Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Why Government Can’t Run A Business

37 Comments

Explained.

This isn’t really news, of course, but apparently, the lesson has to be relearned over and over.

I heard an interview a couple days ago with the Democrat who’s planning to challenge Chris Dodd in the primary, and he pointed out that he had started and managed several successful businesses, whereas Dodd had done nothing but be a politician his entire life. I wonder what he thinks of the Democrat president and vice president…, neither of whom has run so much as a lemonade stand? Or maybe Obama did when he was a kid, and his communist mother subsidized it?

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Problem With Soaking The Rich

51 Comments

They can vote with their feet:

We believe there are three unintended consequences from states raising tax rates on the rich. First, some rich residents sell their homes and leave the state; second, those who stay in the state report less taxable income on their tax returns; and third, some rich people choose not to locate in a high-tax state. Since many rich people also tend to be successful business owners, jobs leave with them or they never arrive in the first place. This is why high income-tax states have such a tough time creating net new jobs for low-income residents and college graduates.

One has to be particularly pig headed not to understand this.

[Thursday morning update]

Adios, New York:

Last week I spent 90 minutes doing a couple of simple things — registering to vote, changing my driver’s license, filling out a domicile certificate and signing a homestead certificate — in Florida. Combined with spending 184 days a year outside New York, these simple procedures will save me over $5 million in New York taxes annually.

By moving to Florida, I can spend that $5 million on worthy causes, like better hospitals, improving education or the Clinton Global Initiative. Or maybe I’ll continue to invest it in fighting the status quo in Albany. One thing’s certain: That money won’t continue to fund Albany’s bloated bureaucracy, corrupt politicians and regular special-interest handouts.

I thought it was stupidly amusing the other week when “Governor” Paterson expressed such glee that he was chasing Rush Limbaugh away with his policies. Well, there are a lot of other people who won’t be any more happy than Rush is to continue to fund these parasites.

[Bumped]

[Evening update]

A disgusting but apt metaphor from Mark Steyn:

As Miss McArdle notes, whether you bail out states “too big to fail” or let them go bankrupt, it will cause pain to taxpayers. But the pain of the latter is relatively short-term. Passing Sacramento’s buck to Washington will accelerate the centralizing pull in American politics and eventually eliminate any advantage to voting with your feet.

Not to be too gloomy, but the country feels like it’s seizing up. It’s as if California and New York have burst their bodices like two corpulent gin-soaked trollops and rolled over the fruited plain to rub bellies at the Mississippi. If you’re underneath, it’s not going to be fun.

I hope that a bailout of California and New York will have huge electoral blowback (including from many Californians, like the ones who voted down the continued state tax and spending on Tuesday, and New Yorkers).

Political Commentary

EmBoldening The Budget

15 Comments

There are rumors that during the Bolden meeting with Obama, the subject of a potential need to decrease NASA’s future budget came up, and that Bolden discouraged the president from doing so.

One of the ways that Goldin ingratiated himself with the Clinton administration was to actually take pride in and volunteer for budget cuts, which simply strained the agency, and some think, led to the Columbia disaster. But it is possible to spend less money on space, and it’s even possible to get more for less than we’re currently getting (simply getting NASA out of the launch-vehicle development business would go a long way toward that goal). The problem is that it’s not politically possible, because the primary goal of the money remains keeping cafeterias and parking lots full in Huntsville, Houston and the Cape

Political Commentary, Space

Contrarian

7 Comments

In the midst of all of the celebration of the successful repair mission, I’m going to dash a little cold water here. While I criticized the O’Keefe decision to not do the Hubble repair, it wasn’t a criticism of the decision itself, but rather of the rationale for it. I’ve never supported the mission, because I think that there were much better uses for the money, even for astronomy. But cancelling it because of risk to the crew was a dumb reason to do so (particularly because it made it easy for Griffin to reverse it when he came in). As always in these cases, it’s the money, stupid. And while I’m sure that we’ll get spectacular results from the fix, I remain convinced that there were better uses for the money.

Anyway, Rocketman agrees. Though I would note that the cost of a Shuttle flight isn’t a billion dollars for the purpose of determining the cost of this mission. What’s important for this analysis is the marginal cost of the flight, which, ignoring the cost of the telescope upgrade hardware, was less than a couple hundred million, including crew training. But it was still a lousy deal.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The People Have Spoken

1 Comment

…the bastards:

“In talking to different organizations that did focus groups and polling throughout the process and also organizations that did exit polling afterwards, it was really clear that voters were giving us a very specific message– This is too complicated. We don’t want to vote on it. We are fatigued with the number of elections we’ve had especially special elections and we want you to go back to Sacramento and resolve this.”

The problem, of course, with this self-serving theory, is that it doesn’t explain the single “Yes” vote to deprive these looters of their pay raises if they can’t balance the budget. I’m going to go with Occam here — the California voters are fed up with spending and taxes. I know that I was when I lived there, and that was five years ago. It’s only gotten worse since.

Related bonus: another good reason that newspapers are dying.

Political Commentary

Arnold’s Legacy

25 Comments

Thoughts from Veronique de Rugy:

In the end, the Terminator’s tenure as a governor of the Golden State will be remembered as a disaster flick which ends with high taxes, failed promises, and gigantic spending. For instance, not only did he bail on his promise to destroy the car tax, cut spending, and bring unprecedented prosperity to California, but he also caved to the unions and now wants voters to pay for the mess he caused.

The sad part of this bad movie is that this is a guy who came into office with a very promising future and a potential to be transformative in important ways. He was pro-business, pro-small government, and open-minded. He even quoted Adam Smith.

Yet he failed in every dimension of the job.

About the best that can be said is that he became a slightly darker shade of Gray.

Political Commentary, Space

Models Versus Reality

6 Comments

Jon Goff has been doing yeoman’s work in digging into the ESAS appendices. I’ve done a lot of this kind of architecture trade, and it is indeed extremely sensitive to assumptions. And from just this excerpt, while I haven’t read it myself (I can’t find the time from my day job, and I’m glad that Jon did), it sure looks like the game was rigged (which isn’t at all shocking in the context of all of the problems that have arisen). I was simultaneously saddened and amused by this:

I know that Mike Griffin was claiming that part of the reason for doing Ares-I was to teach NASA how to design launch vehicles again, and I guess we have documented proof of the need.

Seriously though, this is a common rookie mistake. You don’t go basing decisions worth tens of billions of dollars on an unvalidated design tool. Now, this isn’t saying that INTROS is a useless tool, just that it obviously doesn’t capture all the state of the art in stage design, and until it does, its results ought to be taken with the appropriate sized (apparently multi-ton) grain of salt.

Well, apparently NASA does exactly that. Or at least it pretends to base them on it. I don’t think that they’re going to pull the wool over Norm’s eyes, though.