Residents and visitors alike know that getting around the Bay Area is not exactly a walk in the park. A $2.4 billion Transbay Transit Center is slated to open in December, but as San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross note, this highly touted “Grand Central Station of the West,” will wind up as “little more than the world’s most expensive bus station.” Worse, “it’s going to cost an estimated $20 million a year to run the place, and no one knows where all the money will come from.”
According to San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who chairs the local Transportation Authority, the “operating subsidy” could be $20 million a year but “without a source of revenue.” So as the columnists explain, “taxpayers and bridge commuters will probably be on the hook to pick up millions of dollars in costs, although the exact amount still isn’t known.”
As we noted, a $3.5 billion bond approval has Bay Area Rapid Transit bosses panting for another $1.5 billion in toll hikes that would boost bridge fares as high as $9. On the other hand, BART has no trouble paying janitor Liang Zhao Zhang $271,000 in one year. That includes $162,000 in overtime, even though this sweeping Stakhanov seems to spend much of his overtime inside a closet.
Meanwhile, Supervisor Aaron Peskin has been appointed to the California Coastal Commission, an unelected body of regulatory zealots who override scores of duly elected governments on coastal land-use issues. Peskin was appointed by state Senate boss Kevin de Leon, whose chief of staff Dan Reeves forbade Senator Janet Nguyen, a refugee from Vietnam, from saying anything critical of the late Tom Hayden, a former state senator and Uncle Tom of Vietnam’s Stalinist regime. When Senator Nguyen, a southern California Republican, dared to speak out, Senate Democrats turned off her microphone and tossed the Asian woman from the Senate floor.
In his first go-round as California governor, Jerry Brown opposed the influx of Vietnamese refugees and even tried to block refugee flights into Travis Air Force Base. With Brown governor again, little wonder why the Senate would give Janet Nguyen a rough ride. On the other hand, the state’s ruling class always does the same for California’s embattled taxpayers.
The day before his inauguration, The Hill reported on a trial balloon that members of President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration were floating about potential spending cuts in the federal government’s budget, in which the amount of the federal government’s spending upon the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) were targeted for reduction.
At the time, Alexander Bolton of the Washington Post took great exception to a very small portion of the potential spending cuts that had been floated, where the proposals involved realizing the complete privatization the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and zeroing out the federal contributions for both the NEA and NEH.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting received $445 million in 2016. (It gets additional funding from donors like you.) NEA got $148 million. NEH requested the same. The Congressional Budget Office figures that about $3.9 trillion was spent by the government during the fiscal year.
Bolton continued to narrow his focus on the relative cost to American taxpayers of the National Endowment of the Arts with respect to the size of the U.S. government’s annual spending.
If you were at Thanksgiving and demanded a slice of pecan pie proportionate to 2016 NEA spending relative to the federal budget, you’d end up with a piece of pie that would need to be sliced off with a finely-tuned laser.
What Bolton didn’t consider is the relative size of the benefits that American taxpayers receive from the things the NEA does in spending $148 million each year (actually $131 million, after subtracting the nearly $17 million in salaries paid to some 173 NEA bureaucrats), which has to be compared against the value that the nation’s arts and cultural industrial complex adds to the U.S. economy each year.
According the National Endowment for the Arts itself, just four years ago, the arts and cultural production of Americans contributed $704.2 billion, or $4.2% of GDP, to the U.S. economy.
To be clear, what the NEA is referring to when it cites “arts and cultural production” are activities that include things like the performing arts, museums, motion pictures, sound recording, publishing (including software, such as for video games), sports, et cetera. Many of which are, in fact, multi-billion dollar industries that continuously dedicate enormous resources to developing new products and services, which other businesses subsidize through advertising or other marketing promotions to provide these things at the lowest possible cost to the entire audience of American consumers.
If 100% of the NEA’s entire annual budget made a meaningful contribution to the value added to the U.S. economy by the nation’s arts and cultural production sector, it would account for right around 0.02% of all the other real value that they produce.
Unfortunately, since the NEA’s annual budget represents such a small fraction of the things that the arts and cultural production sector does, much of what it contributes can be considered to be trivial extensions of things that the private sector is already doing without any meaningful assistance from the U.S. government.
For example, private sector concert promoters made a big splash in the news several years ago when they introduced holographic performances by deceased artists like Tupac Shakur at live outdoor concert events. The NEA’s contribution to that technological development involved deciding to retread that same artistic territory by providing $1.7 million to assist the National Comedy Center‘s staging of a hologram performance of a classic scene from the “I Love Lucy” 1950’s television show featuring deceased comedic actress Lucille Ball at the New York state-funded tourist attraction, which is located about 70 miles south of Buffalo.
https://youtu.be/OMv3WctepT8
Thanks to a 2007 study in the National Tax Journal on how the arts industry addressed federal spending cuts enacted in the 1990s, we have a good idea of what would happen to the arts in the United States if the NEA’s budget was entirely eliminated. The private sector would respond to increased fund raising efforts on the part of the affected institutions by taking up a very large share of the slack resulting from any budget cuts, with estimates of the amount of replaced funding that they would be able to obtain ranging between 80 and 100% of their “lost” federal funding on average.
To put the amount of federal funding that we’re talking about into more personal terms, the Washington Post also provides the following estimate of the personal relative cost of the U.S. government’s combined spending on its national endowments for the arts, for the humanities, and for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with respect to the federal budget.
If you make $50,000 a year, spending the equivalent of what the government spends on these three programs would be like spending less than $10.
So here’s a novel idea. If you enjoy consuming the experiences of the products and services found in performing arts, museums, motion pictures, sound recording, publishing, video games, sporting events, et cetera, and you make $50,000, invest $10 or more during the course of a year above and beyond what you do today on the kind of arts and cultural production that you would like to have more of in your life. Not only can you help completely take over and replace the role of these government agencies in the economy, you can get the greater benefit of knowing that your dollars are going to the kind of arts and cultural production that you value most, and not what some federal government bureaucrat or politician values more than you.
February 28 marked 20 years since bank robbers Larry Phillips and Emil Matasareanu engaged in a full-blown firefight with police outside the Bank of America on Laurel Canyon Boulevard in North Hollywood. Both deployed fully automatic rifles illegal to possess at the time. They sprayed anything that moved, firing even at television news helicopters. Viewers across the country saw the shootout unfold and as the twentieth anniversary approached, news accounts recalled the battle. Few, if any, noted how officers had gained the upper hand.
In the early going, the officers’ 9mm pistols were no match for the robo-robbers’ firepower. So the outgunned cops headed to nearby B&B Sales, a private gun store. The owner recognized some of the officers as previous customers and, overlooking the 15-day waiting period a typical civilian would face before being able to legally obtain firearms, quickly supplied them with four 5.56mm Bushmaster XM-15 semi-automatic rifles with high-capacity magazines and two Remington shotguns with rifled slugs. Once the officers were on a more equal footing, they plunged back into the fray, taking down the bad guys with no loss of innocent life.
The shootout prompted calls for stricter gun control but the robo-robbers’ weapons were already illegal and violent criminals do not follow gun laws. As we noted, the six gun-control bills governor Jerry Brown signed last year impose background checks to purchase ammunition, ban magazines holding more than 10 rounds and even restrict the loaning of guns to close family members. Brown’s budget package also slid $5 million to the California Firearm Violence Research Center at UC Davis, which will probe who owns guns, why they own them and how they use firearms. As Stephen P. Halbrook noted in Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State” Germany’s National Socialist regime also wanted to know “who owns guns” and they ruthlessly suppressed firearm ownership by disfavored groups.
Californians can be forgiven for thinking that new gun laws burden law-abiding citizens more than they restrict the violent criminals who flout the law.
In all the excitement over the election last fall, a surging government intrusion failed to get the attention it deserved. In late September, the White House Office of Management and Budget, of all places, proposed a new racial classification: MENA, standing for Middle East and North Africa. It covers the area from Morocco to Iran, a region, as the Washington Post observed, that “comprises a jumble of ethnic and racial categories.” The United States also comprises a jumble of ethnic and racial categories.
People with ancestry in Iceland, Scotland and Denmark are tagged “Caucasians,” which would be accurate only for people from the Caucuses region, such as the Boston Marathon bombers, or Stalin. According to this geographical pattern, people with ancestry in Spain should be classified as “Iberians” but they are not. They are “Latinos,” but in the current system people such as Antonin Scalia, Madonna, and Frank Sinatra, all with ancestry in Italy, home to the plain of Latium, are not “Latinos.” They too are “Caucasians” or “whites.” Many “Latinos” or “Hispanics,” a linguistic term, are whiter than the late Senator Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klucker. Even so, in the USA they can become “people of color.” None of this makes any sense but those who advance it have purposes in mind.
The classification system is the basis for handing out benefits on the basis of race and ethnicity, not something any free society should do. The classification divides society into creditor and debtor classes, oppressor and oppressed, if you will. As the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted, the most meaningful division goes right down the middle of every human heart. The classification system is also a form of identity theft, assigning identity in relation to the group, not the individual, and promoting group rights over individual rights.
The MENA designation will supposedly land in Congress for approval in 2018, in time for the 2020 census. Congress should not approve MENA and would do well to dump the entire classification system. The Census should simply count the number of people in the country. A government that can’t balance a budget, and runs up a debt of $20 trillion, should not be in the ethnic classification business.
On March 15, 2017, the U.S. government’s statutory debt ceiling for its total public debt outstanding will go back into effect at whatever level of accumulated national debt is on the books as of that date. CNBC has marked the date on their calendar.
After a 15-month hiatus, Congress is once again warming up for another round of self-inflicted budget “crises” that have become all but standard operating procedure when the Treasury needs to raise the limit of its borrowing authority.
That’s right: The “debt ceiling” is back.
The budgetary bottleneck arrives again next month, when the latest suspension of the limit expires on March 15. Back in October 2015, Congress decided to punt on the issue by suspending the debt ceiling — with a hard end date.
While the official date is now less than two weeks away, the U.S. Treasury Department has been actively working to keep the nation’s total public debt outstanding from rising any faster than possible since late November 2016. Their efforts so far have been successful in holding the national debt lower than it might otherwise have grown, which if not for their intervention, would have been surpassed $20 trillion back in mid-December 2016.
What the U.S. Congress will most likely do, sometime during the next month, is act to increase the national debt to accommodate the spending already planned to occur through the rest of the government’s 2017 fiscal year, which ends on September 30, 2017.
But there is an interesting dynamic developing in the U.S. Congress where a number of budget-conscious representatives may look to use the debt ceiling to rein in some of the Trump administration’s more ambitious spending plans. Politico‘s Rachel Bade and Josh Dawsey report:
GOP lawmakers are fretting that Trump’s spending requests, due out in a month or so, will blow a gaping hole in the federal budget — ballooning the debt and undermining the party’s doctrine of fiscal discipline.
Trump has signaled he’s serious about a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, as he promised on the campaign trail. He also wants Republicans to approve extra spending this spring to build a wall along the U.S. southern border and beef up the military — the combined price tag of which could reach $50 billion, insiders say. And that’s to say nothing of tax cuts, which the president’s team has suggested need not necessarily be paid for….
“I don’t think you can do infrastructure, raise defense spending, do a tax cut, keep Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security just as they are, and balance the budget. It’s just not possible,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a senior member of the House Budget Committee. “Sooner or later, they’re going to come to grips with it because the numbers force you to.”
Indeed they will, but that hasn’t stopped any previous presidential administration from running up the national debt from the time it took office until it left. At last, not since Andrew Jackson fully paid off the U.S. national debt in 1835.
Last week, on February 22, 2017, President Trump spoke to the press for the first time about the budget and the national debt while attending an informal federal budget meeting at the White House. Here are some quick quotes that stood out during his introductory remarks, first off, covering his impression of the overall state of the nation’s finances.
“Unfortunately the budget we’re inheriting, essentially inheriting, is a mess. The finances of our country are a mess, but we’re going to clean them up.”
On the national debt:
“We have enormous work to do as the national debt doubled over the last eight years. Our debt has doubled, over a short period of time.”
And how he intends to address federal spending:
“We’re going to be spending the money in a very, very careful manner. Our moral duty to the taxpayer requires us to make our government leaner and more accountable, we must do a lot more with less, and we must stop the improper payments and the abuses, negotiate better prices and look for every last dollar of savings.”
Toward the end of his remarks, he made the following observation about the federal budget:
“It is absolutely out of control”.
If you want to see his full introductory remarks, the following just-over-four-minutes long YouTube video captures them.
If Donald Trump has a strength from all his years in business, it lies in his experience in having to address every aspect of controlling his businesses’ expenditures to make sure that waste was minimized while generating the real growth needed to make his businesses profitable. He’s had failures and he’s had successes over his long career in the private sector, where the federal budget presents a challenge for him to apply what he’s learned from both kinds of experiences.
How much success he’ll have as President will in no small part be determined by how well that previous experience can be translated and applied to a federal government that seeks to defy restraint where the spending desired by professional politicians and bureaucrats is concerned.
Over the next four years, President Trump will no doubt have both failures and successes in dealing with that challenge, so the real question is how will the U.S. government’s finances net out? The U.S. government is, after all, already on a trajectory where the status quo means it will return to running trillion-dollar-plus annual deficits within just a few years.
We will all start to find out more about President Trump’s plans for the U.S. government’s budget sometime in the next month. So far, the Trump administration has signaled that both Social Security and Medicare won’t be affected by cuts in their upcoming budget proposal for the U.S. government’s 2018 fiscal year, clearing the field for the fiscally troubled Medicaid program to be the focus of serious budgetary reform efforts in the immediate future.
As we noted, California has made it difficult for veterans to apply their medical skills in civilian life. Like many others, these veterans must contend with the labyrinth of state boards and commissions. According to the state’s Little Hoover Commission, a watchdog agency of sorts, one out of every five Californians must receive permission to work, down from one in 20 sixty years ago. That includes manicurists, who must contend with the Board of Barbering and Cosmetology, which the state eliminated in 1997 then resurrected in 2002. The board now boasts 94 employees and a budget of more than $17 million.
Few of the state boards serve any useful purpose but they do come in handy for rewarding political cronies. For example, after working for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Alexis Podesta served governor Jerry Brown as director of external affairs and chief of protocol. Governor Brown has now appointed Podesta as secretary of the Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency. There she will bag an annual $194,105, all paid by California taxpayers.
Dean Grafilo has been chief of staff for assemblyman Rob Bonta and legislative assistant for assemblyman Alberto Torrico. Governor Brown has appointed Grafilo as a director at the California Department of Consumer Affairs. There Grafilo will bag an annual $176,691, all paid by California taxpayers. These posts hardly exhaust the prospects for the sinecure seekers.
California’s can’t offer anybody a ride on its bullet train, a certified boondoggle. On the other hand, the high speed rail project does provide a board slot for Lynn Schenk, a former member of Congress and chief of staff for California governor Gray Davis.
Likewise, former state senator and Democratic Party boss Art Torres had no medical or scientific expertise but the state stem cell agency, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, duly brought Torres aboard and promptly tripled his salary to $225,000. They did this after businessman Duane Roth, who did have a biotechnology background, offered to serve with no salary. CIRM has spent nearly $3 billion and failed to produce any of the promised cures. Government agencies, boards and commissions are short on results for taxpayers but rich in rewards for political cronies.
As this column makes clear, governments at all levels abuse the public, trample human rights, and waste taxpayers’ money on a massive scale. Sometimes government abuses its own and the public at the same time. Witness the recent smackdown on free speech at the California capitol.
On February 21, the state Senate held a memorial for the late senator Tom Hayden the New Left radical who died back on October 23, 2016. Senate Democrats hailed him in hagiographical style as a “visionary,” a “maverick,” an “independent thinker” and a devotee of “peace, and equity.” Sen. Janet Nguyen, who came to the USA as a Vietnamese refugee, had a different take, but she held off because members of Hayden’s family were present. Two days later, Nguyen rose to offer a different perspective.
“Today I recognize in memory the millions of Vietnamese and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees who died in seeking for freedom and democracy,” she said. At that point, Sen. Ricardo Lara told her to stop, then shut down the immigrant senator’s microphone. Nguyen kept speaking and refused an order to take a seat. Lara then commanded the Sergeant at Arms to remove Janet Nguyen from the senate floor. Accounts of her removal described Hayden as an “anti-war” activist, inaccurate because he was opposed only to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict. Hayden championed the Stalinist Vietnamese regime that drove so many to flee, including Janet Nguyen, born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1976.
Comfy politicians such as Lara and senate majority leader Bill Monning, who took a lead role against Janet Nguyen, never experienced totalitarian rule. On the other hand, they seem to share totalitarians’ distaste for free speech. When an immigrant woman dared speak the truth to power, they turned off her microphone and tossed her by force from the room. Senate bosses also cut off the feed from the California Channel, so viewers statewide would not hear an immigrant woman speak the truth to power. This is a familiar tactic to keep the people in the dark.
As we noted, before the 2012 election, Senate boss Darrell Steinberg cut off the California Channel video on a hearing covering four ballot measures on taxes and spending. “I pride myself on being open and transparent,” he explained. Steinberg is now major of Sacramento.
Last week saw two significant developments at the scandal-ridden U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs:
Stars and Stripes‘ Nikki Wentling transcribes the response by the VA’s congressional overseers regarding the “concerning” report.
“It certainly underscores that the Veterans Health Administration has not made enough progress towards providing quality care for our veterans,” Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., said in a written statement. Roe is chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.
“As I’ve said time and time again, VA should have the resources necessary to serve veterans, but we must also take a close look at how the department is allocating the resources they’ve been entrusted,” the congressman said.
At a hearing last month, Roe said he didn’t think the VA was spending its budget wisely, and that improvements wouldn’t come solely from a budget increase.
Unlike other federal government agencies and departments, the VA has not lacked for funding as its problems have continued.
Despite that funding, Wentling reports that the actions that the VA’s management have taken have failed to seriously address the multiple failures that prompted the GAO to place it on its “high risk” watch list.
The VA made an action plan to work on the issues, but the plan was missing an analysis of the root causes of problems and the ability to clearly measure progress, the GAO said.
Fixing what ails the VA will require both a solid understanding of the root causes that led the department to become the poster child for bureaucratic mismanagement and to be able to demonstrate that its corrective actions are producing the desired results. With new and hopefully more effective leadership now in place at the top of the VA, 2017 may be the year that the VA’s bureaucratic nightmare for veterans seeking timely medical care will be turned around for the better.
The U.S. military trains medics and tasks them to attend those shot, bombed or blown up, sometimes including civilian victims. This is about the most rigorous duty any medic could experience but veterans have a hard time applying their skills in civilian life. As Foon Rhee notes in the Sacramento Bee, the California legislature took five years to open the way for military medics to get professional credit for their experience. This, says Rhee, was a “disgrace,” but returning vets are not the only ones who face obstacles from the state.
As we noted, according to the state’s Little Hoover Commission, one out of every five Californians must receive permission to work, down from one in 20 sixty years ago. For example, manicurists must complete 400 hours of classwork, then take written and practical exams offered only in the cities of Fairfield and Glendale. The licensing board assigns the dates and if candidates can’t make it that day, their candidacy is terminated, they lose their application fee and they must begin the application process all over again.
These boards contribute nothing to productivity but succeed in keeping government employees in highly paid useless jobs. In 1997, the legislature eliminated the Board of Barbering and Cosmetology but Senator Richard Polanco brought it back in 2002. This utterly worthless body now boasts 94 employees and a budget of more than $17 million.
Veterans should not be surprised if California reverses the measure helping military medics to apply their skills. The legislature also took its time offering in-state college tuition to active duty military, though they had no problem granting that break to non-citizens who had entered the country illegally and, unlike the veterans, never served the nation in any capacity. Veterans should not be surprised if California reverses itself on the tuition issue as well. After all, governor Jerry Brown once proclaimed himself a “born-again tax cutter” and now supports some of the highest taxes in the nation. Likewise, the governor once strove to eliminate redevelopment agencies but has now brought those back as well.
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