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President Ronald Reagan called this statement “the nine most terrifying words in the English language.” His comment is still cited today. It illustrates the maxim that the more government expands, the more intervention there is into the lives of the people.
“With more than 1.8 million civilian employees, the Federal Government, excluding the Postal Service, is the Nation’s largest employer. About 9 out of 10 Federal employees work outside the Washington, DC metropolitan area.” (Wikipedia)
The following list of federal administrative departments and regulatory agencies illustrates the point (Source: U.S. Office of Personnel Management):
Department of Agriculture (92,000 employees)
Department of Commerce (39,000 employees)
Department of Defense (623,000 employees)
Department of Education (4,000 employees)
Department of Energy (15,000 employees)
Department of Health and Human Services (60,000 employees)
Department of Housing and Urban Development (10,000 employees)
Department of The Interior (66,000 employees)
Department of Justice (105,000 employees)
Department of Labor (16,000 employees)
Department of State (14,000 employees)
Department of Transportation (53,000 employees)
Department of The Treasury (109,000 employees, including IRS)
In addition, the following independent agencies have a total of 179,000 employees:
Social Security Administration
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Environmental Protection Agency
Tennessee Valley Authority
General Services Administration
Small Business Administration
Office of Personnel Management
The foregoing departments and agencies all have tentacles that extend into the affairs of Americans, in addition to the plethora of committees and regulators who work directly for the Executive and Congressional branches of government. Add President Obama’s 29 czars to the mix. Although some were confirmed by Congress, while others are statutorily created positions established by Congressional legislation, many were selected without any oversight.
However, the Obama administration is not unique in the use of czars to manage the Executive Branch of the federal government. The practice dates back to FDR, who had 19 czars. The only president who did not have any czars was Truman, although several, Eisenhower, Ford, and Reagan each had only one. Perhaps surprisingly, the president who had the greatest number of czars was George W. Bush, with 47.
The Food and Drug Administration, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, further exemplifies the extent of the reach and control over the population that is exercised by the federal government.
In an October 13, 2009 article, the Washinton Post reported:
With much of Washington focused on efforts to revamp the health-care system and address climate change, a handful of Obama appointees have been quietly exercising their power over the trappings of daily life. They are awakening a vast regulatory apparatus with authority over nearly every U.S. workplace, 15,000 consumer products, and most items found in kitchen pantries and medicine cabinets.
Top appointees at the Food and Drug Administration, for example, have cracked down on dietary supplements with “steroid-like” substances that for years had been sold in gyms and health-food stores. In a move designed as much for symbolism as effect, the new chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission dispatched all 100 agency inspectors across the country last month to enforce a law that requires special drains on swimming pools to prevent children from entrapment. The agency shut down more than 200 pools.
The new regulators display a passion for rules and a belief that government must protect the public from dangers lurking at home and on the job — one more way the new White House is reworking the relationship between government and business.
Another example of government overreaching into the lives of citizens was recently noted by TIMESONLINE (timesonline.co.uk), which reported that a proposal is being considered to give British health and safety inspectors “unprecedented access to family homes to ensure that parents are protecting their children from household accidents.” The objective is to “collect data” from the premises where children are “thought to be at ‘greatest risk of unintentional injury’” and to insure that appropriate safety devices, such as smoke alarms, stair gates, hot water temperature restrictors, oven guards and window and door locks, are installed.
Needless to say, this is viewed by many Brits as an unwarranted intrusion into family life: “Good parents will feel the intrusion of the state in ther homes and bad parents will now have someone else to blame if they don’t bring up their children in a safe environment.”
Remember, the nine words Ronald Reagan considered the most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
The historic American rallying cry, “No taxation without representation,” has morphed over the years into a new reality: “Taxation with representation,” which leaves most of us to wonder what happened to the representatives who are charged with the duty of protecting the nation’s citizens from an overzealous government.
The number of taxes and the many jurisdictions that levy them is breathtaking. It’s not just the big ticket items that are strangling taxpayers, but the sheer number and forms of taxation, including the dozens of small taxes and fees that are imposed on such services as the telephone and utilities. The abysmal economic ignorance of political leaders who vote to tax their constituents without any understanding of the impact that taxes have on the economy and employment is stunning. They just don’t get it.
They seem to have the mistaken notion that money the government uses to pay for programs or provide benefits to individuals and various groups is produced by the government when in fact it comes from taxes. And, the more taxes are increased, the less there is for taxpayers to spend or invest.
Pardon my skepticism but, try as I might, I can’t see any reason why it’s always necessary to raise taxes and fees whenever the government is faced with a budget shortfall. Given the size of budgets these days, especially at the state and county levels, it’s hard to understand why legislators invariably look for ways to increase taxes and generally resist cutting costs until they are forced to do so.
With all levels of government competing for new sources of revenue, it seems obvious that we are rapidly running out of options, yet our politicians insist on continuing to paper over the deficits, which seem to get bigger with each fiscal cycle.
John Stossel points out in a November 18, 2009 column, “Worse Than Taxes,” that New York now has a $3 billion deficit, but that the state would have a $14 billion surplus today if the growth of government had been limited to the rate of increase in population and inflation.
Stossel also notes, “Hidden taxes are more pernicious because they disguise what we pay for government,” further commenting that “Politicians are worse than thieves. It’s not that taxes don’t anger me. They do. But I’m more angry about the arrogance of the ruling class.”
The state of California is notorious for its out-of-control spending and deficits, and the Sacramento Bee reported (November 19) that the state will require $20.7 billion to balance its budget over the next 19 months.
I have always been baffled by the fact that so many otherwise seemingly intelligent, responsible citizens, who probably generally use good judgment in the management of their own affairs seem to lose all sense of proportion when they get their hands on government funds. It almost seems as if it somehow becomes some sort of Monopoly play money.
The health care bill that is currently working its way through Congress further illustrates the zeal of legislators to impose more taxes on Americans.
The Heritage Foundation prvides a list of 29 new taxes that are currently included in the plan: An income surtax on taxpayers earning over $500,000 a year, an excise tax on high-cost “Cadillac” health insurance plans, an excise tax on certain medical devices, a limit on itemized deductions for certain taxpayers, a windfall profits tax on health insurance companies, a value-added tax (VAT), and an increase in the Medicare portion of the payroll tax, among others.
The Heritage analysis further notes, “The full list of taxes proposed to pay for health care reform is provided because taxes currently left out of the Senate or House bills could reappear at any point. For instance, the tax on cosmetic surgery listed above (sometimes called the “Botox tax”) was written off long ago as a laughable way to pay for health care reform. Nevertheless, it somehow found its way into the current version of the Senate bill…As the legislative process continues and Congress’s desperation to pass a bill increases, it could propose even more tax hikes to pay for its massive expansion of government size and power…”
This appalling example of the excess of legislative zeal to impose taxes further illustrates that the reason our taxes have been increasing exponentially over the years is because the people who are elected to represent us keep voting for them, which amounts to “taxation with representation.”
One of the key elements of the proposals for reforming America’s health care system is the use of price controls, which have been employed by Medicare. Since 1984, the government has established, in its sole discretion, a schedule of fees they pay to hospitals and doctors for their services. Hospitals are paid 80% of the scheduled fee that is set by the government, regardless of the actual cost to the provider. That’s price control, and the result is that the Medicare program now has an unfunded liability in excess of $11 trillion.
Price controls have never worked, ever, as far back as 4,000 years ago in Babylon. In a November 2005 post to the Mises Daily, Thomas J. DiLorenzo noted: In Babylon, “the Code of Hammurabi was a maze of price control regulations.”
Price controls also failed in ancient Greece and again during the third century B.C. in Egypt.
In Greece, price control laws were routinely ignored, in spite of the death penalty being imposed for failure to observe them.
In 301 B.C., the Roman emperor, Diocletian (244-311A.D.), issued an Edict on Maximum Prices, in an attempt to curb the inflation that was caused by his overspending. The law was quickly ignored.
Price controls are invariably imposed by people who are woefully ignorant of the most basic economic principles, a mistake that has been repeatedly made throughout history. And, the current crop of American politicians is no exception. Does anyone really believe that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, president Obama or the like minded politicians in Congress are so brilliant that they have the ability decide how much everything should cost?
What such leaders invariably fail to take into account is that people react to laws and regulations and modify their behavior accordingly.
DiLorenzo also noted an early example of this when ancient Egyptian farmers “became so infuriated with the price control inspectors that many of them simply left their farms.” By the end of the century the “Egyptian economy had collapsed as did her political stability.”
The health care proposals that are currently working their way through Congress all rely on some form of price control in the mistaken belief that it will reduce costs. However, to reduce costs, it would be necessary for the government to set prices at every level of production and distribution, which is virtually impossible, considering the billions of buy-sell decisions that are made throughout a society literally every day. There are plenty of examples of the failure of this sort of thinking, the most notable being the Soviet Union, which collapsed after 70 years.
In a November 2005 article, economist Thomas Sowell commented:
People who want the government to control the prices of pharmaceutical drugs seldom, if ever, raise the question of what actually happens in places and times when government has controlled the prices of pharmaceutical drugs.
Canada and other countries do it. What consequences have there been?
One major consequence is that Canada and other countries do not create nearly as many of the new life-saving pharmaceutical drugs as the United States does. These other countries live off the results — the medicines — produced by the enormously costly research that “obscene” pharmaceutical profits finance in America.
Other instances of the impacts of price controls include the Revolutionary War, when George Washington’s army almost starved to death because of controls on food that were imposed by Pennsylvania and other colonial governments. And, in 1793, French politicians passed the “Law of the Maximum,” which imposed price controls on grain and other items and caused starvation in some towns.
In 1971, President Nixon’s wage and price controls failed to lower the rate of inflation at the time and were abandoned in 1974.
In 1979, Jimmy Carter’s price control policies caused oil and gas shortages and in the 1990s, California’s energy crisis was caused by price controls on retail prices (but not on wholesale prices).
In spite of clear evidence that price controls have never worked as planned, Obama and Congress continue to press for a health care plan that will make substantial use of them. If they succeed, they will have unintended consequences that are likely to cause major shortages of health care services and will ultimately lead to rationing.
Thomas Sowell’s November 2005 article concluded, “Costs don’t go away because you refuse to pay them, any more than gravity goes away if you refuse to acknowledge it. You usually pay more in different ways, through taxes as well as prices, and by deterioration in quality when political processes replace economic process…But the lure of the free lunch goes on.”
Is it a good idea to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) and four other terrorists in New York City for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001? Attorney General Eric Holder’s November 13 announcement to do just that immediately stirred up strong feelings, pro and con, about the wisdom of the Obama administration’s decision.
Wikipedia notes, “The right to a fair trial is explicitly proclaimed in Article Ten of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article Six of the European Convention of Human Rights, as well as numerous other constitutions and declarations throughout the world.” A fair trial requires a competent, neutral and detached judge and jury, witnesses who are free of influence and adequate legal counsel.
That said, what a “fair trial” in NY City for KSM and the other terrorists is likely to mean has very different connotations for many Americans.
One side tends to see it as an opportunity to showcase America’s justice system to the rest of the world in general and Muslims in particular, in the belief that it will demonstrate the fairness and equity that is accorded even this nation’s worst enemies. They believe the city of New York is well equipped to handle the risks of such a trial in a U.S. Federal court, both judicial and security concerns, and that the case is a slam dunk for conviction that will finally lead to the execution of those responsible for the murder of over 3,000 people in the heart of Manhattan on September 11, 2001.
Elisa Massimino of Human Rights First commented, “It treats these perpetrators as the criminals they are, depriving them of the warrior status which they crave and the military commissions facilitated.”
Another important reason for conducting this trial in New York is to rectify the taint the current administration believes was caused by the way in which KSM was captured and subsequently waterboarded during his interrogation by the Bush administration.
Jeffrey Tobin, CNN’s legal analyst, observed that the trial will perhaps be the biggest “challenge in the history of federal law enforcement to produce a fair trial.” Tobin further noted that the defense will argue that the extensive waterboarding of KSM (183 times) is “misconduct that means the whole case should be thrown out.” However, Attorney General Holder points out that there is sufficient evidence to convict that has not yet been released and that the government will seek the death penalty.
The decision to move the trial to N.Y. City was immediately met with an outcry of opposition.
In a November 13 Politico article (“N.Y. terrorist trial raises stakes”), Josh Gerstein reported, “Families are furious about this,” said Debra Burlingame, whose brother Chic Burlingame was the American Airlines pilot of one of the planes hijacked on September 11…”more than 300 family members have implored the administration not to move the trial to New York.”
Gerstein also points out that there is a risk a judge could dismiss all charges because of “outrageous government conduct.”
Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) has attempted to pass legislation that would force the administration to keep the 9/11 planners before military courts, expressing the concern that trying KSM in civilian court would be a “huge mistake” that would also make it more difficult to try lower-level Al Qaeda members in military tribunals.
There are also a host of security concerns associated with conducting this trial in lower Manhattan, such as protecting the judge and members of the jury from threats to themselves and their families, risk of harm to New Yorkers in the event of an attack on the streets when prisoners are moved. Mayor Bloomberg is confident the City is equal to the task, noting that the NY Police Department is accustomed to dealing with similar problems on a regular basis.
However, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani sees it quite differently and has expressed both outrage and concern about the safety and security issues involved, in addition to many of the legal issues that are raised as a result of transferring this case to the federal courts.
The core issue in all of this is the Obama administration’s position that terrorism should be treated as a criminal matter and dealt with by the criminal justice system as opposed to fighting a war (on terror), notwithstanding the fact that Osama bin Laden (and Al Qaeda) openly declared war against the United States and the West in a news conference on May 26, 1998.
My own conclusion is that the decision of the Obama administration to try KSM and the other terrorists in New York is as much about politics as justice. I believe they see it as another opportunity to fault the Bush administration for a situation that was not handled properly.
We hear a lot about poverty: who is poor, how poor they are, lack of opportunity, how our free-market economic system and the rich are to blame for their condition.
What image comes to your mind when you hear the word poverty? Someone who looks like a bum, homeless, unkempt and lazy, living off the taxpayers? Or a simple, hard-working individual or family, struggling to make ends meet, just trying to get along?
All of the above?
Poverty statistics have always troubled me. Mostly, I think, because they seem to include too large a percentage of the population, and the percentage never seems to change. If anything, it has increased over the years. My sense is that the reason for this is that the definition of poverty keeps changing, generally to bolster the bureaucracy and special interests that have turned it into a business.
The War on Poverty was launched by president Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and “In the decade following the 1964 introduction of the war on poverty, poverty rates in the U.S. dropped to their lowest level to date: 11.1% . They have remained between 11 and 15.2% ever since. Since 1973 poverty has remained well below the historical U.S. averages in the range of 20-25%…In 2004, more than 35.9 million, or 12% of Americans including 12.1 million children, were considered to be living in poverty with an average growth of almost 1 million per year.” (Wikipedia).
The word “poor” is misleading. It tends to imply that people who are considered poor are unemployed, living in the streets, going hungry. However, the reality is far different from the popular image.
Robert Rector, a senior research fellow with the Heritage Foundation, provides an interesting and perhaps surprising insight in the status of the poor in his article, “Understanding Poverty in America, What the Census Bureau doesn’t count when reporting on the “poor.” (See: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjJiMDE5Y2M1OWNmNDFhMDIwNWMxYTA1Mzk5ZDkxMTk=)
Rector notes, for example, that very few of the more than 30 million Americans who are defined as poor actually experience any significant hardship. “According to the government’s own surveys, the typical ‘poor’ American has cable or satellite TV, two color TVs, and a DVD player or VCR. He has air conditioning, a car, a microwave, a refrigerator, a stove, and a clothes washer and dryer. He is able to obtain medical care when needed. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry, and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family’s essential needs.”
Rector also observes that spending on the poor is generally underestimated - by not including the value of many of the government benefits they receive, such as food, housing, medical care, and certain social services. “If converted into cash, this aid would be nearly four times the amount needed to eliminate poverty in the U.S. by raising the incomes of all poor households above the federal poverty levels.”
Rector further comments, “What is surprising is that every year for nearly three decades, in good economic times and bad, Census has reported more than 30 million Americans living in poverty.”
How is possible that the number of Americans living in poverty never changes, no matter how much money and services are provided to help them?
The answer is that the definition of poverty, that is, the formula for calculating income routinely omits many government services and benefits that are provided to the poor. For example, Census figures only count “around 4 percent of total (government) welfare spending as ‘income’”. This makes it possible to increase expenditures for welfare without materially affecting the poverty numbers.
Poverty in America has become a growth industry, with a variety of constituencies and special interests, including many politicians, all of whom benefit from the system and seek to expand it.
Listening to a discussion of health care reform with a group of doctors recently, several of the participants raised the issue of insurance company profits as a significant factor in the high cost of health insurance. They also made the point that health insurance premiums included the profits the insurers paid to their shareholders. The assumption was that if insurance company profits were reduced or eliminated, the cost of health care could be lowered.
Many of those who want to “reform” the nation’s health care system also argue that hospital profits are a major factor in the high cost of health care. In addition, they believe that doctors’ fees are a big part of the reason for high health care costs. On the surface, given that physicians’ earnings are among the highest of all professions, they seem to have a point.
However, as with so many of the claims and counterclaims that are made in the debates about health care reform, these arguments don’t sound right to me, because the assertion is based on the incorrect assumption that hospital and insurance company profits are enough to be a significant factor in the cost of health care.
A Reuters article (March 2, 2009) noted, “Plunging revenues from investments have forced median profit margins for U.S. hospitals to zero, according to a Thomson Reuters analysis of hospital finances…And half of the more than 400 hospitals studied are losing money…The median (half above, half below) total margin among the 439 hospitals in the study was zero percent in the third quarter of 2008, the lowest ever seen.
50 percent of hospitals were unprofitable in the third quarter of 2008.
Payments that hospitals received from Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers were growing but at a declining rate through the end of 2008.
Median cash-on-hand reached an historic low in the third quarter of 2008, demonstrating the impact of the credit crisis on liquidity.”
In March 2002 Reuters reported that hospital profits had fallen to zero, primarily because their investment portfolios had declined as a result of the economic downturn. More than half of the 439 hospitals surveyed were losing money. The study covered “revenue and profit, or total margin for non-profit hospitals, employment levels, closures, inpatient volume, reimbursement rates, and frequency of elective medical treatments. It found:
– The median total margin among the 439 hospitals in the study was zero percent in the third quarter of 2008, the lowest ever seen.
– 50 percent of hospitals were unprofitable in the third quarter of 2008.
– Payments that hospitals received from Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers were growing but at a declining rate through the end of 2008.
– Median cash-on-hand reached an historic low in the third quarter of 2008, demonstrating the impact of the credit crisis on liquidity.”
As for the health insurance companies, a seekingalpha.com article ranked the health insurance industry at number 86, with earnings of 3.3% of their revenue (total income, sales, billings, etc.). So, if all their profits were eliminated, health insurance premiums would only be reduced by 3.3 cents on the dollar from that source. Not much help there.
How about the doctors? Surely, health care costs can reduced by paying them less, given that physicians are among the highest paid professionals in the country. Looking at the median (half above, half below) earnings of doctors, The Medical Group Management Association reported that annual physician compensation in 2005 ranged from $137,199 to $321,686, depending on the specialty and the number of years in practice.
Assuming it would be possible to cut or eliminate their compensation, how much would that save? The numbers actually look pretty good: With upwards of 700,000 physicians in the U. S. and using a simple average, the annual total amounts to something on the order of $1 trillion.
Eliminating or cutting their compensation could produce some savings to help pay for health care reform. But, why would they agree to that? And, how many doctors would retire or leave the practice of medicine for greener pastures if that happened?
Could it be that all the hue and cry about hospital and insurance company profits and how Obamacare will lower costs by reducing them will amount to nothing more than wishful thinking? It’s not their profits that are the problem, it’s their cost of doing business.
Many Americans don’t seem to realize that our nation’s wealth gives us the luxury of thinking we have the right to judge other cultures by our own standards of morality and ethics, or at least the standards that we profess to have. Protecting endangered species and the environment, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, subsidizing the poor and the elderly, helping the disadvantaged, are just some of the worthy and important goals of our society. The list sometimes seems endless; however, Americans, who are often critical of how others around the world deal with such concerns, generally fail to recognize that the basis of our standards of ethics and morality is largely dependent on our wealth. In short, we can afford them.
We rarely acknowledge that other societies cannot afford to live by our standards. Do we really have the right to tell others around the world, who are often literally starving, that stealing or cheating is unethical or immoral? Or, that people in places like Africa, Asia and Latin America, who must somehow try to exist below even subsistence levels, should live by our rules of conduct?
Just how easy is it for starving people to “do the right thing”? Isn’t that much easier for those of us whose basic needs and many of our wants are satisfied? Too often, Americans seem to expect the rest of the world to conform to our ideals of right and wrong, notwithstanding the conditions under which most other peoples are forced to live. Little wonder that we are viewed by so many as arrogant.
Furthermore, our criticisms of the ethical and moral failures of other societies often overlook the fact that there is an overabundance of unethical and immoral behavior right here in our own country. No nationality or ethnic group has a corner on the market for lying, cheating and stealing, or just plain taking advantage of others – and none is exempt, including murder and mayhem. We have only to look at the endless stream of stories in the media about violence, theft and fraud, and business and governmental abuses in our own society to see that we are really not much better than many of those we are so quick to criticize.
It has been said that true morality is doing the right thing when no one is looking. How many Americans can honestly say they live this way? We have evolved into a system of situational ethics, which vary according to the circumstances involved, with no absolutes. Nothing is really right or wrong, only right or wrong depending on the situation.
What we do have going for us that most other societies do not is freedom. That’s what makes us truly different - and better, in spite of our own sorry parade of transgressions. We may often be wrong, but at least we are free to try to improve.
Americans appear to believe these issues can be resolved by passing more or tougher laws to regulate and control behavior, but I worry that this has not worked. Instead, from the vantage point of my 80 plus years, things seem to have gotten progressively worse. Not long ago, I saw a young woman interviewed on television who openly acknowledged that she and a group of fellow students cheated to win a competitive academic contest – and she didn’t see anything wrong with it. As a matter of fact, she volunteered that she would do it again – without exhibiting any evidence of contrition or embarrassment. Current research overwhelmingly reports that cheating is rampant among young people today. So, why are we so shocked to learn that many of our business, political and religious leaders are unethical or immoral? Is our wealth also the basis for this disconnect?
Is it time for a reality check? Perhaps the answer is as obvious as the current generation, especially our political leaders, conducting themselves as exemplars and teachers of moral and right behavior simply by doing right. Or is it too late for that?
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