CalPERS: the pension fund that ate California. A tale filled with lies, waste, and outright corruption that’s even worse than I thought (and I thought it plenty bad).
Via the indispensable Will Franklin comes this eye-opening comparison of welfare in California vs. Texas. “As you can see, California is practically in a quadrant unto itself, indicating a lot of people receiving a lot each in welfare benefits. Meanwhile, Texas is situated precisely in the opposite corner of the graphic, indicating that a low percentage of Texas’ residents are receiving welfare, and among those who are receiving welfare, they’re receiving smaller benefits than those living essentially anywhere else in the country.” Read the whole thing. And get a gander at the chart.
Jerry Brown gets voters to approve a measure that cuts California public employee union pensions a tiny, weensie bit. The result? “California Public Employees’ Retirement System is essentially going to defy the order that pensions will be calculated based on base pay by declaring enhancements and bonuses are part of base pay.” And some unions are suing to opt out. And Brown isn’t even willing to defend the reforms in court.
“The highest-paid 10 percent of Southern California Edison employees earned at least $418.8 million in combined total compensation during 2011, and charged at least $11.8 million to their expense accounts, according to a report the public utility filed with the state. SCE’s most recent annual report showed 19 executives and other SCE employees received more than $1 million in total compensation during 2011, and at least 130 others received $300,000 or more in total compensation.”
And by “an advanced new stealth fighter plane,” I mean “a large plastic RC aircraft that’s obviously not suited for combat, stealth, or actually carrying a pilot.”
“The engine section lacks any kind of nozzle: engine afterburners could melt the entire jet.”
“The cockpit seems to be too small, to such an extent a normal pilot doesn’t properly fit in the ejection seat. Have you ever seen a pilot with his knees above the side borders of the cockpit and his helmet well beyond the ejection seat’s head pad?”
“The canopy lacks transparency and looks like it is made of plexiglass.”
Many viewers have said that the cockpit instrumentation resembles that of a Cessna rather than a fighter aircraft.
It’s always fun to watch liberals stub their toes against reality. This time around it’s JournoLista Matthew Yglesias who is shocked, shocked to discover that trying to start a small business (in his case renting out a spare house) is wrapped up in bureaucratic red tape. When this was pointed out to him on Twitter, he protested that he had often complained about local government red tape. Fine and dandy, but why is he such an enthusiast for big government at the federal level?
His dichotomy of thought seems to suggest there are several blind-spots in his understanding of economics (a rather significant drawback for a journalist who regularly write about economics). Watching him fail to draw the obvious conclusions on the baleful effect of big government on small business is almost priceless in its cluelessness. Let’s discuss a few of the many, many ideas that never seemed to have occurred to him, shall we?
In ways big and small, every single day is like what Yglesias described for small business dealing with big government.
Trudging between bureaucrats, Yglesias should have thought to himself: “ObamaCare will be 1000 times worse for small business than this.” Because it will be. But of course he can’t do that, given what a cheerleader he is for ObamaCare and how he belittled business owner concerns. But it’s always different when it happens to you.
The idea that red tape scales (at a minimum) with the size of government does not seem to have occurred to him.
And excessive red tape begets excessive local red tape complying with federal mandates.
He complains that the process he had to go through could have been made more efficient. What does he think all those Democratic patronage machine jobs are for?
If he’s been writing about economics for years, but is just now discovering the problems of how big government slows down business, you wonder: Does he never get out of DC? He could have picked up the phone and talked to real business owners who work outside the Liberal Reality Bubble and discovered all this many many years ago.
Bureaucratic inefficiencies are much like cockroaches: for every instance you see, there are thousands you don’t. And just like cockroaches, they swarm and multiply off in the dark while you’re not looking.
I’m going to bet that Yglesias has never read James Q. Wilson’s Bureaucracy.
And yet there’s a certain perverse pleasure in watching Yglesias wrestle with the problems of big government and not draw the obvious conclusion. It’s like watching a man hold the 6th piece of a 6-piece jigsaw puzzle, look back and forth between the piece and hole and declare “I just don’t understand!” It’s like watching a blind man suddenly given sight and see the elephant he had been feeling for the first time in his life, then resolutely put on opaque glasses and mutter “No, that can’t be it.” Or like Butt-Head trying to figure out what happened to his TV:
He can’t figure it out because he won’t let himself figure it out. Too much of his own self-love is tied up in the notion that he’s good because he’s a liberal, and liberals are good because big government is good in and of itself. For every maddening piece of red tape, somewhere out there was a Matthew Yglesias who thought that having government run and regulate something was just a swell idea.
You do it to yourself, you do. And that’s what really hurts…
BATF tries to run a sting operation. The result? A lost machine gun, lost confidential information, $35,000 in stolen merchandise, and $15,000 unpaid bills.
“Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if the world had exactly zero guns in it? Then your daughter could fistfight her rapist.”
For Black History Month, here are Frederick Douglass quotes Including: “I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.”
Best Twitter quote this week comes, strangely enough, from game show host Chuck Woolery: “The Constitution is not outdated, it is just an inconvenience to progressives. They hate it. I love it. You should too.”
There’s much news about Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott as of late, so I’m just going to put it all here in this big virtual pile:
First, Abbott now has a hefty $18 million in his campaign fund, fueling speculation that he will be running for governor in 2014.
Rick Perry claims that if Perry runs again, Abbott won’t run against him, and that they’ve actually discussed this. Maybe. And maybe Perry’s not running again (he says he’ll decide in June or July). But frequently people have been known to misremember conversations, and politicians have been known to change their minds….
A mixture of interesting tidbits on the Texas success story, some generic inspirational boilerplate, and some broad outline policy proposals.
Good: More constrained spending, tax cuts, no ObamaCare expansion.
Probably bad: “$3.7 billion from the Rainy Day Fund for a one-time investment in infrastructure programs.” There are, in fact, some infrastructure improvements that would be made around the state, but Perry has occasionally supported infrastructure boondoggles (like the Trans-Texas Corridor) in the past.
The general outlines are very good, but the devil is in the details, which should be forthcoming in the current legislative session.
Senator Ted Cruz is already doing a bangup job bringing the conservative message to Washington. Today’s example: laying a glorious smackdown on Chicago mayor (and former Obama chief of staff) Rahm Emanuel over the latter’s trying to pressure banks into not doing business with gun manufacturers.
Take, for example, this:
We do not accept the notion that government officials should behave as bullies, trying to harass or pressure private companies into enlisting in a political lobbying campaign. And we subscribe to the notion, quaint in some quarters, that private companies don’t work for elected officials; elected officials work for private citizens.
And this:
In light of the reception you have received in the Windy City, please know that Texas would certainly welcome more of your business and jobs you create.
And this:
Should Mayor Emanuel’s bullying campaign prove successful, I am confident that there are numerous financial institutions in Texas that would be eager to earn your business. And in the event that it might prove helpful, I would be happy to introduce you to their leaders.
Instead of going out and doing the heavy lifting myself on a Texas vs. California update, Victor Davis Hanson [[Corrected. – LP]] has done another of his California is totally screwed pieces, and it’s a cornucopia of facts on California’s decline.
A few tidbits:
Salinas just named an elementary school after a serial cop killer
“Hundreds of thousands of the working and upper-middle class, mostly from the interior of the state, have fled — maybe four million in all over the last thirty years, taking with them $1 trillion in capital and income-producing education and expertise. Apparently, they tired of high taxes, poor schools, crime, and the culture of serial blame-gaming and victimhood.”
“One of every three welfare recipients lives in California.”
Most Gene Wolfe-related posts go on my other blog, but I thought this one fit nicely here:
America is in trouble (as it always is). The chief problem is that it is ruled by an elite that is out of touch with the mass of the governed. It’s a fairly recent problem, and will be fixed in one way or another. America is still the greatest nation on Earth.
— Gene Wolfe, as interviewed by Nick Gevers in 2002. Peter Wright, editor. Shadows on the New Sun: Wolfe on Writing/Writers on Wolfe. Liverpool University Press, 2007. Page 183.
Long lines. It took 40 minutes for my friends to get in at noon, and about 28 minutes for me at 1 PM.
Here’s my video of the line:
And the show itself? Pricing on modern sport rifles (AKA “the guns Democrats want to ban because they look scary”) were ridiculous, double or triple what the asking price was before liberals started their latest gun control push, and there wasn’t a great selection on Glocks (I’m looking at a 4″ 9mm Glock as a carry gun).
Honestly, the most tempting thing there was a Barrett .50 BMG rifle at $4,000, which is about list, but: A.) It was the single shot, and I was more interested in a carbine model, which he also had…for $12,000, and B.) I think I need to embark on a rigorous weight-lifting regime before buying a Barrett; those suckers are heavy!
So I bought the traditional item people of my tribe buy when they can’t find a gun to buy at the gun show: venison jerky.
