Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog

Дай мне свои деньги

September 25, 2014

International relations, US business, US politics
The headline is Russian for “Give me your money,” which, Daniel Mitchell reports, non-American bureaucrats want you to do:
People pay every single penny of tax that politicians impose on corporations.

The investors that own companies obviously pay (more than one time!) when governments tax profits.

The workers employed by companies obviously pay, both directly and indirectly, because of corporate income tax.

And consumers also bear a burden thanks to business taxes that lead to higher prices and reduced output.

Keep these points in mind as we discuss BEPS (“base erosion and profit shifting”), which is a plan to increase business tax burdens being advanced by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a left-leaning international bureaucracy based in Paris.

Working on behalf of the high-tax nations that fund its activities, the OECD wants to rig the rules of international taxation so that companies can’t engage in legal tax planning.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is not impressed by this campaign for higher taxes on employers.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development last week released its latest proposals to combat “base erosion and profit shifting,” or the monster known as BEPS. The OECD and its masters at the G-20 are alarmed that large companies are able to use entirely legal accounting and corporate-organization strategies to shield themselves from the highest tax rates governments try to impose. …The OECD’s solution to this “problem” boils down to suggesting that governments tax the profits arising from operations in their jurisdiction, regardless of where the business unit that earned those profits is legally headquartered. The OECD also proposes that companies be required to report to each government on the geographic breakdown of profits, the better to catch earnings some other country might not have taxed enough.

What’s the bottom line?

This is a recipe for investment-stifling compliance burdens and regulatory uncertainty…the result of implementing the OECD’s recommendations would be lower tax revenues and fewer jobs.

…

The high-tax nations will move the goal posts every year or two in hopes of grabbing more revenue.

The end goal is to create a system based on “formula apportionment.”

Here’s what I wrote last year about such a scheme.

…the OECD hints at its intended outcome when it says that the effort “will require some ‘out of the box’ thinking” and that business activity could be “identified through elements such as sales, workforce, payroll, and fixed assets.” That language suggests that the OECD intends to push global formula apportionment, which means that governments would have the power to reallocate corporate income regardless of where it is actually earned. Formula apportionment is attractive to governments that have punitive tax regimes, and it would be a blow to nations with more sensible low-tax systems. …business income currently earned in tax-friendly countries, such as Ireland and the Netherlands, would be reclassified as French-source income or German-source income based on arbitrary calculations of company sales and other factors. …nations with high tax rates would likely gain revenue, while jurisdictions with pro-growth systems would be losers, including Ireland, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Estonia, Luxembourg, Singapore, and the Netherlands.

Equally important, I also pointed out that formula apportionment would largely cripple tax competition for companies, which means higher tax rates all over the world.

…formula apportionment would be worse than a zero-sum game because it would create a web of regulations that would undermine tax competition and become increasingly onerous over time. Consider that tax competition has spurred OECD governments to cut their corporate tax rates from an average of 48 percent in the early 1980s to 24 percent today. If a formula apportionment system had been in place, the world would have been left with much higher tax rates, and thus less investment and economic growth. …If governments gain the power to define global taxable income, they will have incentives to rig the rules to unfairly gain more revenue. For example, governments could move toward less favorable, anti-investment depreciation schedules, which would harm global growth.

Some people have argued that I’m too pessimistic and paranoid. BEPS, they say, is simply a mechanism for tweaking international rules to stop companies from egregious tax planning.

But I think I’m being realistic.Why? Because I know the ideology of the left and I understand that politicians are always hungry for more tax revenue.

For example, from the moment the OECD first launched its campaign against so-called tax havens, I kept warning that the goal was global information sharing.

The OECD and its lackeys said I was being demagogic and that they simply wanted “upon request” information sharing.

So who was right? Click here to find out.
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Why government doesn’t work

September 25, 2014

US politics
Philip K. Howard wrote The Death of Common Sense, and he sees common sense as, well, uncommon:

The Veterans Affairs scandal of falsified waiting lists is the latest of a never-ending stream of government ineptitude. Every season brings a new headline of failures: the botched roll-out of Obamacare involved 55 uncoordinated IT vendors; a White House report in February found that barely 3 percent of the $800 billion stimulus plan went to rebuild transportation infrastructure; and a March Washington Post report describes how federal pensions are processed by hand in a deep cave in Pennsylvania.

The reflexive reaction is to demand detailed laws and rules to make sure things don’t go wrong again. But shackling public choices with ironclad rules, ironically, is a main cause of the problems. Dictating correctness in advance supplants the one factor that is indispensable to all successful endeavors—human responsibility. “Nothing that’s good works by itself,” as Thomas Edison put it. “You’ve got to make the damn thing work.”

Responsibility is nowhere in modern government. Who’s responsible for the budget deficits? Nobody: Program budgets are set in legal concrete. Who’s responsible for failing to fix America’s decrepit infrastructure? Nobody. Who’s responsible for not managing civil servants sensibly? You get the idea.

Modern government is organized on “clear law,” the false premise that by making laws detailed enough to take in all possible circumstances, we can avoid human error. And so over the last few decades, law has gotten ever more granular. But all that regulatory detail, like sediment in a harbor, makes it hard to get anywhere. The 1956 Interstate Highway Act was 29 pages and succeeded in getting 41,000 miles of roads built by 1970. The 2012 transportation bill was 584 pages, and years will pass before workers can start fixing many of those same roads. Health-care regulators have devised 140,000 reimbursement categories for Medicare — including 12 categories for bee stings and 21 categories for “spacecraft accidents.” This is the tip of a bureaucratic iceberg—administration consumes 30 percent of health-care costs. …

“Clear law” turns out to be a myth. Modern law is too dense to be knowable. “It will be of little avail to the people,” James Madison observed, “if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.” The quest for “clear law” is futile also because most regulatory language is inherently ambiguous. Dense rulebooks do not avoid disputes—they just divert the dispute to the parsing of legal words instead of arguing over what’s right. Indeed, legal detail often undermines the regulatory goal. “The more exact and detailed a rule, the more likely it is to open up loopholes, to permit by implication conduct that the rule was intended to avoid,” Judge Richard Posner observed.

What’s the alternative? Put humans back in charge. Law should generally be an open framework, mainly principles and goals, leaving room for responsible people to make decisions and be held accountable for results. Law based on principles leaves room for the decision-maker always to act on this question: What’s the right thing to do here?

Until recent decades, law based on principles was the structure of most public law. The Constitution is 10 pages long and provides basic precepts—say, the Fourth Amendment prohibition on “unreasonable searches and seizures”—without trying to define every situation. The recent Volcker Rule regulating proprietary trading, by contrast, is 950 pages, and, in the words of one banker, is “incoherent any way you look at it.”

Legal principles have the supreme virtue of activating individual responsibility. Law is still supreme. The goals of law are centralized, but implementation is decentralized. Every successful regulatory program works this way. New airplanes, for example, must be certified as “airworthy” by the FAA. There are no detailed regulations that set forth how many rivets per square foot are required. It’s up to the judgment of FAA officials. This system works pretty well. Which would you trust more, a plane approved by experts at the FAA or a plane that was allowed to fly merely because it satisfied a bunch of rules, many outdated?

Simplifying regulation—replacing thick volumes of rules with guiding principles —has two more virtues as well. First, democracy is effective only when there’s someone to hold accountable. Second, principles are coherent. People generally know what’s expected of them. Doctrines such as “unreasonable risk” or a “nutritious meal” or “industry standards” have practical meaning and can be enforced by reference to social norms. “Standards that capture lay intuitions about right behavior,” Posner notes, “may produce greater legal certainty than a network of precise … non-intuitive rules.”

Potentially, simplifying regulation can appeal to both sides: to liberals because it offers regulators more leeway, and to conservatives because it simplifies government and avoids mindless compliance costs.

Here are three examples of how regulation could be simplified:

Oversight of social services: Today, nursing homes, day-care centers, and similar social-service providers are regulated with a maze of input-oriented regulations. “Food shall be stored not less than 15 cm above the floor”; “there shall be .09 recreational workers per resident”—about a thousand rules in most states for nursing homes.

Australia had a similar regulatory structure. But in the wake of scandalous revelations of poor nursing homes in the late 1980s, it abandoned the thick rule book and replaced it with 31 general principles, for example to provide “a homelike environment” and to honor residents’ “privacy and dignity.” The result was an almost immediate transformation for the better. Nursing-home employees started acting on their instincts of right and wrong, instead of trudging through dreary bureaucratic checklists. Regulators and family members engaged in regular dialogues with nursing homes on how to improve things. Nursing homes became nice.

They abandoned the thick rule book and replaced it with 31 general principles. Nursing home became nice.

Environmental review: Environmental review and other infrastructure approvals can last a decade or longer in America. Even projects with virtually no environmental impact can last years, as project sponsors jump through scores of bureaucratic hoops.

The benefits of streamlining approvals would be enormous: several million new jobs, a greener environmental footprint, and enhanced global competitiveness. Replacing America’s antiquated power grid, for example, would save at least 7 percent of electricity—equivalent to the output of 200 coal-burning power plants.

Today the process is interminable, because any naysayer can complain that some pebble was left unturned—and who knows what will happen in court? Far better to give an environmental official responsibility to decide when important facts have been set forth instead of letting the process spin its wheels for a decade and then end up in court. For other permits—for instance, for land-use regulations, navigable-waters approval, landmarks review, and the like—there should also be a “one-stop shop”—a lead agency with the job of coordinating all regulatory concerns. That’s how other greener countries such as Germany are able to approve new infrastructure projects in a fraction of the time it takes in the United States.

Civil Service: More than 20 million people work for federal, state, and local government. Most of them perform needed services. But the accretion of antiquated and unjustifiable work rules has rendered them practically unmanageable.

Hiring and promotion is largely based on written tests, not demonstrated competence. Promoting an exemplary employee is often impossible. Work rules can prevent supervisors from asking workers to pitch in. In New York City, how to use a new copying machine and who can use it is subject to collective bargaining. Firing an incompetent employee under civil-service bureaucracy is almost impossible.

Any critique of this regulatory jungle is met with sanctimonious remonstrations about workers’ rights and the return of the spoils system. But the only relevant criterion for any regulatory structure should be whether it is in the public interest. By that standard, the current civil-service system is indefensible.

The solution is straightforward. Scrap the system and replace it with principles designed to achieve the original goal of a merit system. Avoiding spoils is not hard: Funnel hiring through an independent agency. Work rules should be replaced by general principles, overseen by a neutral review board. Eliminate the presumption of lifetime service, as recommended by the Partnership for Public Service. Terminating a public employee should trigger a safety net, not years of litigation.

Principles, ironically, are less susceptible to abuse of state power and gamesmanship than precise rules. One of the many paradoxes of “clear law” is that no one can comply with thousands of rules. With principles, a citizen can stand his ground to an unreasonable demand and have a good chance of being supported up the chain of authority. …

But what about human error and venality? Does law based on principles mean we must trust people? Of course not. That’s why accountability is still important. Moreover, for important decisions, a structure can require approval of several people. Nothing can get done sensibly or fairly, however, until we reconstruct government with a legal framework which liberates people to roll up their sleeves and make things happen.
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Presty the DJ for Sept. 25

September 25, 2014

Music
The number one song today in 1965 was this pleasant-sounding, upbeat ditty:

That was on the same day that ABC-TV premiered a cartoon, “The Beatles”:

The number one British song today in 1968:

(more…)
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Another sign of political infestation

September 24, 2014

Culture, US politics, Wisconsin politics
Cass Sunstein appears to have found another form of discrimination:

If you are a Democrat, would you marry a Republican? Would you be upset if your sister did?

Researchers have long asked such questions about race, and have found that along important dimensions, racial prejudice is decreasing. At the same time, party prejudice in the U.S. has jumped, infecting not only politics but also decisions about dating, marriage and hiring. By some measures, “partyism” now exceeds racial prejudice — which helps explain the intensity of some midterm election campaigns.

In 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel “displeased” if their son or daughter married outside their political party. By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 percent and 33 percent. Republicans have been found to like Democrats less than they like people on welfare or gays and lesbians. Democrats dislike Republicans more than they dislike big business.

Consider one of the most influential measures of prejudice: the implicit-association test, which is simple to take. You see words on the upper corners of a screen — for example, “white” paired with either “good” or “bad” in the upper left corner, and “black” paired with one of those same adjectives in the upper right. Then you see a picture or a word in the middle of the screen — for example, a white face, an African-American face, or the word “joy” or “terrible.” Your task is to click on the upper corner that matches either the picture or the word in the middle.

Many white people quickly associate “joy” with the upper left corner when it says “white” and “good” — but have a harder time associating “joy” with the left corner when the words there are “black” and “good.” So too, many white people quickly associate “terrible” with the left corner when it says “black” and “bad,” but go a lot more slowly when the left corner says “white” and “bad.”

To test for political prejudice, Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, political scientists at Stanford University, conducted a large-scale implicit association test with 2,000 adults. They found people’s political bias to be much larger than their racial bias. When Democrats see “joy,” it’s much easier for them to click on a corner that says “Democratic” and “good” than on one that says “Republican” and “good.”

To find out whether such attitudes predict behavior, Iyengar and Westwood undertook a follow-up study. They asked more than 1,000 people to look at the resumes of several high-school seniors and say which ones should be awarded a scholarship. Some of these resumes contained racial cues (“president of the African American Student Association”) while others had political ones (“president of the Young Republicans”).

Race mattered. African-American participants preferred the African-American candidates 73 percent to 27 percent. Whites showed a modest preference for African-American candidates, as well, though by a significantly smaller margin. But partisanship made a much bigger difference. Both Democrats and Republicans selected their in-party candidate about 80 percent of the time.

Even when a candidate from the opposing party had better credentials, most people chose the candidate from their own party. With respect to race, in contrast, merit prevailed.

In a further test of political prejudice, Iyengar and Westwood asked 800 people to play the trust game, well known among behavioral scientists: Player 1 is given some money (say, $10) and told that she can give some, all or none of it to Player 2. Player 1 is then told that the researcher will triple the amount she allocates to Player 2 — and that Player 2 can give some of that back to Player 1. When Player 1 decides how much money to give Player 2, a central question is how well she trusts him to return an equivalent or greater amount.

Are people less willing to trust people of a different race or party affiliation? The researchers found that race didn’t matter — but party did. People are significantly more trusting of others who share their party affiliation.

What accounts for the explosive growth of political prejudice? Modern campaigns deserve some of the blame. Iyengar and his colleagues show that when people are exposed to messages that attack members of the opposing party, their biases increase. But the destructive power of partyism is extending well beyond politics into people’s behavior in daily life.

First: It is wrong to discriminate against people based on immutable characteristics — for instance, race. It may or may not be wrong to discriminate against someone for non-immutable characteristics. Do you want a convicted child molester working with your children?

As usual, you have to sift through a load of it’s-the-other-side’s-fault comments to get to the crux of what Sunstein identifies:
- While politics and party ideology are the easy targets, the culprit is the continuous expansion of the size, scope and reach of the US government.
- Why would that explain the animosity towards opposing political parties which is greater than racism?
- Because as more and more of your life is exposed to and impacted by politics, the more threatening someone with opposing political views becomes.
- I would generally agree with that premise only to add that they become more threatening as an individual ties their own well being to that of a political party. So when their party or any of their ideas are assaulted in some manner, it’s taken personally.
  Still, I’m curious why the original poster would suggest this has anything to do with the size of government. It just seems like a sidestep of the original issue presented in this article.
- You’re missing the point. it’s not that people’s well being is tied to a political party, it’s that as governments grows, the non-political sphere shrinks. To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. The federal government dictates the heath insurance I must purchase, the gas mileage my car must get, what kind of light bulbs I can buy, what’s in my kid’s school lunches and a thousand other things.
  If the government’s role was limited to what a strict reading of the constitution allows, very few people would be interested in anybody else’s political leanings. But, for better and for worse, that’s not the world we live in.
- We have reduced politics to a sport in which people display passionate but blind loyalty to their own team while heaping vitriol on the other. The spirit of respectful and reasoned debate backed by a willingness to compromise has been lost, and our democracy can’t function effectively without it.
- Maybe there isn’t anything valuable being put forth. Maybe the politicians themselves invent problems and crisis and the perception that they can fix them. Maybe Americans have finally started to realize that government is inept to solve problems and thus should be a minimized “necessary evil”
  “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” – Thomas Paine
- I’d suggest that what the article reports upon is quite real — widespread revulsion with liberal and conservative viewpoints, to the point that an increasing number of people cannot be paid off to go along with either one.
  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that a fairly large number of self-described conservatives are not particularly conservative, they are best described as “vehemently opposed to the liberal agenda.” In fact, when “their” conservative agenda is attacked, they have little to say in favor of conservatism, responding almost entirely with anti-liberal venom.
  Ditto a fairly large number of self-described liberals.
- The political divisions that exist in this country are driven more by media than anything else.
  At ground level I have friends and work associates of all political persuasions and we rarely quarrel or hate over those differences.
  Want to feel hate and contempt? Turn on the TV or jump on the Internet. Want to avoid those negativities? Spend most of your time among actual people. People in person rarely quibble about politics, practical concerns make up the day.
  The author not only does a poor job isolating media as a major factor but also plays up the divisiveness for the sake of a column.
  The media is owned and run by the powers-that-be; evidently they’d much rather we quarrel with each other than with them.
  That in fact is the crux of the matter; divide-to-rule is one of the oldest and most pervasive power strategies in the book. See the button-pushing clearly for what it is.
- Attempting to draw conclusions about reality from artificial “studies” with limited participation (while a favorite hobby of Sunstein’s) is fraught with risk.
  That said, are we really surprised that politics trumps race in the “trust” test? A white person and a black person are not, necessarily, adversaries in any particular sense. But political parties are, necessarily, antagonistic: in any given house, senate or presidential race, only one candidate wins. So if I give $10 to my opponent and they receive $40–and the only thing I know about that person is their political affiliation–I now know that this person has every rational reason to keep $40, even if that person is kind and trustworthy.
  Of course, this has no bearing on reality. In real life, there are reasons why people may reach across the aisle–the most obvious being that life is a repetitive game and someone in a majority position today may be in a minority position tomorrow. There is zero reason to expect that to be replicated in the lab.
It may shock some readers to know that I have liberals in my own family. In fact, at one of our Christmas celebrations talking about politics was banned by the powers-that-be. (Mothers, of course.) I also have friends whose political viewpoints differ substantially from mine.

The fact is, however, that politics is a zero-sum game. One side wins, which means the other side loses. Next year maybe the winner and loser switch sides, but the zero-sum game remains, with, unlike a sporting event, no end. (Except, of course, for John Maynard Keynes’ observation that “In the long run we are all dead.”) As Douglas MacArthur said about war, in politics there is no substitute for victory, even if the victory is often fleeting and sometimes Pyrrhic.

There are some political issues that are truly zero-sum. If you believe that, for instance, abortion or war are truly evil, then the correct number of abortions or wars is zero. If you believe that life begins at conception, then reducing the number of abortions in half still means that that number of lives are being snuffed out. If war is the worst thing on this planet, then you’re not very happy with, well, any presidential administration since Herbert Hoover.

Some of this, I suppose, could be blamed on our I-am-the-center-of-the-universe society. Try talking to a diehard Bears fan about the Packers. Try talking to a Government Motors enthusiast about, say, Toyota. Suggest to a Beatles fan that the band might be overrated, but you had better have a leg pointing in an escape direction. I know huge fans of fantasy football, but I question the use of a made-up sport that, frankly, measures the wrong things instead of what counts in sports — wins and losses.

Of course, you can choose to watch the Bears or Packers (or no football at all), you can buy one brand of car instead of another, and you can choose or not to participate in a particular pastime. Trotsky’s alleged statement (which sounds like something Yakov Smirnoff would say) is absolutely and unfortunately correct.

I don’t have a sister, but I do have children. I am positive I will have no input on their choice of spouse. That question is moot, because parents don’t have a vote. (Entertaining side note: My mother, raised a Methodist, was to marry my father, raised Roman Catholic. Before the wedding day, an ex-boyfriend of my mother’s called my grandmother to implore her to forbid my mother from marrying one of those Catholics. My grandmother, also a Methodist, told the ex where he should go.)

The thing about people with political views that differ from your own, it seems to me, is the extent to which your political opponent feels the need to jam his or her views down your throat. My observation from experience is that liberals base their arguments on emotions, whereas conservatives base theirs on logic, but that doesn’t necessarily always apply. (The same could be said by replacing “liberals” with “women” and “conservatives” with “men,” irrespective of the political viewpoints being expressed, but that could be a generalization too.) I know liberals and conservatives who literally cannot shut up about politics, and even the ones I agree with can become annoying.

Politics should not be the be-all and end-all of your life. It is possible that if you meet someone who has different political views from yours, that person may have other different views that makes that person incompatible with you. Or maybe they just have different political views. Mature people should know what is important.
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Obama, Barra and Goodell

September 24, 2014

Culture, US business, US politics
Jim Geraghty notes similarities among several CEOs who aren’t having very good years:

Does our president just reflect a broad cultural trend in the behavior of leaders, or does he set the tone from the top?

Consider some recent examples of leaders of large organizations with important responsibilities, once they find themselves in the public eye:

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told CBS This Morning he never saw the second tape of Rice striking his wife before Monday. He said, “When we make a decision we want to have all the information that’s available. When we met with Ray Rice and his representatives it was ambiguous about what actually happened.” Friday afternoon, he announced the league would be making a new effort in dealing with unacceptable player conduct . . . by forming a special committee.

Then there’s General Motors CEO Mary Barra, whose company has recalled 2.6 million cars with defective ignition switches. The faulty parts have been linked to at least 13 deaths and 54 accidents since 2009 and have led to numerous lawsuits. She said, “I don’t really think there was a cover up. I think what we had, and it was covered in the report, there were silos of information, so people had bits and pieces and didn’t come forward with the information or didn’t act with a sense of urgency, and it simply was unacceptable.”

Did anyone at NBC News ever answer for the decision to hire Chelsea Clinton for $600,000 a year for three years?

Freedom Industries, that company that spilled ten thousand gallons of chemicals into the Elk River, forcing 300,000 residents to stop drinking, cooking, washing or bathing in their tap water, will face a ton of lawsuits. Their management and leadership has been hard to identify, much less hold accountable; apparently no one with the company feels the need to stand before the public and face the consequences of their actions and inaction. (Notice this is a story tailor-made for even the left-leaning MSM — evil corporation pollutes water of innocent people — and yet there’s been little coverage outside of West Virginia.)

These are all private-sector scandals, of course. Every administration and every era has its scandals. What our current moment seems to feature is a bumper crop of (alleged) leaders insisting they can wait out the storm, often displaying a glimpse of indignation at suggestions that they resign because something terrible happened on their watch. Somehow tapes of criminal behavior never reach the folks at the top, nor do reports of a defect in ignition switches.

Everybody’s got rogue-level staffers in Cincinnati, it seems.

You get that joke because you’re a well-read audience, but also because we’ve seen leaders point the finger below them so many times. The moves of the unaccountable leader, caught with a mess on his watch, are so predictable now: This is the first I’m hearing of it. I learned about it from media reports. I’m as outraged as anyone. We’re going to get to the bottom of this. I’m promising a comprehensive review. It will report to me, and I will let you know about the results of that review several news cycles from now. Subtext: Hopefully in a few weeks you’ll have forgotten about it.

No, Obama didn’t invent this “leadership” dynamic, but you can argue America’s frustration with it in the previous administration helped drive the president there: The wrong intelligence about Iraq. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” The Abramoff scandal. The Wall Street meltdown, jeopardizing the entire economy, with the lingering sense that few of those who made the decision to invest heavily in the “toxic assets” ever paid the price for bad judgment.

The country feels deeply betrayed by its governing and economic elites. Enter Obama. He’s elected. In his inaugural, he declares, “In the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things . . . Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those that prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.”

And you know what we got. Stimulus waste; State Department employees on paid leave over Benghazi; “At this point, what difference does it make?”; the VA, where the secretary belatedly discovered an “unacceptable lack of integrity within some of our veterans health facilities”; Obamacare, where Kathleen Sebelius let the president go out and say things about the Healthcare.gov web site she knew wasn’t true, and still kept her job for several months. The NSA.

Now here’s the new IRS commissioner, allegedly in place to clean up the mess of the last one:

Under his management, the agency has ignored and strung out congressional demands for documents and witnesses. Mr. Koskinen waited months to tell Congress the IRS had “lost” the emails of Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the center the probe, and arguably only did so because an outside lawsuit revealed that the email record was incomplete. He testified that there were no backup tapes with Lerner emails, but we have since learned there are 760 server drives that may contain copies.

The message has been sent, far and wide: Accountability is for suckers.
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Presty the DJ for Sept. 24

September 24, 2014

Music
We begin with an odd moment today in 1962: Elvis Presley’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, declined an invitation on Presley’s behalf for an appearance before the Royal Family. Declining wasn’t due to conflicting film schedules (the stated reason) or anti-royalism — it was because Parker was an illegal immigrant to the U.S. from the Netherlands (his real name was Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk), and he was afraid he wouldn’t be allowed back into the U.S.

Number one in Britain today in 1964:

Number one in Britain …

… and in the U.S. today in 1983:

(more…)
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Chisholm vs. Lutz

September 23, 2014

Wisconsin politics
Stuart Taylor follows up on his report of the real character of Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm:

After missing a scoop on Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm’s long-running investigation into Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writers, along with the district attorney’s staff, hunted down the key source who had asked for anonymity, fearing retaliation.

That story, produced by the American Media Institute and published by Legal Newsline last week, said that the district attorney’s wife was a teachers union shop steward, had taken part in demonstrations against the Republican governor’s proposal to curb public employee unions and was repeatedly moved to tears by governor’s legislative crusade.

Chisholm, a Democrat, said privately that it was his “personal duty to stop Walker,” the confidential source said.

AMI’s confidential source was a former prosecutor in Chisholm’s office who feared his reputation and his law practice would suffer if he were unmasked.

The district attorney’s staff launched a Nixon-style “mole hunt” to find the anonymous source, a Journal Sentinel columnist said, and was annoyed that the description of the confidential source wasn’t precise enough to identify him. The staff developed a list of roughly a dozen suspects, the columnist said. The Journal Sentinel never reported this secret search.

The feared retaliation was not long in coming. The Journal Sentinel’s Dan Bice, whose “political watchdog” column is titled “No Quarter,” appeared after dark at the source’s home on Sept. 11. Bice’s persistent door-bell ringing and heavy knocks awakened and frightened the source’s sleeping 12-year-old daughter, he said. The noise was so loud that a neighbor came out to investigate the din, he said.

When the source, a decorated and disabled-in-the-line-of-duty police officer, Michael Lutz, came to the door, he opened it a crack to hear Bice demand to know if he was the person quoted in the story. He did not deny it and speaks exclusively on the record in this story for the first time.

Lutz says he has been friends with John and Colleen Chisholm for more than a decade. He admires the district attorney, considering him a role model and mentor. He says he worked with Chisholm as a police officer and in the district attorney’s office, first as a law school intern in 2010 and as a special prosecutor in 2011 – a period of more than a year, not the five-and-a-half months reported by Bice.

(An editing change in this reporter’s Sept. 9 article identified Lutz as a “longtime Chisholm subordinate,” which has been faulted as inaccurate. Even if valid, the criticism has little or no relevance to Lutz’s credibility in light of what can now be revealed about him. In any event, police officers can be called subordinate to the district attorney.)

Lutz says he met with Chisholm in his private office in 2011 and was surprised when he heard the district attorney say that his wife had wept repeatedly and joined demonstrations against Walker, who was fighting for and winning legislative approval of his union reforms. Lutz said Chisholm demonstrated what he called a “hyper-partisan” bias against Walker.

Lutz’s motivation for speaking out was based on principle: “I don’t like what he [Chisholm] has done in regard to political speech that he disagrees with.”

Revealing how Chisholm allegedly spoke of his wife’s anguish in connection with his own determination to “stop” Walker, Lutz said, wasn’t meant to harm her. “I never did anything to hurt anyone,” Lutz said. “I just wanted to speak the truth because I don’t think it’s right the way they are stifling speech.”

Citing one previously unreported example, Lutz mentions not being “allowed” to express an opposing viewpoint. He wrote in an May 20, 2012, email to an unidentified person:

When “I was a Special Prosecutor in the DA’s office and [Wisconsin Supreme Court] Justice [David] Prosser approached me to do a [pre-election] video spot about how the decision authored by him about the guy who shot me was a very important ruling for Police officers in general, DA Chisholm … stated that he couldn’t allow me to do it and he wants to stay as far away from these Republicans as he can … Fast forward 8 months and HIS [Chisholm’s] liberal block of DA’s, 80% of them, are actively campaigning, emailing, and even verbally bashing Walker at meetings. I think Chisholm has left the reservation and now has his flag firmly planted in the liberal left’s camp.”

Prosser won his election in April 2011. He voted with the majority on July 31 when the state Supreme Court upheld Walker’s reforms by a vote of 5-2.

Lutz felt he had a lot to lose if his identity were revealed, which Bice and the Journal Sentinel did on Sept. 12. Lutz felt that if he were exposed as the source, it would be hard to find clients once everyone in the county knew that the district attorney was now his enemy.

Most journalists’ first instinct is to protect the identity of whistleblowers against powerful people likely to retaliate against them. Not columnist Bice or the Journal Sentinel. They have devoted their energy to exposing Lutz’s identity, subjecting him to attacks, and seeking to discredit him.

Chisholm’s wide-ranging investigation into Walker, his staff and 29 nonprofit conservative groups was accompanied by sweeping subpoenas for documents, phone records, emails, cell phones, computers and more; predawn raids on conservative activists’ homes without allowing them to call their lawyers; and “gag orders” about the investigation. These gag orders silenced virtually all of the conservative movement in Wisconsin by denying its leaders the chance to defend themselves publicly.

This was by design, say critics who characterize the investigation itself as a political vendetta by a Democratic district attorney against a Republican governor.

Over the years, Chisholm’s office has consistently denied political motivations, stressing the roles of two Republican district attorneys who opened proceedings to help enlarge his investigation’s territorial reach, and that of Francis Schmitz, a political independent who was made Special Prosecutor and titular head of the investigation in August 2013.

The entire investigation was found unconstitutional and temporarily blocked by U.S. District Judge Rudolph Randa in a May 8 decision that is now on appeal. During the Sept. 9 oral arguments, one of the three federal appellate judges, Frank Easterbrook, noted that the gag orders appeared to be “screamingly unconstitutional” while expressing doubt (as did Judge Diane Wood) that the case belonged in federal court. …

Lutz provided additional information and documents that call into question the objectivity of the Journal Sentinel’s reporting.

As a police officer working in Milwaukee, Lutz was named “Professional Law Enforcement Officer of the Year” in 1997 and again in 2007. He received the Milwaukee Police Department’s Purple Award of Valor in 2009, commendations for heroism in 1996 and 2006, and an Award of Merit from the FBI in 2006. In all, he won 11 honors and decorations.

Injured in the line of duty, he retired on disability pay and went to law school, earning his degree in December 2010. He worked in Chisholm’s office to gain experience from June 2010 to July 2011.

When Lutz went into private practice, Chisholm wrote a memo to him on July 27, 2011, that said his service “has been exemplary,” that his “dedication and hard work … have proved to be invaluable,” and that “I am extremely grateful for the service you provided.”

In a previous letter of recommendation from November 2007, Chisholm wrote that Lutz had been “one of the best investigators in the Milwaukee police department” and had “removed some of the most dangerous offenders from the streets of Milwaukee” while combining “a remarkable memory with unceasing hard work and courage.”

Critics of the Journal Sentinel’s coverage of Chisholm’s investigation of Walker, his staff and his allies have long complained of what they call biased reporting and commentary, especially by Bice, overseen by Managing Editor George Stanley.

“Dan Bice and the Journal Sentinel have abandoned journalistic standards in covering the long-running investigation of Gov. Scott Walker, his staff, and allied conservative advocacy groups,” said George Mitchell, a former journalist who worked for former U.S. Rep. Les Aspin and former Wisconsin Gov. Pat Lucey – both Democrats.

“Bice and the paper have relied heavily on material that originated from illegal leaks. They have smeared numerous innocent people who were barred by secrecy orders from responding to rumors and leaks. They have dishonestly portrayed completely legal and widespread political conduct. The list goes on. It is long.”

Lutz says he has no animus toward Chisholm, adding he gave $200 last month for a Chisholm campaign fundraiser. He has visited the Chisholms’ home several times and gone to dinners, after-work functions, and other outings with one or both of them over the years.

As to the effect of the Journal Sentinel campaign to discredit him, Lutz said in an email:

“I have relocated my kids to prevent them from being brought to tears by any more J-S reporters and to protect them from the onslaught that has already begun. All for telling the truth.”

The consequences for telling that truth are already being felt, Lutz writes. “My law practice … is over in MKE [Milwaukee]. There is no doubt, as one person has put it, that I am already blacklisted. . . . . Supporting the family will be difficult. Of course, it has been a huge undertaking to go through 4 surgeries, take care of 2 children, drive back and forth to Madison daily in order to get my law license … only to be persecuted for simply telling the truth.”

In response to suggestions by the Journal Sentinel that Lutz must not be telling the truth because no other current or former employee of the district attorney’s office has corroborated his allegations, Lutz says: “No one in the current DA’s office or any practicing attorney in Milwaukee would dare speak up against Chisholm or even mention a suggestion of partisanship. Their [private] practice would be killed in Milwaukee. Mine is finished but I can still rely on my police pension.”

Mitchell adds:

In a responsible newsroom, Chisholm and Lutz would get equal scrutiny and balanced reporting. There’s obviously no chance of that happening.

In a responsible legal environment, Lutz’s claims would get independent scrutiny, perhaps by the state’s Judicial Commission. Chisholm is an officer of the court. The Commission’s “task is to enforce high standards of judicial behavior, both on and off the bench, without compromising judicial independence. [It] strives to maintain public confidence in the judiciary by providing a forum for the expeditious and fair disposition of complaints of judicial misconduct and disability.” If ever there was a case of where “public confidence” is at issue, this is it.
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“Climate change” craziness

September 23, 2014

US politics, weather
If you live in a college town, you may have seen protesters Sunday and wondered what they were protesting.

Probably this, as pictured by Weasel Zippers …

… and reported by John Fund:

All day Sunday, they filled the streets of Manhattan for a march that featured Al Gore, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, and various Hollywood actors.

But they certainly didn’t act like a movement that was winning. There was a tone of fatalism in the comments of many with whom I spoke; they despair that the kind of radical change they advocate probably won’t result from the normal democratic process. It’s no surprise then that the rhetoric of climate-change activists has become increasingly hysterical. Naomi Klein, author of a new book on the “crisis,” This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, said, “I have seen the future, and it looks like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.” In her new book she demands that North America and Europe pay reparations to poorer countries to compensate for the climate change they cause. She calls her plan a “Marshall Plan for the Earth” and acknowledges that it would cost “hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars.” But she has an easy solution on how to pay for it: “Need more money? Print some!” What’s a little hyperinflation compared to “saving the planet”?

Nor is Klein alone in her hysteria. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio is releasing a new film in which he warns that the world is threatened by a “carbon monster” that is treated like a kind of Godzilla that must be killed off by ending the use of carbon-based fuels.

One reason the rhetoric has become so overheated is that the climate-change activists increasingly lack a scientific basis for their most exaggerated claims. As physicist Gordon Fulks of the Cascade Policy Institute puts it: “CO2 is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea-ice melt that is not occurring . . . and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.” He points out that there has been no net new global-warming increase since 1997 even though the human contribution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 25 percent since then. This throws into doubt all the climate models that have been predicting massive climate dislocation.

Other scientists caution that climate models must be regarded with great care and skepticism. Steven Koonin, the undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Obama’s first term, wrote a pathbreaking piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal in which he concluded:

We often hear that there is a “scientific consensus” about climate change. But as far as the computer models go, there isn’t a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing human influence. . . . The models roughly describe the shrinking extent of Arctic sea ice observed over the past two decades, but they fail to describe the comparable growth of Antarctic sea ice, which is now at a record high. . . . Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties, but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future. Recognizing those limits, rather than ignoring them, will lead to a more sober and ultimately more productive discussion of climate change and climate policies. To do otherwise is a great disservice to climate science itself.

Even scientists who accept the conventional scientific treatment of the subject by the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change increasingly question just how much it would help to curb emissions or to radically redistribute wealth, as activists like Klein urge us to do. Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, told me that all of the carbon-reduction targets advocated by the U.N. or the European Union would result in imperceptible differences in temperature, at enormous cost. “We would be far better off and richer if we did simple things like painting roofs in hot climates white and investing in new technologies that could help us adapt to any change that is coming,” he says. Even the U.N.’s own climate panel admits that so far, climate change hasn’t included any increase in the frequency or intensity of so-called extreme weather. …

Maybe that’s why the climate-change extremists are basing fewer of their appeals on fact and more on hysteria. You scream the loudest when the opposition is about to tip over on you and pin you down.

Fund quotes climate scientist Roy Spencer:

For many years we had been hearing from the “scientific consensus” side that natural climate change is nowhere near as strong as human-caused warming . . . yet the lack of surface warming in 17 years has forced those same scientists to now invoke natural climate change to supposedly cancel out the expected human-caused warming!

C’mon guys. You can’t have it both ways! They fail to see that a climate system capable of cancelling out warming with natural cooling is also capable of causing natural warming in the first place. . . . To me, it feels like a climate skepticism tipping point has been reached.

Except among the activists, reports The American Interest:

The New York Times has a taste of the rhetoric being bandied about on the ground today:

“I’m here because I really feel that every major social movement in this country has come when people get together,” said Carol Sutton of Norwalk, Conn., the president of a teachers’ union. “It begins in the streets.” […]

“The climate is changing,” said Otis Daniels, 58, of the Bronx. “Everyone knows it; everyone feels it. But no one is doing anything about it.” […]

“Climate change is no longer an environmental issue; it’s an everybody issue,” Sam Barratt, a campaign director for the online advocacy group Avaaz, which helped plan the march, said on Friday.

“The number of natural disasters has increased and the science is so much more clear,” he added. “This march has many messages, but the one that we’re seeing and hearing is the call for a renewable revolution.”

It was the usual post-communist leftie march. That is, it was a petit-bourgeois re-enactment of meaningless ritual that passes for serious politics among those too inexperienced, too emotionally excited or too poorly read and too unpracticed at self-reflection or political analysis to know or perhaps care how futile and tired the conventional march has become. Crazed grouplets of anti-capitalist movements trying to fan the embers of Marxism back to life, gender and transgender groups with their own spin on climate, earnest eco-warriors, publicity-seeking hucksters, adrenalin junkies, college kids wanting a taste of the venerable tradition of public protest, and, as always, a great many people who don’t think that burning marijuana adds to the world’s CO₂ load, marched down Manhattan’s streets. The chants echoed through the skyscraper canyons, the drums rolled, participants were caught up in a sense of unity and togetherness that some of them had never known. It was almost like politics, almost like the epochal marches that have toppled governments and changed history ever since the Paris mob stormed the Bastille.

Almost. Except street marches today are to real politics what street mime is to Shakespeare. This was an ersatz event: no laws will change, no political balance will tip, no UN delegate will have a change of heart. The world will roll on as if this march had never happened. And the marchers would have emitted less carbon and done more good for the world if they had all stayed home and studied books on economics, politics, science, religion and law. Marches like this create an illusion of politics and an illusion of meaningful activity to fill the void of postmodern life; the tribal ritual matters more than the political result. …

In the annals of serious climate policy, however, an explosive essay landed in the Wall Street Journal this past Friday. Titled “Climate Science Is Not Settled“, it will have more impact than anything said or chanted by the misguided marchers. Its author, Dr. Steven A. Koonin, was the Undersecretary for Science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama’s first term. Dr. Koonin argues that while certain things about the climate are in fact settled science, there is much that is still disputed among climate researchers. A taste:

The crucial scientific question for policy isn’t whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: The climate has always changed and always will. Geological and historical records show the occurrence of major climate shifts, sometimes over only a few decades. We know, for instance, that during the 20th century the Earth’s global average surface temperature rose 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax: There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. There is also little doubt that the carbon dioxide will persist in the atmosphere for several centuries. The impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself.

Rather, the crucial, unsettled scientific question for policy is, “How will the climate change over the next century under both natural and human influences?” Answers to that question at the global and regional levels, as well as to equally complex questions of how ecosystems and human activities will be affected, should inform our choices about energy and infrastructure.

But—here’s the catch—those questions are the hardest ones to answer. They challenge, in a fundamental way, what science can tell us about future climates.

It is this uncertainty about accurately predicting future outcomes, on both the local and aggregate levels, that makes sound policy decisions almost impossible:

Policy makers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is “settled” (or is a “hoax”) demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding its progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on. It should not be confined to hushed sidebar conversations at academic conferences.

Society’s choices in the years ahead will necessarily be based on uncertain knowledge of future climates. That uncertainty need not be an excuse for inaction. There is well-justified prudence in accelerating the development of low-emissions technologies and in cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.

But climate strategies beyond such “no regrets” efforts carry costs, risks and questions of effectiveness, so nonscientific factors inevitably enter the decision. These include our tolerance for risk and the priorities that we assign to economic development, poverty reduction, environmental quality, and intergenerational and geographical equity.

Individuals and countries can legitimately disagree about these matters, so the discussion should not be about “believing” or “denying” the science. Despite the statements of numerous scientific societies, the scientific community cannot claim any special expertise in addressing issues related to humanity’s deepest goals and values. The political and diplomatic spheres are best suited to debating and resolving such questions, and misrepresenting the current state of climate science does nothing to advance that effort.

All of this is so very spot on—and so refreshing coming from a former Obama Administration official. We can’t encourage you enough to read the whole thing.

One thing we would add to the Koonin essay is that the rapidly developing information revolution is already contributing to declining carbon emissions in countries like the United States and the potential for changing technologies to create a cleaner, less energy-intensive economy is becoming more evident all the time. Fixing the environment isn’t about donning hair shirts and eating granola; it’s about harnessing the marvelous technological breakthroughs that will allow us and our descendants to live richer and more abundant lives on a more flourishing planet.

One more photo of the rally:
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Presty the DJ for Sept. 23

September 23, 2014

Music
The number one song today in 1957:

The number one song today in 1967:

Today in 1969, the Northern Star, the Northern Illinois University student newspaper, passed on the rumor that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash in 1966 and been impersonated in public ever since then. A Detroit radio station picked up the rumor, and then McCartney himself had to appear in public to report that, to quote Mark Twain, rumors of his death had been exaggerated.

(more…)
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Intellectual laziness, incorrect facts and bad ideas

September 22, 2014

Wisconsin politics
Mary Burke made news last week, and not news of the good kind for a political candidate.

If Burke’s jobs plan seems familiar, there’s a good reason, M.D. Kittle reports:

Buzzfeed, which has had its own PR black eyes with plagiarism, reported late Thursday that Burke’s plan, “Invest for Success” pilfers entire passages from the jobs plans laid out by Delaware Democratic Gov. Jack Markell in 2008, and Democratic gubernatorial candidates Ward Cammack of Tennessee in 2009 and John Gregg of Indiana in 2012.

A spokesman for the Burke campaign told BuzzFeed News an “expert” named Eric Schnurer, “who also worked on the other campaigns(,) as responsible for the similar text, a case of self-plagiarism.” Schnurer is founder and president of Philadelphia-based consulting firm Public Works.

Burke campaign spokesman Joe Zepecki told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Schnurer was let go as soon the camp was made aware of the BuzzFeed report.

Zepecki defended the swiping, telling the newspaper the sections represented “fewer than 10 paragraphs of a 49-page plan.” …

BuzzFeed cited several passages in Burke’s plan pulled nearly verbatim from the work of others, including:

Ward Cammack’s plan:

Expanding intern programs to provide help to small farmers and also give students direct agricultural education and experience.

And here’s Burke:

Expanding intern programs to provide help to small farmers and also give students direct agricultural education and experience.

Here’s Gregg:

At the same time, small-and medium-sized businesses have been hiring new employees at a faster rate than large companies since the beginning of the economic recovery in 2009.

And here’s Burke:

And in the short-term, small-and medium-sized businesses have been hiring new employees at a faster rate than large companies since the beginning of the economic recovery in 2009.

You can read all of Cammack’s plan here … if you have nothing better to do.

This is one of the things that as someone with a degree in political science (for what that’s worth) and in journalism (for what that’s worth), I just shake my head. It is just lazy for Schnurer to copy and paste his own work instead of rewriting it, particularly in an era in which your own previous work is probably somewhere on the World Wide Web. This certainly doesn’t reflect well on the Burke campaign either, because someone working for the campaign evidently didn’t vet Schnurer enough, as demonstrated by Schnurer’s firing for the offense of publicly embarrassing his employer.

The next thing that comes to mind is that only one of the three Democrats got elected with this plan, whoever belonged to it first, and him in a generally Democratic state. Since the first goal of politics is to get elected, this document is one for three on that test, which is good in baseball and volleyball hitting and nowhere else.

This is more a case of intellectual laziness on the part of Burke (who, remember, derided Scott Walker’s 2010 economic plan as appearing to have been written by an eighth-grader) than plagiarism, even though if you put your name on it, it’s your work whether or not you actually did the work. (Which I suppose makes Burke an accessory to self-plagiarism, or something.) Wisconsin is neither Indiana nor Tennessee nor Delaware. Apparently Burke, or Burke’s campaign, could not be bothered to create a Wisconsin-centric document, which makes you question how serious Burke is about being governor. (Which is, of course, different from getting elected governor.)

BuzzFeed reports that that’s not the only instance of Burke’s borrowed work:

In Mary Burke’s Invest in our Rural Communities plan:

Here’s a Council Of State Governments report from 2003:

At a time when U.S. manufacturing employment is generally on the decline, the production of wind equipment is one of the few potentially large sources of new manufacturing jobs on the horizon.

And here’s Burke:

While manufacturing employment in general has been declining for years, the production of wind equipment is one of the few potentially large sources of new manufacturing jobs.

In Mary Burke’s recent Plan for Wisconsin Veterans:

Here’s a 2013 Dunn County News column:

The opposition argued that the bill would impose additional burdens on those that were injured — and in some cases plaintiffs could die before their cases made it through the lengthened court process.

And here’s Burke:

This places additional burdens on those who were injured and in some cases plaintiffs could die before their cases make it through the lengthened court process.

Here’s the Wisconsin Food Cooperative’s website:

The WFHC helps local farmers by providing them with the opportunity, through marketing, sales, aggregation, and logistics, to access wholesale markets they could not access easily before.

And here’s Burke:

Promoting the replication of Food Hubs for helping small farmers get their produce to retail markets, profitably. The Food Hub model, exemplified by the Wisconsin Food Hub Cooperative (WFHC), helps local farmers – through marketing, sales, aggregation, and logistics – to access wholesale markets.

Here’s the National Rural Health Institute:

Although only one-third of all motor vehicle accidents occur in rural areas, two-thirds of the deaths attributed to these accidents occur on rural roads.

And here’s Burke:

And although only one-third of motor vehicle accidents occur in rural areas, two-thirds of automobile fatalities occur on rural roads.

Here’s the Journal of Extension on incubator farms:

An incubator farm is typically a place where people are given temporary, exclusive, and affordable access to small parcels of land and infrastructure, and often training, for the purpose of honing skills and launching farm businesses.

And here’s Burke:

An incubator farm, like other entrepreneurial incubators, is a place where aspiring farmers can have temporary affordable access to small parcels of land and infrastructure, training, practice, and mentorship for the purpose of honing skills and launching farm businesses.

The plagiarism, if that’s what you want to call it, is actually the least of the issues here. No one is concerned when good ideas are borrowed from someone else. Did Bill Clinton plagiarize from Tommy Thompson when Clinton came up with federal welfare reform? Who cares? Welfare reform was something whose time was long overdue. When Ronald Reagan proposed income tax cuts when he was running for president, I doubt Arthur Laffer cared whether or not Reagan gave him credit. Are all of the Democrats running on increasing the minimum wage guilty of plagiarism from whoever thought of it first?

Wisconsin lefties have been complaining for years about the American Legislative Exchange Council, and Gaia forbid if one of their ideas ever ends up in a bill in the Legislature. A good idea — for instance, fiscal responsibility, a big ALEC issue — stands up regardless of whether it’s an original idea or not. (More on that later.)

Since perception is reality in politics, Jerry Bader notes how this hurts Burke:

In my formative years in talk radio someone once taught me: “don’t answer questions people aren’t asking.” That’s a radio consultant’s clever way of saying be relevant with your topics. In politics the strategy of answering questions people aren’t asking is often employed to avoid answering the questions people are asking. It’s the politician’s equivalent of the magician’s sleight of hand; get the audience to watch one hand so they won’t notice what the other hand is doing. With the media playing the role of her lovely assistant, gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke is attempting to pull off such a trick. …

All of this is decidedly answering a question no one is asking. Burke isn’t under fire because Schnurer “plagiarized himself.” She’s under fire for passing off his ideas as her own. With Governor Scott Walker falling short on his pledge of 250,000 jobs created in his first term, Burke unveiled the plan in an effort to establish her economic gravitas. And as noted above, there was little uncertainty at the time that this was being presented as Mary Burke’s plan, created by her based on her Ivy League education and personal business experience. We now know that’s not true. Yet Burke isn’t speaking to that point and the media isn’t pressing her to answer a question people are indeed asking. …

Yet, in this case, Burke is the hapless victim of an unscrupulous consultant. When they called the plan “thoughtful and substantial” back in March, was there any doubt the JS was lauding what it believed to be Burke’s thoughts and substance? This is a case of plagiarism, but not on Eric Schnurer’s part. Burke passed off his ideas as her own when she unveiled this plan. Of course, given that most of the ideas are well established liberal pabulum (full disclosure: The Weekly Standard called them that before I did) we should have known they weren’t Burke’s original thought. That might be her most honest possible defense of all.

Beyond its lack of originality, Burke’s, or Schnurer’s, plan needed an editor and a proofreader because, Tom Blumer reports:

The real problem with Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke’s “jobs plan” … isn’t its plagiarized material. It’s the content. The presence of certain obviously wrong facts and patently pathetic assertions indicates that Ms. Burke, a successful entrepreneur who one would think should have known better, hardly scrutinized her plan at all before allowing its publication. …

Burke’s plan claims that “small-and medium-sized businesses have been hiring new employees at a faster rate than large companies since the beginning of the economic recovery in 2009.”

Bloomberg reported in January 2013 that “Payrolls at firms with fewer than 500 employees accounted for less than 50 percent of the total workforce for the first time in 2008 during the recession and have barely recovered.”

In March of 2013, Joel Kotkin at Forbes wrote:

… small business is still in recession. The number of startup jobs per 1,000 Americans over the past four years fell a full 30% below the levels of the Bush and Clinton eras…. a recent Brookings study reveals … (that) larger businesses came out of the recovery stronger, not their beleaguered smaller counterparts.

Burke’s material here in this regard isn’t just plagiarized; it’s dated boilerplate. The statement about small business was predominantly true for decades before the most recent recession; since then, it has not been. This tells me that Burke and her team didn’t really vet the material they were presented, not only for originality but for simple accuracy.

Another claim copied verbatim was made in plagiarized materials about other states in previous years:

Our university and college systems have made great progress in aligning requirements for course work to make transferring credits easier.

Given the plagiarism, it would seem fair to assert that even if this statement is true, it’s only by accident, and not the result of any specific research into Badger State higher education practices.

Going to the detailed jobs plan, even the most basic claims Burke makes don’t hold up, like this one:

When I served as Wisconsin’s Commerce Secretary, Wisconsin had 72,000 more jobs than it does now, based on the latest data.

The plan specifically refers to the following table at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and is as of roughly February of this year:

There is no point in time during Burke’s 2005-2007 tenure when Wisconsin’s statewide employment was 72,000 jobs higher than at the right end of the graph. The largest difference is roughly 55,000.

Burke also claimed, as if we’re supposed to be impressed, that:

The state’s annual average unemployment rate was never higher than 4.8% when I was Commerce Secretary – but unemployment has never been below 6.1% under the current Administration.

At the time it was written, the state’s February seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 6.1 percent was 0.6 points below the national average. Its August rate of 5.6 percent was a half-point lower. Wisconsin’s unemployment rate of 4.8 percent in February of 2005 was 0.6 points below the nation’s 5.4 percent. In October 2007, the last full month of Burke’s tenure as the State’s Secretary of Commerce, the state’s unemployment rate of 4.7 percent was the same as the rest of the nation. Compared to the U.S. as a whole, Wisconsin squandered its lead under Burke, but has stayed ahead under Governor Scott Walker. Wisconsin’s current unadjusted unemployment rate is only 5.1 percent, which under the left’s “new normal” definition, is actually below, i.e., better than, full employment, which they now define as 5.5 percent unemployment.

I could go on, but I don’t need to. Readers can see that plagiarism is the least of the problems with Mary Burke’s jobs plan. Basic accuracy is its primary shortcoming.

The better question is whether or not Burke’s plan (or whoever wants to take ownership of the plan) would actually create jobs. Collin Roth gives four reasons the exact opposite would happen:

1.) The Minimum Wage – Mary Burke supports the nationwide initiative to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. Burke has said, “I think increasing the minimum wage leads to people being able to support themselves and their families, and we can do it in a way that’s not going to hurt job creation.”

But according to a study by Dr. David MacPherson of Trinity University commissioned by the Wisconsin Restaurant Association (WRA), hiking the minimum wage to $10.10 could cost as many as 16,500 jobs in Wisconsin. The WRA study finds that “increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 would eliminate 16,500 jobs—over half of which are jobs held by women. The bulk of the job losses would be concentrated among individuals with a high school degree or less, and among people who work in the retail or leisure & hospitality industries.”

2.) The Northern Wisconsin Mine – Mary Burke was made it very clear that she opposes the GTac mine and if elected would work to put a stop to it. “I’m against that mine,” Burke told a Madison radio show in 2013.

The GTac mine is a $1.5 billion investment in Northern Wisconsin and is anticipated to support 3,175 jobs during the two year construction phase. Once constructed, the mine would create around 700 jobs at the mine while supporting 2,834 jobs in the 12 county region surrounding the mine.

3.) Obamacare – Mary Burke has made expanding Obamacare in Wisconsin a centerpiece of her campaign. In 2008, Burke campaigned for President Obama and touted his healthcare reform. An MSNBC interview said “Burke is an unequivocal supporter of the Affordable Care Act.”

But once again, studies have revealed that the Affordable Care Act is, and will, take a toll on the Wisconsin economy. A recent study from the American Action Fund found that Obamacare has already cost 4,239 jobs at small businesses in Wisconsin. And when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected the ACA could result in 2.5 million job losses by 2024, Americans for Tax Reform broke that down into each state. ATR projects that Wisconsin could lose 51,633 jobs.

4.) EPA Regulations – In an interview with Politico, Mary Burke was given the opportunity to explain any policy or position that she might disagree with President Obama. After a 12 second pause, Burke took the life preserver from her aide and said trade issues.

President Obama’s new EPA regulations are anticipated to be nothing short of a bomb dropped on the Wisconsin economy. A study from the Heritage Foundation found that Wisconsin could lose 11,702 jobs by 2023 due to the EPA regulations on carbon emissions. In addition, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) found that new ozone standards being pushed by the EPA could be the costliest regulation in history. In Wisconsin, the new ozone standards would result in 52,031 lost jobs or job equivalents.

Burke’s positions on these four issues prove that Burke really knows nothing about Wisconsin business beyond her family’s own business. Whether or not someone gets a business degree, someone in business at some point learns that things that increase expenses (wage increases not based on improving the business, ObamaCare) are bad for business, which mean they’re bad for employees.

Someone probably should tell Burke that the three biggest business sectors in Wisconsin are manufacturing, agriculture and tourism. If Burke knew that, she might realize, or someone might be able to get her to understand, that the EPA’s dumping 52,000 Wisconsin manufacturing jobs would be bad for Wisconsin. And then maybe someone could get Burke to understand that a higher minimum wage’s dumping 16,500 jobs in one part of tourism would also be bad for Wisconsin. And then maybe someone could get Burke to understand that ObamaCare’s trashing 51,000 jobs across every sector of Wisconsin business would also be bad for Wisconsin.

You need not use Invest for Success in Delaware/Indiana/Tennessee/Wisconsin as evidence that Burke is not serious about being governor. Burke’s positions on her supposed strength, business, prove that she’s not a serious candidate for governor. Mitch Henck wrote in the Wisconsin State Journal Sunday that Burke “has to convince voters she’s a pro-business Democrat …” when the only correct word in that phrase is “Democrat.”
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