Net Neutrality: The Apocalypse

Via Being Libertarian (Facebook)

Your tax dollars, misdirected (as usual)

The Internal Revenue Service, despite having the same six-year heads-up the rest of us had regarding the demise of Windows XP support, was caught unprepared when the deadline arrived.  Engadget, April 13:

[S]upport for XP officially stopped on April 8th, meaning that Microsoft will no longer provide support or security updates for the venerable OS. However, governmental computers can't be left vulnerable, so the IRS will be paying Microsoft millions of dollars for custom support to keep their machines secure and functional. Right now, over half the agency's PCs still run XP, despite Microsoft telling the whole world that it would stop support for the OS in 2014 six years ago.

Too busy targeting Tea Party organizations and implementing Obamacare enforcement, I suppose.  As far as priorities go, it's business as usual.

Obamacare: Just wait until it's the only choice

When a private company provides a mediocre product, customers can "punish" the company by denying it their business. Are we sure we want to entrust our lives and health to a bureaucracy that will pay no penalty for being wrong?

I ask because the Affordable Care Act in its current form is almost certainly not the end game of our current president and his fellow travelers. Once we get to single-payer health care in this country, we will have no alternative but to endure debacles like the online health insurance marketplace which, despite three years of work and half a billion dollars of investment, should not have gone live earlier this month.

Washington Post, October 21:

Days before the launch of President Obama’s online health ­insurance marketplace, government officials and contractors tested a key part of the Web site to see whether it could handle tens of thousands of consumers at the same time. It crashed after a simulation in which just a few hundred people tried to log on simultaneously.

Despite the failed test, federal health officials plowed ahead.

When the Web site went live Oct. 1, it locked up shortly after midnight as about 2,000 users attempted to complete the first step, according to two people familiar with the project.

As new details emerged about early warning signs of serious deficiencies in HealthCare.gov, Obama on Monday gave a consumer-friendly defense of the health-care law, insisting that the problems many Americans have faced in trying to enroll in insurance plans will be fixed quickly.

How San Francisco’s $10.24 minimum wage hurts the people it allegedly helps

NBC Bay Area, March 29 brings us another example of the tyranny of good intentions:

Signs posted at Subway sandwich shops sadly inform San Francisco patrons -- we hear Willie Brown is a big fan -- that "all SUBWAY Restaurants in SF County DO NOT PARTICIPATE IN Subway National $5.00 Promotions," according to the newspaper.

[…] Apparently, the city's new minimum wage, raised to $10.24 as of Jan. 1, make $5 footlongs an impossible business model.

Apparently the economic concept is too difficult for the compassionate left to grasp: Raising the minimum wage also raises the cost of items sold at businesses that employ minimum-wage workers.  As these workers go out and spend their raise, the extra income is consumed by the price increases, and the employees are not much better off than they were before. 

When employers are allowed to pay wages at a level where each employee’s labor is a net economic benefit to the business, prices remain stable (absent other upward pressures on costs, such as government regulations or taxes).

The best way for a low-wage employee to better his life is to make himself more valuable to his employer through merit, or to get some training and find a better job.  When he does that, and the employer has the freedom to pay the employee what his labor is worth, everybody wins.

Quick Quote: James Madison on the federal leviathan

“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?”

— James Madison, The Federalist #62

Unions could indeed be the strongest force for good government, if it wasn’t for the fact that they are unions

Today’s email update from CNSNews had this ironic juxtaposition of headlines:

Rep. Grayson Calls Labor Unions Strongest Force for ‘Good Government’

Unions Making Postal Service Unsustainable, GAO Says

That giant sucking sound you hear…

…is your hard-earned money going into the coffers of the federal government and into the pockets of those who do business (directly or indirectly, through contracts or lobbying) with the federal government.

Washington Examiner, March 10:

6 of the 10 richest counties in U.S. are in DC area

Loudoun ranks as the richest county in the United States, immediately followed by Fairfax and Howard counties, while Montgomery, traditionally one of the wealthiest, is now 10th.

Forbes magazine ranked eight other Washington-area counties in its list of the nation's 25 wealthiest counties, far more than any other area in the country. The rankings are based on 2008 median household income data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Loudoun's median household income was $110,643, while Fairfax's was $106,785 and Howard's came in at $101,710.

Here are the rankings, according to Forbes.

In my youth my family lived in four of the top ten counties, but we certainly dragged the median down in each case.

Quick Quote: Founder Patrick Henry speaks out on ObamaCare

The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.

-- Patrick Henry

In fairness, the federal government as a whole has been guilty of this inversion of the Constitution’s purpose for several generations.  It was bad enough when the Bush administration gave us things like the Medicare Prescription entitlement. It’s just that the current administration has ratcheted things up a few notches from the worst excesses of any previous administration (including perhaps the FDR administration).

(By the way, I’m assuming this quote was actually from Patrick Henry.  I have looked for a site that gives the original reference for the quote, but so far, if there is any citation at all, the websites are citing each other.  If someone can point me to the quote’s actual source, I’d be much obliged.)

San Francisco’s city government defies gravity; fails to collapse under its own bloated weight

San Francisco has already been described as an increasingly child-free city.  Lately, many have come to recognize yet another dubious distinction for SF.  Benjamin Wachs and Joe Eskenazi report December 14 in SF Weekly:

Despite its good intentions, San Francisco is not leading the country in gay marriage. Despite its good intentions, it is not stopping wars. Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, its homeless problem is worse than any comparable city's. Despite its spending more money per capita, period, than almost any city in the nation, San Francisco has poorly managed, budget-busting capital projects, overlapping social programs no one is certain are working, and a transportation system where the only thing running ahead of schedule is the size of its deficit.
It's time to face facts: San Francisco is spectacularly mismanaged and arguably the worst-run big city in America. This year's city budget is an astonishing $6.6 billion — more than twice the budget for the entire state of Idaho — for roughly 800,000 residents. Yet despite that stratospheric amount, San Francisco can't point to progress on many of the social issues it spends liberally to tackle — and no one is made to answer when the city comes up short.

“Despite its good intentions”… For some, the nobility of one’s intentions cover a multitude of sins.  Sure, many of these problems are worse than ever despite all of the money we’ve thrown at them, but at least we care.

Yes, the blue counties got most of the stimulus money, but…

Did the Obama administration intentionally steer the bulk of the stimulus money to counties that voted for him?

A story in the July 8 USA Today shows that Obama-backing counties did in fact win the stimulus lottery by a 2-to-1 margin.

Counties that supported Obama last year have reaped twice as much money per person from the administration's $787 billion economic stimulus package as those that voted for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, a USA TODAY analysis of government disclosure and accounting records shows. That money includes aid to repair military bases, improve public housing and help students pay for college.

The reports show the 872 counties that supported Obama received about $69 per person, on average. The 2,234 that supported McCain received about $34.

But is this compelling evidence of administration skullduggery?

Unless more evidence comes forward, I’d say that based on the types of projects being funded – especially public works projects – the money was fated to end up in urban areas, which for the most part are Democrat strongholds.

In other words, no real story there.

There is, however, some red meat in another story published by USAT the day before:

Under pressure to spend stimulus money quickly, many states are using the federal funds for short-term projects and to fill budget gaps rather than spending on long-term improvements, according to a report by congressional investigators.

The report, scheduled to be released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) at a House oversight hearing, also says many states aren't meeting some goals and requirements of the economic recovery program. Some states, for example, are not sending transportation funding to the most economically distressed areas, and they are using education funds to prevent layoffs rather than fund innovative new programs, the report says.

So, states aren’t having much luck resisting the urge to divert stimulus funds to other uses.  The money isn’t even reaching many of the Obama-backing counties.

Is it any wonder that some Democrats in Congress are talking about throwing even more money into another stimulus? 

The federal government may not have engineered the stimulus funds to go mostly to Obama country, but Democrat officials could not possibly have failed to notice that existing rules worked to their political benefit.

Buy local -- or else (Economic stimulus, Chinese style)

The Telegraph (UK) reports that one Chinese province has come up with a novel way to boost the local economy:

Local government officials in China have been ordered to smoke nearly a quarter of a million packs of cigarettes in a move to boost the local economy during the global financial crisis.

The edict, issued by officials in Hubei province in central China, threatens to fine officials who "fail to meet their targets" or are caught smoking rival brands manufactured in neighbouring provinces.

Even local schools have been issued with a smoking quota for teachers, while one village was ordered to purchase 400 cartons of cigarettes a year for its officials, according to the local government's website.

The move, which flies in the face of national anti-smoking policies set in Beijing, is aimed at boosting tax revenues and protecting local manufacturers from outside competition from China's 100 cigarette makers.

In total, officials have been ordered to puff their way through 230,000 packs of Hubei-branded cigarettes worth £400,000.

It's not unusual for various levels of government in the U.S. to have "Buy American" or "Buy Local" mandates for their agencies, but cigarettes.... I don't think so.