The Journalist-to-Government Revolving Door

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Just out from the Rhode Island Senate is a press release announcing the hiring of Providence Journal reporter Kate Bramson as the chamber’s new $121,340 director of the Senate Policy Office:

Ms. Bramson was chosen from a field of 40 applicants. “Although many highly qualified individuals applied – and we are grateful to all of them – Kate was exceptional. My team and I were remarkably impressed with her deep knowledge on a wide range of issues. I have been interviewed by Kate in the past, and I always respected her thorough knowledge of the topic she was covering. My admiration grew through the interview process for this position. She is exceptionally well-versed in many areas, and particularly economic development. Kate offered the kind of analysis and insights that will serve the Senate well as we work to make our state a better place to live and work. She will be joining an outstanding staff in our Senate Policy Office.”

Every time a local journalist steps up to government (the direction it must be in pay, anyway), I’ve noted the dangerous precedent, and this is a big one.  Can people really trust journalists’ objectivity when being hired for highly contested and highly remunerated government jobs has become a regular part of their career path?

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Cover Up in the Scandal-Free Administration

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Just because I think it’s important for somebody in Rhode Island to make this a topic of conversation, here’s Andrew McCarthy (no raving conspiracy theorist) detailing what appears to be a cover-up of Hillary Clinton’s private email usage, for the following reason:

From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton–emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call — not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) The decision was inevitable. Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.

These emails must have involved some classified information, given the nature of consultations between presidents and secretaries of state, the broad outlines of Obama’s own executive order defining classified intelligence (see EO 13526, section 1.4), and the fact that the Obama administration adamantly refused to disclose the Clinton–Obama emails. If classified information was mishandled, it was necessarily mishandled on both ends of these email exchanges.

The last paragraph, though, is the key to explaining much of our country’s experience since the election:

All cleaned up: no indictment, meaning no prosecution, meaning no disclosure of Clinton–Obama emails. It all worked like a charm . . . except the part where Mrs. Clinton wins the presidency and the problem is never spoken of again.

When one thinks of all the people who just went along with the talking point that Obama’s administration was “largely scandal free” (right down to Rhode Island’s own Arlene Violet), one can only wonder whether they understood that they meant scandal as in “what the news media makes a big deal about” rather than behavior that ought to be scandalous.  The measure of the former isn’t very helpful, meaning mainly an ability to keep the press in your corner, by which measure just about every dictator presides over a scandal-free era.

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Picking an Inspector General

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Potential Return on an Inspector General

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At Least the Past Is Transparent

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The Illness of and Medicine for Corporate Crony Incentives

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With a mention of the questionable benefit from having wooed General Electric to Boston with $150 million in subsidies, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argues against the crony-capitalist bribing of companies to locate within a jurisdiction:

Amazon says it is seeking to build its new home in a metropolitan area with a large population, an international airport, and good schools. But as everyone understands, it also expect to be courted with publicly-funded “incentives” — some combination of property-tax abatements, job-creation credits, direct grants, sales-tax refunds, land-acquisition assistance, and the other varieties of corporate welfare that governments have concocted to lure businesses. Amazon knows how the economic-redevelopment game is played in what The Economist calls this “sweet land of subsidy.” (Just this week, Wisconsin agreed to pay Foxconn a staggering $3 billion in subsidies to construct a flat-screen factory in the state.) If cities and states are determined to compete for Amazon’s new campus by showering it with fistfuls of taxpayer dollars, the company can’t be blamed for pocketing the largesse.

But what excuse do mayors and governors have? Again and again they spend taxpayers’ funds to woo companies in this way. Again and again the taxpayers get jilted.

Yet, this is the strategy that our Democrat governor, Gina Raimondo, wishes to expand in her recently proposed budget, including special subsidies to lower-end cronies, from students to small businesses.  Under this model, the government makes it unreasonably difficult for individuals and businesses to act economically and then tries to take credit for easing the burden with subsidies… for those individuals and businesses willing to kneel before the bureaucrats and be bought into the game.

By way of a bigger-picture medicine for this hard-to-kick mental disease, I like Glenn Reynolds’s suggestion:

State tax abatements and other “incentives” should be treated as taxable income at the federal level. States should be encouraged to have low taxes for every company, not just the favored few.

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Key Questions on School Infrastructure

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A Public Project That Has It All

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Pigs, PawSox, and a Pitiful Budget

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As Southern New England government squeezes everybody in order to keep growing, more people will begin paying attention to what they’re having to give up.

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How the Mob State Government Balances a Budget

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When Police Agency Becomes Corrupt for Technical Reasons

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PawSox Make or Break

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How Accountability Works in Government

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Former WPRI employee Stephanie Chalfant describes the accountability faced by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency who inadvertently put an entire city into panic by hitting the “incoming missile” button rather than the “this is a test button”… twice:

The employee who hit the button has since been reassigned, according to state officials.

“I’m sure he feels horrible,” Chalfant added. “I can’t even imagine being in this person’s shoes who had done this. He must feel awful.”

Well, as long as he feels bad, then the public can rest assured that these sorts of mistakes — with the very real potential to put people in harm’s way — will not happen again.  (That’s sarcasm, by the way.)

In the private sector, the consequences to an ordinary employee — somebody who isn’t connected or mission critical — would almost certainly be much more substantial, not the least because the entire company could go out of business.

Once again, the impression is that they (government workers) don’t work for us.  We’re just lucky that they deign to provide us services.

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If the Process Is Open, Why Are They on a Side?

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Licensing as Legalized Racketeering

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Writing in the American Spectator, Jon Cassidy likens government’s occupational licensing regimes to racketeering:

Racketeering is a multifarious concept, but when the word was coined in 1927 by the Employers Association of Chicago, it referred specifically to tradesmen who had banded together to artificially drive up the cost of their services. The employers group wanted the authorities to crack down on crooked laundry and building trades, among others, but in the long run, the trades won by subverting and perverting the power of the government. It’s easy enough to picture the old noir films with cops on the take, doing the mob’s bidding, but this corruption was of a less glamorous, more insidious sort.

That lead-up reminds me of my response when people attempt to quantify government corruption in order to claim that Rhode Island isn’t that much of an outlier.  The problem is that we’ve essentially made corruption legal, and with deteriorated social norms around inside dealing, the word “corruption” is useless if it must involve something illegal.

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The Puzzle of Moral Obligation Bonds

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Ocean State Priorities

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The Government Plantation Dragging Down California

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Trying to understand why wealthy California would have the highest Supplemental Poverty Measure, which includes cost of living, Kerry Jackson describes what I’ve been calling the “government plantation“:

Self-interest in the social-services community may be at fault. As economist William A. Niskanen explained back in 1971, public agencies seek to maximize their budgets, through which they acquire increased power, status, comfort and security. To keep growing its budget, and hence its power, a welfare bureaucracy has an incentive to expand its “customer” base. With 883,000 full-time-equivalent state and local employees in 2014, California has an enormous bureaucracy. Many work in social services, and many would lose their jobs if the typical welfare client were to move off the welfare rolls.

The change, since 1971, is that this tendency of social welfare bureaucracies has metastasized to the entire government.  The leverage isn’t just one agency as opposed to others, but government itself, as a sector in society.  Whether elected or appointed, government officials’ incentive is to create new services to provide and to increase the number of people receiving them.  This expands their base of support while ratcheting up the amount of money they can extract from others.

The well-advertised benefits available attract people interested in collecting them, even as the increased costs and restrictions on private-sector life drive away the people whose work is supposed to grow the economy that pays for it all.  California started from an enviable position, which put in place some massive wealth centers, but even so, a growing tumor will eventually kill even the healthiest animal.

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Where the Public Transportation Doesn’t Go

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Longing for a Time Not So Long Ago

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A Green Pitch for the Loughlin Marina

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How New Englanders Should Deal with Snow

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The Value of an Inspector General

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Letting the Private Sector Go Where It Needs to Go

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Those of us here in the corner of Rhode Island that’s like a beachhead into Massachusetts are watching the south end of Fall River reverse its seemingly inevitable decline and revive.  A Herald News editorial spots a lesson:

If this rapid movement teaches us anything, it’s that the free market is stubborn. It goes where it wants to go, not where it is told to go.

For decades, Fall River has been trying to “revitalize” downtown. Results have been mixed, but we certainly haven’t seen the rapid movement downtown that we’re seeing in the South End, despite repeated promises from mayor after mayor and a snow drift of studies paid for by the taxpayer.

We’ve seen this in Tiverton, with the town’s would-be planners longing for an active downtown in the north end of town while blocking any kind of development elsewhere.  And we see it in the entire economic development philosophy of Rhode Island.  Rather than announcing that the state is changing its control-your-life ways and letting the economy flourish where there is opportunity, officials announce that there is taxpayer money on offer for anybody who is willing to play ball with insiders.

On the local level, one can understand (even while disagreeing) why folks who live in a relatively small town would work to preserve the scenery, even if their only benefit is driving by it from time to time.  Rhode Island goes well beyond that sort of preservation, however, to the point of insisting that only a future that meets with the central planners’ approval is worth having. The end result is more likely to be that they don’t get what they want (because it’s fantasy), while those who know how to game the system thrive.

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The Benefits of Letting People Figure Out How to Live

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What strikes me most about Jonathan Tobin’s thoughts on the benefits of the recent change in federal economic policy is how easily Rhode Island could take the same approach:

What’s even more astonishing is that as the story’s headline concedes, this impending boom is being directly caused by “The Trump Effect.” American businesses aren’t, as The Times points out, merely happily anticipating the cut in corporate tax rates provided by the reform bill passed last month by Congress. What’s really fueling the upturn, according to The Times, is “the Trump administration’s regulatory pullback.”

Despite the widespread consensus in the mainstream media that the administration has been a disaster on all fronts, Republicans have often singled out regulatory reform as a highlight of Trump’s first months in office. Liberal economists have dismissed this assertion as nothing more than a talking point to reassure Republicans that Trump was, despite his populist tone, trying to govern like a conservative. But, as The Times report points out, the impact of his orders to cut back on regulations that hamstring businesses is real.

Since business leaders are reassured that not only will many Obama-era regulations be cut back, but also that no new arcane rules will be implemented in the next few years, they’re able to plan with confidence. That means more investment, more jobs, and ultimately higher wages for workers in a trifecta that appeals to both big business and also to the needs of the working class voters who were responsible for electing Trump last year.

Government promises security and (somebody’s vision of) fairness as it takes control of the economy.  But when it comes to regulations, its incentive is always to do more than is necessary for a stated policy goal, and the restrictions and uncertainty it places on people who operate businesses do real harm.

In life, we do things like eat healthy, exercise, and visit doctors regularly in order to allow us to live.  When it comes to government regulation, we tend too much to allowing officials to tell us how to live for our own good — or rather, how to live for the good of whomever the government prioritizes.

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Net Neutrality-Related Cooperation

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Licensing Puts Us at the Mercy of Legislators and Bureaucrats

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Eric Dexheimer, staff writer for the Austin American-Statesman, relates the story of Shayne Gatlin, who made the dumb decision as a teenager to agree to drive the getaway car for his friends after they broke into a house.  Some years later, he took up the trade of locksmith, and over 30 years, he has built up a solid reputation and stellar Better Business Bureau rating.

In 2004, however, his home state of Texas began licensing locksmiths, which presented him no problem, beyond the embarrassment of disclosing his record, until he recently had to supply a digital fingerprint under a new rule:

That appears to have set into motion a mandatory new review of his background, said Steve Thornton, Gatlin’s attorney. But rather than acknowledging Gatlin’s long and clean track record, court records show, the Private Security Program instead treated him as a new locksmith applicant. That meant applying an inflexible rule it had adopted in 2014 stating that any applicant with a house burglary conviction, no matter how long ago it occurred, was to be rejected.

The public can disagree about the appropriate rigidity of the law for professionals working in home security, but Gatlin’s story illustrates an important point:  When you need the government’s permission to work, you’re constantly at their mercy.  The rules can change arbitrarily and a single decision — made by legislators or bureaucrats who are too confident in their ability to foresee every consequence — can wipe out your entire life’s work.

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The Necessary Schemes of the Government Plantation

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Red Jahncke describes one part of the government plantation funding strategy:

… 42 states tax hospitals. Why? One answer is the perverse incentives built into the Medicaid law. When a state returns tax money to hospitals through Medicaid “supplemental payments,” it qualifies for matching funds from Washington. Connecticut hospitals will pay $900 million in taxes, but the state will offset that with $600 million in supplemental Medicaid payments—matched with $450 million of federal funds, meaning Hartford comes out ahead in the whole scheme by $750 million. Nice work if you can get it.

As Jahncke closes his essay by suggesting, if government wants to do this, it should be straightforward about it. The problem is that, increasingly, the business model of government is to seek people to whom to provide benefits or services and then find ways to make taxpayers at all levels of government pay for it.  If the wealth transfer were more obvious, then the people paying the bill would more quickly decline to do so, especially for those portions funded across state lines by the federal government.

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The Post Office’s Delivery Neutrality

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One suspects that Wall Street Journal reporters Cara Lombardo and Paul Ziobro saw their recent article on the United States Post Office’s imbalance with Amazon as residing in the “Trump tweets versus the world” category.  On the social media platform, the president expressed frustration that the money-losing government agency is basically subsidizing Amazon’s business by keeping shipping costs artificially low.

The ins and outs of that conflict — woven through consumer interests, the destruction of local brick-and-mortar retailers, and so on — are interesting, but for my narrow purpose, here, it occurred to me that the matter offers a serviceable analogy to net neutrality:

… some critics suggest that the USPS is underpricing such services and that the e-commerce deliveries are being subsidized by the universal service obligation that the USPS must maintain under congressional edict. The universal service obligation is a collection of requirements that ensures all users receive a certain level of service at a reasonable price.

Like Internet service providers, the post office has a limited amount of bandwidth, and it wants to keep prices down to maximize the number of individuals and organizations that can use the service.  That low price, however, creates a framework on which major players can lean their business models for greater profits than would be possible if the providers were able to absorb some of them to provide their mission-critical link in the chain.

Both issues present a need for balance, and people can obviously apply different priorities; the distinction between government and private corporations also has an effect.  Both seem to me, however, to show quite readily the complex nature of balancing society’s interests and the folly of attempting to channel them through blunt government instruments.

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