Last night Sarah Palin added her voice to the populist chorus:

Darn right it was the predator lenders, who tried to talk Americans into thinking that it was smart to buy a $300,000 house if we could only afford a $100,000 house. There was deception there, and there was greed and there is corruption on Wall Street. And we need to stop that.

How? If private citizens are adults, how does the government prevent them doing something dumb? Or greedy?

Truth in Lending laws already compel lenders to spell out terms (that mountain of paperwork required for every loan closing.) So what if borrowers won’t/don’t take the time to understand what they’re signing?

How big a Nanny must the state be?

While responsible American taxpayers fume about bailing out/rescuing Wall Street, they should reserve some ire for their greedy neighbors on Main Street. After all, who borrowed the billions that are not being repaid?

As we now see, when your neighbor stiffs the bank, he’s also stiffing you.

During the real estate boom, many gleefully watched their home equity boom. Many tapped that equity (windfall profits?) to buy (speculate?) on second houses, finance cars, go on vacations etc. Those that couldn’t or wouldn’t pay back the loans are predatory borrowers, no?

Palin added a moment later: 

We need to make sure that we demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in charge of our investments and our savings and we need also to not get ourselves in debt. Let’s do what our parents told us before we probably even got that first credit card. Don’t live outside of our means. We need to make sure that as individuals we’re taking personal responsibility through all of this.

According to pollster Frank Luntz, who had an audience wired as they watched the debate, this comment registered a jolt of approval.

Palin added:

It’s not the American people’s fault that the economy is hurting like it is, but we have an opportunity to learn a heck of a lot of good lessons through this and say never again will we be taken advantage of.

That’s wrong. It is certain people’s fault that the economy is hurting. It may be bad politics to say so, but it’s the truth.

As John McCain and Barack Obama both claim to be reformers who will cut government waste.  Who put his money vote where his mouth is?

This year both Republicans and Democrats joined hands (oh, sweet bi-partisanship!) to screw the American public with a bloated farm bill. Bush vetoed it, but was overridden.

About the bill, The WSJ noted:

Yet you couldn’t write a piece of legislation that more thoroughly represents the Beltway status quo than this one. In every way imaginable, and even a few more, it repeats and compounds the spendthrift errors of previous farm bills.

Since the last farm bill in 2002, the price of cotton is up 105%, soybeans 164%, corn 169% and wheat 256%. Yet when Mr. Bush proposed the genuine change of limiting farm welfare to those earning less than $200,000 a year, he was laughed out of town. The bill purports to limit subsidies to those earning a mere $750,000, but loopholes and spousal qualifications make it closer to $2.5 million. As Barack Obama likes to say, it’s time Washington worked for “the middle class,” which apparently includes millionaire corn and sugar farmers.

Another purported change is the arrival of “fiscal discipline,” in Nancy Pelosi’s favorite phrase from the 2006 campaign. Yet it turns out this farm extravaganza may bust federal budget targets even more than we thought a week ago. That’s because the new price supports – the guaranteed floor payments farmers receive for their crops – have been raised to match this year’s record prices.

Mad yet? Keep reading.

The USDA reports that if crop prices fall from these highs to their norm over the next five years, farm payments will surge. For example, if corn prices return to $3.25 a bushel from today’s $6, farmers would get $10 billion a year in support payments. If bean prices fall to their norm, they’d get $4 billion. Thus, if farm prices stay high, consumers face higher grocery bills and farmers get rich. If farm prices fall, taxpayers kick in the difference and farmers still get rich.

Sugar producers also make out like Beltway bandits, receiving the difference between the world price of sugar, which is now $12 per pound, and the guaranteed price of about $21 per pound. That’s a roughly 75% subsidy for already wealthy cane growers and a nice payoff for the $3 million they contribute to House candidates each year.

Any wonder why food prices are going up?

All of this is a status quo that both political parties can believe in. More than a few liberal Democrats are privately embarrassed by this corporate welfare spectacle. But they’ve been mollified by Speaker Pelosi, who spent the last week assuring her left that the bill also includes another $10.4 billion for food stamps and nutrition programs.

This entitlement expansion comes only days after the Congressional Budget Office reported that paying the bills for existing entitlements could require tax rates to climb to 80% in the future. Yes we can!

So the American taxpayer gets screwed coming and going. Now, guess who voted for this piece of crap?

Sen. Barack Obama voted for the bill.

Sen. John McCain voted against it.

Congress has decreed the demise of the incandescent light bulb by 2012. They are to be replaced with CFLs — those Dairy Queen ice cream shaped bulbs that cost more, last longer, cannot be dimmed and contain mercury.

They are also a fraud when it comes to light output. The 23-watt CFLs are touted as equal to a 100-watt incandescent. Until today, I blindly believed this. (I’ll add that I was an early adopter of CFLs and have them in most lamps where they’ll work or fit.)

When my wife and I bought a new torchiere lamp, we put in a 23-watt CFL. It seemed dim, so I bought a 120 watt equivalent, which seemed dimmer.

Curious, I got out my light meter and compared the 23 watt CFL, rated at 100 watts, with a real 100-watt incandescent light bulb. The incandescent bulb puts out twice as much light.

I hate it when people lie to me. I hate it when Apple claims ridiculous battery life for its iPods. But I especially hate it when meddlesome Congressional dim bulbs force me to use something inferior.

Caveat: I only tested one brand of CFL (from Costco). Others may output more light, but I doubt it. Anyone else with a light meter, pleasure measure your bulbs and let me know.

Pubs in Yorkshire have been ordered to ban people from wearing flat caps or other hats so troublemakers can be more easily recognised.

Blimey, better blame Bush!

Wall Street Journal: 

Justice Scalia shreds the collective interpretation as a matter of both common law and Constitutional history. He writes that the Founders, as well as nearly all Constitutional scholars over the decades, believed in the individual right. Many Supreme Court opinions invoke the Founders, but this one is refreshing in its resort to first American principles and its affirmation of a basic liberty. It’s not too much to say that Heller is every bit as important to the Second Amendment as Near v. Minnesota (prior restraint) or N.Y. Times v. Sullivan (libel) are to the First Amendment.

Which makes it all the more troubling that no less than four Justices were willing to explain this right away. These are the same four liberal Justices who routinely invoke the “right to privacy” – which is nowhere in the text of the Constitution – as a justification for asserting various social rights. Yet in his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens argues that a right to bear arms that is plainly in the text adheres to an individual only if he is sanctioned by government.

Justice Breyer, who wrote a companion dissent, takes a more devious tack. He wants to establish an “interest-balancing test” to weigh the Constitutionality of particular restrictions on gun ownership. This balancing test is best understood as a roadmap for vitiating the practical effects of Heller going forward.

Using Justice Breyer’s “test,” judges could accept the existence of an individual right to bear arms in theory, while whittling it down to nothing by weighing that right against the interests of the government in preventing gun-related violence. Having set forth this supposedly neutral standard, Justice Breyer shows his policy hand by arguing that under this standard the interests of the District of Columbia would outweigh Mr. Heller’s interest in defending himself, and the ban should thus be upheld.

But as Justice Scalia writes, no other Constitutional right is subjected to this sort of interest-balancing. “The very enumeration of the right takes [it] out of the hands of government” – even the hands of Olympian judges like Stephen Breyer. “Like the First, [the Second Amendment] is the very product of an interest-balancing by the people – which Justice Breyer would now conduct for them anew.”

In that one sentence, Justice Scalia illuminates a main fault line on this current Supreme Court. The four liberals are far more willing to empower the government and judges to restrict individual liberty, save on matters of personal lifestyle (abortion, gay rights) or perhaps crime. The four conservatives are far more willing to defend individuals against government power – for example, in owning firearms, or private property (the 2005 Kelo case on eminent domain). Justice Anthony Kennedy swings both ways, and in Heller he sided with the people.

A President Obama would give us more Breyers, which is ironic, given that Leftists are always complaining about the government intruding on their civil liberties.

The Bush tax relief that played such an integral role in our emergence from the last recession and in our admirable growth for over six years will expire at the end of 2010. That event, if allowed to occur, will represent the largest tax increase in American history — as much as $2 trillion over 10 years by some estimates. This compares with the Clinton tax increase that was scored at $240 billion over five years. 

But first, any honest discussion on taxes must begin with an honest examination of who pays. For 2005, the most recent year for which information is available, IRS data indicate that taxpayers with an adjusted gross income in the top 25 percent of the population bore 86 percent of the federal income tax burden. If you expand it to the top 50 percent, the number jumps to 97 percent. In other words, the bottom half of the country pays a paltry 3 percent of the country’s taxes. This proves, in part, the steep progressivity of the income tax system. 

 But what about the Bush tax cuts? They only favor the wealthy, right? Again, let’s go to the facts. Since 2000, when President Bush entered office, the share of federal tax liabilities borne by the lowest and middle quintiles has decreased, while the share borne by the highest quintile has increased. In 2000, the lowest quintile bore 1.1 percent of total federal tax liabilities compared with 0.9 percent in 2004, the year that all of the Bush tax cuts were in effect. Thus, the federal tax liability of the lowest quintile dropped 18 percent. However, the highest quintile paid 67.2 percent of these liabilities in 2004, an increase of 1 percent in their liability since 2000, when they paid 66.6 percent. Far from favoring the wealthy, these numbers suggest that the wealthy are bearing more of the tax burden 

The Department of the Treasury recently released a paper studying the impact of letting tax relief expire: “A four-person, one-earner family with wage income each year of $40,000 in 2007 dollars would see a tax increase of $2,345; a four-person, one-earner family with wage income each year of $80,000 in 2007 dollars would see a tax increase of $2,000; a three-person, one-earner family with wage income each year of $40,000 in 2007 dollars would see a tax increase of $1,655; and a head of household with two children and wage income each year of $30,000 in 2007 dollars would see a tax increase of $1,615.” 

More than 116 million Americans would see their taxes go up. And small businesses that pay their taxes based on individual rates (which is most of them) could see their effective rate rise to more than 44 percent. 

Usually nanny state is used metaphorically. In Canada, it is literal — a father cannot punish his daughter by withholding privileges without Big Hoser Daddy overruling him.

A father plans to appeal after a Quebec court ruled that he didn’t have the right to punish his 12-year-old daughter by barring her from a school trip.

Quebec Superior Court Judge Suzanne Tessier ruled Friday that the girl should be allowed to attend the three-day trip within Quebec this week.

Initially, the father forbade his daughter from going online after the Grade 6 student posted photos on a dating site, the Globe and Mail reported in its Thursday edition.

The girl’s parents are divorced, and after she had an alleged row with her stepmother, her father barred her from going on a school trip to mark the class’s graduation from elementary school, the newspaper reported.

“When he said, ‘OK, it’s final. You’re not going,’ she smacked the door, left and went to live with her mother,” the father’s lawyer, Kim Beaudoin, told CBC News.

Last Wednesday, the father received a motion petitioning the court to overturn the punishment.

Two days later, the judge ruled the punishment was too severe because the girl had already been sufficiently disciplined, Beaudoin said.

Imagine telling your child to go his room or else, to which he replies, “Who’s gonna make me? You and what judge?”

But the judge’s decision was not just a case of a child going to court to get out of trouble, said Miriam Grassby, a Quebec family lawyer who has spoken with the various attorneys involved.

Under Quebec family law, it is not uncommon for a child in a high-conflict situation between two parents to have an attorney appointed to protect his or her best interests, as was the case here, Grassby said.

“In Quebec, no matter who has custody, we have joint parental authority,” Grassby told CBC News on Thursday. “There are issues of discipline where both parents have to agree, and if they don’t, we will have a place” to resolve the issue in court.

The attorney representing the child had been chosen and agreed to by both parents, she noted.

“The court is there to be an objective third party, and these children who are in these high-conflict situations need the protection of the court,” Grassby said.

“I think we could presume the judge had good judgment in the fact that she read the statements and found out what both parents were saying, and that the child was punished at least once for that, and this was excessive punishment.”

Kevin Kosar: 

“Troublemaker” may be the nicest epithet ever applied to Chester E. Finn Jr. Though genial and in possession of legions of friends and admirers, Finn, the head of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, has many critics. Leftist academics have nothing but spite for him. Henry A. Giroux, a professor of communications, has called Finn “slimy,” and a fair number of other members of the education establishment, a.k.a. “the blob,” deride Finn as part of a conservative, neoconservative, or capitalist (take your pick) cabal that is hell-bent on privatizing public schools. 

In part, this enmity is due to Finn’s brutal candor, which I witnessed firsthand at an education conference in 2001. Early in the program, a sharp reporter of some renown lobbed a half-baked question at Finn. With a few words, “Checker” (as everyone calls him) blew the question from the sky like a clay pigeon. I thought, “Doesn’t he know who she is? He’s going to get hammered in her next article.” Of course, he knew who the reporter was; he just did not care.  

Mostly, though, Checker has earned enemies because he is a tireless advocate of school reform—and has been one for four decades now. His relentless questioning of popular shibboleths (“Fewer children in a classroom makes for higher achievement! Charter schools take money from public schools!”) has made him a pariah among many academics and activists.

Checker’s passion for improving student learning comes through clearly in Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik (Princeton, $26.95). His family story is classically American. The Finns arrived from Russia in 1891 and settled in Dayton, Ohio. Checker’s great-grandfather started a “bag and burlap” company. One of his sons, Samuel, Checker’s grandfather, completed high school and sold soap door-to-door while studying law. By age 30, Samuel Finn had passed the bar and started a law firm. The Finn family was ascending. As Checker puts it, “Just three decades after my Yiddish-speaking great-grandmother peddled produce from a wagon, my father matriculated at Yale.”

Jonah Goldberg on the Senate privatizing its restaurants. 

This was a painful decision for many Democrats who believe that privatization can’t be justified simply because it delivers better service and higher quality for less money. “What about the workers?” they cried. Apparently, some Democrats feel that the top priority in the restaurant business is to generate paychecks for people who are bad at their jobs.

Feinstein, head of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, was forced to deal with reality. “It’s cratering,” The Washington Post quoted her as saying. “Candidly, I don’t think the taxpayers should be subsidizing something that doesn’t need to be. There are parts of government that can be run like a business and should be run like businesses.”

Yes, yes, go on, Dianne. Run with that thought. Explore it, as the therapists say.

Perhaps you might meditate on the District of Columbia’s public school system, which spends roughly $14,000 a pupil in exchange for one of the worst educations in the country. Every year, one of the greatest mysteries in the nation’s capital is whether textbooks have been delivered to the right kids, or even to the right schools. It can take until Christmas to get it all worked out. FedEx Corp., meanwhile, can tell you where any of its millions of packages are in more than 100 countries, right now. (Why not just FedEx the textbooks to the kids?)

Or you might ponder the hilarious example of New York’s OTB. For most of the last 40 years, these state-run betting parlors have actually lost money. Apparently, the house always wins - except when the government is the bookie.

Look wherever you like, it’s not as if there’s a shortage of examples. And more are on the way.

Indeed, all augurs point to a tsunami of government ambition in the years ahead, particularly if Barack Obama wins in November. Obama promises a national health-insurance plan overseen by the kith and kin who serve the Senate its navy bean soup.

He believes that the failure of public schools - like DC’s - is largely attributable to the under-funding of education. DC’s schools already are among the best-funded and worst schools in the country. By all means, let’s have more of the same!

And he’ll celebrate it as change!

In politics, “change” is just shorthand for “me, not him.” Brian Wesbury makes the case that when people yearn for change, it’s really because they’ve had too much of it to digest.

…what everyone seems to want – change. Sen. Obama promises to provide “Change We Can Believe In.” Sen. McCain suggests that “the choice is between the right change and the wrong change.” If it’s the war that is the focus of all this talk about change, well, that’s understandable, and maybe people really do want change. But if it’s the economy, it’s hard to imagine that change could happen any faster.

In fact, the U.S. economy (really, the global economy) is transforming at an absolutely astounding rate. We’re living in Internet Time, where policies and their consequences travel the world at the speed of light. The normal human reaction to such a rapid pace of change is to be overwhelmed, stressed out, anxious and fearful. As a result, it is probably true that when voters listen to talk about change, what they really hear are promises of “no change,” which would be a huge difference from the status quo. They just want things “the way they were.”

Look at the chart nearby. America’s manufacturing output, as measured by the Federal Reserve, is up seven-fold since 1950, but manufacturing jobs as a share of all jobs have fallen to 10% from 30%. Your grandfather and father may have worked for General Motors (and joined the UAW), but it’s likely that you don’t and won’t.

The problem, if it really is one, is not foreign competition or evil financiers. It is technology and productivity. In the 10 years ending in 2007, durable goods manufacturing productivity averaged an annual growth rate of 4.8%. In other words, if real growth is less than 4.8%, the sector needs fewer workers year after year.

For the economy as a whole, overall U.S. business productivity rose 2.7% at an average annual rate during the decade ending in 2007, 1.7% in the decade ending in 1997 and 1.4% in the 10 years through 1987. Change is everywhere, and it’s accelerating.

This has happened before – in the Industrial Revolution – where the political environment bred America’s first real populists, people like William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt. Bryan was perhaps the best orator of American political history, and like Mr. Obama, he could affect people emotionally. Roosevelt, like Mr. McCain today, was a true American hero and one tough guy. History may not be exactly repetitive, but it sure seems to move to similar rhythms.

Unfortunately for the American economy, the populist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to a rapid growth in government intrusion into business activity. The populists didn’t like the gold standard and demanded more government regulation.

In 1913, the Federal Reserve System was created and the income tax was introduced to pay for a growing government. And then, during the Great Depression – which was caused by the new Fed, trade protectionism and tax rate increases – a massive expansion in government took place. Forty years later, in the malaise of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the U.S. finally figured out what it was doing wrong. By returning to hard money under Paul Volcker, and lower taxes and less regulation under Ronald Reagan, the high-tech leg of the Industrial Revolution began.

The fruits of this are plain to see. Rather than watching the sun set on the U.S., as many believed would happen in the early 1980s, the U.S. has experienced one of the greatest booms in wealth creation in world history. And the impact of our technological innovation has helped lift untold numbers out of poverty.

This technology has created massive amounts of change. Like the Industrial Revolution before it, the current transformation is anything but pain-free. It’s what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. Google, Craigslist and Microsoft have been prospering. General Motors, United Airlines and the New York Times have not. In the midst of layoffs in the newsroom, it’s hard to see anything good happening in the rest of the economy.

What kind of “change” do we really need?

Americans have had it so good, for so long, that they seem to have forgotten what government’s heavy hand does to living standards and economic growth. But the same technological innovation that is causing all this dislocation and anxiety has also created an information network that is as near to real-time as the world has ever experienced.

For example, President Bush put steel tariffs in place in March 2002. Less than two years later, in December 2003, he rescinded them. This is something most politicians don’t do. But because the tariffs caused such a sharp rise in the price of steel, small and mid-size businesses complained loudly. The unintended consequences became visible to most Americans very quickly.

Decades ago the feedback mechanism was slow. The unintended consequences of the New Deal took too long to show up in the economy. As a result, by the time the pain was publicized, the connection to misguided government policy could not be made. Today, in the midst of Internet Time, this is no longer a problem. So, despite protestations from staff at the White House, most people understand that food riots in foreign lands and higher prices at U.S. grocery stores are linked to ethanol subsidies in the U.S., which have sent shock waves through the global system.

This is the good news. Policy mistakes will be ferreted out very quickly. As a result, any politician who attempts to change things will be blamed for the unintended consequences right away.

Unless they’re Democrats with the news media covering for them.

Both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama view the world from a legislative perspective. Like the populists before them, they seem to believe that government can fix problems in the economy. They seem to believe that what the world needs is a change in the way government attacks problems and fixes the anxiety of voters. This command-and-control approach, however, forces a misallocation of resources. And in Internet Time this will become visible in almost real-time, creating real political pain for the new president.

In contrast to what some people seem to believe, having the government take over the health-care system is not change. It’s just a culmination of previous moves by government. And the areas with the worst problems today are areas that have the most government interference – education, health care and energy.

And these are the same folks who want to take over health care.

Year after year, decade upon decade, the U.S. Senate’s network of restaurants has lost staggering amounts of money — more than $18 million since 1993, according to one report, and an estimated $2 million this year alone, according to another.

The financial condition of the world’s most exclusive dining hall and its affiliated Capitol Hill restaurants, cafeterias and coffee shops has become so dire that, without a $250,000 subsidy from taxpayers, the Senate won’t make payroll next month.

The embarrassment of the Senate food service struggling like some neighborhood pizza joint has quietly sparked change previously unthinkable for Democrats. Last week, in a late-night voice vote, the Senate agreed to privatize the operation of its food service, a decision that would, for the first time, put it under the control of a contractor and all but guarantee lower wages and benefits for the outfit’s new hires.

Savvy Senate staffers cross over to the House restaurants for better food. The House restaurants have been in private hands since the 1980s and are profitable. Instead of sucking taxpayer subsidies, they’ve paid Uncle Sam $1.2 million in commissions since 2003.

“Those who think the House and Senate don’t talk enough clearly haven’t been in the Longworth cafeteria on the House side at lunchtime recently. Senate staffers have been flocking there for better food, more options, and you get some exercise to boot,” said Brian Walsh, spokesman for Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.),who frequently dines on the other side of the Capitol.

In the past 10 years, only 20 new items have been added to the Senate menus. So rare are new entrees that last year’s arrival of daily fresh-made sushi was treated in some senatorial quarters as if a new Nobu had opened in the Capitol dining room.

Oy, the farm bill…

Yet you couldn’t write a piece of legislation that more thoroughly represents the Beltway status quo than this one. In every way imaginable, and even a few more, it repeats and compounds the spendthrift errors of previous farm bills.

Since the last farm bill in 2002, the price of cotton is up 105%, soybeans 164%, corn 169% and wheat 256%. Yet when Mr. Bush proposed the genuine change of limiting farm welfare to those earning less than $200,000 a year, he was laughed out of town. The bill purports to limit subsidies to those earning a mere $750,000, but loopholes and spousal qualifications make it closer to $2.5 million. As Barack Obama likes to say, it’s time Washington worked for “the middle class,” which apparently includes millionaire corn and sugar farmers.

Another purported change is the arrival of “fiscal discipline,” in Nancy Pelosi’s favorite phrase from the 2006 campaign. Yet it turns out this farm extravaganza may bust federal budget targets even more than we thought a week ago. That’s because the new price supports – the guaranteed floor payments farmers receive for their crops – have been raised to match this year’s record prices.

Mad yet? Keep reading.

The USDA reports that if crop prices fall from these highs to their norm over the next five years, farm payments will surge. For example, if corn prices return to $3.25 a bushel from today’s $6, farmers would get $10 billion a year in support payments. If bean prices fall to their norm, they’d get $4 billion. Thus, if farm prices stay high, consumers face higher grocery bills and farmers get rich. If farm prices fall, taxpayers kick in the difference and farmers still get rich.

On the same day that Congress fleeces the taxpayer for agribusiness, it spanks oil company executives for making too much money!

Sugar producers also make out like Beltway bandits, receiving the difference between the world price of sugar, which is now $12 per pound, and the guaranteed price of about $21 per pound. That’s a roughly 75% subsidy for already wealthy cane growers and a nice payoff for the $3 million they contribute to House candidates each year.

Any wonder why food prices are going up?

All of this is a status quo that both political parties can believe in. More than a few liberal Democrats are privately embarrassed by this corporate welfare spectacle. But they’ve been mollified by Speaker Pelosi, who spent the last week assuring her left that the bill also includes another $10.4 billion for food stamps and nutrition programs.

This entitlement expansion comes only days after the Congressional Budget Office reported that paying the bills for existing entitlements could require tax rates to climb to 80% in the future. Yes we can!

So the American taxpayer gets screwed coming and going. Now, guess who voted for this piece of crap?

Sen. Hillary Clinton? Yes!
Sen. Barack Obama? Yes!

Sen. John McCain? No.

Once upon a time government jobs paid less, but offered steady work: that was the trade off. But with public employee unions, that’s changed.

Now private citizens work for the government workers. It’s true in California and especially true in Taxachusetts. Writes Jeff Jacoby:

The Boston Globe recently reported that retirements are suddenly spiking at the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority. Why? Because a new law taking effect in 2009 slightly reduces benefits for workers who retire before age 65. The major change: As of next year, retirees will have to pay 15 percent of their health insurance premium. Current retirees get free healthcare for life. That’s in addition to their pensions, of course. MBTA workers can retire with a full pension after just 23 years on the job, at which point they are perfectly free to find another government job and get right back on the public payroll.

Such double-dipping is common in the public sector, just like so many other lucrative perks that government employees take for granted and most private employees can only dream about. “The nation is dividing into two classes of workers: those who have government benefits and those who don’t,” USA Today noted in 2007. “The gap is accelerating in every way - pensions, medical benefits, retirement ages.” According to the Congressional Research Service, the pension collected by the average private-sector retiree is worth less than half of what a typical government retiree can expect. If you don’t have your snout in the government trough, you can expect to work ever-longer hours and pay ever-higher taxes and fees to support those who do.

Those, for example, like Michael Mulhern. He is the 40-something former MBTA general manager who “retired” in 2005, began collecting a $130,000 annual pension, then hired on as head of the MBTA retirement fund, a job that pays about $225,000 annually. Mulhern’s total take: more than $350,000 a year. He is just one illustration of a huge problem growing more urgent by the day - the staggering sums that taxpayers are shelling out for the care and feeding of avaricious public employees. In Massachusetts and nationwide, a backlash is coming.

Andrew Natsios and Norman Borlaug write that changes in food aid are needed to avert disaster in Africa: in short, buy locally.

The Bush administration has urged, rightly, that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) be allowed to buy food locally, particularly in Africa, instead of only American-grown food.

The U.S. government currently buys grain and other foodstuffs from American farmers for free distribution in poor countries where a disaster has occurred, or sells it in food-deficit nations to generate funds for food-security development programs. Under the law, the food must be shipped almost exclusively on American vessels.

Ocean shipping costs are 20%-30% of the food-aid budget; and it takes on average over four months to order, buy, ship, offload and transport food by ground. In a famine, people can die waiting for the food to arrive.

Other problems arise. One food shipment sunk in a storm off the coast of Asia in 1996. In 2006, two food shipments were hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia. Hurricane Katrina nearly shut down much of the foreign food-aid delivery system in the Mississippi Delta.

Purchasing food locally simplifies the process, cuts down the time delay in delivery, reduces the logistical risks, and saves transport costs. These savings can be used to buy more food. At the same time, higher prices will probably reduce the purchasing power of USAID’s food-aid programs by at least $200 million this year. While President George W. Bush has released food aid from a reserve fund, it is not sufficient.

Direct food purchases in local countries could also help improve their agriculture. In Africa, for example, two-thirds of the 200 million people who suffer hunger are small-scale farmers, primarily engaged in subsistence production because they find too few buyers for any larger harvest.

In Ethiopia in 2003, for example, widespread drought occurred in the low-lying areas of the country and the very dry northern highlands. Some 12 million to 15 million people were at risk of hunger and starvation. But in the central and southern highlands of Ethiopia, farmers were producing a bumper crop of corn and other cereals. Yet with no market for the locally produced grains, prices collapsed.

If USAID could have purchased and helped distribute some of this excess, up to 500,000 small farmers would have benefited, as well as the millions at risk of starvation. But its only option was to import surplus food grain from the U.S.

Beer lovers would have to pay a lot more to get their buzz if Assemblyman Jim Beall has his way.

The San Jose Democrat last week proposed raising the tax on beer by $1.80 per six-pack - or 30 cents per can or bottle - a 1,400 percent increase over the current 2-cent-per-can tax.

Beall said the tax would generate $2 billion a year to fund health-care services, crime prevention and programs to prevent underage drinking and addiction.

“The people who use alcohol should pay for part of the cost to society, just like we’ve accepted that concept with tobacco,” Beall said.

This will never happen, but it illustrates the busy-body mindset of Democrats, just as yesterday’s post about mandating exercise programs.

Brad Dickson: 

A San Fernando Valley legislator weary of the obesity epidemic has introduced legislation that would compel businesses to encourage their employees to lead healthier lifestyles. This is the stupidest idea since the Los Angeles City Council considered banning murder for a weekend.

Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, a Democrat from Woodland Hills, would require California companies desiring state contracts to provide their workers with fitness-related benefits - things like access to gyms, yoga instructors, company-sponsored sports teams and nutritionists.

I’m all for improving the fitness of Californians, but should this be a high government priority? If Levine’s measure becomes law, some Valley residents will drive to work past armed illegal-immigrant gangbangers on streets that were last repaved during the Sam Yorty administration and walk into their tagger-defaced workplace to find a fully equipped gymnasium and on-site yoga master.

The new law would apply to businesses with as few as 10 employees, which means we could see workers with state-of-the-art workout rooms who are sans comprehensive health coverage. “We can’t pay for your kidney transplant, Johnson, but do a few reps on our $6,000 state-mandated Bun Blaster. Maybe you’ll perk up.”

This isn’t to say that Levine’s motives aren’t admirable. An estimated 57percent of Californians are overweight or obese. That’s my theory on why there’s an increase in reported freeway shootings: We’ve grown to big to miss.

As the presidential campaign enters its final stages, there will be increased debate over budget priorities and how they will be paid for. Many commentators and political leaders, including Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, believe that tax increases are needed to restore near-term budget balance and finance longer-term entitlement growth.

These claims fail budget arithmetic and economics. Worse, they raise serious questions about the nation’s broad fiscal policies and its commitment to economic growth.

By historical standards, federal revenues relative to GDP, at 18.8% last year, are high. In the past 25 years, this level was only exceeded during the five years from 1996 to 2000. Still, we stand on the verge of a very large tax increase, one that will occur unless the next Congress and president agree to rescind it. Letting the Bush tax cuts expire will drive the personal income tax burden up by 25% – to its highest point relative to GDP in history.

Get this:

Three corporate executives summoned Friday for a shaming by Democratic lawmakers defended raking in hundreds of millions of dollars despite contributing to the subprime mortgage crisis that has their companies reeling from losses and the nation on the edge of recession.

Congress thinks it has a role to play in “shaming” business leaders?

Contribute to the subprime crisis? Not long ago Congress was accusing lenders of red-lining minority neighborhoods and not lending them money.

“There’s a complete disconnect with reality,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Indeed. Henry, and the disconnect begins with you.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes:

…one in every nine black men ages 20 to 34 was behind bars? What if the red phone rang at 3 a.m. and the president was told that among black men 18 or older, the figure was one in 15? If the president was like any of his (or her) predecessors, he’d pull the blankets over his face and go right back to sleep.

…and that only Barack Obama can deal with the problem, because, well, he’s half-black.

…those incarceration figures represent an enormous challenge to the next president. It is a challenge Barack Obama, for obvious reasons, is uniquely qualified to meet. This is not just because he can be a role model for young black men, who as a group are in a perilous state. It is because he sees himself playing exactly that role.

Is this really a presidential matter? Are not state craft, national security etc. federal priorities? Are not the problems he describes properly the purview of governors and mayors?

“I can say certain truths that might be more difficult for other candidates to say,” he said last year. “I’ve talked about the need for more responsibility among black fathers. I’ve talked about the need for parents to do more to instill a sense of educational achievement in black kids.”

Now that’s Obama playing the race card. Only a black person can speak truth to black failure? Ask Bill Cosby or Juan Williams how well that goes.

If you stipulate, as I am willing to do, that some black men have been jailed unfairly and some because of the disproportionate penalties regarding crack cocaine (as opposed to powder cocaine), that still leaves a lot of criminals. And where there are criminals, there are victims — and blighted neighborhoods, and unruly schools and sections of town that you, dear reader, will avoid regardless of your race, religion or national origin. The costs of this phenomenon — social, human and economic — are beyond calculation.

Agreed on the crack issue. Fortunately, the rules have been fixed. This was indeed a federal issue.

It is a subtle but pernicious form of racism to turn one’s back on this problem and not face what is happening to young black men — and even to young black women. It is a subtle but pernicious form of racism not to recognize that a kind of cultural malignancy has taken root in parts of the African American underclass — not, by any means, in black America in general. It takes a cold indifference not to notice that lives are being wasted and that, really, the only difference between the perp and his victim is timing. Soon the former will be the latter. Count on it.

Exactly what and how much are middle-class families working through their busy lives expected to do? And what is the root of the problem?

Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted in the early 1960’s that illegitimate births would decimate the social fabric of black communities. He was right. What did government do? Enable the problem with its welfare policies.

Thus the malignancy Cohen describes.

What did the mainstream media do? Remove the stigma from illegitimate births. Rappers and movie stars broadcast their anti-social (yes, it is) behavior and get written up on magazine covers.

Government and big media have been the biggest enablers of the social corrosion that besets us, and it’s not just inner cities. There’s your true “pernicious racism.”

Daniel Weintraub:

When California voters approved Proposition 34 in 2000, they were told it would limit the influence of money in political campaigns. The measure capped contributions to legislative races at $3,000, and it put a $5,000 limit on donations in most statewide elections, with a $20,000 ceiling in campaigns for governor.

But the ballot measure had consequences most voters probably never imagined. Instead of costing less, campaigns now cost more. And instead of candidates raising money and controlling how it is spent, independent groups that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money now control much of the political battlefield.

This is typical of campaign finance reform. Almost every attempt to limit the role of money in politics has failed. And most of them, including Proposition 34, have actually made things worse.

What a shock.

Now, what comes to mind when you hear the term “special interests?” Cigar chomping lobbyists for Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Banking…etc? Think again.

Here’s a list of the Top 8 (by $$ spent) lobbyists in California.

1. Californians for Better Government — a PAC that supports Democrat candidates

2. Alliance for a Better California — a consortium of unions

3. First Americans for a Better California — Indian gambling tribes

4. JOBS PAC — a pro-business group

5. CA Correctional Peace Officers Association — another union

6. Morongo Band of Mission Indians — more casino Indians

7. Strengthing Our Lives Through Education — a “unique coalition of labor, community and faith-based groups” they say. Another union group.

8. Team 2006 — still running this one down.

IBD:

When a great American company offers a medicine that lengthens the lives of hundreds of millions of people, you might think politicians would say thank you. Instead they say: How dare you advertise it.

Pfizer has just been pressured by Congress into dropping its main ad campaign for the cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor, arguably the most popular medicine in the world and with very good reason.

Lipitor can lower the deadly artery-clogging substance by as much as 60% and, when combined with regular exercise and a low-fat diet, prevents heart attacks and sudden deaths.

Companies who do so much for so many deserve plaudits. But liberal politicians never rest in their search for corporate villains, and so they have demonized the pharmaceutical industry, just as they have an oil and gas industry that spends billions developing new technologies to reach crude and natural gas deposits that were inaccessible only a few years ago.

Just as Congress’ big shots have no appreciation for how “Big Oil” can cut our dependence on oil-rich enemy countries, they’re equally ungrateful for how “Big Pharma” cures and manages disease.

In his research on productivity and health care for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Columbia business professor Frank R. Lichtenberg found a direct connection between new drug approvals and rapidly increased longevity.

Lichtenberg reckons the average new drug approval adds a total of 1.2 million years to the lives of current and future generations. With it costing the pharmaceutical industry about $500 million to bring a new drug to market, Lichtenberg extrapolated that the “cost per life-year gained is $424″ — just a fraction of the economic value of a single year of a person’s life of $150,000, cited by Lichtenberg based on calculations by University of Chicago economics professors Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel.

Drug manufacturers such as Pfizer have been performing such incalculably valuable services to Americans and the rest of the world for generations.

It may have been the disorganized Alexander Fleming who won the Nobel Prize for accidentally discovering penicillin in 1928. But he actually failed to recognize its importance and abandoned his discovery. Pfizer, with its expertise in fermentation, mass produced the new wonder drug in response to an appeal from the U.S. government, saving multitudes of Allied forces in World War II.

If publicly-funded and operated healthcare is so much more efficient than the private sector, then why this?

Los Angeles County healthcare officials unveiled a draft cost-cutting plan Wednesday that calls for closing all but one of the county’s dozen clinics and reduces services at its six comprehensive outpatient health centers.

Officials said a $195-million deficit makes the cuts necessary even under a “best-case scenario” for the badly strapped public healthcare system. The county faces the threat of more reductions in state and federal aid in the next few months. Health department officials have privately floated the possibility of deeper cuts if the projected deficit grows.

The current proposal, if approved by the Board of Supervisors, would dramatically retreat from the county’s longtime role in providing primary care to the indigent. The clinics and comprehensive centers get about 400,000 primary care visits a year, nearly two-thirds from uninsured patients.

Officials said they plan for private, nonprofit clinics to step into the gap and provide care to most of the displaced patients for a lower cost than the public system. The county currently has contracts with private clinics, and those would be expanded.

Sidestepping any potential opposition from its commission, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is shopping for a contractor to run pregnancy and breast-feeding classes for its workers for up to $50,000 a year.

Because the contract for “lactation specialist services” is less than $150,000, General Manager H. David Nahai can award it without seeking approval from the DWP board once the proposals are opened March 7.

Patsouras said it’s inappropriate to continue the lactation program at a time when the utility wants to raise electric rates by 9 percent over three years and water rates by 6 percent over two years.

“It’s absurd. At a time when we’re asking ratepayers to increase the rates, we’re going for lactation,” Patsaouras.

One vote that went largely unremarked upon this past Super-Duper-Tsumani Tuesday was LA’s Measure S. That’s “S” as in scam.

At issue was a 10% telephone tax that LA had been illegally charging its residents. After a court invalidated it, threatening about $250 million in annual revenue, the mayor and other pols put together Measure S and promoted it as a telephone tax cut, from 10% to 9%. In reality, the choices were between zero percent and nine percent.

Police Chief William Bratton did television spots implying that without the “tax cut” the city would descend into anarchy. The measure passed by a 2-1 margin.

The LA Daily News noted:

Measure S, the troubling communications tax on Tuesday’s Los Angeles ballot, passed not because of its merits, but because of the dishonesty behind it. It’s likely many of the people who stamped the “yes” button thought that this was a simple 10percent tax reduction, as the ballot language led the cursory reader to believe.

Maybe it even made them feel good about the city leaders. Or perhaps voters were simply swayed by the mailers featuring Police Chief William Bratton saying Measure S was all about public safety. Unfortunately for the city’s naive voters, neither is true.

They were duped by the city’s elected officials who have so badly managed the city’s money that the prospect of the current phone tax being ruled illegal as it works its way through court prompted them to resort to trickery to find a new source.

In essence, they just voted us a tax increase cannily worded to seem the opposite.

The result might be a reduction in the rate of taxation, but it actually increases what can be taxed to all sorts of services including text messages and Internet access. So users will pay a slightly lower percentage, but on a lot more.

Nor is this money for public safety. The campaign consultants just figured voters would be moved to say “yes” if scared by the thought of criminals running unchecked through Los Angeles.

Let’s hope he won’t be baaack with this idea again.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “universal” health-care plan died in the California legislature on Monday, in what can only be called a mercy killing. So let’s conduct a political autopsy, because there are important lessons here for the national health-care debate.

It’s especially useful to compare today’s muted obituaries to the page-one melodrama that surrounded the Governor when he announced his plan a year ago. Endless media mash notes were bestowed on the “post-partisan” Republican trying to get something done.

The idea was that Mr. Schwarzenegger would set a national precedent, leading to a groundswell for reform in Washington. Not to mention that the Schwarzenegger plan was a near-copy of the one Mitt Romney pioneered in Massachusetts, and the one Hillary Clinton now favors. A leading author of the California plan was Laurie Rubiner, who directed health policy at the New America Foundation before becoming Senator Clinton’s legislative director in 2005.

But a dose of reality killed it.

An independent analysis confirmed the plan would be far more expensive than proponents admitted. Even under the most favorable assumptions, spending would outpace revenue by $354 million after two years, and likely $3.9 billion or more. “A situation that I thought was bad,” Mr. Perata noted, “in fact was worse.”

This reveals that liberal health-care politics is increasingly the art of the impossible: You can’t make coverage “universal” while at the same time keeping costs in check — at least without prohibitive tax increases. Lowering cost and increasing access, in other words, are separate and irreconcilable issues.

Of course Washington might be able to disregard these practicalities, because the states are prohibited from running deficits while the feds aren’t. But the California experience also reveals some of the ideological differences among Democrats, which would also divide in the Beltway.

The centerpiece of the Schwarzenegger plan was the “individual mandate,” which is also the heart of HillaryCare 2.0. Such a law would compel everyone to acquire insurance, with subsidies for those who couldn’t afford it. But the individual mandate incited a liberal revolt. Many Democrats and some unions argued the subsidies weren’t generous enough to cover lower-income families, and it wasn’t fair to penalize them for coverage they couldn’t afford. One state Senator called the plan “a knife in the throat of the working poor.” So the plan failed because it was too expensive — and because for some Democrats it wasn’t expensive enough.

Opposition also arose because the plan didn’t do enough to punish the left’s health-care villains. While it greatly expanded regulation of insurers — requiring them to accept all applicants, and prohibiting premium differences based on health status — it didn’t cap how much they could charge consumers, or regulate their profits. Democrats also complained that the taxes the plan imposed on business, as high as 6.5% of payroll, weren’t high enough.

When Bush got drug benefits added to Medicare, he was criticized by Democrats for not allowing the government to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. Given that liberals regard profits as exploitation, they assumed Bush was in the pocket of drug companies.

But there was a very sensible reason for not giving the Feds a strong arm against pharmaceutical companies — in time, there would be fewer new drugs coming to market.

Megan McArdle explains:

People who think that there will be continuing R&D in the pharmaceutical industry are basically thinking of it as a budgeting problem. They think of the pharmaceutical industry’s gross income as a budget to be allocated between various functions, such as marketing and R&D. They may concede that by changing the size of the budget, you may shrink the amount of money to fund R&D, because there will be less money in the kitty. (Though many or most hope that shrinking the size of the pie will force pharmaceutical companies to transfer money from the advertising budget to R&D¹). But, their reasoning goes, there will still be money in the kitty; if you allow pharmaceutical companies 1/3 as much gross income, you will get 1/3 as much R&D. Or perhaps they will cut their advertising budgets to zero, and then you will get 2/3 as much R&D. But still, you will get something.

I don’t think of R&D as a budgeting problem; I think of it as an investment problem. After all, even if the pharmaceutical industry has no profits right now, they can borrow the money in the financial markets at fairly attractive rates.

The main obstacle to R&D, then, is not the current state of pharmaceutical industry profits; it is the potential return on the investment in R&D. After all, Merck doesn’t have to make drugs; it could generate a nice, safe return of 5% a year in government bonds. Or it could get into some other business, such as making soap. If you drive down the profits on new drugs too far, it stops making sense to invest in new drugs, even if there is a small profit to be made on current production.

Developing new drugs is very, very risky. Depending on what you think constitutes a drug candidate, somewhere between one in one thousand, and one in ten thousand drug candidates makes it from a lab bench to clinical trials. Each of the failed drugs was very expensive, particularly if it got partway through clinicals, which run about $500 million per course.

The problem is, once you’ve developed a drug, it’s easy to copy. It’s also usually trivially cheap to produce. And your patent is rapidly running out. This gives a monopsony buyer a lot of leverage to force down your price–you’re almost always better off taking something. This is particularly true if the monopsony buyer has the power to break your patent and license its generic manufacturers to turn out cheap but near-perfect imitations of your product². This is, in fact, what Europe has done; they make pharmaceutical firms sell to them at cost plus. The lion’s share of the profits on any drug come from the United States; what they get in Europe and Canada and the rest of the world is (thin) gravy, a price that is just a little bit better than not selling any drugs there.

Now imagine that America drives drug prices down to that sort of “cost+10″ or “cost+20″ level. The pharmaceutical firms will keep making the drugs they already have, because there will still be a little profit there. But they would have to be psychotic to invest billions of dollars over a 20 year time horizon in exchange for a one in a thousand chance of making that small a profit. Would you put 20% of your income now into an investment that might yield a profit of 10% of your income–in thirty years?

But they have to invest in R&D, say my interlocutors; otherwise they won’t have any drugs to sell! This makes the odd assumption that they can’t do anything else. But history is full of companies that used to do something else entirely–and also, of companies that went out of business when their market collapsed.

European nations bully the drug companies to sell at their price, thus America indirectly subsidizes their wonderful “single payer” healthcare plans — something to remember when liberals whine about how expensive our healthcare is.

The “California Clean Car Discount Act” is the Orwellian name for a scheme by Democrat busybodies to influence what car you drive.

Say you buy a car that coughs out a lot of greenhouse gases. Should you pay more for the privilege of polluting?

And say your neighbor buys a car that spews out far less. Should he be rewarded for helping to save the planet?

I’d say no and no. But noooo…

This week, the California Assembly is expected to vote on the California Clean Car Discount Act, which, if passed, would be the nation’s first “feebate” law, imposing charges and granting rebates based on a vehicle’s emission of carbon dioxide and other gases.

One-time registration fees of up to $2,500 would be levied on new gas guzzlers, such as Hummers, Dodge Vipers and Chevy Tahoes. Some cleaner sport utility vehicles, pickups and minivans would be exempt from any charge, while the Toyota Prius, Honda Civic, Nissan Sentra and other fuel-efficient cars would get hefty rebates.

I don’t like Hummers, but if someone wants to buy one and pay $150 a week to gas it up (paying fat taxes to the state and feds while do so) then let them. But gouging them $2500 because it offends your faux religion of Global Warming? Go to hell.

Oh, for a clean, well-lighted place to do time.

For well-heeled convicts sentenced to jail for relatively minor crimes, a cell at one of a handful of Southern California city jails is just a fistful of cash away - and Glendale’s facility is gaining a reputation as an oasis. At $85 a day, demand has surged for the jail’s pay-to-stay program after errant celebrities Kiefer Sutherland and Gary Collins recently picked the site to bunk down in.While Sutherland, 41, star of “24,” was released last week, and Collins, 69, a veteran of countless TV shows, also is gone, the jail has been flooded with calls.“After Kiefer and Gary, we got inundated with calls, so we actually have people lined up through the summer,” said jail administrator Juan Lopez, who noted more than a dozen inmates are now signed up.

There’s good jack to be made running a good jail.

While limited, pay-to-stay programs are useful for some jails. Pasadena got $234,000 last year from pay-to-stay inmates, Robinson said. Glendale has already collected nearly $10,000 in pay-to-stay fees, Lopez said.

“Most people that have the resources, that are middle class, are so terrified of going to county jail that they would spend whatever they have to guarantee that they’re going to be in a safer environment,” said Jonathan Mandel, 56, a defense attorney.

Terrified of what?

L.A. County jails, where about 2,500 inmate assaults occurred in a recent 12-month period, according to a county report. In recent years, the overcrowded jails also have had riots and staph infections.

Liberals pine for a day when all Americans agree with them. They call this being united. Disagree with them and you’re a divider. To which I say: bring it on!

Face it, there are two Americas — and I’m not channeling John Edwards — and they don’t much like each other.

Liberal America believes in government as the great provider and equalizer. To libs, it’s the government’s job to make sure they’re fed, clothed, housed and kept healthy.

Conservative America thinks the government that governs least governs best. We’re happy to take our chances out in the big bad world, to take our victories and take our lumps. We know when government gets a monopoly, bad service, bloated costs and inefficiency follow. 

This came to mind reading a poll showing that

Democratic voters are far more dissatisfied with the nation’s health-care system than their Republican counterparts and much more likely to support a substantial increase in government spending to expand health coverage, a new report says.

Fine. Let them have government healthcare, but count me out. Let’s recognize the two Americas’ irreconcilable differences and divorce. We can still be civil. We can even be friends.

Here’s how it will work. Create two citizenship plans with two different tax rates. Lib Citizens will get free healthcare, free food, free retirement, free whatever — and pay 70% income tax rates for the package deal.

Conservative Citizens will pay 25% income tax and buy our own health insurance etc. To make sure no one becomes a burden on the state, Conservative Citizens must agree to invest 15% of their earnings (the current Social Security tax, which we will no longer pay) in indexed mutual funds. And we’ll agree to purchase some kind of health insurance regardless of age.

By divorcing, Americans can stop bickering over the same issues. Those who believe in Nanny government can put their money where their mouth is. The others will put their money in the bank and spend it as they see fit.

Just call me Pro-Choice.  

The clowns who run Los Angeles don’t know much, but they do know how to run businesses out of town with excessive regulation and high taxes.

Los Angeles has a national reputation for hostility to business — and it’s getting worse. Recent business surveys by Kosmont & Associates, a private consulting group, and the Rose Institute at Claremont McKenna College rank the city as the second most expensive in which to do business in California.

Larry Kosmont, co-author of the Kosmont-Rose Institute report, says business costs in L.A. average between 2 1/2 to five times those of more business-friendly cities.

For instance, a $10-million office or retail operation pays about $59,000 in annual utility taxes and license fees to do business in L.A., compared with $9,300 in Pasadena, $904 in Burbank and zero in Rosemead.

So by moving a couple miles, from LA to Burbank, a retailer can save $58,096 annually, just in taxes. Unlike politicians, businesses are rational so they split town to the tune of 100,000 jobs lost since 1995.

What to do? Why, empanel a panel of the same types who created the problem. It’s the circle of life: create problems, then hire yourself to fix them.