Economics


Legislator Speak

It is well known that legislators generally can only be trusted when they promise to take your money. They are not bashful about speaking disengenously, providing misleading information, and, for that matter, outright lying about the impacts of proposed legislation. They’ll regularly contradict themselves in the course of the same conversation.
For instance, the Illinois senate just passed a bill that says:

Working parents would be entitled to 24 hours of unpaid work leave during a school year to attend their children’s school conferences or classroom activities,

One of the sponsors, Senator Iris Martinez, touts the bill:

“I personally feel that when you have employees, and you are sensitive to their parental needs, you have a happy employee,” Martinez said. “It shows the employer cares about family. Then you have families involved in education.”
But Martinez said the legislation provides safeguards so employees don’t abuse the privilege. She said employees would have to give advance notice of their absence and would be required to provide employers with certification from an educator upon their return.

And then the lie:

“We’re making sure the employer doesn’t lose any productivity,” she said. “There are a lot of safety nets put into place.”

Uhh, let’s see: employee gets unpaid time off, there is paper work to process, but there is no productivity lost? She is probably saying this BS with a straight face.
Perhaps the Illinois house will have better sense.
Remember, when stuff like this becomes law we all pay for it through higher prices, reduced wages, and lost jobs.


Choicepoint

Most of you are, by now, aware of the Choicepoint fiasco:

Criminals posing as legitimate businesses have accessed critical personal data stored by ChoicePoint Inc., a firm that maintains databases of background information on virtually every U.S. citizen, MSNBC.com has learned.
The incident involves a wide swath of consumer data, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, credit reports and other information. ChoicePoint aggregates and sells such personal information to government agencies and private companies.

Ed Foster notes:

What the ChoicePoint fiasco really shows we need, however, are baseline federal privacy standards that apply to all industries. Although it’s certainly ironic that the “nation’s leading provider of identification and credential verification services” couldn’t figure out it was selling our info to a ring of criminals, the real problem is that data brokers like ChoicePoint can legally sell our information to just about whomever they please.

Federal standards and regulations are invariably broken and generally never written with individual citizens in mind but Ed’s last point hits the nail on the head.
No institution, government or private, can be allowed to collect or distribute, for free or for fee, any information about an individual without that individuals specific consent on a per incident basis and if the distribution is for a fee then that individual must be compensated at a rate agreeable to the individual.
The Privacy Digest has more information on both what the Choicepoint breach means to individuals and what information they may have about you.