Assuming that Thursday’s forecasted storm doesn’t topple power lines or knock down cellphone or radio towers, I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin program Friday doing the 8 a.m. Week in Review segment.
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
If the headline and lead sentence seem apocalyptic for what now is a forecast of 1 to 3 inches, let me double-down: Ripon is going to close schools Friday. (It is a scheduled day off.)
Today in 1998, the members of Oasis were banned for life from Cathay Pacific Airways for their “abusive and disgusting behavior.”
Apparently Cathay Pacific knew it was doing, because one year to the day later, Oasis guitarist Paul Arthurs was arrested outside a Tommy Hilfiger store in London for drunk and disorderly conduct.
Birthdays begin with Johnny Winter, who worked with Rick Derringer and brother Edgar:
Rusty Young, who played pedal steel guitar for Poco:
Steve Priest of Sweet:
Brad Whitford, guitarist for Aerosmith:
Howard Jones:
Two deaths of note today: Melvin Franklin of the Temptations in 1995 …
… and Milwaukee native Howie Epstein, bass player for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, in 2003:
Thirty-two years ago shortly after 4 p.m., the U.S. Olympic hockey team faced off against the Soviet Union in the 1980 Winter Olympics hockey medal round.
For those who argue that sports has an outsized influence on our culture, one hockey game might prove your point. For those who argue that sports has too much influence on our culture, this hockey game proves otherwise.
Things were not good in 1980. (Similar to today.) Americans enjoyed both double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation. Gas prices were going upward in the second energy crisis of the 1970s. The Soviet cancer seemed to be growing unchallenged worldwide, the Soviets having invaded Afghanistan and having promoted friendly governments in Africa and eastern Europe. Three months earlier 52 Americans had been taken hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran. President Jimmy Carter appeared to have been elected to preside over the decline of the U.S., even in sports, where he decided to keep the U.S. out of that summer’s Olympics in Moscow.
The Olympic world was different from today. The Soviet Union was considered the best hockey team in the world, given their collection of world championships and Olympic titles. Their American counterparts were college hockey players, two from Madison — forward Mark Johnson and defenseman Bobby Suter — coached by one of the best college coaches of all time, Herb Brooks, who met no one’s definition of Mr. Personality. (In sharp contrast to Johnson’s and Suter’s coach, “Badger Bob” Johnson, who had coached the Olympic team to a fourth-place finish four years earlier.)
The TV world was also different from today. Unless you were an employee of ABC-TV or an ABC affiliate station, or lived close enough to the Canadian border to get Canada’s live coverage, you didn’t see the game live. ABC didn’t broadcast the game until its Friday evening Olympic coverage started at 7 p.m., when those watching the 6 p.m. news probably already knew the results.
Brooks, the last cut from the 1960 Olympic hockey team, put his team through a gauntlet of pre-Olympic games that included the Soviets’ flattening of the Americans just before the start of the Olympics. (The same Soviet team also beat a National Hockey League all-star team.) So even though the U.S. had overachieved to get to the medal round, one would have had to have been excessively optimistic to think the U.S. could actually beat the Soviets and then win the gold medal two days later.
But a funny thing happened on the way to yet another Soviet gold medal.
The world’s greatest goaltender, Vladislav Tretiak, was unusually sieve-like, giving up his second goal just before the end of the first period. And then Soviet coach Viktor Tikhonov either panicked or let his anger get the best of him and replaced Tretiak after one period. Even though the Soviets dominated the second period, they led just 3–2 going into the third period of a game that ABC’s Al Michaels called “the rarest of sporting events — an event that needs no buildup, no superfluous adjectives.”
Johnson scored his second goal of the night on a power play near the midway point of the third period. And then …
Because of its context, the game turned out to be not only the biggest American hockey moment of all time (biggest? The term “sacred” wouldn’t be an overstatement), but arguably the biggest American sports moment of all time.
Having covered a lot of sports over the years, I’ve seen that blank look of the loser at the end of the big game. But I’m still struck 32 years later at the look of mixed emotions on the parts of the Soviets at the end of the game, as if they realized that the right team won that game, even though it wasn’t them. Years later, Tretiak said something like “We lost to a bunch of students!”, as if channeling Michaels’ last line about “the most improbable circumstance you could ever have imagined before these Olympics started.”
That win did not win the gold medal, of course. The next game did:
The cover of the following week’s Sports Illustrated is the only cover in the nearly 60-year history of the magazine to have neither headline nor caption. It didn’t need one.
Today is Ash Wednesday, which begins the Christian season of Lent.
Today is also Catholic Blog Day, which, despite my not being a Catholic blogger (or perhaps as an ex-Catholic blogger, or a non-Roman non-Orthodox Catholic blogger), intrigues me:
All Catholic bloggers are invited to write on a common theme for the day. By speaking with many voices on a common aspect of the faith, we can help evangelize the digital continent and demonstrate the powerful presence of Catholics online.
The theme for February 22 is: penance.
Penance is defined as “repentance of sins.” The term also refers to the Roman Catholic Church’s Sacrament of Penance, which during the 1970s got renamed the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
Our previous priest (“rector,” not “pastor,” because the pastor of every Episcopal church is Jesus Christ) called the church “countercultural.” He was certainly right, because our self-esteem society, where all viewpoints are valid, has little tolerance for such radical ideas as our being sinners — people who, having been given free will by God, do wrong things and need to atone for our actions and seek forgiveness from those we’ve wronged. It’s as if we’ve all bought into Stuart Smalley:
Part of the reason is, I think, an incomplete reading of Christ’s forgiveness of sins. When the Pharisees brought the “woman caught in adultery” in John 8:3–11 trying to get an endorsement of her stoning, Jesus replied, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” After all the sinners left, Jesus told the woman, “Neither do I condemn you: go, and sin no more.”
There’s also Christ’s admonition that begins chapter 7 of Matthew, which must be read beyond the first seven words but usually isn’t:
Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why behold you the mote that is in your brother’s eye, but consider not the beam that is in your own eye? Or how will you say to your brother, Let me pull out the mote out of your eye; and, behold, a beam is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of your own eye; and then shall you see clearly to cast out the mote out of your brother’s eye.
When Jesus said that we should not judge unless we be judged also, he was not saying that we are to never judge if behavior is sin or not. What he was doing was giving us a caution to make sure that we are willing to be judged by the same standard of judgment. This verse is not a warning against judging an action. It is a warning against self deception and hypocrisy. …
Before you ever start to tell someone else what is wrong with their life, make sure you take a good look at your own life first. But notice, Jesus does not say, take the log out of your own eye and don’t say anything about the speck in the others person’s eye. That would be the result of never judging anyone about anything. Instead Jesus says that after you take care of your own stuff, then go and help your brother. So you are to help then with their issue but only once you have done a personal spiritual check to make sure that you are right with God. …
In the Lord’s Prayer we pray that God would forgive us as we forgive others. Well in order to forgive someone, you have to first, “judge” that they have done something wrong. The very act of forgiveness that Jesus teaches so clearly, requires that we identify some behavior as wrong. To fail to judge it as wrong or sinful in the first place, makes it impossible to forgive.
Secondly, the Bible is filled with admonitions that we avoid evil, flee from temptation, cling to what is good and lovely. In order to do that, we have to make judgment calls. We have to decide that one thing is good and another is not. We make these decisions all that time as a matter of course in life. We do it if we are a follower of Jesus or not. Everyone has somethings that they decide are right to to and others that are not. Every society and culture has these things and every member of those cultures has to think and decide, has to judge what behaviors fit the standard.
I am not a theologian, but it seems to me that to be a Christian worthy of the title requires more than acknowledging Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior; it does require being “right with God.” Christ died to atone for all our sins. But if that was all being a Christian required, then there would have been no need for the New Testament beyond the four Gospels. Being a real live Christian requires a real effort to live a virtuous life, by example and not merely words, and help others who need help — in other words, to live a life worthy of Christ’s sacrifice for us.
(The public attempts of presidential candidate Mitt Romney and quarterback Tim Tebow to lead that virtuous life have led to interesting strong negative public reactions, which tell you a lot about our culture today. It’s as if people feel threatened by someone else’s living the kind of life we should aspire to.)
Since we all fail in living a life worthy of Christ’s sacrifice for us, every Sunday Catholic and Episcopal Mass includes an admission of our shortcomings. Catholic priests have three forms from which to choose for General Confession:
I confess to almighty God,
and to you, my brothers and sisters,
that I have greatly sinned
in my thoughts and in my words,
in what I have done,
and in what I have failed to do;
through my fault
through my fault
through my most grievous fault
Therefore, I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin,
all the angels and saints,
and you, my brothers and sisters,
to pray for me to the Lord our God.
One of the priests at our Madison church would begin the Penitential Act by inviting parishioners to recall our previous week’s moments of “sin against God, against each other and against ourselves,” because those were the three involved “when we sin — when we reject God’s love.”
Most Episcopal churches use the shorter Rite Two form of the Penitential Order …
Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your Name. Amen.
… instead of the longer and more stern Rite One version:
Almighty God,
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
maker of all things, judge of all men:
We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins
and wickedness,
which we from time to time most grievously have committed,
by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty,
provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.
We do earnestly repent,
and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings;
the remembrance of them is grievous unto us,
the burden of them is intolerable.
Have mercy upon us,
have mercy upon us, most merciful Father;
for thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake,
forgive us all that is past;
and grant that we may ever hereafter
serve and please thee in newness of life,
to the honor and glory of thy Name;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Nothing feel-good about any of that, is there? And yet it helps remind us that we are not the center of the universe, but we’re all very flawed people who do things we shouldn’t do and don’t do things we should do. Another word for that is “conscience.” Or, if you prefer, “reality.”
Posts in this blog can now also be found at IBWisconsin.com, the Wisconsin blog of Madison’s In Business magazine.
Since posts to run or not will be the province of IBWisconsin, I assume IBWisconsin will choose to post entries about Wisconsin business and/or Wisconsin politics. So if you’re looking for my thoughts about, for instance, the Boy Scouts, facial hair, large cars, station wagons, rock music or food, the original Presteblog probably remains your best place.
There is great irony in my appearing in a Madison-based blog, even though it covers the entire state and not merely the People’s Republic of Madison. Though I am a native of the 77 square miles surrounded by reality, I have absolutely zero interest in returning as a Mad City resident, in part because the Madison of my childhood has been replaced by something bigger but not better, and in part because of official and unofficial Madison’s absolute intolerance for non-liberal points of view. Madison’s always been liberal in my lifetime, but not anti-conservative, which it certainly is now.
For those who haven’t read me yet, my views veer between conservative and libertarian depending on the subject. That’s because I’ve observed over the years that Republicans can foul things up while in power as well as Democrats can, and because I find inconsistent the view that government should stay out of your wallet but should be in your bedroom, or vice versa. Despite what you may conclude from reading, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the Republican Party. When Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans deserve criticism, they get it here.
My fellow IBWisconsin bloggers include various business experts and David Blaska, recently (wrongly) punted from Isthmus; Tom Still of the Wisconsin Technology Council, who I started reading at an age far younger than either of us wants to admit back in his Wisconsin State Journal days; former U.S. Senate candidate Terrance Wall; Tom Breuer, former columnist for The Scene, who once interviewed a certain business magazine editor to get an opinion utterly opposite his tabloid’s views; and In Business editor Joe Vanden Plas, who approached me after I corrected a misapprehension of his last year.
One thing new readers will find is that I am the king of state business climate comparisons. The second term paper I did as a political science major at the University of Wisconsin focused on the state’s business climate, back in the days after Kimberly–Clark’s well publicized departure of its corporate headquarters for Dallas because of the state’s bad business climate, as characterized by then-K–C chairman Darwin Smith.
The various business climate comparisons use and weight different criteria (although taxes weigh heavily). Most of them (most recently Forbes) have come to the same conclusion: Wisconsin’s business climate isn’t very good. And Walker and the GOP haven’t done nearly enough to change it in the right direction. (Of course, the Democrats’ goal is to have Wisconsin rank dead last in every business climate comparison.)
Let’s see — the stupid Walker recall election, Recallarama part deux, a socialist running for U.S. Senate, and four more years of the hopey-changey thing? I certainly do not lack for things to write about.
Its remake 16 years later — which I had never heard of before writing this blog — finished 12 places below the original:
The number one British single today in 1962:
The number one single today in 1975
Proving there is no accounting for taste, even among the supposedly cultured British, I present their number one single today in 1981:
The number one British single today in 1997:
The short list of birthdays begins with one-hit-wonder Ernie K. Doe (whose inclusion certainly does not express my opinion about my own mother-in-law):
Bobby Hendricks of the Drifters:
Michael Wilton of Queensryche:
One non-musical death of note today in 1987: The indescribable Andy Warhol, who among other things managed the Velvet Underground:
One musical death of note today in 2002: Drummer Ronnie Verrell, who drummed as Animal on the Muppet Show:
Nearly every politician or candidate speaks of education spending as an “investment.” Some claim any kind of government spending is an “investment,” but education is always so termed, particularly by teacher unions, as if the more spending on schools, the better schools will be, and the better our country will be.
Anecdotally, this doesn’t make sense, at least in Wisconsin. The state has spent more than nearly every other state for decades for our alleged ‘great schools.” Based on education “investment,” Wisconsin should have the number one state economy in the U.S. And yet, in such measures of economic health as per capita personal income growth, business start-ups and incorporations, Wisconsin has trailed the nation since the late 1970s.
Louis Woodhill demonstrates what our education “investment” has gotten us:
Many so-called “Conservatives” voice agreement with this notion. The unstated assumption on both sides of the aisle is that “investment in education” produces an attractive return. But is this true?
No, it’s not. The numbers strongly suggest that, at least in economic terms, America has gotten nothing for the enormous increase in educational “investment” that we have made over the past 60 years. …
So, how would we know if increased government “investment” in education was producing a return? We would see a steady rise in the ratio of GDP to “nonresidential produced assets” over time. Our GDP is produced by a combination of physical capital and human capital. Accordingly, if the economic value of our human capital were rising, the impact would show up in the numbers as increasing productivity of physical capital.
Now, here is the bad news. While total real ($2010) government spending on education increased almost 13-fold from 1951 to 2009, the measured GDP return on physical capital actually declined slightly, from 47.7% to 44.1%. This could not have happened if we were getting an appreciable economic return on our huge “investment” in education. …
Assuming that about 25% of our total population is in school at any one time, average real (2010 dollars) government spending per student rose from $1,763 in 1951 to $12,209 in 2009. This is an increase of about 7 times. Assuming an average of 13 years of education per student (some go to college, some drop out of high school), this means that during this 58-year time period, we increased our real “investment” in the human capital represented by each student from $22,913 to $158,717.
Meanwhile, we have also been investing more in physical capital. Real nonresidential produced assets per worker increased from $79,278 in 1951 to $206,717 in 2009. So, each worker in 2009 had $127,439 more in physical capital and $135,804 more in educational “capital” to work with than he did in 1951.
Unfortunately, it is clear from the numbers that GDP tracks only physical assets, and not the sum of physical assets and educational “assets”. Excluding the GDP produced by the housing stock, the ratio of GDP to nonresidential produced assets has been essentially constant over the 59 years 1951–2009 (it has oscillated with the business cycle around a midpoint of 48.2%).
So, it appears that our massive “investments” in education have produced no measurable economic return. Should we be surprised by this? No. Average scores on standardized tests have not risen, despite the fact that we are “investing” seven times as much in real terms in each student than we did six decades ago. So, even by the measures used by the educational establishment, it is clear that the higher spending has not created any additional human capital. …
Also, imagine if, instead of being given a 2009 education for $158,717, an average student were given a 1967-style education for about $58,000, and $100,000 in capital with which to start his working life. This would be sufficient to start any number of small businesses. Alternatively, if put in an IRA earning a real return of 6%, the $100,000 would grow to about $1.8 million over 50 years.
The huge government “investments” made in education over the past 50 years have produced little more than “Solyndras in the classroom”. They have enriched teachers unions and other rent-seekers, but have added little or nothing to the economic prospects of students.
I eagerly await the next candidate for Wisconsin political office who points out what our billions of dollars spent on education has gotten us. (And if increasing education spending by seven times is producing no test score improvement, well, seven times zero is zero.) I would also love to see a candidate for superintendent of public instruction who didn’t merely parrot what the K–12 education establishment says. For that matter, I’d love to see a school board member or candidate for school board who didn’t merely parrot what the school district administrator said or wanted. (I tried.)
Here’s an indirect example: I went to a meeting for those interested in the Ripon Area School District’s charter middle school, which starts in September. One of the teachers involved mentioned that the charter school is seeking a Department of Public Instruction waiver from the state’s picayune (my term, not his) requirements specifying a certain number of minutes of instruction per subject. (Waiver applications are commonplace among charter schools.) That prompted a parent to object to the waiver application because, she claimed, she wanted her child to be forced to learn such subjects as physical education or art.
I didn’t say anything, because the meeting wasn’t a place to start a political fight. It’s hard to argue against the value of being a well-rounded person, except that school is not where one necessarily becomes a well-rounded person. (Ever heard of church? Scouting?) But the aforementioned instruction-time requirements weren’t created in the educational process; they were created in the political process. (For example, the labor history requirement shoved through the state budget by Gov. James Doyle.) And as the father of children involved in soccer, basketball, swimming and baseball, a physical education requirement seems like a huge waste of time.
As a father of a second charter school student, I find the self-directed nature (within reason) of charter schools appealing. As someone who believes government screws up at least as much as it does well, I find the ability to skirt government’s definition of what students are supposed to learn especially appealing. The time I spent in, for instance, middle school sewing class is time I’ll never get back, and I suspect readers can recall their own wastes-of-time classes.
Is having an educated populace a good thing? Of course it is. But among other things, education is supposed to prepare you for the next level of your life — post-high-school education in the case of high school, and your career in the case of post-high-school education. I don’t find education spending the equivalent of government spending on the War on Poverty, where, it’s been written, the country achieved as much as if the federal government had spent nothing on the War on Poverty. But it does seem obvious that the billions spent in this state and the trillions spent nationally have not achieved anything close to the rate of return all that spending should have achieved. When they were alive, I would have preferred having my eighth-grade-educated grandmother and father-in-law representing us, because despite their lack of education, they were wiser than anyone you’ll run into in the state Capitol.
Education is also supposed to teach you to think for yourself. Those who are touting spending billions of dollars in annual school spending apparently don’t want you to think of where it’s going, or for what.
Beloit Daily News editor William Barth has some advice for Gov. Scott Walker:
If you want to win a recall election (and, I assume, you do), get out of the bunker and out among the people at every wide open public event you can find.
That may make your handlers nervous. They’ll tell you there will be scenes, that protesters will stake out the place, hooting and hollering and shouting you down so bad the audience won’t hear a word you say.
They’ll warn you that loudmouths with bullhorns will harass you and everybody else who comes to see you. Demonstrators may shout profanities and make obscene gestures. They might even try to physically block entrances, or clog up traffic. A mob scene. Ugly.
Precisely why you should get out there, every chance you get, if you want to win.
Face it, governor, after your first year one would think it’s impossible in Wisconsin to make Scott Walker look like a sympathetic figure.
But some of these folks — rude, crude, sometimes indecent — are managing to make that happen.
Why?
Because the Midwest and Wisconsin remain home territory for regular folks who still value decency, civility, manners and mild behavior. They are put off by outlandish misconduct.
Even a lot of people who may not like you much, governor, probably like these louts even less.
Barth got to witness firsthand the quality of protesters Walker is attracting at the Rock County Republican Party Lincoln Day dinner, which featured, in the words of Finnegan’s RV Center owner Mark Finnegan, “a few [protesters] even laying down on the ground in front of the doors to disrupt guests from entering. As I escorted my [World War II veteran] guest through the crowd, we were met with an onslaught of profanity, boos, taunting and a childish, obnoxious guy with a bullhorn.”
Finnegan, by the way, was an invited guest for his role in the VetsRoll program, which takes World War II and Korean War veterans to the war memorials in Washington, D.C. His mother, 86, was a “Rosie the Riveter,” and he escorted two World War II veterans.
Finnegan then became the target:
“After I guided her safely inside, I went back out to meet my arriving mother and to escort her through this intimidating group. Someone in the group recognized who I was and immediately the crowd began a chant of ‘Boycott Finnegans’ RV Center!’ … I met my mother and convinced her that these people were simply expressing their ‘rights’ and that she would be safe. She somewhat reluctantly agreed to walk in. … As we tried to walk through the group again, these people (not kids, mostly in their 40s to 60s) continued to focus their boycott chant on our family name and business of 43 years, crowding, screaming and booing not only me, but my beloved 86-year-old mother. The moron with the bullhorn walked beside us while leading the ‘Boycott Finnegans’ chant with that thing only about 12 inches from my ear and that of my mother’s.”
Finnegan clearly has great self-control. Had I been in his situation, the “moron with the bullhorn” would have been eating said bullhorn, or perhaps receiving it as a suppository.
Barth adds:
• The more obnoxious and repellent protesters act out in public, the better Walker’s chances of surviving a recall become. Offending people is not a very good vote-getting strategy.
• Backlash is all but assured. If I were advising the governor, I’d put him out there with this crowd early and often. Bad behavior drives votes to the other side.
Barth clearly is not familiar with the People’s Republic of Madison, whose Sly in the Morning has devised a new excuse for the behavior of protesters, according to Media Trackers:
Well, the way I see it, yelling at Republican donors who are literally giving money to this governor to suppress worker’s rights, versus people egging homes, calling up people who sign recall petitions, harassing people who are collecting recall signatures, are two very different things. I’m not saying that anyone on our side has stepped over the line. They have.
We’re the aggrieved party.
This is like the police showing up to a case where, ya know, the guy’s beat the crap out of his wife. And yet, ya know, she pushed back. Well, ya know, yes, there was a physical altercation between the couple. But who’s the aggrieved party? Who’s the aggressor?
They are!
I’m not sure what kind of mind believes that people who get good pay and outstanding benefits for their work are the equivalent of domestic abuse victims. Then again, the purpose of unions is to get paid as much as possible for doing as little work as possible.
Today is Presidents Day, a day when you discover who government considers to be “essential.”
The “essential” workers — police officers and firefighters, among others — work today. (So will presidential candidates, not that they’re “essential.”) The nonessential government workers, including nearly all of the U.S. Postal Service, do not work.
The 34.9 percent — those who work for private-sector employers, those who, in Tim Nerenz‘s words, “create the wealth that sustains us all” — are also working today.
What the employers of the 34.9 percent are not doing today is hiring, according to Neal Boortz:
A recent Gallup Poll shows that 85% percent of small business owners say that they are currently not looking for any new workers
Why are they not hiring? Of those who said they were not hiring, 48% cited their concern about possible rising healthcare costs (Read: ObamaCare). Another 46% said that they were worried about new government regulations. Who can blame them? The economy, of course, is also a huge factor.
And here’s one more interesting stat: 71% of small businesses surveyed said that revenues from sales wouldn’t justify hiring additional workers. The cost of employing people, thanks to government regulations, is not worth it to an employer, even if they are successful at generating revenue. …
There are countless stories of businesses having to endure the burdensome reach of our government. Government is impeding growth, rather than fostering a positive growth environment.
Boortz isn’t the only one to notice our overregulation (from those who, I assume, aren’t working today). The Economist:
The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a huge burden collectively. America is meant to be the home of laissez-faire. Unlike Europeans, whose lives have long been circumscribed by meddling governments and diktats from Brussels, Americans are supposed to be free to choose, for better or for worse. Yet for some time America has been straying from this ideal.
Consider the Dodd-Frank law of 2010. Its aim was noble: to prevent another financial crisis. Its strategy was sensible, too: improve transparency, stop banks from taking excessive risks, prevent abusive financial practices and end “too big to fail” by authorising regulators to seize any big, tottering financial firm and wind it down. This newspaper supported these goals at the time, and we still do. But Dodd-Frank is far too complex, and becoming more so. At 848 pages, it is 23 times longer than Glass-Steagall, the reform that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929. Worse, every other page demands that regulators fill in further detail. Some of these clarifications are hundreds of pages long. Just one bit, the “Volcker rule”, which aims to curb risky proprietary trading by banks, includes 383 questions that break down into 1,420 subquestions. …
Dodd-Frank is part of a wider trend. Governments of both parties keep adding stacks of rules, few of which are ever rescinded. Republicans write rules to thwart terrorists, which make flying in America an ordeal and prompt legions of brainy migrants to move to Canada instead. Democrats write rules to expand the welfare state. Barack Obama’s health-care reform of 2010 had many virtues, especially its attempt to make health insurance universal. But it does little to reduce the system’s staggering and increasing complexity. Every hour spent treating a patient in America creates at least 30 minutes of paperwork, and often a whole hour. Next year the number of federally mandated categories of illness and injury for which hospitals may claim reimbursement will rise from 18,000 to 140,000. There are nine codes relating to injuries caused by parrots, and three relating to burns from flaming water-skis. ..,
Complexity costs money. Sarbanes-Oxley, a law aimed at preventing Enron-style frauds, has made it so difficult to list shares on an American stockmarket that firms increasingly look elsewhere or stay private. America’s share of initial public offerings fell from 67% in 2002 (when Sarbox passed) to 16% last year, despite some benign tweaks to the law. A study for the Small Business Administration, a government body, found that regulations in general add $10,585 in costs per employee. It’s a wonder the jobless rate isn’t even higher than it is. …
America needs a smarter approach to regulation.
The aforementioned “smarter approach to regulation” was first touted by the “Third Way” Clinton administration. That didn’t work out so well. In fact, the argument could be made that “smart” attached to a government activity makes it an oxymoron.
While the regulatory pile-on is bipartisan, this chart from the Jobs Creators Alliance shows the number of “economically significant rules” has gone up more steeply in the last few years under the current administration. The White House concedes their new rules have cost businesses $25 billion, more than double the costs from the two previous administrations:
Two groups benefit from overregulation — the government employees who take legislators’ brilliant ideas and turn them into law, and companies large enough to hire employees to deal with the Washington- and Madison-generated red tape. Nerenz pointed out:
Most people are stunned to learn that only 20 million Americans (6.4%) make, mine, build, or grow things. And even that is a bit inflated, as many of the jobs in those companies that make things are administrative positions which exist only to provide information to government agencies and assure compliance with regulations.
Free Enterprise touts a legislative solution:
A step toward a solution is also bipartisan, the Regulatory Accountability Act, sponsored by Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH), Mark Pryor (D-AR), and Susan Collins (R-ME). It would require agencies to weigh the costs and benefits of proposed rules, add more transparency and public input to the rulemaking process, and ensure agencies use sound scientific and technical data in their analysis.
It’s a way to uncoil the regulatory python around the American economy, allowing it to spring free to create jobs and prosperity.
A comment in the Economist story suggests another, and possibly better, way out of this regulation hell:
Taking money out of politics won’t hinder the rent seeking efforts of the big corporations and labor unions–it will only hurt smaller groups. The big special interest groups will elect politicians and promise them their rewards once they are out of office. Many politicians, bureaucrats, go to work for the industry they were monitoring after their careers in politics are over. A better solution would be to implement what public choice economist and Nobel laureate, James Buchanan, put forward: constitutional restraints on the power of politicians. An unregulated political marketplace with self-interested political agents making transactions with corporations and unions, externalizing costs to us, is the problem.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 