30 March 2010

Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS Oh, and it’s not just Iraq. “Like Iraq, Afghanistan will require roughly
50,000 U.S. combat troops, probably rebadged as advisors, for many
TLF Celebrates 5,000 Posts more years before it is able to stand on its feet.”

[Cato at Liberty] It seems cruelly ironic that Pollack, whose most recent book is titled A
MAR 29, 2010 05:07P.M. Path Out of the Desert, seems only to have a bottomless stack of plans to
keep America stuck on the treadmill in the desert he urged us onto more
By Jim Harper than seven years ago.

The TechLiberationFront blog is celebrating its 5,000th post. If you’re I’ve only skimmed the piece, so maybe there’s more going on here, but
interested in free-market technology policy, it’s a good read. this drip, drip, drip of Beltway elites urging the president to stick around
for several more years is cause for alarm. (And cause for me to start
thinking about drawing up odds about whether we’re going to actually
leave.)
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Keep in mind, the president doesn’t have anybody who vocally opposed
Are We Really Going to Leave the Iraq war in the upper echelons of his administration, so there likely is
nobody on hand to challenge the logic that “success in Iraq is vital to U.S.
Iraq? (part III) [Cato at Liberty] interests.” It’s like it’s 2002 all over again. With the economy in the front
MAR 29, 2010 03:49P.M. of the president’s brain, he seems much more likely to outsource foreign
policy decisions to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and the gaggle of “strategic
By Justin Logan class” foreign policy elites they brought into office with them. And the
American people seem less likely to punish him if he does so.

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

Thoughts on Five-Day Mail

[Cato at Liberty]
MAR 29, 2010 03:47P.M.

By Tad DeHaven

I’ve been asking this question for a while now (see here and here). Now
the influential liberal foreign policy analyst Kenneth Pollack and
coauthor worry that the United States is headed for “premature
evacuation” [.pdf] in Iraq. Pollack and coauthor argue that “if the United
States turns away from Iraq prematurely, it would have dire
consequences for Iraq, whose fragile government will be more likely to
fail, and for the United States, because success in Iraq is vital to U.S.
interests.” Accordingly, the United States needs to aim at “securing a
new agreement with the Iraqi government that would allow U.S. military
forces to remain in the country beyond 2011.”
The USPS has taken the first step toward reducing mail delivery to five
days a week by sending a request to the Postal Regulatory Commission.
However, it will be ultimately up to Congress whether or not Saturday
delivery is eliminated.
The USPS, which is in a death spiral, views the elimination of Saturday
mail delivery service as a step toward regaining its financial footing. Not
surprisingly, the decision is proving controversial among some members
of Congress.
Here’s a better idea: give Americans the freedom to choose the mail
services they want by repealing the USPS monopoly. That way
consumers and businesses could choose to provide and use mail services

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
zero days a week or seven days a week.
Online movie rental services like Netflix offer a small example. A lot of
folks time their Netflix rentals so that they have movies for Saturday
night. Eliminating Saturday delivery will necessarily degrade the quality
of online movie rental services that people are paying for. With
competition, Netflix could offer Saturday (or even Sunday) delivery
through a private alternative. Perhaps there would be a surcharge, but at
least consumers would be allowed to make that choice.
Supporters of the government mail monopoly regularly cite their
amazement that they can drop a letter in a mailbox and it will arrive
unharmed in another mailbox clear across the country. As a $70 billion
operation with the largest workforce in the country, I would hope the
USPS can pull off such a feat.
I find it more impressive that I can go into a grocery store almost
anywhere in the country and be met with an incalculable number of
choices. Take Coke products for instance. I recently made a list of the
various Coke products available to me at a local grocery store. The
following is just a sample: regular Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine-Free Coke,
Diet Caffeine-free Coke, Coke Zero, Coke with Splenda, Coke with Lime,
Coke with Lemon, and Diet Coke Plus. Don’t like Coke? There’s a similar
array of Pepsi products. Don’t like either? The grocery stores also offer
pricier micro-brands with all sorts of unique flavors.
These choices reflect the awesome power of the market, which provides
nearly all the goods and services people want without any direction from
officials in Washington. It would interesting to see what sorts of
innovations and products private mail deliverers would come up with if
the government’s mail monopoly didn’t exist. Instead, Americans are
stuck with a government operation whose floundering business model
will require it to raise prices while simultaneously reducing its services.
So much for freedom of choice.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Monday’s Daily News [The Club
for Growth]
MAR 29, 2010 02:02P.M.
The Repeal pledge is becoming a GOP s actually a labor shortage in
China. Over 2,000 Capitol Hill staffers make 6-figure salaries. Here are
the submitted earmark requests for this year.
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30 March 2010
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
First to the “Top” [Cato at
Liberty“Top”]
MAR 29, 2010 01:58P.M.
By Neal McCluskey
Congratulations Delaware and Tennessee — you’ve won the Race to the
Top beauty contest! Of course, the grading was subjective and will be
disputed by lots of states that haven’t won. Well, haven’t won yet —
there’s a second round to this, remember.
So what do the victories for Delaware and Tennessee mean? The edu-
pundits will no doubt be reading deep into the results over the coming
days, trying to determine what they portend for the future of RttT,
federal education policy generally, and politicians across the country.
And there are some juicy political leads worth following, including the
possibility that the winning states were chosen because they
have Republican congress members who could be pivotal in getting
bipartisan support for the administration’s No Child Left Behind
reauthorization plans.
All of this, though, will ultimately miss by far the biggest point
about RttT: The most beautiful promises and laws mean nothing unless
they are implemented, and history offers little reason to believe that even
the finest parts of the RttT winners’ applications will be brought to bear.
Despite over forty years of federal education interventions, and nearly
two decades of state-level standards-and-accountability reforms,
academic achievement has stagnated. Long-term National Assessment of
Educational Progress scores in mathematics and reading for our schools’
“final products” — high-school seniors — have been almost completely
flat since the early 1970s, and fourth and eighth-grade “main NAEP”
reading scores released just last week demonstrate the same awful trend
since the early 1990s. This despite a 123-percent increase in real, per-
pupil funding since 1970.
Quite simply, no degree of legislative tinkering within the system has
produced lasting improvements because those who would be held to high
standards — teachers, administrators, and bureaucrats — have by far the
most political clout in education, and they’ve hollowed out anything
“tough” that’s been tried. The only thing that will move us powerfully
forward — as extensive research on educational freedom demonstrates –
is empowering parents to bypass education politics by freely choosing
schools that have the autonomy needed to compete and innovate.
Unfortunately, that kind of reform wouldn’t gain a state so much as a
point in the Race to the Top. And the limited choice — charter
schools – that could get a state some points? According to the Center for
Education Reform, Delaware only gets a B for its charter school law — a
grade based generally on how free and competitive charter schools can
be – while Tennessee gets an atrocious mark of D.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
There’s nothing beautiful about that.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Dimensions of Diversity [Cato
at Liberty]
MAR 29, 2010 01:52P.M.
By Julian Sanchez
David Boaz posed some questions about diversity promotion in
American newsrooms in a post yesterday:
But if reflecting the community is essential, why are race and
gender the only categories to be considered? Alexander
doesn’t mention sexual orientation. Does the Post have gay
(and lesbian and bisexual and transgender and questioning…)
journalists in the correct proportions?
And how about ideological diversity? In the 2008 exit polls,
23 percent of voters described themselves as white,
Protestant, born-again or evangelical Christians. A survey of
American religion said that 34 percent of Americans describe
themselves as evangelical or born-again. How many editors
and reporters at the Post would describe themselves that
way? I’ll bet that born-again Christians are the most
underrepresented group in elite newsrooms.
I think David mostly means to offer these as a reductio of preference
policies generally, but I think they’re fair enough questions on
face—possibly because I’m less confident than David that there’s a useful
operational concept of “merit” in reporting that can be disentangled from
identity given some intransigent social facts about 21st century America.
Past some threshold level of competence, a gay reporter is just going to
be able to do a better job of reporting on the gay community than I am,
and a black reporter is going to have an easier time covering Anacostia.
And yes, a white evangelical will probably have an easier time covering
white evangelicals—though it’s no mystery why editors might be more
skittish about an active preference for historically privileged groups. In a
better world, identity might be less important, but in the one we’ve got
it’s likely to bear on a reporter’s effectiveness in certain beats. The
principle has its limits—Gay Talese or Tom Wolfe are going to be
brilliant covering just about anyone—but among mortal reporters you’d
expect some effect.
That said, I can think of a couple reasons why religion and (especially)
ideology might be less desirable diversity targets than immutable
characteristics like race, sex, or orientation. First, outside the realm of
screwball comedies from the 80s, there’s not all that much reason to
worry about aspiring reporters trying to “pass” as black or Hispanic or
(Jack Tripper notwithstanding) gay in hopes of securing a professional
advantage. Religion and politics, by contrast, are fundamentally choices
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30 March 2010
we make, and a system of preferences would create an unseemly
incentive to—either cynically or subconsciously—drift in the favored
direction. There is, I think, something clearly distasteful about a
professional environment in which (say) a mainline Protestant reporter
is perpetually awkwardly aware that his chances at promotion might turn
on whether he’s prepared to declare himself “born again.”
Second, because religion and political ideology are identities
fundamentally grounded in belief, they necessarily go beyond the
reportorial desiderata of being able to understand and get access to a
community you cover. They entail a commitment to seeing one group as
systematically in the right in an array of different types of conflicts or
disagreements with other groups. Making that kind of intellectual
commitment a prerequisite of covering certain beats might run contrary
to the norms of objectivity good newsrooms try to cultivate.
So that might be a legitimate reason for papers to aim for some level of
representativeness along racial, gender, or sexual orientation lines, but
omit religion and ideology—from the newsroom, at any rate. Those
arguments don’t apply as strongly to the editorial page—where, indeed,
we do often see conscious (if not always competent) attempts to
maintain some semblance of balance among perspectives.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
High Interest Rates, Not
Deficits, Cause Inflation [Larry
Kudlow’s Money Politic$]
MAR 29, 2010 12:52P.M.
Treasury rates jumped last week as the 10-year bond moved up to
around 3.85 percent, about 20 basis points or so in the last week or two.
Former Fed head Alan Greenspan calls this the “canary in the coal mine,”
and he blames budget deficits and the huge overhang of the federal debt.
Ask almost anybody in the money business, including the bulk of the
investor class, and they will tell you that budget deficits drive up interest
rates. I’m here to tell you that is wrong. It may seem reasonable, but it’s
still wrong.
This “deficit causes high rates” theory embraced by Alan Greenspan, and
by David Stockman during the Reagan years, and by Robert Rubin
during the Clinton years, has no statistical basis in fact. Actually, one
could make the case that higher deficits are consistent with declining
interest rates, since the worst deficit numbers typically occur when the
economy is in recession and there is no private credit demand. During
economic recoveries, deficits shrink as tax revenues come pouring in.
But interest rates rise during expansions as real investment returns
improve.
The real cause of high interest rates? Inflation.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
If prices are rising, investors demand higher interest rates as inflation
premiums to compensate for their money-value loss. Basically, long-
term interest rates fell from 1980 all the way through 2009 — 30 years as
the inflation rate dropped from 14 percent to roughly zero. That’s three
decades of deficits going up and down and up and down. Rates
continued to fall.
Let me add that a stable King Dollar holds down inflation. That is a much
more powerful tool for interest rates than business-cycle swings in the
budget deficits.
Oh, by the way, deficit/interest-rate mongers fall into a tax-hike trap.
The real issue for holding back deficits over the long run is to curb
excessive federal spending and to keep marginal tax rates low enough to
spur incentives for economic-growth-producing tax revenues. In other
words, the Laffer curve.
Lower tax rates mean a stronger economy. A stronger economy means
more tax revenues. More tax revenues mean lower deficits. And keep
King Dollar intact to hold back the inflationary tide.
Of course, the real problem here is federal spending, not taxes.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
ObamaCare’s New Entitlement
Spending “Sows the Seeds” of a
Budget Crisis [Cato at
Liberty“Sows the Seeds” of a
Budget Crisis]
MAR 29, 2010 12:51P.M.
By Michael F. Cannon
From Robert J. Samuelson’s column in today’s Washington Post:
When historians recount the momentous events of recent
weeks, they will note a curious coincidence. On March 15,
Moody’s Investors Service — the bond rating agency —
published a paper warning that the exploding U.S.
government debt could cause a downgrade of Treasury
bonds. Just six days later, the House of Representatives
passed President Obama’s health-care legislation costing
$900 billion or so over a decade and worsening an already-
bleak budget outlook.
Should the United States someday suffer a budget
crisis, it will be hard not to conclude that Obama and
his allies sowed the seeds, because they ignored
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30 March 2010
conspicuous warnings. A further irony will not escape
historians. For two years, Obama and members of
Congress have angrily blamed the shortsightedness
and selfishness of bankers and rating agencies for
causing the recent financial crisis. The president and
his supporters, historians will note, were equally
shortsighted and self-centered — though their quest
was for political glory, not financial gain.
I hope Samuelson is wrong, but it’s probably a good idea to behave as if
he’s right, and repeal ObamaCare’s new entitlement spending.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Medicare Fraud: 1, Anti-Fraud
Measures: 0 [Cato at Liberty]
MAR 29, 2010 12:48P.M.
By Michael F. Cannon
As the nation contemplates the new health care entitlements that
Congress and President Obama just created, it is worth noting an article
in today’s Washington Post, which reports on the performance of past
efforts to eliminate fraud in another health care entitlement:
More than a decade ago, Congress set out to squeeze the
fraud out of Medicare billing at nursing homes, requiring
more precise justifications for costs. It created new “ultra-
high” billing categories intended to be used for only 5 percent
of the patients needing highly specialized care and
rehabilitation.
But within a few years, nursing homes flooded the ultra-high
categories with patients, contributing to $542 million a year
in potential overpayments, federal analysts found.
Since then, the numbers in the ultra-high categories have
quadrupled, and the amount of waste and abuse could reach
billions of dollars a year…
The article ends with the ominous implication that eliminating fraud in
entitlement programs like Medicare will ultimately require government
agencies to decide whether certain services are medically necessary.
Death panels, anyone?
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Crist Fiscally Responsible? Not
So Fast [Cato at Liberty]
MAR 29, 2010 11:46A.M.
By Chris Moody
He did it again: Florida governor and senatorial candidate Charlie Crist
cited Cato’s 2008 Governors’ Report Card as evidence of his fiscal
conservative credentials, this time in a Fox News Sunday debate with his
primary opponent Marco Rubio.
Trouble is, the report card’s author, Chris Edwards, has gone on the
record again and again explaining how Crist has fallen hard off the fiscal
responsibility wagon since the report was released two years ago.
The Florida media has publicized Edwards’ correction of the record
numerous times since Crist began citing the Cato rating in his political
ads. It is difficult to believe that Crist can be unaware of that.
Here’s Edwards in October 2009:
Since I wrote the report in mid-2008, the governor seems
to have fallen off the fiscal responsibility horse.
In particular, Crist approved a huge $2.2 billion tax
increase for the fiscal 2010 budget, even though he had
promised that $12 billion in federal “stimulus” money
showered on Florida over three years would obviate the need
for tax increases.
About $1 billion of the tax increases are on cigarette
consumers, which will particularly harm moderate-income
families. The rest of the increases are in the form of higher
costs for often mandatory services, such as automobile
registration, which is really just a sneaky form of tax
increases.
Watch the exchange below. Crist cites Cato at 8:43:
Watch the latest news video at video.foxnews.com
Transcript here.
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30 March 2010
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Justice Sunstein? [Cato at
Liberty]
MAR 29, 2010 11:41A.M.
By Tim Lynch
Glenn Greenwald takes a look at the prospect of Obama nominating Cass
Sunstein to the Supreme Court. Whereas Randy Barnett has championed
a “presumption of liberty” whenever a constitutional controversy is
unclear, Sunstein seems to champion a “presumption for the state.”
More on Sunstein here.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
A Columnist Sentenced to Three
Years in Prison in Ecuador
[Cato at Liberty]
MAR 29, 2010 10:39A.M.
By Gabriela Calderon
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has long labeled the free press as his
“main enemy.” His attitude has unfortunately resulted in official
intolerance of individuals critical of the government.
The latest example is that of Emilio Palacio, the editor of the op-ed page
of El Universo — the newspaper with the highest circulation in the
country — who was sentenced on Friday to three years in jail for an op-
ed he wrote in August 2009. Palacio accused Camilo Samán, director of a
state-owned bank, of having sent protesters to El Universo’s offices after
the newspaper reported on possible acts of corruption at the bank. The
President has repeatedly stated that Palacio should be punished for what
he wrote. In a country where everybody knows that the courts are not
independent of political power, it’s not surprising that the ruling went
against the editor.
I have known Palacio since I began writing op-eds for El Universo in late
2006. Although we hardly ever agree on policy issues, I certainly don’t
believe he (or anyone else) deserves to go to jail (and possibly pay a fine
of $3 million) for expressing an opinion. (The court actually found
Palacio guilty of libel, but even if we were to agree with that finding, the
punishment surely does not fit the crime.)
Correa’s government has accused at least 31 people of offending “the
majesty of the presidency,” jailing many of them for short periods of
time. To do so, the President revived a law that the first military
dictatorship of the 1970s put into place that made such an offense a
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
crime and that was never taken off the books.
The government regularly vilifies its critics including journalists,
university students, businessmen, and indigenous leaders. For example,
during his weekly national radio shows, the President has attacked
Carlos Vera and Jorge Ortiz, the two most popular news anchors in the
country. The government’s frequent nationally televised messages (that
every TV station on public airwaves is forced to broadcast) usually have
the sole purpose of attacking a person or group that opposes official
policy. Sometimes these messages were broadcast during Vera’s and
Ortiz’s programs, thereby keeping their viewers from watching them. In
2008 Correa took over several privately owned TV and radio stations.
Last year, he apparently had his eyes set on Teleamazonas, another TV
station on public airwaves. In December, the government shut down
Teleamazonas for three days and now has a frivolous legal case pending
against it.
Sadly, Correa is following the pattern of his fellow populist Hugo Chávez
in curtailing freedom of speech, though receiving virtually no
international scrutiny.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
The Flat Tax: Good for America,
Bad for Washington [Cato at
Liberty]
MAR 29, 2010 09:58A.M.
By Daniel J. Mitchell
America’s biggest fiscal challenge is excessive government spending. The
public sector is far too large today and it is projected to get much bigger
in coming decades. But the corrupt and punitive internal revenue code is
second on the list of fiscal problems. This new video, narrated by yours
truly, explains how a flat tax would work and why it would promote
growth and fairness. Something to keep in mind with tax day in just a
couple of weeks.
There are two big hurdles that must be overcome to achieve tax reform.
The first obstacle is that the class-warfare crowd wants the tax code to
penalize success with high tax rates. That issue is addressed in the video
in a couple of ways. I explain that fairness should be defined as treating
all people equally, and I also point out that upper-income taxpayers are
far more likely to benefit from all the deductions, credits, exemptions,
preferences, and other loopholes in the tax code. The second obstacle,
which is more of an inside-the-beltway issue, is that the current tax
system is very rewarding for the iron triangle of lobbyists, politicians,
and bureaucrats (or maybe iron rectangle if we include the tax
preparation industry). There are tens of thousands of people who make
very generous salaries precisely because the tax code is a playground for
corrupt deal making. A flat tax for these folks would be like kryptonite
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30 March 2010
for Superman. But more than two dozen nations around the world have
implemented a flat tax, so hope springs eternal.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Podhoretz on Palin [Cato at
Liberty]
MAR 29, 2010 09:57A.M.
By Roger Pilon
Today Politico Arena asks:
Comment please on Podhotetz on Palin
My response:
To complete Norman Podhoretz’s thought in this morning’s Wall Street
Journal, “I knew Ron Reagan. Ron Reagan was a friend of mine.
Governor Palin, you’re no Ron Reagan — but I like you all the same.”
And that distinguishes Podhoretz from those “conservative intellectuals”
whose antipathy to Sarah Palin and “the loathsome Tea Party rabble” is
ultimately explained, he believes, by “the same species of class bias that
Mrs. Palin provokes in her enemies and her admirers.”
To be sure, that “class bias” explains a good measure of the hostility Mrs.
Palin has faced, especially among that often diverse band called
neoconservatives. For like their counterparts on the left, most
neoconservatives find their roots in progressivism, not in limited
government classical liberalism, and hence in the idea that society
should be “run” by elites trained at the “best schools” — the difference
being that in engineering society the neoconservatives march to different
drummers than modern liberals. Both camps have greater faith in
government than does ”the common man,” who is distrusted by both
camps (not always without reason), although Podhoretz seems more
trustful than most in his band.
Where he errs, I believe, is in his too breezy comparison of Palin to
Reagan. There are similarities of course – especially in the reactions of
elites to both, on which his essay dwells — the most important of which
is that both show a certain common sense approach to the world and to
public affairs. Their intuitions seem sound, that is. But it takes more
than sound intuition to be a successful president. Ronald Reagan was
always underestimated. Unlike so many of his elite critics, left and
right, he came from humble beginnings, but he was an autodidact his
whole life. He read and understood economists, political theorists,
historians, and biographers. That knowledge, coupled with a wealth of
experience, including two successful terms as governor of the nation’s
largest state, distinguishes him from Mrs. Palin. Both have that common
sense that enables them to speak to “the common man,” but the
similarity ends there.
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Perhaps Mrs. Palin will find the life she has carved out since leaving the FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
governorship of Alaska will be attractive enough to encourage her to
continue in it. My sense, however, is that the millions of Americans who Why Congress Should Repeal
today are deeply troubled by the direction the country is taking under the
Obama administration are still looking for candidates who combine the the Individual Mandate [Cato at
understanding, the common sense, and the humility that Ronald Reagan
so clearly embodied. Liberty]
MAR 29, 2010 09:45A.M.

By Michael F. Cannon
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

Pot, Protectionism, and Unions

[Cato at Liberty]
MAR 29, 2010 09:48A.M.
By David Boaz
Lobbying reporter Tim Carney notes that some California marijuana
growers are worried that a proposed legalization initiative could drive
down the price of the product and adversely affect their incomes. They’re
holding meetings to deal with the threat. Some growers are just talking
about creating an official Humboldt seal of approval. Maybe they could
even get legal restrictions on who can use the Humboldt name, like
Champagne and Roquefort. But some local stores sport bumper stickers
reading “Save Humboldt County — keep pot illegal.”
The story reminds Carney of this Reason.tv video featuring a
spokeswoman for the purported American Marijuana Growers
Association, who urge smokers to buy only American-grown bud:
And that video reminds me of this classic Saturday Night Live video,
from those heady days in the ’70s when television shows could joke
about marijuana, featuring the American Dope Growers
Union reminding viewers that when you buy pot from Mexico or
Colombia, “you’re putting an American out of work.” (The SNL sketch
was based on a much-broadcast commercial by the International Ladies
Garment Workers Union singing “Look for the Union Label,” to
discourage Americans from buying foreign-made products.)
Union rules, protectionist laws, and sometimes even outright bans are all
ways of avoiding the rigors of competition, seeking to prevent consumers
from buying products and services where they’re cheapest. Sometimes
there are laws banning or taxing the purchase of goods from another
country. Sometimes there are appeals to compassion and patriotism, like
“Buy American” or “Buy Local” campaigns. Sometimes an outright ban
on the sale of a product actually products the market for established
illegal sellers, as the Humboldt County marijuana growers are thinking,
and as economist Bruce Yandle theorized in his work on “bootleggers
and Baptists.”
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Earmark Requests Going Online
— In Wrong Formats [Cato at
Liberty— In Wrong Formats]
MAR 29, 2010 08:39A.M.
By Jim Harper
As required by rules instituted last year, members of Congress are
posting their earmark requests online. And in a small improvement over
past practice, t he House Appropriations Committee is p o s t i n g
links to all th ose pages ( in alphabetical
order andb y s t a t e ). The Senate
Appropriations Committee is doing the same.
So, great. You can go line-by-line and figure out what requests your
member of Congress has put in. But what’s the total number of your
members’ requests? What’s the total amount of his or her requests? Who
requested the most earmarks, in dollars or in number? Where in your
district is the money supposed to go?
HTML pages and PDF documents are very hard to work with and don’t
allow us to answer these questions. The Earmarkdata.org project is
asking Congress to produce information about what it’s doing in formats
that are useful for public oversight. Cato’s December 2008 policy forum
on this topic was called “Just Give Us the Data!”
The Earmarkdata.org site has a petition people can sign to ask their
representatives to produce good earmark data.