Indoor Air Quality Program? SRSLY?

Sailorcurt spots a few candidates for Cali budget cuts.

And when I say a few, I mean one hundred six.

And that’s only A through I.

(h/t Robb Allen)

Today’s Must-Read

By way of Trying to Grok, I stumbled upon this very simple, lucid, SENSIBLE explanation of why the New Deal was not a successful program.

Let me modify it, and present it to you this way. Let’s say that we have a nice suburban area sort of like we have here in Washington, DC, out in Chevy Chase. And we have some guy there who has a nice picture window, and some kid goes by, a hoodlum, and throws a rock through that window, breaks it. And let’s say that it costs $500 to replace that window. Well, our first reaction might be: What a horrible thing. Let’s catch the perpetrator.” But what if somebody else came up and said, “Wait a minute. The window’s been broken, some time has elapsed, we haven’t caught the guy, but maybe we shouldn’t catch him to throw him in jail. Maybe we should catch him to pat him on the back. Because I’ve observed what’s happened in that house and what’s happened is this: He broke the window, but the guy who had the window broken called up the glassmaker and the glassmaker put the window in and installed it for $500. Then the glassmaker took that $500 and bought a DVD player. He also bought a couple DVDs. And then he bought a reclining chair to sit back and watch the movies, all with that $500. So that broken window has generated business and now we have more DVD sales, more reclining chair sales, and it’s generated business all around town. So isn’t this a good thing?”

Where’s the problem with this argument? The valid point here is that the guy whose window was broken also might have wanted to buy a DVD player and a reclining chair. Or he might have wanted to buy a suit of clothes and some insurance. So that guy, and the tailor, is out $500 because instead of buying a suit and a shirt, he now had to pay for the window. You never generated real business because the guy who had the window broken is out $500 and the guy who had replaced the window is up $500, but the guy who had the window broken would have also been spending $500. So there’s really no net gain. Hazlitt called this the broken window fallacy.

Do you see the linking of the Fox News poll and the broken window fallacy? If you have a government program, the taxpayers pay for it. You never actually generated a job with that program; you merely transferred dollars from the taxpayers to the government. The taxpayer would have bought radios, or TVs, or DVD players with that money. Or he could have put it in the bank and it would have gone out for a loan to someone. See, the point is it would have been put to use, but instead it was taken from him, given to someone else who now has a job. But the only thing that you see is the job that was created. If you understand those principles, you can understand why the New Deal failed.

The New Deal consisted of a set of programs initiated by Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats in Congress. Those programs transferred assets from taxpayers, centralized them in the federal government, and dispersed them supposedly to create new jobs. However, every time you see a New Deal program, you need to see that money leaving a taxpayer’s hand. Once you mentally see that shift taking place, you’re alert that a job was never actually created.

Go.  Read.  Or do you need more to whet your appetite?

Now, with Roosevelt you say, “My gosh! How could he win elections?” Roosevelt went on the campaign trail in 1936 and said, “You poor people are doing your share, but the rich are avoiding the taxes. We should make them pay.” And he recommended a tax to congress, on all income over one hundred thousand dollars. His recommendation in 1941 was for a 99.5 percent tax on all income over one hundred thousand dollars. And when the budget director said, “What!” Roosevelt’s comment was, “Why not?”

When congress refused to pass that bill, Roosevelt was furious. Therefore he instituted a 100 percent income tax, by executive order, on all income $25,000 or more. I repeat, Roosevelt instituted an executive order on April 27, 1942 for a 100 percent income tax on all income over $25,000. How many of you knew about that? Oh good, somebody did. Actually, the Republicans won the next election and voted it out, and Roosevelt had to settle for 90 percent. He had to settle for a 90 percent marginal tax. Here’s a quotation from Roosevelt, it was during World War II, “Discrepancies between low personal incomes and very high personal incomes should be lessened.” Oh, and he used the war as a crisis, you see. “And I therefore believe that in this time of grave national danger, when all excess income should go to win the war, no American citizen ought to have a net income after he’s paid his taxes of more than twenty-five thousand dollars.”

I have made this offer to teachers and students around the country. You show me an American history textbook that tells that Roosevelt had a 100 percent tax. I would think that if you’re going to rank him the number one president in American history, and he did that, that ought to be mentioned somewhere. You show me where it’s mentioned in any U.S. history textbook, and I will eat the textbook. I only ask that they bring me mustard and salt. I must say that I’ve had a textbook free diet for every year since I’ve been making that offer. I have never seen a textbook bring up that fact.

Certainly news to me (though it may not be to the rest of you).  I’m not 100% sure that date is correct — looks like it was October, not April —  but yes, it does appear to have happened:

7. In order to correct gross inequities and to provide for greater equality in contributing to the war effort, the Director is authorized to take the necessary action, and to issue the appropriate regulations, so that, insofar as practicable no salary shall be authorized under Title III, Section 4, to the extent that it exceeds $25,000 after the payment of taxes allocable to the sum in excess of $25,000. Provided, however, that such regulations shall make due allowance for the payment of life insurance premiums on policies heretofore issued, and required payments

I repeat:  Go.  Read.

Fun with passports

Good morning!  I’m back!  I’m back!!  Did you miss me?? 

(Ha!  I know there are about ten of you who feverishly check my blog and generate exactly all of my hits every day.  Don’t think I’m knocking you.  You’re my biggest fans and I love you to pieces!)

Florida was lovely, though the weather didn’t quite cooperate; it was 84 and sunny on Friday (we arrived around 11 PM), then scattered thunderstorms all Saturday and a high of 64 on Sunday.  Mike’s mom has banned all future visitors from the Northeast, as we always seem to bring the cold and gloom with us.  God forbid Al Gore ever come a-knockin’!

We didn’t have much trouble getting home last night — flights more or less on time, traffic more or less reasonable — but I had a rather odd episode which kept me on the road for a few more hours.  Just as soon as I had walked in the door, petted the cat, removed my boots, petted the cat, removed my coat, petted the cat, and sat down to pet the cat, I received a frantic call from my sister.

She was on the road to Canada to visit our grandmother.  She had driven 300 of the 600 miles.  SHE HAD GRABBED THE WRONG PASSPORT.  THE ONLY LEGAL DOCUMENT IN HER POSSESSION BESIDES HER DRIVER’S LICENSE HAD EXPIRED ALMOST TWENTY YEARS AGO.

Doesn’t that sound like a lovely occasion for a panic attack?

The long and short of it was, within five minutes I was re-booted, re-coated and on my way out the door to Jennyville, Land of the Older Sisters.  Having feverishly dug up the spare key to Casa de Jenny, broken several speeding limits, desperately rooted around to find the Super Secret Document Stash and located her CURRENT passport, I flew back out the door like a bat out of hell and barreled back to Lissaville, Home of the Evil Conservatives.

I’d like to take a moment to thank David and Melissa, desk clerks extraordinaire, from the Hampton Inn in Watertown.  When I frantically called Melissa on my desperate flight to Jennyville she graciously agreed to receive a fax for my sister, even though we were not guests nor had any plans to be guests.  When she arrived Melissa was on her lunch break; David courteously assisted my sister as I faxed them carefully-made copies of her passport front page, signature page, photo page and bar-coded last page, as well as her birth certificate. 

As you can imagine, the next half hour we all waited on tenterhooks.  Oh please god, make the border patrol let her through.  She just wants to go see our 94-year-old grandmother.  Oh please let her through.  I know I think about border security more than the average American, which makes it ironic that I want you to let her through on nothing but Xeroxed copies, but c’mon – you can read the passport bar code off the copy.  You can pull up her picture on her computer, it looks exactly like her.  You can call the hotel and confirm her reservation.  You can call me and I’ll read you off MY passport information and you can see we’re sisters and pull my photo and we look so alike and EVER SO INNOCENT AND WELL-INTENTIONED.  PRETTY PRETTY PRETTY PLEASE.

And the survey said . . . . 

IN!

The border patrol laughed at her MASSIVELY expired passport but said that it, and her driver’s license, were sufficient to get her into Canada.  The faxed copy of her birth certificate, according to her, is enough to get her back into the States.

Massive sigh of relief, before I finally settled down to dinner at 9:15. 

Malbec tastes so much better when it’s washed down with copious amounts of THANK YOU GOD.

(P.S. I take full credit for the idea of locating a hotel just off the highway where Jenny would be in forty minutes, calling them to see if they would take a fax and therefore getting her copies of the documents while she was en route.  I need to do so because my strokes of genius — known to others as common sense — are extremely few and far between.  By tomorrow, I should be back to my regularly scheduled activities.  Like eating paste.)

UPDATE:  Oh, dear, I really have to be more careful in these family posts.  On re-reading this a few hours later, it makes my sister seem like a careless simpleton.  Nothing could be farther from the truth; it was so shocking and panic-inducing precisely because my sister is by nature extremely competent and redolent with common sense.  She, for some reason, does not like paste.  No, Brad, not even with cinnamon sugar.  Go figure.

(Edited slightly)