should be able to see every dollar authorized or appropriated in every bill, nearly instantly. The data should be a foundation for dozens of sites and services that disseminate iformation in different ways to different audiences.
Here’s hoping that the House Administration Committee’s standards drive all the way to machine-readability. It will be a step into the 21st century if the House provides data the Internet can use and that the Internet-connected public very much wants to see.
Coming through with robust machine-readability will handily take the transparency mantle from President Obama, who promised transparency as a campaigner, but who was not produced the vibrant, different government people wanted. As I noted in a write-up last week, the administration has some low-hanging transparency fruit that could bring its grades up decisively. House Republicans are first out of the gate.
Jack Link’s Presents: Messin’ With Taxpayers
If you’re a taxpayer and you like beef jerky, I have good and bad news. The good news is that Jack Link’s is expanding the production facilities at its corporate home in Minong, Wisconsin. The bad news is the expansion is being “made possible” with a $365,000 federal grant to Minong for infrastructure upgrades.
The money comes from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant program. Curiously, the state’s Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation doesn’t mention in the press release that the money is coming from federal taxpayers:
The Village of Minong will receive a $356,000 Community Development Block Grant for Public Facilities for Economic Development from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) to help finance utility improvements that will facilitate the expansion of Link Snacks, Inc. Link Snacks’ expansion is expected to create 70 full-time jobs over the next three years…
The Community Development Block Grant program is a versatile financing tool for general-purpose local units of government in need of funds to undertake needed infrastructure and public building projects. The program is designed to enhance the vitality of a community by undertaking public investment that contributes to its overall community and economic development.
The WEDC was created by Republican Gov. Scott Walker to replace the state’s Department of Commerce and is modeled after Gov. Mitch Daniels’ Indiana Economic Development Corporation. Like the IEDC, the WEDC dispenses corporate welfare and engages in what I derisively call “press release economics.” Given that the press release doesn’t mention that the money came from the federal government, and thus makes it look like the Walker administration is responsible for the “job creation,” I’d say that the WEDC has learned well from its cousin in Indiana.
The bottom line is that it is not a proper role of the federal government to fund local infrastructure projects for the benefit of a business. The bureaucratic inefficiency alone of laundering money through three levels of government (from federal to state to local) is reason enough to terminate the Community Development Block Grant program. Unfortunately, the CDBG program creates a win-win situation for politicians at all levels, which means that taxpayers are going to keep losing unless enough voters come to realize that robbing Peter to pay Paul’s company isn’t good economics.
See this Cato essay for more on fiscal federalism and this essay for more on the community development subsidies.
The Brutal Impact of North Korean Statism
One hopes that the dictator of North Korea suffered greatly before he died. After all, his totalitarian and communist (pardon the redundancy) policies have cause untold death and misery.
But let’s try to learn an economics lesson. In a previous post, I compared long-term growth in Hong Kong and Argentina to show the difference between capitalism and cronyism.
But for a much more dramatic comparison, look at the difference between North Korea and South Korea.
Hmmm… I wonder if we can conclude that markets are better than statism?
And if you like these types of comparisons, here’s a post showing how Singapore has caught up with the United States. And here’s another comparing what’s happened in the past 30 years in Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela.
NTSB Misled Public On Cellphone ‘Toll’
Last week, in calling for a ban on even handsfree cellphone use behind the wheel, National Transportation Safety Board chief Deborah A.P. Hersman denounced “talking, texting and driving” and said:
it’s what happened to more than 3,000 people last year. Lives lost. In the blink of an eye. In the typing of a text. In the push of a send button.
Columnist Mona Charen:
Is that true? No. In a detailed report on distracted driving issued earlier this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that only 995 deaths resulted from distraction by cell phones in 2010. The 3,000-person figure refers to all distracted driving.
It’s true that the problem of driver distraction due to cellphones (and radios, and other passengers, and the need to fish quarters out of one’s pocket approaching a toll booth) is a real one worth the attention of (mostly local and state) road operators. It’s also true, as columnist Charen notes, that overall highway deaths have been dropping steadily, from 44,599 in 1990 to 32,885 in 2010, even though there are now more licensed drivers and cars on the road, and of course vastly more phones. That’s no “epidemic.”
I round up some other voices at Overlawyered, including Cato’s own Radley Balko two years ago, Ira Stoll (per the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, quoted on NPR, “states with cellphone bans have seen no real decrease in accident rates”) Marc Scribner at CEI (even bans on texting don’t seem to have worked as intended), and Instapundit Glenn Reynolds at Popular Mechanics (texting by the at-fault underage driver in the catastrophic Missouri crash was already illegal; and NTSB “seems to have deliberately downplayed” “more mundane causes” that contributed to that crash).
On this last, by the way, the NTSB’s own mission statement describes the board’s primary function as “determining the probable cause of transportation accidents” with “independence and objectivity.” If instead its leaders mislead the public about accident causes, and forsake their independence in exchange for a cheerleading role in DoT campaigns, one has to ask: is the board worth keeping?
Vaclav Havel on Cuba
Czech writer Vaclav Havel, who died on Sunday, was a lifelong champion of freedom. The former dissident, and later, president of his country, was especially active in denouncing Cuba’s totalitarian system and in stressing the importance of solidarity with that country’s many brave dissidents. In the video below, he discusses Cuba.
On a related note, Cuban cyber-dissident Yoani Sanchez had this to say by Twitter upon the death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il: “Nature accomplishes what citizens have not been able to.”
I’ve Never Seen an Unbroken Window Create Jobs
Such is, literally, the wisdom of retiring Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), who (according to ThinkProgress) said:
I’ve never seen a tax cut put out a fire. I’ve never seen a tax cut build a bridge.
That is the equivalent of saying, “I’ve never seen an unbroken window create jobs, so let’s break this one.”
Frank either never read his Bastiat, or didn’t understand what he read.
A Few Final Thoughts on Iraq
The news from North Korea is dominating the media cycle this morning, but I feel compelled to offer a few final thoughts regarding Iraq before the images of the last U.S. troops departing the country fade too far into the past.
As the lead author of the monograph Exiting Iraq, as well as at two major papers and more op-eds than I care to count, you would think that I would be exultant that this long war has finally ended.
I am not. My chief regret is that those vocal few who worked to stop the war failed, and that those of us who pushed for a speedy end succeeded only in the latter sense. It ended, but the end wasn’t swift.
The supporters of this war tried to paint war opponents as hostile to American servicemen and women, but their efforts have failed. Most Americans now oppose the war, and yet the vast majority of Americans also support the troops. They understand that the blame for this war falls on those who promoted it, not those tasked with executing it.
Most Americans supported the war at the outset, but they did so on false pretenses. Some believed that Saddam Hussein was connected to al Qaeda. Others thought him to be involved in the events of 9/11. Still others were focused on his supposed capacity for building and deploying mass casualty weapons. A few, perhaps many, Americans believed all of these things. But when these dubious rationales all fell away, we were left with just one justification – establishing a representative government in Iraq — and that rationale was found wanting. Very few Americans believe that U.S. military personnel should be in the business of promoting democracy by force. I strongly suspect that war supporters knew this all along, which is why they worked so hard to hype the supposed threat that Saddam posed to the world.
And, in a more general sense, that explains the precipitous decline in support for this war. Americans grew tired of Iraq because the costs far exceeded the benefits, and this would have been true even if the benefits were more tangible (if, for example, U.S. troops had found a vast stockpile of Saddam’s nukes in a tunnel somewhere).
Military leaders knew that war is never cheap or easy, but the rest of the Inside-the-Beltway crowd told the public at large that this war would be. Perhaps average citizens should have known better, and perhaps they would have paid more attention if they knew that they (or their sons and daughters) might be called to fight. But the wars of the 1990s were not particularly costly, and the first war of the post-9/11 appeared in the summer of 2002 to have followed that earlier pattern. Of course, the war in Afghanistan is now in its eleventh year.
And yet, a stubborn few in Washington refuse to admit what most Americans concluded long ago. I was most discouraged by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s comments over the weekend:
“As difficult as [the Iraq war] was,” and the cost in both American and Iraqi lives, “I think the price has been worth it, to establish a stable government in a very important region of the world,” he added.
One could say that he was simply performing his role as SecDef. Perhaps he believed that suggesting that the war wasn’t worth it would be discouraging to the troops, and disrespectful to the sacrifices that they made. But that simply plays into the fiction that one has to be anti-military in order to be anti-war. The opposite is closer to the truth.
Even David Frum, one of the war’s most enthusiastic supporters, the man who is credited with coining the term “axis of evil” and who later co-authored a book The End to Evil, admitted in response to a hypothetical question to the GOP candidates, “knowing everything you know now,” would you have supported the decision to go war?:
“No….The world is a better place without Saddam, but as with everything, the question is one of costs and benefits. The costs to the U.S. were too high, the benefits to the U.S. too few.”
In 2008, Americans elected as president a man who opposed the Iraq war before it began, and, in the process, turned aside one of the war’s leading advocates. And yet President Obama’s national security team is at pains to state clearly what is abundantly clear: This war was a mistake, and we should collectively vow to reject the flawed logic and the radical ideology that spawned it. If the Obama team can’t say that, what hope is there that they — or we — have learned anything from this awful affair?
North Korea: Kim Jong-il’s Death and the Coming Succession Struggle
North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il is dead. There is now no prospect of negotiating and implementing a new nuclear agreement with the North in the near future. The so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is likely to be consumed with a power struggle which could turn violent. Washington’s best policy option is to step back and observe.
After his stroke three years ago, Kim anointed his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, as his successor. However, the latter Kim has had little time to establish himself. The previous familial power transfer to Kim Jong-il took roughly two decades. There are several potential claimants to supreme authority in the North, and the military may play kingmaker.
Some observers hope for a “Korean Spring,” but the DPRK’s largely rural population is an unlikely vehicle for change. Urban elites may want reform, but not revolution. If a North Korean Mikhail Gorbachev is lurking in the background, he will have to move slowly to survive.
During this time of political uncertainty no official is likely to have the desire or ability to make a deal yielding up North Korea’s nuclear weapons. The leadership will be focused inward and no one is likely to challenge the military, which itself may fracture politically.
Nor is China likely to play a helpful role. Beijing views the status quo as being in its interest. Above all else, China is likely to emphasize stability, though it may very well attempt to influence the succession process outside of public view. But China does not want what America wants, preferring the DPRK’s survival, just with more responsible and pliable leadership.
Washington can do little during this process. The United States should maintain its willingness to talk with the North. American officials also should engage Beijing over the future of the peninsula, exploring Chinese concerns and searching for areas of compromise. For instance, Washington should pledge that there would be no American bases or troops in a reunited Korea, which might ease Beijing’s fears about the impact of a North Korean collapse.
Most important, the Obama administration should not rush to “strengthen” the alliance with South Korea in response to uncertainty in the North. The Republic of Korea is well able to defend itself. It should take the steps necessary to deter North Korean adventurism and develop its own strategies for dealing with Pyongyang. America should be withdrawing from an expensive security commitment which no longer serves U.S. interests.
Kim Jong-il imposed unimaginable hardship on the North Korean people. However, what follows him could be even worse if an uncertain power struggle breaks down into armed conflict. Other than encourage Beijing to use its influence to bring the Kim dynasty to a merciful end, the United States can—and should—do little more than watch developments in the North.
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