Government


Your Legislators Would Never Lie to You

Or would they?

But a professor at Oxford University in England has done a compelling series of studies trying to get at why big public-works projects such as bridges, tunnels and light-rail systems almost always turn out to be far more costly than estimated.
“It cannot be explained by error,” sums up one of his* papers, matter-of-factly. “It is best explained by strategic misrepresentation — that is, lying.”

Don’t think for a minute that this problem is limited to large public-works projects.
It permeates every branch of government and every political party.
It’s not just that they don’t know what they are doing:

It’s not technical challenges or complexity or bad luck, he asserts. If that were so, you’d get more variation in how it all turns out. He concludes the backers of these projects suffer from two main maladies.
One is “delusional optimism” — they want it so badly, they can’t see its flaws. I know about this firsthand from when I supported the monorail.
The second is worse: They knowingly are lying to the public.

Large public-works projects are small compared to wars and massive social programs and the same maladies apply.

*The person referred to is Bent Flyvbjerg. See here and here for more detailed information


Clarifying Middle Class

Here is a chart that makes clear exactly what being middle class means in terms of income: an average annual household after tax income for the middle fifth of households in 2006 of $52,100. Simple interpolation suggests that the top of the middle income group is around $62,950.
Yglesias thinks the chart as a whole implies that:

…the trend is unmistakable. Higher taxes, more transfers, and more government services.

This is undoubtedly true as long as so many believe that government’s role, as our politicians state repeatedly, is focused on protecting and assisting those in the lower 2-3 quintiles.
The chart makes makes a pretty good case, though, that government actions have been around protecting and enhancing the wealth and power of that upper 20% and most particularly the upper 1%.
More taxes, transfers and services are palliatives applied to win votes and do little, if anything, to fix the structural problems that lead to such a poor distribution of income.

The only effective way to make the results among the quintiles more equal will be to change the structure of the economy so that the top 1% is no longer favored. This will require eliminating the extensive government interventions that feed the wealthy on the backs of the poor; on the backs, if you will, of the lower 90+%.


A Lesson obama Could Learn From roosevelt

As they continue enforcing failed policies of their predecessors the obama administration continues to look in a dark hole for answers:

The Obama administration’s top cops and their Mexican counterparts are looking for ways to stop arms smuggling across the border as well as new strategies for fighting the drug cartels that have fueled violence in both countries.

There may not be anything roosevelt can teach obama about dealing with an economic crisis but obama and his administration should be able to learn from the great failure that was righted during the roosevelt administration:

Ending the drug war may not create as many jobs as the above video suggests would be created by ending prohibition but it may certainly end a bunch of useless jobs:

As Webb pointed out in a cover story in Parade magazine, the U.S. is, by far, the most “criminal” country in the world, with 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners. We spend $68 billion per year on corrections, and one-third of those being corrected are serving time for nonviolent drug crimes. We spend about $150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5% of all arrests are marijuana-related.

As Klein says in this article:

That is an awful lot of money, most of it nonfederal, that could be spent on better schools or infrastructure — or simply returned to the public

Heck, perhaps the police could even do something about protecting the public from real crimes with the extra time they would have on their hands; perhaps the judicial system could take steps toward becoming affordable and responsive to the public it is supposed to serve, you know, resolving cases in weeks or months instead of months and years.
Klein’s argument of potential massive tax windfalls is probably wildly overstated:

It is estimated that pot is the largest cash crop in California, with annual revenues approaching $14 billion. A 10% pot tax would yield $1.4 billion in California alone.

Take away law enforcement’s inflated estimates and take away the risk premium and watch that cash crop value drop 50% or more.
The US can end the carnage in Mexico easily. End the drug war and as the last phrase in this History Channel video says: the gangster era of the twenties is over.

In this case it will be the gangster era the past 50 years.