Photo ID Laws Mean Some Won’t Vote
Because all of us are with ourselves all day every day, we naturally tend to think that our own lives are pretty standard fare. But that’s just not so in a country of 300+ million people ranging over a vast expanse. So I found worthwhile this NPR story on people who don’t have IDs, people who face difficulty with laws requiring IDs to vote. Not everyone trundles down to the DMV and plunks down money and paperwork for an ID whenever they please.
The voter ID issue is a hot one. Some are strongly committed to the idea that identification requirements are needed to suppress voter fraud. There isn’t much evidence of that problem, and to worry about impersonation fraud at polling places, one has to put aside absentee ballot fraud, which is probably much easier, as well as election fraud—rigged vote counts, for example—which is much more efficient.
States should tinker with their voting rules and processes, each seeking for itself the methods that optimally secure elections while facilitating voting. It’s a big country, and different states may require different rules. My emphasis has always been on avoiding a national voter ID system, which would inevitably be a national ID system, paving the way for greater federal control of individuals’ lives.
The Euro Crisis in Prose and Poetry
The European debt crisis is inspiring public radio to literary analysis. Last week NPR’s Planet Money put the French-German relationship into a “threepenny opera”:
All
Everyone is counting on you
You’ve got the money
We’ve got the debt (Oh yes, we’ve got a lot of debt!)
And do we need a bailout—you betGermany
Zat’s it, I’ve had enough
Looks like it’s time now for me to leave…France
Oh?
Germany
Vhy is ze door locked? You must let me out.
France
Dear when the times are tough
It’s better to give zan to receive
Then Monday Marketplace Radio turned to classics professor Emily Allen Hornblower and economist Bill Lastrapes to discuss Greek debt as classical tragedy—Oedipus? The ant and the grasshopper?
Loyal Cato readers will recognize Bill Lastrapes as the coauthor of the much-discussed Cato Working Paper “Has the Fed Been a Failure?”
And then, if you prefer prose and sober analysis to literary analogies, let me recommend Holman Jenkins’s perceptive column on why Europe hasn’t solved its crisis yet, which unfortunately appeared in the less-read Saturday edition of the Wall Street Journal. (OK, not less read than Cato-at-Liberty, but probably less read than the weekday Journal.)
Neither leader has an incentive to sacrifice what have become vital and divergent interests to produce a credible bailout plan for Europe. To simplify, German voters don’t want to bail out French banks, and the French government can’t afford to bail out French banks, when and if the long-awaited Greek default is allowed to happen….
There is another savior in the wings, of course, the European Central Bank. But the ECB has no incentive to betray in advance its willingness to get France and Germany off the hook by printing money to keep Europe’s heavily indebted governments afloat. Yet all know this is the outcome politicians are stalling for. This is the outcome markets are relying on, and why they haven’t crashed.
All are waiting for some market ruction hairy enough that the central bank will cast aside every political and legal restraint in order to save the euro….
And then the crisis will be over? Not by a long shot.
All these “solvent” countries and their banks will be dependent on the ECB to keep them “solvent,” a reality that can only lead to entrenched inflation across the European economy. That is, unless these governments undertake heroic reforms quickly to restore themselves to the good graces of the global bond market so they can stand up again without the ECB’s visible help.
It’s just conceivable that this might happen—that countries on the ECB life-support might put their nose to the grindstone to make good on their debts, held by ECB and others. Or they might just resume the game of chicken with German taxpayers, albeit in a new form, implicitly demanding that Germany bail out the ECB before the bank is forced thoroughly to debauch the continent’s common currency, the euro.
Friday Links
- “PBS used to ask, ‘If not PBS, then who?’ The answer now is: HBO, Bravo, Discovery, History, History International, Science, Planet Green, Sundance, Military, C-SPAN 1/2/3 and many more.”
- “The fiscal problem that is destroying U.S. economic confidence is not the fiscal balance, however. It is the level of government expenditures relative to GDP.”
- “The Pentagon’s first cyber security strategy… builds on national hysteria about threats to cybersecurity, the latest bogeyman to justify our bloated national security state.”
- “How ‘secure’ do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and, on hearing sounds indicative of things moving, forcibly enter and search for evidence of unlawful activity?”
- National debt is driving the U.S. toward a double-dip recession:
When the Government Lobbies Itself
“National Public Radio (NPR) is paying the lobbying firm Bracy, Tucker, Brown & Valanzano to defend its taxpayer funding stream in Congress, according to lobbying disclosure forms filed with the Secretary of the Senate,” reports Matthew Boyle at the Daily Caller. Once again, a government-funded entity is using its taxpayer funds to lobby to get more money from the taxpayers.
When the bailouts and takeovers started in 2008-9, I noted that there was lots of outrage in the blogosphere over revelations that some of the biggest recipients of the federal government’s $700 billion TARP bailout had been spending money on lobbyists. And I wrote:
It’s bad enough to have our tax money taken and given to banks whose mistakes should have caused them to fail. It’s adding insult to injury when they use our money — or some “other” money; money is fungible — to lobby our representatives in Congress, perhaps for even more money.
Get taxpayers’ money, hire lobbyists, get more taxpayers’ money. Nice work if you can get it.
At the same time, Dan Mitchell wrote that companies that received government money and then lobbied for more “deserve a reserved seat in a very hot place.” Taxpayer-funded lobbying is a scandal, but it’s a scandal that has been going on for decades:
As far back as 1985, Cato published a book, Destroying Democracy: How Government Funds Partisan Politics, that exposed how billions of taxpayers’ dollars were used to subsidize organizations with a political agenda, mostly groups that lobbied and organized for bigger government and more spending. The book led off with this quotation from Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.”
The book noted that the National Council of Senior Citizens had received more than $150 million in taxpayers’ money in four years. A more recent report estimated that AARP had received over a billion dollars in taxpayer funding. Both groups, of course, lobby incessantly for more spending on Social Security and Medicare. The Heritage Foundation reported in 1995, “Each year, the American taxpayers provide more than $39 billion in grants to organizations which may use the money to advance their political agendas.”
In 1999 Peter Samuel and Randal O’Toole found that EPA was a major funder of groups lobbying for “smart growth.” So these groups were pushing a policy agenda on the federal government, but the government itself was paying the groups to lobby it.
Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for the very lobbying that seeks to suck more dollars out of the taxpayers. But then, taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize banks, car companies, senior citizen groups, environmentalist lobbies, labor unions, or other private organizations in the first place.
Thursday Links
- Gary Johnson: the anti-Trump.
- Interventionists to the left.
- Interventionists to the right.
- There ain’t no such thing as free… parking.
- Vermont has a new universal health care proposal on the table. Michael Cannon joined WAMU’s The Diane Rehm Show (Washington, DC) yesterday to discuss the plan with a panel of other experts:
Tina Brown and the Economics of Recession
Talking about royal weddings on NPR, Tina Brown says that there’s high unemployment in Britain, as there was in 1981, because of Conservative governments’ budget cuts (transcript edited to match broadcast):
Of course, the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana occurred three decades ago, but Brown points out that there are plenty of similarities between the two eras. “2.5 million are out of work right now with the budget slashes and all the economic austerity that’s happening in England,” Brown says. “There were actually the same amount of people exactly out of work at the time of Charles and Diana, when Mrs. Thatcher came in and began her draconian moves.”
I know that Tina Brown is a journalist, not an economist, but surely she’s heard of the recessions of 1979 and 2009, both of which may have helped to usher in a new government pledged to economic reform. It isn’t budget cuts that have increased British unemployment, it’s the recession. The unemployment rate started rising in early 2008 and kept right on rising during the world financial crisis, which featured not budget cuts but massive spending by governments around the world.
Your Tax Dollars at Work (2)
Public television stations in Washington and elsewhere will be broadcasting live the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton for several hours on Friday, April 29. And if you need more background on the happy couple, they will also broadcast a documentary, “William and Kate: The Royal Wedding,” in the weeks leading up to the big day.
Now some churlish republicans might say that our ancestors fought and died just so we didn’t have to pay attention to the comings and goings of royalty. But I say it’s just this sort of live, breaking-news, current affairs coverage for which we need public broadcasting. Without PBS, where could Americans watch the handsome young prince take the beautiful commoner to be his wife? I mean, other than ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, TLC, BBC America, and YouTube?
As they used to say, If PBS doesn’t do it, who will?
‘We’re All In This Together’
Today POLITICO Arena asks:
Given that Planned Parenthood’s online donations have shot up over the last two months, is Mike Pence (R-Ind.) correct to say it could — and should — operate without taxpayer funds?
My response:
Given that many Americans believe that abortion is murder, of course Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading abortion provider, should not be publicly funded. (And please don’t say that no taxpayer funds go for abortions: money is fungible.)
Democrats think that almost everything should be publicly funded – education, health care, retirement, the arts. What’s next? News? Entertainment? Oh, I forgot: NPR and PBS. But only that programming that meets their exacting standards. FOX News? Faget about it! Where you from? Kansas? And they wonder why there’s a Tea Party.
Wednesday Links
- “Since Congress has not declared war on Libya, is American involvement in the Libyan war unconstitutional?”
- A year later, Obamacare still faces bipartisan opposition.
- Public sector unions have awakened a sleeping giant.
- It is irrelevant which way public broadcasting tilts–the problem is that it tilts at all.
- Cato founder and president Ed Crane made a rare media appearance yesterday, joining talk radio host Neal Boortz to discuss Libya and…well, a bunch of other things:
Tuesday Links
- Still think the War on Drugs is a good idea, or that it’s working? Decreases in cocaine production in Colombia have been almost fully offset by increases in Peru and Bolivia.
- Why is nobody talking about the right of Wisconsin taxpayers to not deal with unions?
- “If you’re the rare bird who favors limited government at home and abroad, you can hardly expect good news from a poll of this generation’s Tracy Flicks.” (Maybe not.)
- NPR and PBS are using taxpayer dollars to lobby for… more taxpayer dollars. But that’s hardly a new game in Washington.
- Afghanistan: nation-building on crack.
- Saying no to a no-fly zone over Libya should be a no-brainer:
NPR — A New Target for Harkin?
Secret recordings apparently revealing rampant dirty dealing. Big headlines. Taxpayer dollars wrapped up in it all. Surely all this ugliness — even if it turns out that the reality isn’t nearly as bad as inital reports make it sound — is coming from the favorite target of Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), evil for-profit colleges!
Nope. It’s National Public Radio. And I assume Harkin and his pals will give NPR the exact same over-the-coals treatment they’ve been giving for-profit schools.
OK, I’m probably not able to assume that at all — but I should be.
Privatizing Public Broadcasting
I appeared on WFPL, the NPR affiliate in Louisville, Kentucky, today to argue for ending the federal funding for NPR and PBS. Sort of like Daniel in the lion’s den. But since I survived, and since NPR stations are using all their government dollars to mount a vigorous radio and internet campaign to get more government dollars, I thought I would pull together some of my writings on the topic.
You should shortly be able to listen to the show here. I made the point that we have a $1.5 trillion deficit, and every spending program has to be on the table. But more importantly, as I said in my article on the top ten reasons to privatize public broadcasting,
And the number one reason to privatize public broadcasting is:
1. The separation of news and state. We wouldn’t want the federal government to publish a national newspaper. Why should we have a government television network and a government radio network? If anything should be kept separate from government and politics, it’s the news and public affairs programming that Americans watch. When government brings us the news—with all the inevitable bias and spin—the government is putting its thumb on the scales of democracy. It’s time for that to stop.
Here’s my testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee — four public broadcasting CEOs and me — which is actually more balanced than most congressional hearings. This includes data on public broadcasting demographics that I cited on the air.
Here’s the Cato Handbook for Policymakers chapter on “Cultural Agencies.”
Here’s my speech, “The Separation of Art and State,” delivered at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts.
Read my reflections on the scandals in public broadcasting here.
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