Kirsten Mortensen's blog

Nobody really knows, as is once again made abundantly clear, this time in the aftermath of Joe Bruno’s ethics indictment. Here’s James Odato, writing in the Albany Times-Union:

Dollar amounts on state financial disclosure forms, which are not published on the Internet, exist as only broad ranges of value — and even those vague range values are withheld from the public. Descriptions of income or gift sources are allowed to be similarly opaque.

Public officials in New York are not required to disclose conflicts of interest. Such conflicts, when they are discovered, are actionable only if ethics officials, who operate in secrecy, deem them to be “significant.” And state prosecutors cannot bring criminal charges under the state’s ethics laws without a referral from an ethics panel, which consists of members appointed by the very politicians they regulate.

Even if prosecutors clear those hurdles and bring charges, a violation of the ethics law is only a misdemeanor, not a felony.

We pay the highest taxes in the country. Our revenue per capita ratio is one of the highest in the country. Yet Albany is out of money, and is preparing to tax us even more.

How can this happen? Because the Empire State has been hijacked by thugs.

“There is no watchdog,” said Blair Horner, legislative director for the New York Pubic Research Interest Group. “You’ve had an astonishingly long list of lawmakers getting into trouble. We haven’t reached the tipping point yet.”

Horner said it isn’t surprising Bruno didn’t take ethics oversight seriously: The ethics panel, chosen by him and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, has never charged any lawmakers with wrongdoing.

Of course it hasn’t.

Maybe there is still a bit of Jefferson’s influence hanging around.

From a new Washington Post-ABC News Poll. When asked, “Generally speaking, would you say you favor smaller government with fewer services, or larger government with more services?” 53 percent of respondents picked smaller government, to 43 percent who picked larger.

Of course, it’s just common sense.

Too bad our politicians don’t have any.

Via Just One Minute.

In the prologue to his biography of Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Ellis shares several anecdotes about people who, upon learning that he was writing the book, volunteered their input into how he should approach his subject.

If you’ve spent any time at all on political blogs, you’ll recognize some of the characters. One in particular jumped out at me. He forwarded to Ellis three (!!!) copies of a no-doubt-self-published book titled Revolution Song, which professes to offer a Jeffersonian-based alternative to communist ideology. It reminded me of the well-meaning folks who post misattributed Jefferson quotes on online forums; in a kind of a naive Internet primitivism, they hold the man up as a one-dimensional small-government/individual-freedom demigod. Despite the fact that he held slaves and advocated, rather cavalierly, periodic returns to bloody revolution (“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.” How’s that for a pretty Jefferson quote?)

T. Jefferson was, in reality, a complex man, to put it lightly. His positions on issues were often muddy, the product of personality more than ideological purity, and sometimes downright contradictory. Ellis makes this all amply clear in the book.

And so Ellis has little patience, understandably, with people who try to appropriate Jefferson in service of overly simplistic political ideologies. He dismisses Revolution Song, for instance, as “propagandistic,” with a “hyperventilating tone . . . reminiscent of those full-page newspaper ads in which Asian gurus or self-proclaimed prophets lay out their twelve-step programs to avert the looming apocalypse.”

I should break here to note that Ellis is a wonderful and engaging writer. My copy of American Sphinx came to me courtesy of my dad (thanks, Dad!); he went on an Ellis jag a year or two ago, kindly passed the books along to me when he’d finished them, and I’ve enjoyed every one I’ve read so far. They are truly lovely, and for the most part I trust Ellis’ perception of his subject matter. He’s steeped himself for decades in Revolutionary-era scholarship, and it shows; he moves deftly, brushstroke by brushstroke, detail to context back to detail again; you feel history wash over you as you read.

And yet. Wonderful as he is as a historian and a writer, Ellis strikes me as out of touch, in some respects, with contemporary political thought. He states bluntly, for example, that Jefferson’s ideology from a policy perspective has no relevance today. “After the New Deal,” he writes (tellingly, in a sentence that is uncharacteristically awkward)

no serious scholar any longer believed that the Jeffersonian belief in a minimalist federal government was relevant in an urban, industrialized American society.

Ah. I see. And the quote unquote libertarians out there who do believe in minimalist federal government don’t count, of course, because they, presumably, aren’t “serious scholars.”

Ellis has every right, of course, to place a high value on formal scholarship. It beats t.v. history any day of the week. But Ellis overreaches when he dismisses Jefferson’s relevance to current political affairs. You can see it here, in the paragraph just prior to the one from which I pulled the above sentence:

The main story line of American history . . . cast Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the lead roles of a dramatic contest between the forces of democracy (or liberalism) and the forces of aristocracy (or conservatism). While this formulation had the suspiciously melodramatic odor of a political soap opera, it also had the advantage of reducing the bedeviling complexities of American history to a comprehensible scheme: It was the people against the elites, the West against the East, agrarians against industrialists, Democrats against Republicans.

Ellis’ definition of “liberalism” and “conservatism” are 19th century definitions, not 21st century definitions.

Today, it’s the elites who advocate large government.

Our academics are overwhelmingly Democratic, for example, as are our journalists: two sectors which dominate mainstream intellectual thought and discourse — surely one measure of elite status.

Our politicians — elites by virtue of wielding political power — overwhelmingly support increasing government (the Republicans as well as the Democrats). They know how to butter their bread, after all: by delivering goodies, one at a time, to specific constituencies in exchange for blocs of votes. You can’t play that game and shrink government at the same time.

And business — elites via $$ — take advantage of increasingly centralized political power to align itself with it. They support the Dems, therefore, when the wind’s blowing that way: in 2008, 55 percent of political donations from businesses went to the Democratic party, for instance. So you can no longer argue that business sides with democracy over aristocracy. On the contrary. It supports the party that would see Caroline Kennedy appointed to a NY Senate seat, while one of its own, billionaire Paychex founder Thomas Golisano, managed but a measly 14 percent of the state vote when he last ran for governor.

These are the facts of today’s political landscape, and so while Ellis’ neat Democrat v. Republican line-up may have made sense 150 years ago, today those words mean something entirely different.

Those of us who do not believe that minimalist federal government is “irrelevant” are, in fact, politically marginalized. The GOP once paid lip service to reducing the size of government, but they are liars for the most part and nobody believes them any more. As the bailout debacle in Washington makes perfectly clear, both parties are perfectly happy expanding both the size and scope of government.

Jefferson, on the other hand, shrank it.

Of course, the task was immeasurably simpler when he assumed the Presidency in 1801. There were but 130 federal employees in Washington. Federal government revenues (raised “mostly from customs duties and the sale of public lands”) totaled only $9 million annually.

Yet in Jefferson’s eyes, the beast was already too large and too intrusive. He hated the national debt, and commissioned his treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, to formulate a plan to retire it over a 16-year period. He took a dim view of taxes as well. He wrote that no American should never see a “tax-gatherer,” and in his first speech to Congress as President, in 1801, advocated abolishing ALL “internal taxes.”

Can you imagine? No taxes. An America with NO taxes.

So yeah, Jefferson deserves to be held up as an ideal by small government advocates. What politician today would dare to suggest such a thing?

American Sphinx was first published in 1998. Two years later, Ellis made news when it emerged that he’s a liar himself. He had claimed in a number of venues (including press interviews) that he’d served in Viet Nam as a paratrooper, and had been active in the civil rights and peach movement activist. The claims were fabrications. When asked to explain them, he told the AP that he’d done it because of his dysfunctional family and alcoholic father.

For me, this scandal doesn’t necessarily detract from the pleasure of reading Ellis’ books. But it does suggest a curious parallel between Ellis and his subject. Jefferson railed against the national debt, for instance, but was in his personal life a profligate spender who never lived within his means; he was consequently bankrupt at the time of his death. His words “all men are created equal” are so much a part of the American mind that people who can’t even name Obama’s vice presidental candidate could no doubt recite them. Yet Jefferson not only held slaves himself, he refused to tackle the problem of slavery as a politician, preferring to bequeath the issue to future generations — who consequently fed his tree of liberty with the blood of some 620,000 Americans between 1861 and 1865. Nice work, TJ.

Ellis ascribes Jefferson’s tendency to self-contradiction to his character, as suggested by the book’s subtitle. For instance, Ellis writes that Jefferson’s duplicity on slavery was “more self-deception than calculated hypocrisy.”

Then Ellis gets truly weird, writing it was “the kind of duplicity possible only in the pure of heart.”

Come again?

One wonders of whom Ellis was really writing, when he penned that sentence. Himself, perhaps?

And so we look with fresh eyes at Ellis’ statements equating liberalism to “the people” and conservatism to “elites.” Ellis, himself an elite, dismisses the advocacy of minimalist government as “irrelevant;” in so doing, he sweeps aside the policy preferences of “the people,” if by “the people” you mean folks who are by definition not elites, because they don’t have connections in high places, they aren’t represented by Congressional caucuses or national get-out-the-vote organizations: small business owners, the middle class — people who don’t hold advanced degrees, who aren’t held in esteem by the press, who have no friends in Washington because they don’t have the money, pooled or individually, to buy them.

I’m an optimist by nature, so I won’t give up on the notion of minimalist government. But things do look pretty grim. We’re gathering momentum by the hour toward what Peter Wehner and Paul Ryan, writing on Friday’s WSJ op-end page, called “a tipping point for democratic capitalism:”

The last several months are a foreshadowing of a new era of government activism, rather than an unfortunate but necessary (and anomalous) emergency action. We will soon shift from a market-based economy to a political one in which the government picks winners and losers and extends its reach and power in unprecedented ways.

Mmmm. That’s exactly what is worrying us — we, “the people” — a.k.a. the adults in the room.

So. Joe. Loved the book. But advocacy of small government isn’t irrelevant. It’s just politically inconvenient. And elites like you who want to brush it aside are guilty of abetting those in power — those who hope Americans have forgotten their roots and will continue to trade their hard-won income for big government promises of everlasting existential peace.

He was a hypocrite, yes, but on the subject of the size of government, Jefferson’s public persona got it right.

People once fled New York State for California. And bragged about it.

Now they’re moving away. (Granted, not to New York, where all our leaves are brown, still. Also covered with a couple feet of snow. And chilled down to a cozy 4 degrees this morning.)

The number of people leaving California for another state outstripped the number moving in from another state during the year ending on July 1, 2008. California lost a net total of 144,000 people during that period — more than any other state, according to census estimates. That is about equal to the population of Syracuse, N.Y.

The state with the next-highest net loss through migration between states was New York, which lost just over 126,000 residents.

California’s loss is extremely small in a state of 38 million. And, in fact, the state’s population continues to increase overall because of births and immigration, legal and illegal. But it is the fourth consecutive year that more residents decamped from California for other states than arrived here from within the U.S.

When the article moves on to answer the burning question of “why,” it falls back on the usual dreamy litany. Unemployment. High foreclosure rate. Personal income flat.

Well, yeah. Those are the immediate causes. But I also agree with Shannon Love that the real issue is the state’s fiscal policy:

California has followed the grim path of the Great Lakes states.

[T]hose states where [sic] once the industrial dynamo for the entire Earth, yet they destroyed that enormous economic dominance by political policies hostile to economic creativity . . .

It seems that in post-New Deal America, economic and civil success sow their own seeds of destruction. When things are going good, socialist experimentation seems harmless. A booming economy can pay for increased government spending and an ever-increasing scope of government power. Eventually, however, socialism strangles the economic engine and destroys civil society.

In 2006, California held the number 8 slot in the list of states with highest tax revenues per capita. (New York was #3.)

What have they done with all those riches?

Does running California really cost $1800 more per person than running New Hampshire?

Of course not. At least, it shouldn’t.

America is wasting its assets by funneling our money through political machines that add ZERO value.

California is our canary in the gold mine . . .

(P.S. California’s population is still growing, incidentally, thanks to the birthrate etc. It’s the people who can voluntarily move who are leaving. The babies are staying put for now.)

How I wish this were required reading for everybody in this country: Stephen Moore, in the Wall Street Journal, compares recent government “policy” to the near-parody programs Ayn Rand described in Atlas Shrugged:

For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.

In the book, these relentless wealth redistributionists and their programs are disparaged as “the looters and their laws.” Every new act of government futility and stupidity carries with it a benevolent-sounding title. These include the “Anti-Greed Act” to redistribute income (sounds like Charlie Rangel’s promises soak-the-rich tax bill) and the “Equalization of Opportunity Act” to prevent people from starting more than one business (to give other people a chance). My personal favorite, the “Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Act,” aims to restrict cut-throat competition between firms and thus slow the wave of business bankruptcies. Why didn’t Hank Paulson think of that?

These acts and edicts sound farcical, yes, but no more so than the actual events in Washington, circa 2008.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why people can’t grasp how badly our politicians are running the government right now.

It’s just COMMON SENSE.

I know that there are good, thoughtful people out there who hope the Democrats can rescue this country from the mess we’re in. But government isn’t the answer. You can’t force people, through legislation, to not be stupid and greedy. They’re going to be stupid and greedy no matter what, and when you pass a law to restrict one behavior, they’ll just express their greed & stupidity some other way.

This is an existential issue, folks. You can’t legislate what goes on in peoples’ souls.

Meanwhile, that growing pile of increasingly byzantine laws encumbers EVERYONE. You end up with lunacy. You end up with things like a tax code that’s so complicated people can’t fill out their income tax forms without professional help. As one example of many.

That’s why the minimalist approach of our Constitution is such a beautiful thing.

Probably the best article I’ve read so far on what was going on, in the last few years, on Wall Street is this one: a piece in Conde Nast Portfolio by Michael Lewis (author of Liar’s Poker.) The article does a great job of describing just what greed & stupidity looked like among the guys who engineered our current fiscal disaster.

But we don’t make it better by putting our politicians in charge — because they are every bit as greedy, and if anything more stupid, than the Wall Streeters.

They don’t have our best interest at heart — and we don’t have the resources to keep them honest. We just don’t. We’re looking after our homes, and our families, and our jobs.

There’s only one way out. We have to take our medicine and put our economy back on sound fiscal footing again. Even if it means we go through a period of economic upheaval, and uncertainty, and even hardship for a few years. We can handle it. We can come together at a community level and take care of each other.

That’s the only way out of this mess.

Common sense.

Anybody who knows me also knows: I’m the first to applaud efforts to get rid of toxins, particularly in our food and — most certainly — in anything our kids might put into their mouths.

But we now have another textbook example of why we can’t entrust Congress with this responsibility.

They’ve passed a law mandating that all products sold to kids 12 and other be tested for lead and phthalates.

Sounds great, right?

The problem is, the law is written so broadly that nobody can sell second-hand children’s clothing any more. Anyone who wants to will first have to test every article.

Can you imagine how expensive that would be?

“We will have to lock our doors and file for bankruptcy,” said Shauna Sloan, founder of Salt Lake City-based franchise Kid to Kid, which sells used children’s clothing in 75 stores across the country and had planned to open a store in Santa Clara, Calif., this year.

I know my posts of late have been dripping with disgust for our politicians, but I’m sorry, it’s warranted.

Really, is it too much to ask for them to read their stupid laws before they vote on them?

And while I’m at it, activists who push for legislation on these things — I know you think you’re doing the right thing, but you need to learn a lesson here, too. Even if this law is softened in some way, it will still have two consequences that I bet you will hate to see.

1. More stuff — including perfectly safe stuff–will be sent to landfills instead of being reused/recycled and

2. Toxic stuff that’s of any value, but that can no longer be sold second hand here, will be shipped overseas where laws are more lax.

That twinge you feel is your conscience . . .

$88,000 a year sound like a good figure?

Because–as I posted last summer–that’s what we spend annually to fluoridate our water in this county.

I’ve been fuming about that figure again lately, and not only because we’re facing the prospect of unprecedented tax hikes, thanks to the poor fiscal management of our pols.

There’s also, this, now: A new round-up, courtesy of the Fluoride Action Network, of 23 studies to that link fluoride consumption to lower IQ.

Much of this research was originally published in China, but the FAN is translating it.

Meanwhile, the National Research Council, which has reviewed a handful of these studies, says “the consistency of the collective results warrant additional research on the effects of fluoride on intelligence.”

Yeah, well how about discontinuing mass fluoridation of our water until we know for sure, folks?

It’s almost enough to make you believe the conspiracy theorists who think the government is deliberately trying to make people stupid.

At the least, it’s a clear window into how these agencies view their responsibilities toward the American people. They’re not going to err on the side of protecting us from brain damage. What do they care if our kids’ IQ loses 5 or 10 points? They’re collecting their salaries, and seeing their names published in prestigious medical journals, and being invited to speak at all the right conferences.

Nice people. So glad they’re in charge.

Came across this article from 2003. It’s a reprint of a piece by Kevin Hasset that was originally published in the October/November 2003 issue of The American Enterprise magazine.

Hassett compares the fiscal health of states that voted for Bush to that of states whose voters when for Gore.

Ha ha ha.

Though the total population of Bush and Gore states are almost identical, the states that voted Democratic account for fully 70% of today’s state deficits; Republican states ring up only 30% of the total. And of 10 ten states with the largest per capita budget deficits (see nearby table), every single one voted Democratic in the last presidential election.

But wait, there’s more!

. . . in the top 10 deficit states (again: all Democratic) tax revenues increased at the dramatic rate of about 5% a year over the last decade.

And more!

. . . the average tax revenue per person in today’s sickest ten states was $2,445 in the last data available–compared to only $1,923 per person in the 10 healthiest states. This blasts out of the water the idea that states get sick because they have been starved of revenue; indeed it shows the opposite.

Hassett doesn’t pick on Democrats alone, mind you. He reserves some sharp words for President Bush, who, he notes

increased spending on just about everything. Three of the five biggest increases in federal spending in U.S. history occurred during Mr. Bush’s first three years in office (the other two took place during World War II).

Something that makes me positively sick to my stomach, btw.

Because those of us who understand that government spending is a hugely, hugely inefficient way to take care of people have no party that even approximates our views. We’re forced to hold our noses and consort with fringey groups that attract only marginal political talent. Ugh.

My only hope is that people will finally wake up and look at the data. It’s right there, if you just look. Increasing taxes should NEVER be the first line solution. We have to tighten our belts. We have to stop running deficits. We have to truly cut the size of government.

Until we can show the maturity and discipline to do those things, our situation is only going to get worse. It might take a generation or two, but we will impoverish ourselves.

Like Norway.

No, that isn’t a joke. That’s a New York Times article. Click it and read for yourself.

THE received wisdom about economic life in the Nordic countries is easily summed up: people here are incomparably affluent, with all their needs met by an efficient welfare state. They believe it themselves. Yet the reality – as this Oslo-dwelling American can attest, and as some recent studies confirm – is not quite what it appears.

Even as the Scandinavian establishment peddles this dubious line, it serves up a picture of the United States as a nation divided, inequitably, among robber barons and wage slaves, not to mention armies of the homeless and unemployed. It does this to keep people believing that their social welfare system, financed by lofty income taxes, provides far more in the way of economic protections and amenities than the American system. Protections, yes -but some Norwegians might question the part about amenities.

In Oslo, library collections are woefully outdated, and public swimming pools are in desperate need of maintenance. News reports describe serious shortages of police officers and school supplies. When my mother-in-law went to an emergency room recently, the hospital was out of cough medicine. Drug addicts crowd downtown Oslo streets, as The Los Angeles Times recently reported, but applicants for methadone programs are put on a months-long waiting list.

More:

After I moved here six years ago, I quickly noticed that Norwegians live more frugally than Americans do. They hang on to old appliances and furniture that we would throw out. And they drive around in wrecks . . .

One image in particular sticks in my mind. In a Norwegian language class, my teacher illustrated the meaning of the word matpakke – “packed lunch” – by reaching into her backpack and pulling out a hero sandwich wrapped in wax paper. It was her lunch. She held it up for all to see.

Yes, teachers are underpaid everywhere. But in Norway the matpakke is ubiquitous, from classroom to boardroom. In New York, an office worker might pop out at lunchtime to a deli; in Paris, she might enjoy quiche and a glass of wine at a brasserie. In Norway, she will sit at her desk with a sandwich from home.

So those of you who want our country to abandon our Constitution and go socialist, there’s your template.

Celebrate politicians who call for tax increases.

Call at the top of your lungs for more government “services.”

Beg for more government intervention into businesses and our private lives.

And, if things go really really well, we might one day be as well-off as Norway.

Goody goody.

Front page, yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Article titled The Doomsayers Who Got It Right. The “doomsayers” being folks who had the audacity, while the rest of the world was drunk on paper wealth, to suggest that a crash was coming.

Well guess what, they’re still worried.

[They] fret that U.S. government spending on bailouts and stimulus plans that preserve failed business models could increase the likelihood of a worse calamity later.

They foresee a long season in which consumers cut their spending, and instead sharply increase the savings rate. That would be healthy for savings-anemic U.S. households, which have spent beyond their means for years, but deeply problematic for a country where consumers drive 70% of all economic activity.

They also envision higher taxes and the likelihood of further declines in U.S. stock prices as the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index bottoms out as much as 30% lower than today. And while noting that “deflation” is today’s catchword, several experts say that inflation and perhaps even hyperinflation (in which prices rise at double- or triple-digit percentages) is the real issue a few years down the road as the Federal Reserve increases the money supply and relies on untested measures, such as buying home mortgages or other assets, to spur the economy.

Meanwhile, via Instapundit, this Reuters story: U.S. governors seek $1 trillion federal assistance.

Governors of five U.S. states urged the federal government to provide $1 trillion in aid to the country’s 50 states to help pay for education, welfare and infrastructure as states struggle with steep budget deficits amid a deepening recession.

The governors of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin — all Democrats — said the initiative for the two-year aid package was backed by other governors and follows a meeting in December where governors called on President-elect Barack Obama to help them maintain services in the face of slumping revenues.

There we have our leaders, America. Not the so-called “doomsayers” who actually have the tools (i.e. intellect and integrity) to make a pretty sound estimate of the effects of our fiscal choices. Oh, no. Instead we have people whose only concern is to “maintain services.”

Because heaven forbid, in the face of a worldwide fiscal meltdown, anybody has to actually do without “services.”

The medicine has been poured. It sits there in the spoon in front of our mouths, so close our noses tell us clearly how bad it’s gonna taste.

But we’re still kicking and screaming like a bunch of babies that we aren’t going to take it.

Begging our government to give us sugar instead. Make it all go away. Sugar for the auto industry, sugar for the banks, sugar for the mortgages we shouldn’t have signed in the first place. And now sugar for the state governments who have been overspending their budgets for years.

It never ends, because we’re fearful and unimaginative, and if that’s not enough we’re being led by politicians who are stupid and corrupt and whose only worry is whether their policies will buy the votes they’ll need later to get re-elected.

We’re big babies. Infantalized by our government, by the so-called socialist model that proposes government solve peoples’ financial problems for them.

Not enough money to pay off our bills? No problem! Just print more!

What could possibly go wrong if we do that?

I remember once, years ago, reading about a ferry that capsized somewhere. Near Thailand maybe. The ferry was fine. But it started to rain. Half of the deck had a canopy over it, and when the rain started, all the people on the deck of the boat rushed over to that side.

They tipped the boat over.

I feel like I’m on that boat.