Used Furniture
(503) 232-7412
Office Furniture
(503) 238-4477
Home Furniture
(503) 230-7716
The New Rentier Class
Excerpt from Forbes - 2009-06-22; Page 12"You low-down rent seeker!" That's an insult used by economists.
The term "rent-seeking behavior" dates only to 1974, but the concept goes back a ways. RSB can be defined as the extraction of undeserved economic rewards. How? Via threats of violence, for example. Or help from elected officials. In a free market, your reward is a function of how much you contribute to the economy; in a regulated market, of how much you contribute to politicians.
The effort succeeds often enough to support a thriving class of facilitators. A few centuries ago we had fawning courtiers at the court of Queen Elizabeth. Now we have Tom Daschle running around town in a limousine. Lobbying (the disclosed portion of it, that is) is a $3.3-billion-a-year industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Even--no, especially--in a recession, RSB is big business. There's all that stimulus money. In the doldrums of New Haven, Conn. a commercial printer is putting up a windmill. It makes no economic sense, not even in a world trying to curb its appetite for carbon. But it makes sense to him, because he's paying only a sliver of the cost. See the story by Jonathan Fahey.
Vendors of renewable energy would go near the top of any list of rent seekers. Here are the next nine in my catalog of favorite RSBs.
The tax code. Why do we have a depletion allowance for spodumene, whatever that is--or 70,000 pages of other peculiarities? To help members of the Joint Tax Committee get campaign donations.
UAW pay and benefits. These are being supported with $50 billion of federal money. We are taxing $30-an-hour schoolteachers to help out $59-an-hour autoworkers.
Public employee pay and benefits. When the privately owned BMT competed with the IRT, the New York City subways did not offer such nice pensions, or employ so many featherbedders.
Cap and trade. The clean way to limit carbon is with a tax. The dirty way is with a system of permits dished out in an arbitrary fashion. Guess which we'll get?
Farm subsidies.
Transportation permits. Why is a NYC taxi medallion worth $600,000? That sum is monopoly rent (rigged fares, that is), capitalized.
Baseball stadium financing. George Steinbrenner gets welfare. Classic RSB.
Opera. Consumption by aristocrats gets help from the tax deduction for "charity."
Academia. What explains the comfortable lifestyle of those economists and other professors? Not the economic value of liberal arts education, which is nowhere close to the $330 billion a year this sector consumes. The explanation is federal handouts.
William Baldwin
Group bubbling over soda pop in prisons
Excerpt from The Oregonian - 2009-05-12; Page B2Spending | Common Sense for Oregon, a conservative group, thinks the money spent on the drinks could serve a better purpose
SALEM -- Oregon Corrections Department officials said Monday they're trying to wean inmates from soda pop with their meals, but a conservative group says it's time to cut prisoners off of their free Coke.
A new group, Common Sense for Oregon, awarded the state prison system its inaugural "Oregon Golden Fleece Award" for spending $773,000 on soda pop for inmates.
"It's real simple," said Ross Day, the group's executive director. "Do people want that money to go state troopers or teachers or whomever, or do they want a prisoner to sit down and have a Coke and a smile?"
Corrections spokeswoman Liz Craig said the department has an exclusive contract with Coca-Cola to provide soda pop to the 14,000 inmates in the prison system. She said that, depending on the institution, inmates have a choice of between four and six Coca-Cola products, including Diet Coke, Sprite and Coca-Cola Cherry.
However, Craig said that for both budgetary and health reasons, the department launched a program a year ago to reduce access to soda pop in prison dining halls. In the past, soda was generally available at lunch and dinner. Now, for example, the bubbly is only flowing at dinner at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. And at the Oregon State Correctional Institution, where many inmates are close to their release dates, soda is offered at only one meal a week.
Craig said the state will cut its spending on soda by more than half in the next budget cycle as each institution implements its own soda reduction plan. She said corrections did not want to cut off access to soda abruptly because food is used as a "management tool" to improve inmate behavior.
Craig said inmates can get refills, but she said they use small cups, making it difficult to get as much as the equivalent of a 12-ounce can of soda in the time they have to eat.
Day said his group has started running radio ads promoting its golden fleece award, which is modeled on a similar national publicity effort waged for several years by former Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis.
Day, an attorney also active in such conservative groups as Oregonians in Action, declined to reveal his donors. But he said that former state GOP Chairman Kevin Mannix, who ran for governor twice, and Russ Walker, who heads the Oregon chapter of Freedom Works, are on the group's board.
----------
By JEFF MAPES
The Oregonian Staff
Jeff Mapes: 503-221-8209
jeffmapes@news.oregonian.com
The Liberal Hour
Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal - 2009-04-29; Page A12Dick Cheney is often critical of President Obama, but on one issue we suspect the former Vice President has a grudging admiration: In a mere 100 days, the Democrat has silenced eight years of criticism about the Imperial Presidency. It is once again the liberal hour in American politics, and the media and political classes now see energy in the executive as a national asset.
Though we disagree with much of Mr. Obama's agenda, this turnaround has its benefits. A worried electorate wants to feel better about the country after the bitterness of the Bush years, and his cool confidence has lifted the public mood. He is a likable man who seems open to other arguments, even if he really isn't. His rise to Commander in Chief has sapped the war debate of its partisan animus, and he is now responsible for success or failure in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has made responsible decisions on both fronts.
We have our doubts about Mr. Obama's faith in diplomacy with enemies, but even here his first three months have had their uses. When Kim Jong Il broke his nuclear promises and tossed U.N. inspectors from North Korea in 2002, Democrats blamed President Bush. Now that Kim is doing the same despite Mr. Obama's open handshake, we know better. Our guess is that Mr. Obama's dalliance with Iran, Syria and other rogues will be similarly instructive, and we can hope the President draws the proper lessons before Iran goes nuclear. It's too early to know if Mr. Obama will turn out to be a tough-minded liberal internationalist, in the Tony Blair mode, or a naive globalist, a la Jimmy Carter.
On the home front, there can no longer be any such doubts. Mr. Obama talks the language of pragmatism, but his program has revealed a man of the left. He clearly views the financial crisis and the liberal majorities in Congress as a rare chance to advance the power of the state in American life. The only two comparable moments in the last century were 1965, which gave us the Great Society, and 1933, which bequeathed the New Deal. Mr. Obama's goals are at least as ambitious, resuming the march toward the European welfare state that was stopped by what Democrats like to call the Reagan detour.
His main method here is to make the federal government the guarantor of middle-class security. He wants to make a college education a new entitlement, regardless of the cost. He wants state-financed health-care available to all, even if it means jamming a $1 trillion bill through the Senate with 51 votes. And he wants a cap-and-trade tax that would punish the main current sources of U.S. energy and hand Washington a vast new source of revenue.
Oh, and by the way, he also wants to fix the financial system, run the auto industry, and build a nationwide, high-speed rail network. And on the seventh day, he rested.
What's striking is that Mr. Obama betrays no sense that maybe all of this isn't achievable, much less affordable, all at once. In contrast to Bill Clinton, he has abandoned any deficit concern, building in red ink of at least 4% of GDP for the next decade. And that's assuming the revival of rapid economic growth, and before counting the real cost of health care.
He claims to believe that the revenue to pay for this can be had merely by tapping the rich, as Democrats did during the 1990s, because he and his advisers assume that higher tax rates don't matter. But growth in the 1990s got going in earnest only after HillaryCare collapsed, Republicans took Congress and at least for a while spending was restrained and taxes were cut. The current arc of spending and taxes is only going up -- and to levels not seen in decades. The Obama program is going to test the liberal faith, not observed since the 1970s, that deficit spending and easy monetary policy are engines of prosperity. If they are wrong, then Mr. Obama will eventually find himself managing the politics of stagflation.
More troubling still is Mr. Obama's leap into managing major U.S. industries. Even the European left got out of the nationalization business as a loser after the 1970s. But the Obama White House and Treasury are nationalizing GM and Chrysler, expanding government's role in the mortgage markets, and widening their ownership of the U.S. banking system. The deeper they dig in, the harder they will find it politically to exit. And as economic policy, the mauling of GM bondholders, the banker-baiting on Capitol Hill, and the refusal to let even healthy banks escape the TARP won't revive animal spirits.
This last point may be more a matter of Mr. Obama's character than his ideology. One lesson from the first 100 days is that the President doesn't like to do things that are politically difficult, such as stand up to Congress. He has abdicated the writing of most legislation to liberal committee chairmen, at the cost of bipartisanship. This means that when he really needs Republicans -- on trade and national security -- they might not be there. And he has bent far too easily to his party's populists on AIG bonuses, Mexican trucks and interrogation memos -- even as they threaten to complicate his other priorities.
Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, and sooner or later the twain shall meet. For now, we are living in another era of unchecked liberal government. The reckoning will come when Americans discover how much it costs.