Category Archives: Business

The Bump On The Road To Nowhere

Thoughts from Mark Steyn on the state of the economy:

The Department of Education issues search warrants? Who knew? The Brokest Nation in History is the only country in the developed world whose education secretary has his own Delta Force. And, in a land with over a trillion dollars in college debt, I’ll bet it’s got no plans to downsize.

Nor has the TSA. A 24-year-old woman has been awarded compensation of $2,350 after TSA agents exposed her breasts to all and sundry at the Corpus Christi Airport security line and provided Weineresque play-by-play commentary. “We regret that the passenger had an unpleasant experience,” said a TSA spokesgroper, also very Weinerly. But hey, those are a couple of cute bumps on the road, lady!

The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic, grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.

In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding. Instead, our elites worry about sea levels.

The country’s in the very best of hands.

In Which The Dalai Lama

declares himself an economic and ethical ignoramus:

“Still I am a Marxist,” the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader said in New York, where he arrived with an entourage of robed monks and a heavy security detail to give a series of paid public lectures.

Marxism has “moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits,” the Dalai Lama, 74, said.

Well, he can afford to be. The rest of us? Not so much.

We Need More Bureaucrats

…like Orson Swindle:

Mr. Swindle is keen to point out that he did not “eventually come around to the view” that the EDA is a mess and a waste — he went in knowing that. A true-believing Reaganite, his desire was to kill the EDA, or, failing that, to get it on a very short leash.

“It was a controversial agency at that point in time,” he says. “We knew what we were doing: We had to cut off the flow of money. And EDA was one of the worst examples I’d seen in my life, just one massive divvying out of money with nothing to show for it.”

Unable to simply shut the agency down, Mr. Swindle began engaging in some Reaganite hijinx: He began by submitting budget requests of $0.00. When Congress appropriated the money, anyway, Mr. Swindle made it harder to spend, capping grants at around $600,000 instead of the previous multi-million-dollar awards. The bureaucrats did not appreciate that: Ten $600,000 grants instead of one $6 million grant meant ten times the work.

And when all else failed, he turned to shaming the grant recipients. It is customary for government grant-making agencies to write boilerplate congratulatory letters to their clients, along with those oversized checks designed for photo ops. When a particularly egregious grant was proposed, Mr. Swindle would fight it. If eventually forced by Congress to make it, anyway, he’d have some fun with that letter. “Instead of writing, ‘Dear Mr. Mayor, it is my pleasure to award you a $400,000 grant for . . . whatever,’ I’d write, ‘As you know, you have been awarded $400,000 for a project that does not meet the standards or guidelines of EDA. Since you’re getting it, some other, more deserving city isn’t.’”

Maybe the next president can get him back.

Climate Change–The Republican Position

Some lengthy thoughts and suggestions from Steve Hayward. I particularly liked this:

The climate campaign’s monomania for near-term suppression of greenhouse gas emissions through cap and trade or carbon taxes or similar means is the single largest environmental policy mistake of the last generation. The way to reduce carbon emissions is not to make carbon-based energy more expensive, but rather make low- and non-carbon energy cheaper at a large scale, so the whole world can adopt it, not just rich nations. This is a massive innovation problem, but you can’t promote energy innovation by economically ruinous taxes and regulation. We didn’t get the railroad by making horse-drawn wagons more expensive; we didn’t get the automobile by taxing the railroads; we didn’t get the desktop computer revolution by taxing typewriters, slide-rules, and file cabinets. It is time to stop ending the charade that we can enact shell game policies like cap and trade that will do nothing to actually solve the problem, but only increase the price of energy and slow down our already strangled economy. I support sensible efforts for government to promote energy technology breakthroughs, but am against subsidizing uncompetitive technologies.

Bjorn Lombog’s Cool It is a good source of common sense on this as well.