Calvin Woodward and Robert Burns do an AP Fact Check, catching Obama in a whopper when blaming deficits on the Iraq war.

OBAMA:“Unfortunately, over the last decade, we have not done what is necessary to shore up the foundation of our own prosperity. We have spent over a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has shortchanged investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.”

THE FACTS: This is partly true. For sure, the costly Iraq and Afghanistan wars have contributed to the nation’s budget deficit — but not by as much as Obama suggests. The current annual deficit is now an estimated $1.5 trillion. But as recently as 2007, the budget deficit was just $161.5 billion. And that was years after war expenses were in place for both the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.

Most of the current deficit is due to the longest recession since the 1930s. It has seriously depressed tax revenues while increasing costs to the government — including social safety-net programs such as unemployment insurance and spending by both the outgoing Bush and incoming Obama administrations on stimulus programs and on bailouts of banks and automakers.

The AP doesn’t question Obama’s notion of “investing in our own people” –lib-speak for tax (take money from those who earned it) and spend (on someone Obama, et al, feel is more deserving.)

Neal McClusky at CATO:

So U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan invited every Education Department employee to attend Rev. Al Sharpton’s Glenn Beck counter-rally. As David Boaz explained in the Examiner, it was a ”highly inappropriate” thing to do, pushing people who are supposed to serve all Americans to support one side of a “political debate.” But that’s just the most obvious problem with Duncan’s weekend doings.

Perhaps just as troubling as his rally-prodding is that Duncan declared education “the civil rights issue of our generation” at Sharpton’s event. This only about a year after helping to kill an education program widely supported by many of the people he and Sharpton insist they want to empower. I’m talking, of course, about Washington, DC’s, Opportunity Scholarship Program, a voucher program that was proven effective. But the heck with success — Duncan and President Obama let the union-hated program die.

The cause for concern, though, doesn’t end there. According to the Examiner, an Education Department spokeswoman tried to gloss over the boss’s out-of-bounds play by suggesting that Sharpton’s rally was but a mere “back-to-school event.” Sound familiar?

That’s right! As I just blogged about, last year the Obama administration scared parents and taxpayers across the country by sending politically charged material to all public schools to prepare them for the president’s planned address to the nation’s children. Only after it took serious heat for that did the administration have the most alarming material changed. And then what did it do? Declared that the address would obviously be but a simple back-to-school speech, and tried to make everyone who knew what had actually transpired seem like a partisan attack dog.

As long as politicians run education, education will be hopelessly politicized. Unfortunately, that’s the simple back-to-school lesson for today.

Daily Caller

But why are bed bugs back? Though they’ve been sucking humans’ blood since at least ancient Greece, bed bugs became virtually extinct in America following the invention of pesticide DDT.

There were almost no bed bugs in the United States between World War II and the mid-1990s.

Around when bed bugs started their resurgence, Congress passed a major pesticides law in 1996 and the Clinton EPA banned several classes of chemicals that had been effective bed bug killers.

The debate isn’t over long-banned DDT, since modern bed bugs have developed a tolerance for that chemical. But in the pre-1996 regime, experts say, bed bugs were “collateral damage” from broader and more aggressive use of now-banned pesticides like Malathion and Propoxur.

Now some health officials are clamoring to bring those chemicals back to help solve the bed bug “emergency.” Meanwhile, EPA bureaucrats have downplayed the idea and environmentalists are pushing hard against the effort, citing safety concerns. (more…)

…and getting a fight. Peggy Venable:

The state’s slogan is “Don’t mess with Texas.” But the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is doing just that, and at stake is whether the Obama administration can impose its global-warming agenda without a vote of Congress.

President Obama’s EPA is already well down the path to regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, something the act was not designed to do. It has a problem, however, because shoehorning greenhouse gases into that 40-year-old law would force churches, schools, warehouses, commercial kitchens and other sources to obtain costly and time-consuming permits. It would grind the economy to a halt, and the likely backlash would doom the whole scheme.

The EPA, determined to move forward anyway, is attempting to rewrite the Clean Air Act administratively via a “tailoring rule,” which would reduce the number of regulated sources. The problem with that approach? It’s illegal. The EPA has no authority to rewrite the law. To pull it off, the EPA needs every state with a State Implementation Plan to rewrite all of its statutory thresholds as well.

Where are the voices wailing about the “shredding of the Constitution.”

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Chairman Bryan W. Shaw saw the tailoring rule for what it really is: a massive power grab and centralization of authority. They are fighting back, writing to the EPA:

“In order to deter challenges to your plan for centralized control of industrial development through the issuance of permits for greenhouse gases, you have called upon each state to declare its allegiance to the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently enacted greenhouse gas regulations – regulations that are plainly contrary to U.S. laws. … To encourage acquiescence with your unsupported findings you threaten to usurp state enforcement authority and to federalize the permitting program of any state that fails to pledge their fealty to the Environmental Protection Agency. On behalf of the State of Texas, we write to inform you that Texas has neither the authority nor the intention of interpreting, ignoring or amending its laws in order to compel the permitting of greenhouse gas emissions.”

Read it all.

How many things can one man get wrong? Hot Air

President Obama may be on vacation this week at Martha’s Vineyard, but as with all Presidents, it’s a working vacation.  That’s good, because the people who rely on fishing in the Northeast Atlantic have a message for Obama, which is that they don’t think that fewer jobs is better for their industry.  The Boston Herald highlights a little-covered aspect of the administration’s efforts to impose top-down economic policies, this time on fisheries to solve a problem that’s mainly resolved anyway:

Leaders of the recreational and commercial fishing industry are planning a boat protest against federal policies Thursday outside the harbor of Vineyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard, where President Obama and his family are summer vacationing.

The protest is being organized after a bipartisan, bicameral coalition of federal lawmakers — including the core of the President’s Congressional base on banking and health care issues — have given up hope of working productively with Obama’s top appointee for oceans and fisheries, Jane Lubchenco, who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The White House and Lubchenco want an end to private commercial fishing and have taken steps to eliminate “freelancing,” for lack of a better term.  Instead, they want to close the fisheries into “commodities markets” where the government essentially licenses fishermen and then allocates the catch based on a predetermined distribution plan.  The “commodities markets” will kill many fishing-based jobs and essentially turn fishermen into government employees, and they’re not happy about it.

In an economy where jobs are already scarce, how does the Obama administration justify the destruction of these jobs?

In a statement to the Times soon after her confirmation by the Senate, Lubchenco’s office said her goal was to see a “significant fraction of the vessels … removed.”

With the stocks rebuilding strongly, fishermen wonder at the need to reduce the size of the work force. …

Lubchenco has argued that consolidation, which has consistently followed catch shares, produces fewer but better jobs while giving the government a stronger hand in conservation.

So the new mantra is “fewer, but better jobs”?  I’m certain that the fishermen stuck on land will appreciate the beauty of the jobs they no longer hold.

The new policy has already been put in place in New England for groundfisheries, and the command economy approach has already produced its usual results:

New England’s groundfishery, America’s oldest continuing industry which had harvested commonly owned resources, was converted to catch share principles on May 1 — with a total allocation divided and distributed to fishermen as catching rights that [can] be bought, sold or traded.

But the minute size of the total allocation and the eccentric mixes of quota from the 15 species and 20 stocks in the groundfishery have pushed many businesses into — or close to — insolvency, a development that earlier this month brought a proposal from a bipartisan coalition of U.S. senators for a $100 million buyout.

Let’s get this straight.  The new policy of this administration is to encourage the kind of commodities speculation in fisheries that we saw in mortgage-backed securities?  And doesn’t that system favor large corporations who can afford to speculate with their capital over the small businesses and independent operators who can’t afford to buy rights to fish in these “commodities markets”?   Get ready for higher prices and more unemployment.

Tom Blumer at Pajamas Media:

It’s safe to say that the disconnect between the resourceful, wealth-producing private sector and the resource-draining, wealth-destroying public sector has never been greater. In his seminal, insightful essay at the American Spectator, Angelo M. Codevilla of the Claremont Institute characterizes the former as “the country class” and the latter as “the ruling class.”

To see that the ruling class currently has the upper hand, one need look no further than an August 10 USA Today report covering federal, state, and private sector compensation filed by Dennis Cauchon.

Here’s the rundown in round numbers:

• The average civilian federal worker earns — I’m sorry, “gets paid” — over $81,000 a year. After adding in almost $42,000 for benefits, he or she receives total compensation of over $123,000.
• For state and local government employees, the analogous figures are a shade over $53,000, almost $17,000, and nearly $70,000.
• Private sector workers average about $50,500 in pay, $10,500 in benefits, and just over $61,000 in total comp.

For those keeping score, the average federal worker — oops, “employee” — is paid 60% more than his or her private sector counterpart, receives bennies that are four times greater, and gets a total compensation package that is more than twice as high.

You know things are out of whack when including UAW workers at government-controlled General Motors in the federal government’s numbers (they aren’t; GM — get ready for this — calls itself “a private company” in its regulatory filings) would more than likely bring those averages down.

Chuck DeVore at Big Government demonstrates that GOP-leaning states handle their budgets more responsibly.

…Now, compare the high-debt states to the states shown in blue that voted for Obama—the linkage between debt and voting behavior is visually clear.

According to Moody’s, the average state per capita debt of the 28 Obama states is $1,728 while the average debt in the 22 McCain states is less than half, at $749.  This information alone says a lot about voters and their attitude towards government and debt.  Voters with a propensity to elect politicians who burden future generations who can’t yet vote with huge debts voted for Obama while fiscally responsible voters generally voted for McCain.

New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch sent a taunting message yesterday to fellow Democrat Gov. Deval Patrick and Beacon Hill leaders on the eve of the Bay State’s two-day tax holiday: Keep the tax hikes coming.

“It’s fine whenever Massachusetts wants to raise their taxes, because it always benefits us up here,” Lynch said, adding that Massachusetts’ high sales and income taxes have sent scores of shoppers and business owners over the border. “There’s a reason why our economy is doing better than many other states.”

Patrick – who has refused to rule out new taxes if he were re-elected – moved to slap higher levies on sugar and bottled water this year but was blocked by Democratic lawmakers leery of voter payback in November.

Since Patrick signed a 25-percent sales tax boost into law last year, the Bay State is grabbing $900 million more annually from shoppers’ pockets amid a sputtering economic recovery.

Someone should pass a law requiring Congress to mind its own business. Oops, I forgot, the Constitution does that.

But no matter…

The crusade for an education jobs bill, led by the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in Congress, has always struck us as more of an election-year favor for teachers unions than an optimal use of public resources.

Billed as an effort to stimulate the economy, it’s not clearly more effective than alternative uses of the cash. Yes, school budgets are tight across the country, but the teacher layoff “crisis” is exaggerated. In fact, as happens each year, many teachers who got pink slips in the spring have been notified that they’ll be hired after all. Many layoffs could have been — and indeed have been — avoided by modest union concessions.

As of last school year, the money for 5.5 percent of the 6 million K-12 jobs nationwide came from Washington through the 2009 stimulus; the new money reinforces this dangerous dependency.

Nor does the legislation target areas with the most projected teacher layoffs; Maryland, for example, is slated to get $179 million, yet officials have no estimate of layoffs for the school year that begins in a few weeks. The Baltimore Sun noted in May that “most of [the state's] school systems are not planning to lay off teachers,” and that several were hiring new ones. No matter: The bill allows school systems to use the money to expand their teaching staffs or even to raise teacher salaries.

Or subsidize extravagant school districts such as Los Angeles that build $578 million high schools.

New York Times:

The haves are retirees who were once state or municipal workers. Their seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide.

The have-nots are taxpayers who don’t have generous pensions. Their 401(k)s or individual retirement accounts have taken a real beating in recent years and are not guaranteed. And soon, many of those people will be paying higher taxes or getting fewer state services as their states put more money aside to cover those pension checks.

At stake is at least $1 trillion. That’s trillion, with a “t,” as in titanic and terrifying.

The figure comes from a study by the Pew Center on the States that came out in February. Pew estimated a $1 trillion gap as of fiscal 2008 between what states had promised workers in the way of retiree pension, health care and other benefits and the money they currently had to pay for it all. And some economists say that Pew is too conservative and the problem is two or three times as large.

So a question of extraordinary financial, political, legal and moral complexity emerges, something that every one of us will be taking into town meetings and voting booths for years to come: Given how wrong past pension projections were, who should pay to fill the 13-figure financing gap?

And let’s not overlook how these golden deals were wrought: by the influence of public service unions and their Democrat puppets.

Consider what’s going on in Colorado — and what is likely to unfold in other states and municipalities around the country.

Earlier this year, in an act of rare political courage, a bipartisan coalition of state legislators passed a pension overhaul bill. Among other things, the bill reduced the raise that people who are already retired get in their pension checks each year.

This sort of thing just isn’t done. States have asked current workers to contribute more, tweaked the formula for future hires or banned them from the pension plan altogether. But this was apparently the first time that state legislators had forced current retirees to share the pain.

Sharing the burden seems to be the obvious solution so we don’t continue to kick the problem into the future. “We have to take this on, if there is any way of bringing fiscal sanity to our children,” said former Gov. Richard Lamm of Colorado, a Democrat. “The New Deal is demographically obsolete. You can’t fund the dream of the 1960s on the economy of 2010.”

But in Colorado, some retirees and those eligible to retire still want to live that dream. So they sued the state to keep all of the annual cost-of-living increases they thought they would be getting in perpetuity.

Naturally, they are fighting back in court, claiming a deal is a deal.

Taxpayers, whose payments are also helping to restock Colorado’s pension fund, may not be as sympathetic, though. The average retiree in the fund stopped working at the sprightly age of 58 and deposits a check for $2,883 each month. Many of them also got a 3.5 percent annual raise, no matter what inflation was, until the rules changed this year.

Private sector retirees who want their own monthly $2,883 check for life, complete with inflation adjustments, would need an immediate fixed annuity if they don’t have a pension. A 58-year-old male shopping for one from an A-rated insurance company would have to hand over a minimum of $860,000, according to Craig Hemke of Buyapension.com. A woman would need at least $928,000, because of her longer life expectancy.

Who among aspiring retirees has a nest egg that size, let alone people with the same moderate earning history as many state employees? And who wants to pay to top off someone else’s pile of money via increased income taxes or a radical decline in state services?

Megan McArdle:

If you want to know why us libertarian types are skeptical of the government’s ability to prevent housing market bubbles, well, I give you Exhibit 9,824:  the government’s new $1000 down housing program.

No, really.  The government has apparently decided, in its infinite wisdom, that what the American economy really needs is more homebuyers with no equity.

Now, qualified homebuyers in the three states pioneering Affordable Advantage do not need to put down the 3.5 percent minimum down payment required by the Federal Housing Agency, or much of a down payment at all. They can get 100 percent financing — a loan as big as the purchase price of the house — for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage — a vanilla mortgage. The deal includes a program to help homebuyers if they become unemployed, lowered fees and there is no requirement that the homebuyer purchase mortgage insurance.

Wisconsin started the program first, in March, offering 100 percent loan-to-value mortgages for borrowers with a minimum credit score of 680. “It’s a good credit score,” explains Kate Venne, the spokesperson for the Wisconsin HFA. “In addition, we want to see what other lines of credit people have, and their performance. We look at their work history. We call their employers.” Thus far, Wisconsin’s HFA has offered $52 million in mortgages to 450 buyers.

Now, commentators left and right can agree that this is not a good idea.  No matter how stable said low-income homeowners are, they shouldn’t be buying houses with no equity, because if they suddenly have to sell said houses, they’re going to have trouble coming up with 6% to pay the broker, closing costs, etc.

So why is the government doing this, even though I can think of no policy analyst who doesn’t actually work for the National Association of Realtors who would say that this is a good idea?  Because politicians want to help poor people with capital formation, and homeownership is the way that the American middle class has traditionally gone about capital formation.

It’s true that this particular program is small–I don’t think the economy is going to be brought to its knees by several hundred houses.  The important thing, however, is that this is how the government thinks about housing.  The private bankers have at least reacted to their little scare by getting somewhat more conservative about the loans they offer–probably not conservative enough, but still, more conservative.  The FHA, on the other hand, is still out there offering 3.5% mortgages to anyone who can meet some fairly basic guidelines; those mortgages now account for almost 20% of all home purchases.  Yet so far, the FHA has cracked down in only one area:  it now requires a 10% downpayment from buyers with very bad credit.  On the other hand, it’s also expanded into pricier homes, so I’m not sure you can say the loan criteria have tightened overall.

…the Obama administration, that is. Byron York:

Did you know the Justice Department threatened several universities with legal action because they took part in an experimental program to allow students to use the Amazon Kindle for textbooks?

Last year, the schools — among them Princeton, Arizona State and Case Western Reserve — wanted to know if e-book readers would be more convenient and less costly than traditional textbooks. The environmentally conscious educators also wanted to reduce the huge amount of paper students use to print files from their laptops.

It seemed like a promising idea until the universities got a letter from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, now under an aggressive new chief, Thomas Perez, telling them they were under investigation for possible violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

From its introduction in 2007, the Kindle has drawn criticism from the National Federation of the Blind and other activist groups. While the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature could read a book aloud, its menu functions required sight to operate. “If you could get a sighted person to fire up the device and start reading the book to you, that’s fine,” says Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the federation. “But other than that, there was really no way to use it.”

Blind people read print books, so why allow them on campus?

Legally blind citizens account for just .3% of Americans. Must everyone else do without because of their disability?

In Obamaland, yes.

First it was the city of Bell, where city officials looted the treasury with gigantic salaries. Now other cities fear citizen’s looking at who gets paid how much and what for.

The scandal over high salaries paid to Bell officials has city leaders throughout the state scrambling to limit the political damage.

LA Times:

City halls have seen an uptick in residents calling to find out what their local officials make ever since the story broke two weeks ago and prompted widespread public outrage.

On Thursday, city managers from across the state will gather in Sacramento to discuss damage control. Among the ideas on the table: launching an independent examination of city officials’ salaries and compiling a database of salaries for municipal executives.

The Legislature also is mulling several Bell-inspired proposals, including a requirement that cities make salaries easily accessible on websites. Another suggestion would cap pensions of highly paid city officials, an issue that arose after The Times reported that former Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo, who earned nearly $800,000 a year, would receive roughly $600,000 a year in pension benefits once he retired.

Many of the ideas are designed to put political distance between Bell and the rest of California’s 480 cities and towns. “It would be really unfortunate if anyone took the outrageous action of one city and generalized it to all cities,” said Chris McKenzie, executive director of the League of California Cities, which is hosting the meeting.

The stories of soaring salaries come at a difficult time for cities, which are making cutbacks amid a recession that has made many taxpayers ever more interested in what services they get for their tax dollars.

In Sacramento, the Bell salary controversy threatens to undermine the arguments made by city managers against state budget proposals that would take money away from municipalities. For months, city officials have lobbied the Legislature, arguing that they are suffering financially because of the economic slump and cannot afford deeper cuts.

“However, the Times story suggests this duress may not apply to all our cities, or that some cities are not allowing their economic plight to curtail Fortune 500-level salaries for their senior executives,” State Senate President Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) wrote in a pointed letter to the League of Cities last week.

In California, this should be going on statewide.

Updating the story on the LA county city of Bell, where top officials got fat and rich.

Last night, the city council voted itself a 90% pay cut — from $100,000 to $8,000.

But before all that, the city was cutting programs and laying off workers.

Details of the cuts came from interviews and from Bell’s Comprehensive Financial Report for fiscal year 2009, the latest available.

The report shows that community services, including social services and recreation programs, were cut by 21%, or $593,438, while public safety took a 3.7% hit, or $228,888. Police training was whacked by 58%.

The salaries of Rizzo, Adams and Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia are equal to about 10% of Bell’s $15.9-million general fund budget.

The report provides a less rosy picture of Bell’s finances than the one city officials have offered in recent weeks. While Bell has a balanced budget, it has also faced significant belt-tightening.

Mayor Oscar Hernandez has defended Rizzo’s salary, citing “15 years of balanced budgets” and the transformation of Bell into a “model of financial prudence.”

It’s more like an exaggerated model of government in general — instead of the government working for the people, its vice-versa.

First, the Germans:

Marco Wanderwitz, a conservative member of parliament for the German state of Saxony, said it is unfair and unsustainable for the taxpayer to carry the entire cost of treating obesity-related illnesses in the public health system.

A true conservative (Germany has few, if any) would suggest breaking up the government healthcare monopoly.

“I think that it would be sensible if those who deliberately lead unhealthy lives would be held financially accountable for that,” Wanderwitz said, according to Reuters.

Germany, famed for its beer, pork and chocolates, is one of the fattest countries in Europe. Twenty-one percent of German adults were obese in 2007, and the German newspaper Bild estimates that the cost of treating obesity-related illnesses is about 17 billion euro, or $21.7 billion, a year.

Walter Willett, a professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, described the idea of a fat tax as “not humane.” He told AOL News that lifestyle is not the only factor in obesity, with both genetics and urban environments playing major roles.

You may recall the Obamacare stipulates that electronic health care records track American citizens’ our Body Mass Index, a potential prelude to intrusion into diet control.

When that was announced, there were no yelps from privacy advocates.

But when Wal-Mart decides to…

…put electronic identification tags on men’s clothing like jeans starting Aug. 1 as the world’s largest retailer tries to gain more control of its inventory. But the move is raising eyebrows among privacy experts.

The individual garments, which will also include underwear and socks, will have removable smart tags that can be read from a distance by Wal-Mart workers with scanners. In seconds, the worker will be able to know what sizes are missing and will also be able to tell what it has on hand in the stockroom. Such instant knowledge will allow store clerks to have the right sizes on hand when shoppers need them.

The tags work by reflecting a weak radio signal to identify the product. They have long spurred privacy fears as well as visions of stores being able to scan an entire shopping cart of items at one time.

Wal-Mart’s goal is to eventually expand the tags to other types of merchandise but company officials say it’s too early to give estimates on how long that will take.

“There are so many significant benefits in knowing how to better manage inventory and better serve customers,” said Lorenzo Lopez, a Wal-Mart spokesman.

Smart business, right? Keep costs down for the consumer, etc?

“This is a first piece of a very large and very frightening tracking system,” said Katherine Albrecht, director of a group called Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering.

Albrecht worries that Wal-Mart and others would be able to track movements of customers who in some border states like Michigan and Washington are carrying new driver’s licenses that contain RFID tags to make it easier for them to cross borders.

Albrecht fears that retailers could scan data from such licenses and their purchases and combine that data with other personal information. She also says that even though the smart tags can be removed from clothing, they can’t be turned off and can be tracked even after you throw them in the garbage, for example.

Wal-Mart might track your garbage? Frightening!

Uncle Sam will track your body weight? Yawn.

WSJ:

If it seems as if the tax code was conceived by graphic artist M.C. Escher, wait until you meet the new and not improved Internal Revenue Service created by ObamaCare. What, you’re not already on a first-name basis with your local IRS agent?

National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, who operates inside the IRS, highlighted the agency’s new mission in her annual report to Congress last week. Look out below. She notes that the IRS is already “greatly taxed”—pun intended?—”by the additional role it is playing in delivering social benefits and programs to the American public,” like tax credits for first-time homebuyers or purchasing electric cars. Yet with ObamaCare, the agency is now responsible for “the most extensive social benefit program the IRS has been asked to implement in recent history.” And without “sufficient funding” it won’t be able to discharge these new duties.

That wouldn’t be tragic, given that those new duties include audits to determine who has the insurance “as required by law” and collecting penalties from Americans who don’t. Companies that don’t sponsor health plans will also be punished. This crackdown will “involve nearly every division and function of the IRS,” Ms. Olson reports.

Well, well. Republicans argued during the health debate that the IRS would have to hire hundreds of new agents and staff to enforce ObamaCare. They were brushed off by Democrats and the press corps as if they believed the President was born on the moon. The IRS says it hasn’t figured out how much extra money and manpower it will need but admits that both numbers are greater than zero.

Ms. Olson also exposed a damaging provision that she estimates will hit some 30 million sole proprietorships and subchapter S corporations, two million farms and one million charities and other tax-exempt organizations. Prior to ObamaCare, businesses only had to tell the IRS the value of services they purchase. But starting in 2013 they will also have to report the value of goods they buy from a single vendor that total more than $600 annually—including office supplies and the like.

Democrats snuck in this obligation to narrow the mythical “tax gap” of unreported business income, but Ms. Olson says that the tracking costs for small businesses will be “disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvement in tax compliance.” Job creation, here we come . . . at least for the accountants who will attempt to comply with a vast new 1099 reporting burden.

In a Monday letter, even Democratic Senators Mark Begich (Alaska), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire) and Evan Bayh (Indiana) denounce this new “burden” on small businesses and insist that the IRS use its discretion to find “better ways to structure this reporting requirement.” In other words, they want regulators to fix one problem among many that all four Senators created by voting for ObamaCare.

We never thought anyone would be nostalgic for the tax system of a few months ago, but post-ObamaCare, here we are.

The LA Times

Bell, one of the poorest cities in Los Angeles County, pays its top officials some of the highest salaries in the nation, including nearly $800,000 annually for its city manager, according to documents reviewed by The Times.

In addition to the $787,637 salary of Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo, Bell pays Police Chief Randy Adams $457,000 a year, about 50% more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck or Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and more than double New York City’s police commissioner. Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia makes $376,288 annually, more than most city managers.

Top officials have routinely received hefty annual raises in recent years. Rizzo’s contract calls for 12% raises each July, the same as his top deputy, according to documents obtained under the California Public Records Act.

Rizzo, who has run Bell’s day-to-day civic affairs since 1993, was unapologetic about his salary.

“If that’s a number people choke on, maybe I’m in the wrong business,” he said. “I could go into private business and make that money. This council has compensated me for the job I’ve done.”

The city had 36,600 citizens in 2000. It does have a claim to fame, per Wikipedia:

In March 2000, Bell gained worldwide publicity, as the media announced that a shipment of 55 Oscar statuettes were stolen from a trucking company loading dock in the City of Bell. In addition to the Los Angeles and Bell police departments, FBI art-theft experts were investigating.

First, there’s this:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan called on Congress on Friday to send emergency education education to the states to prevent lay-offs, according to the AP.

Now, let’s look at how the Los Angeles school district (LAUSD) manages its money. In 1999, it opted to build a high school on a toxic site.

The Belmont Learning Complex was envisioned as one of a kind. It would combine the city’s first new high school in nearly 30 years with housing and retail development — extras that could raise money to help cap construction costs at about $45 million.

When the school opens in 2008, at least nine years behind schedule, it will indeed make history — with its cost. The final tab will top $400 million, almost certainly claiming the title of America’s most expensive high school, and there will be no retail or housing.

Also, because of the methane leaking from the soil expensive pollution mitigation costs will endure forever. You’d think that would chasten the LAUSD. But no…

Disney Hall, built for half the cost of LA's latest high school

Already ballooning to $572 million, Los Angeles Unified’s most expensive school – and possibly the nation’s – looks like it will need a final $6 million infusion before fully opening this fall.

The Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools, a K-12 complex on the former site of the Ambassador Hotel where Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, needs the money to satisfy environmental regulations.

School board members are scheduled Tuesday to vote on the additional funding request.

The school will consist of six different learning centers and enroll 4,260 students, making the cost per seat about $135,000 – nearly 40 percent higher than the average school built in the central Los Angeles area over the past two years.

It even exceeds the per-seat cost of the pricey High School for the Visual and Performing Arts, whose $132,000 per-seat price tag – along with its bold, roller-coaster inspired architecture – raised plenty of eyebrows when it opened in September 2009.

District officials say the cost of the Robert F. Kennedy complex is more than justified if you consider its urban location, historical significance and expected community role.

“It has all the modern amenities, like an underground garage, a pool, a state-of-the-art auditorium…,” said James Sohn, LAUSD’s chief facilities executive. “In that context, cost of the schools is appropriate.”

Why not? It’s not their money. The Daily News put the $572 million price tag in context with some other LA buildings.

Americana at Brand: $400 million, 2008

Staples Center: $375 million, 1999

Walt Disney Concert Hall: $274 million, 2003

Universal Studios backlot: $200 million, 2010

Downtown cathedral: $190 million, 2002

Home Depot center: $150 million, 2003

LAUSD has a dismal graduation rate. By contrast, Thousand Oaks High school is a top academic performer in the state. The school looks like something the army would build — purely utilitarian with a gym designed like a quonset hut.

In the collectivist minds of Obama and his party, well-run school districts and their citizens should subsidize free spending idiots.

Democrats fret about low voter turnout. Instead of  insuring a thorough civics education via our schools (which they largely run) they opt for silly solutions that don’t work.

Operating on the false assumption that people do not vote because it is difficult to register, Bill Clinton pushed through the Motor Voter law. That boosted voter rolls but didn’t increase the number of engaged voters. So with more voters registered, the percentage of eligible voters voting went down. Oy!

J. Christian Adams writes about another aspect of the law.

I was at the Voting Section of the Justice Department for over five years. This office is responsible for enforcing most federal election laws which do not involve criminal matters. My previous articles at Pajamas Media have spoken of the DOJ’s lawless abandonment of race-neutral enforcement of voting laws, and other outrageous conduct. I will continue to publish here at Pajamas Media more instances of failure to enforce the law equally by the Department.

One such instance relates to the Motor Voter law, and will shock Americans who care about integrity in the electoral process.

The “Motor Voter” law was passed in 1993 to promote greater voter registration in the United States. It did this — most Americans now know from visits to the DMV — by requiring states to offer voter registration materials whenever someone had contact with a variety of state offices. These included welfare offices, social service agencies, and motor vehicle departments.

A lesser-known provision also obliged the states to ensure that no ineligible voters were on the rolls — including dead people, felons, and people who had moved. Our current Department of Justice is anxious to encourage the obligations to get everyone registered, but explicitly unwilling to enforce federal law requiring states to remove the dead or ineligible from the rolls.

In November 2009, the entire Voting Section was invited to a meeting with Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes, a political employee serving at the pleasure of the attorney general. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Motor Voter enforcement decisions.

The room was packed with dozens of Voting Section employees when she made her announcement regarding the provisions related to voter list integrity:

We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.

Jaws dropped around the room.

It is one thing to silently adopt a lawless policy of refusing to enforce a provision of federal law designed to bring integrity to elections. It is quite another to announce the lawlessness to a room full of people who have sworn an oath to fairly enforce the law.

Worse yet, it is a broken campaign promise by Barack Obama, and I’m sure he would not be happy to have heard the announcement. After all, his Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez has been traveling around the country bashing the Bush-era Department of Justice. Perez says as often as he can:

Those who had been entrusted with the keys to the division treated it like a buffet line at the cafeteria, cherry-picking which laws to enforce.

Yet at this meeting, Ms. Fernandes openly relished her time at the buffet line in the Voting Section cafeteria.

The problem with this sort of lawlessness, apart from the fact that it is becoming a trend in this administration, is that it nullifies the important compromise that Congress reached in 1993. Greater access to registration came by turning welfare agencies into voter registration offices, but the law also included provisions to ensure greater integrity. It is a dangerous development for our electoral system when one part of that compromise is tossed overboard by a bureaucrat.

Today’s Internet is a perfect expression of the wisdom of crowds — sites live and die based on a very democratic system. What people like survives, what they don’t does not.

BBC News writes about efforts to harness the wisdom of crowds (read the terrific book by that title).

Both the British government and BP have recently called on the public to help them sort out a mess. Chancellor George Osborne asked for tips on programmes to be cut to trim the huge budget deficit, while deputy prime minister Nick Clegg wants us to suggest “silly” laws that can be repealed.

And the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico prompted BP to call on Joe Public for ideas to stem the flow of oil after its in-house solutions failed. So far BP’s corporate May Day has elicited more than 20,000 suggestions.

In trendy parlance, such appeals for outside help are known as crowdsourcing, a term that Mr Clegg made sure to name check in his appeal.

So what is crowdsourcing? Anthony Williams, co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changed Everything, says examples are everywhere.

Open source computer operating systems, such as Linux and Google’s Android, the big rival to Apple’s iPhone, are written and refined by members of the public.

Another good example of such collaboration is Wikipedia, which allows users to write and edit entries for its online encyclopaedia: “For the first time millions of people can aggregate their talent and expertise,” says Williams.

“Previously the assumption had been you had to create a company. Here is something completely different.”

There are numerous modern examples of how collaboration has transformed businesses, Williams says. One good recent example is that of the Canadian mining company Goldcorp, which was struggling financially and unable to find gold on its land in northern Ontario.

When a new chief executive arrived he put all its geological data online, asked for help on where the gold was located and put up $500,000 in prize money for accurate suggestions.

Striking $3bn of gold

“They got submissions from people all over the world, including people using 3D computer modelling techniques. They found $3bn worth of gold on the property and Goldcorp became one of Canada’s biggest mining companies.”

It’s just one of a number of examples of how opening a problem out to the public and away from a small pool of workers can lead to huge gains, Williams says.

“These things happen a lot. You’re making a problem accessible to a large range of people with a diverse range of skills. And it turns out it’s not just for companies it applies to government as well.”

The idea is gaining traction in the normally more conservative corridors of the public sector, says Natalie Evans, deputy director of think tank Policy Exchange.

“We now have the technology to reach a huge pool of talent and ideas from the general public in way that simply wasn’t possible before. Done properly, this means we can leverage mass collaboration in a way that fosters a sense of ‘public buy-in’.

“This can be particularly important where – say in the case of deciding where the axe must fall in terms of cutting public spending – there are difficult decisions to be made.”

Seeking ideas is one thing. But how willing are those in power to act on the public’s suggestions?

Those in power rarely value the wisdom of crowds, especially the Big Government busy-bodies currently running the USA.

Doyle McManus editorializes in the LAT about the Kagan:

…the hearings were not a hollow charade. They gave senators a chance to stage a bank-shot debate over legal and political philosophy that was, at times, downright energizing. And they held up a mirror to the state of our major political parties in this election year: the Republicans, radical, cohesive and fierce; the Democrats, scattered, diverse and only occasionally fierce.

“In the wake of one of the largest expansions of government power in history, many Americans are worried about Washington’s disregard for limits on its power,” thundered Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), whose 1986 nomination as a federal judge was rejected by the same committee. The Obama administration’s approach to government, he said, “sounds a lot like the progressive philosophy which became fashionable among elite intellectuals a century ago, and is now seeing a revival.…I believe that’s a dangerous philosophy.”

Sessions didn’t mention that one of the great exponents of progressive government a century ago was a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt. The senator was “narrowcasting,” sending a signal of approbation to small-government conservatives and “tea party” activists who want to erase TR’s brand of federal activism from the party’s acceptable doctrines.

Quite a stretch, bringing up Teddy. A few thoughts:

• In the Progressive Era, many members of both parties were progressive. Progressivism at that time included eugenics and imperialism, something today’s progressives fail to acknowledge.
• Republican Richard Nixon started the EPA, Affirmative Action and instituted price and wage controls. The latter exceeded any Obama power grab to date.
• Democrat Jimmy Carter deregulated the airline industry, among other things.

So what?

“Millions of Americans believe that the federal government is simply out of control,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). The Supreme Court, he charged, has mostly given up trying to limit congressional power, even under its current conservative majority. This year’s healthcare law, Cornyn charged, was “an unprecedented reach” of federal power into individuals’ lives — and a signal that activists should seek constitutional amendments to restrict Congress’ powers.

The US Constitution is a radical document because it expressly limits the power of government. Progressives were openly disdainful of the Constitution because it thwarted their  schemes to remake the nation in their know-it-all image.

So they “interpreted” the limitations on government power away.

Supreme Court Justic Oliver Wendell Holmes famously defended the forced sterilization of “inferior” citizens, writing in one case that “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” That’s big government, folks.

The same kind of thinking — the Constitution is a “living document” — that empowered the government to invade a woman’s body and sterilize her, later found a right for a woman to have someone else invade her body and kill her fetus.

Today’s progressives pretend t0 respect the Constitution even as they render it meaningless. If point that out makes one radical, count me among them.

If our nations CEOs are this gullible, no wonder we’re in trouble. Kimberly Strassel on Obama’s bait and switch on Big Business.

To listen to President Barack Obama, corporate America is a juggernaut, a force of calculating capitalists who ceaselessly plot against his national reforms. To listen to Ivan Seidenberg is to wish the president were even a little right.

Mr. Seidenberg, officially Verizon’s CEO, moonlights as chairman of the influential Business Roundtable, the “association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies.” That would be the same Business Roundtable that woke up this past month to discover the White House has been playing it for a patsy. It turns out that actively supporting a pro-tax, pro-regulation Democratic majority on issues like health care doesn’t really get you anything save more taxes and more regulation.

This has clearly come as a shock to the Business Roundtable, as Mr. Seidenberg made clear this week with his newsy and newfound criticism of the White House. The chairman revealed in a speech to the Economic Club of Washington that he’d become “somewhat troubled” by a “disconnect between Washington and the business community.” Here he and his fellow CEOs had “worked closely with policy makers”—they’d even pushed ObamaCare. And yet! “We see a host of laws, regulations and policies being enacted that impose a government prescription” on private actors. Truth was, Washington had created a downright “hostile environment” for job creation!
Agreed, said Roundtable President John Castellani, in an op-ed the same day. We stuck with that majority “through trying circumstances,” even “alienating many of our traditional colleagues,” and what did we get? They keep “vilifying” the private sector! And taxing it, and empowering unions, and ignoring trade. “The time has come for a new course,” declared Mr. Castellani, a mere 18 months after Democrats announced plans to tax companies, empower unions and ignore trade.

Just how the Roundtable came to this tardy rebellion is a tale worth recounting, as it holds lessons. It begins more than a year ago, when the White House announced it would further tax U.S. companies that operate overseas. Our multinationals already face higher taxes than companies in other countries, but President Obama also wanted an end to “tax breaks” for companies that “ship jobs overseas.”

Why announce such a big fight when the White House was already knee-deep in health care and energy? Ask Robert Reich, former Clinton labor secretary, who blogged the day of the announcement: “The President needs the cooperation of many big corporations if he’s going to get universal health insurance,” and this was a “bargaining chip.” “He might be willing to take [the tax hikes] off the table if big corporations lend him active support . . .”

The specific target was in fact the Business Roundtable, which represents the multinationals that would be most hurt by the tax hikes. The lobby ran for the bait. The plan would “cripple economic growth,” said Mr. Castellani upon the announcement, broadcasting that his group would do anything to prevent it.

The White House played it magnificently. It spent a year carefully fiddling with the tax proposal, even disappearing it for a while. The White House provided cheery access to its Business Roundtable partners, even as it whacked the Chamber of Commerce for daring to step out of line. All the while a hopeful Business Roundtable worked for ObamaCare, made pleasant comments about climate-change legislation, and stayed quiet on issues it might have otherwise condemned.

And guess what? Health care passed. Democrats moved on to new priorities, including another round of unemployment benefits and spending. And guess what, then? The House decided to help pay for it with $14 billion in . . . taxes on companies that operate overseas. The Business Roundtable reeled off a denunciation, which congressional Democrats ignored.

David Harsanyi:

Your moral bearings obviously have been corrupted by high concentrations of carbon dioxide.

You’ve gotten past that scandalous word — “oil” — for a moment and begun to wonder who gave the administration the authority to shut down a vital regional industry without a shred of scientific evidence or tangible safety concern.

Perhaps it’s just that unshakable affection you have for BP (Exxon is also dreamy), but you wonder aloud how the administration has the power to extract $20 billion from a corporate partner — without congressional or independent oversight or even an executive order — then name a political appointee to head up the fund and allow him to mete out the money any way he sees fit.

You’re pretty sure, judging from the administration’s track record — “stimulus” to health-care legislation to fiscal reform, and so on — that it would be patently absurd to trust that it could divvy out billions without attaching political considerations.

Then again, you’re a coal-lovin’ shill. No, it doesn’t matter that Barack Obama was the top recipient of BP’s political action committee and individual bucks over the past 20 years. It is irrelevant that BP was a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership and lobbies for cap-and-trade schemes.

According to a Wall Street Journal article, in fact, the administration’s compensation fund has a little something for BP, as well. “In the end,” the piece states, “one aim of the fund — and a prime reason BP agreed to it — will be to minimize lawsuits against the company.”

To minimize lawsuits against the company is the function of Kenneth Feinberg — with imperial experience as auto bailout “compensation czar” — who went on to say that “I will have to make an offer — ‘You take this amount in full satisfaction of your claim, but only if you waive your right to future litigation.’ ” (more…)

Did Barbara Boxer’s campaign pitch this absurd story or did the AP just dream it up themselves?

Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina is kicking off her general election campaign against Democrat Barbara Boxer by criticizing the $862 billion federal stimulus package as doing little for private businesses.

Yet there was at least one California business that benefited from the stimulus plan, one close to Fiorina’s personal story.

Federal data analyzed by The Associated Press show that Hewlett-Packard Co., where Fiorina was chief executive from 1999 to 2005, has been paid $22.5 million so far in stimulus money distributed to cities, school districts, hospitals and universities across the country.

They used the money to buy computers, laptops, servers and other equipment from the Silicon Valley computer giant that provided much of Fiorina’s personal wealth.

So a company Fiorina used to run got federal dollars from a program she opposes.

So what?

While Barry was busy community organizing, writing memoirs and becoming a perfessur, millions of citizens built the Internet into something grand.

Now his know-it-all regime wants to regulate it.

Proposed regulation of high-speed Internet service providers by the U.S. government could cost the economy at least $62 billion annually over the next five years and eliminate 502,000 jobs, according to a study released by New York Law School.

The report estimates that broadband providers and related industries may cut their investments by 10 percent to 30 percent from 2010 to 2015 in response to additional regulation. At 30 percent, the economy might sustain an $80 billion hit, according to Charles Davidson, director of the law school’s Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute, which released the report on June 16.

“There will be follow-on effects in the whole ecosystem,” said Bret Swanson, president of technology researcher Entropy Economics in Zionsville, Ind., who co-authored the study with Davidson. “A diminution of investment by the big infrastructure companies will reduce network capacity, new services, and investment by all the ecosystem companies,” such as application providers and device manufacturers, he said in an interview.