It’s Friday, December 29th, 2017…but before we begin, further evidence, whatever you might have heard to the contrary, Washington is one swamp which is far from being drained:
Just to be clear, these are EPA employees, federal workers whose salaries WE are paying!
“President Trump is on the hunt for a 2018 issue—a strong follow-up to his tax-cut victory that will motivate voters and gain bipartisan support. Democrats are pushing for an infrastructure bill, inviting the president to spend with them. House GOP leaders are mulling entitlement reform—a noble goal, if unlikely in a midterm cycle.
Fortunately for the president, there’s a better idea out there that’s already a Trump theme. It’s also a sure winner with the public, so Republicans ought to be able to pressure Democrats to join.
Let 2018 be the year of civil-service reform—a root-and-branch overhaul of the government itself. Call it Operation Drain the Swamp…”
And the douche pumps pictured above should be the first ones…
…forced into the sewer.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up on the last edition of 2017, writing at the WSJ, John Bolton, our choice as Secretary of State in any Administration, tells us…
“Turtle Bay has been impervious to reform largely because most U.N. budgets are financed through effectively mandatory contributions. Under this system, calculated by a “capacity to pay” formula, each U.N. member is assigned a fixed percentage of each agency’s budget to contribute. The highest assessment is 22%, paid by the U.S.This far exceeds other major economies, whose contribution levels are based on prevailing exchange rates rather than purchasing power parity.China’s assessment is just under 8%.
Why does the U.S. tolerate this? It is either consistently outvoted when setting the budgets that determine contributions or has joined the “consensus” to avoid the appearance of losing. Yet dodging embarrassing votes means acquiescing to increasingly high expenditures.
The U.S. should reject this international taxation regime and move instead to voluntary contributions.This means paying only for what the country wants—and expecting to get what it pays for. Agencies failing to deliver will see their budgets cut, modestly or substantially. Perhaps America will depart some organizations entirely. This is a performance incentive the current assessment-taxation system simply does not provide.
Start with the U.N. Human Rights Council…The U.N.’s five regional economic and social councils, which have no concrete accomplishments, don’t deserve American funding either…Next come vast swaths of U.N. bureaucracy…Significant savings could be realized by reducing other U.N. offices that are little more than self-licking ice cream cones, including many dealing with “Palestinian” questions.
…Some will argue incorrectly that unilaterally moving to voluntary contributions violates the U.N. Charter. In construing treaties, like contracts, parties are absolved from performance when others violate their commitments.Defenders of the assessed-contribution model would doubtless not enjoy estimating how often the charter has been violated since 1945.
If the U.S. moved first, Japan and some European Union countries might well follow America’s lead. Elites love the U.N., but they would have a tough time explaining to voters why they are not insisting their contributions be used effectively, as America has. Apart from risking the loss of a meaningless General Assembly vote—the Security Council vote and veto being written into the Charter itself—the U.S. has nothing substantial to lose.
Thus could Mr. Trump revolutionize the U.N. system. The swamp in Turtle Bay might be drained much more quickly than the one in Washington.“
Speaking of government bureaucrats flushing money directly down the toilet, courtesy of Best of the Web, James Freeman recalls the Ghost of Stimulus Past:
“According to polls most Americans still don’t approve of the job Donald Trump is doing as President. But they have to be impressed by his recent policy achievements. And as Washington ponders a new program to encourage the construction of roads and bridges, the former real-estate developer would seem to have the perfect set of skills and experience to oversee a building boom. To avoid the mistakes of his predecessor, Mr. Trump will need to prioritize the protection of taxpayers.
…Voters heard a lot about infrastructure from former President Barack Obama, especially when he first took office. Sold as a way to create jobs while making needed transportation improvements and an environmentally sensitive economy, the stimulus plan was drafted in haste by Democrats in Congress and then signed by Mr. Obama on Feb. 17, 2009. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was priced at $787 billion when enacted; the official estimate later soared past $800 billion.
In a 2012 book called “Money Well Spent?,” Michael Grabell of the nonprofit news organization ProPublica noted that only about 10% of the spending, or $80 billion, was devoted to infrastructure—and very little of that total went to critical work.The political necessity to fund the “shovel-ready” projects promised by the president meant that money didn’t go to the bridges most in need of repair but to jobs that could quickly clear the thicket of regulatory permitting.Repaving roads was a typical activity; less than 12% of the infrastructure spending went for work on bridges.
Even with his report of such modest success, Mr. Grabell may still have overstated the case. In 2014 the Obama White House released its own review of its stimulus program. Writing for the Huffington Post, Philip K. Howard decided to find out how much of the money went to transportation infrastructure, based on Team Obama’s own data. According to Mr. Howard:
Toward the back of the report (Table 8 on p. 34) there’s a chart that gives the number: $30 billion. That’s a little more than 3 percent of the total stimulus plan.
Three percent!!
…Here’s hoping that America’s current developer-in-chief, with his significant experience in private construction projects(only if you buy Trump’s hype!), will favor the creation of infrastructure without public money.Taxpayers have suffered enough.“
Though as Rich Terrell notes, this belated recognition of the flagrant fraud, wanton waste and egregious abuse at the heart of the 2009 Stimulus is just in keeping with the only truly amazing aspect of The Dear Misleader’s time in office: his…
Which is shriveling quicker than an Irishman’s schwantz in the Arctic Ocean.
Next up, courtesy of his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty explains, Facebook‘s supposed best efforts to the contrary notwithstanding…
“Right before the holiday, Guy Benson noted that two widely spread viral tweets about the tax reform bill were flat-out false. The first, from actress Jenna Fischer, contended that because of the GOP-supported tax reform, “school teachers can no longer deduct the cost of their classroom supplies on their taxes.”
Cut Fischer a little bit of slack; she eventually corrected her assertion and offered a lengthy apology. Her information was outdated; the House version of the bill would indeed have eliminated the $250 deductions that teachers could take for purchasing school supplies for their students. A short time earlier, it was a fair complaint; the final version of the bill kept the deduction intact, however. Still, her original complaining Tweet was retweeted at least 46,000 times; her apology was retweeted 3,600 times.
The second, from a now-deleted Twitter account called “@Sykotik_Dreams” — declared, “My wife’s friend just received a letter from Medicaid and Social Security saying her severely disabled autistic 7 year old son just lost his healthcare and benefits. The letter states that it’s due to your #TaxScamBill. It’s 3 days before Christmas you [bad word] [bad word]!!” This, too, was retweeted more than 46,000 times before it was deleted.
…Let me help you understand how people decide whether information is accurate or not, Facebook. A great many people have strong belief systems, and at the core of those strong belief systems is the idea that they are good and people who disagree are bad; alternately, my tribe is good and the other tribes are bad. If new information comes along and appears to confirm that they and their tribe are good, or that the other tribes are bad, then they choose to believe it. If new information comes along and appears to confirm that they and their tribe are bad, or that the other tribes are good, they will declare the information false.“
As usual, Mr. Geraghty is spot on. Which is why wealways attempt to verify, to the very best of our ability, every story which crosses our computer. Unfortunately, like so many of life’s other lessons, it’s one we learned early on only through experience, having published what turned out to be a tall tale we so wanted to be true.
Case in point, courtesy Dan Flynn writing at City-Journal via the WSJ:
Words of the Year
‘The ventriloquists at Oxford, Merriam-Webster, and Dictionary.com put words in our mouths.’
Merriam-Webster named “feminism” its Word of the Year for 2017—not 1971, as might have been more appropriate. The reference company’s shortlist for consideration included “Antifa,” “White Fragility” (two words?), and “Broflake,” defined as “a man who is readily upset or offended by progressive attitudes that conflict with his more conventional or conservative views.”…
Oxford Dictionaries selected a similarly politically charged term, albeit one more obscure than the ubiquitous “feminism.” The company defines “youthquake” as “a significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people.” That seems neutral enough, until one understands that it was UK Labour Party gains, fueled by the youth vote, that led to the company’s elevation of a term that, as a befuddled Washington Post pointed out, nobody really uses…
Dictionary.com went with “complicit,” which initially appears to be a perfectly cromulent and un-weaponized word. But in explaining its choice, the popular website cited the complicity of various politicians in aiding and abetting Donald Trump’s agenda…
In selecting these as the year’s supposed buzzwords, the ventriloquists at Oxford, Merriam-Webster, and Dictionary.com put words in our mouths.The words define them more than they do us.
A better candidate for 2017’s word of the year can be found in a 36-year-old Kinks song. “Predictable,” Ray Davies sang in 1981, “yeah, that’s the word of the year.” Davies, who boasts a better track record with the English language than the philologists, glossarists, and other word weirdos insisting that they know best what words we should use, drew a bead on our times earlier than most.
Thus do three formerly unimpeachable sources of fact surrender to the power of Political Correctness.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
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