Referring to an article on the Drudge Report, a local Wichita blogger writes “According to this report on June 24th 2009 the ‘Free Press’ died without a whimper. It rushed head long into suicide.”
The entire post is Journalism died 24 June, 2009.
Tag: Kansas blogs
Kansas blogger prone to exaggeration
Jason Croucher, writing in the Kansas Jackass blog, says that we’re spending trillions on the Iraq war and little domestically. Is this really the case?
A running tally of the cost of the war from CostOfWar.com is at about $605 billion. That’s in line with other estimates. It’s true the war is going to continue to cost a lot for some time, and the cost may well exceed $1 trillion at some time in the future, but that’s a lot different from saying “all those trillions spent in Iraq.”
Then there’s this from Croucher: “Ah, but then, suddenly, the federal government did something they haven’t done in years — they actually spend [sic] some money domestically!”
I realize that Croucher is exaggerating a bit — okay, a lot — in order to be sensational and amuse his readers. But to say that federal domestic spending hasn’t been increasing is far from factual.
Croucher may have been relying on material such as that presented by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (This might be the case if he’s doing any actual research when forming his opinions instead of parroting leftist talking points.) Their analysis shows that federal domestic spending is growing less rapidly than defense and security spending for the period 2001 through 2008. Relative to this spending, domestic spending is shrinking, they say.
This analysis, however, ignores the fact that spending has been increasing, and rapidly, too. Numbers will illustrate this.
The Heritage Foundation has a series of charts prepared from the historical tables of the U.S. budget. One chart, titled Since 9/11, Federal Spending Has Increased Much Faster Than Inflation, contains this analysis: “Total nominal spending has increased 97.6 percent since 1992, while the Consumer Price Index has increased a relatively modest 47 percent, which means that government spending is growing much faster than inflation. Less than half of the increase in federal spending came from defense and homeland security spending.”
So federal spending is growing, and it’s not all on the war and homeland security.
While the Iraq was is expensive, it’s nowhere near the budget-buster that Croucher might have you believe. The chart titled Despite War Costs, Defense Spending Falls Below Historical Average tells the story that even though defense spending is rising, it is still below — way below — spending in recent periods (as a percent of GDP) .
The spending whose absence Croucher laments has, in fact, been increasing rapidly — even during the recent Bush presidency. The chart Mandatory Spending Has Increased Almost Five Times Faster Than Discretionary Spending illustrates. The mandatory spending shown in this charts is mostly social security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending. That’s all domestic.
Remember too that it was George W. Bush who started the prescription drug benefit program for seniors. That’s an expensive program.
We really don’t know what Kansas taxes should be — except lower
Today’s edition of the Kansas Jackass blog has a post written by Jason Croucher that criticizes Americans For Prosperity because the group doesn’t like taxes.
That’s not quite accurate, as Croucher himself says he doesn’t like paying taxes. Instead, the post seems to argue that we have to pay taxes because they’re there, and we don’t know whether they’re too high, and anyway, we can’t identify and agree on what is waste, so let’s just pay. Something like this, anyway. But there are a few problems with this post that deserve discussion.
He likens paying his cable television bill to paying taxes. This analogy is false on several levels.
First, subscribing to cable television is a voluntary act. A company offers a service, a person decides to buy, and therefore becomes a customer. The customer — and the company, too — can decide to sever the relationship whenever and for whatever reason the parties have agreed to.
That’s not the way taxes work. There’s nothing voluntary about the relationship between state and taxpayer.
Then he says that he doesn’t know whether his cable bill and taxes are too high — his emotions make him feel like they are — and how there’s no rational reason for thinking they should or could cost less.
As it turns out, there is a rational reason why a cable bill is what it is: competition provided through markets. It hasn’t been this way until recently, but now you can get television service in several ways besides free over-the-air broadcasts: cable TV, satellite TV, and in many areas, TV provided by the telephone company. These three service providers compete with each other on the basis of price and service. (This doesn’t include services like hulu that show television programs over the Internet.)
For most of the things that government does and taxes us to pay for, government is the sole source. Even for areas where there are alternatives, such as private schools, many people can’t afford to pay their taxes and private school tuition at the same time, so government is almost like the sole source. And even if a family decides not to use the government schools, they still have to pay the same taxes just as through they used them. Companies operating in markets can’t compel their customers to do that.
Furthermore, competition provides a built-in incentive to control waste, something that Croucher seems to think is desirable to control in government, if we could come to agreement as to the definition of waste.
In private industry, the profit and loss system provides a powerful incentive to control waste. At the minimum, being efficient while satisfying customer needs leads to greater profits. Its strongest incentive, however, is survival: those firms that are wasteful die.
What happens to wasteful government programs? President Obama campaigned on ending wasteful earmarks, but signed a bill containing 8,500 such earmarks. He did say this is the “end to the old way of doing business,” but I don’t think anyone believes him. Or ask George Will about the mohair subsidy.
The automatic pruning of inefficient or wasteful companies through markets and the profit and loss system saves consumers from having to do with a grocery store what Croucher wants us to do with Kansas government: come up with a list of “waste.”
So government, as we see, is largely immune from the pressures of a marketplace. So Croucher is correct on one respect: we don’t know what our taxes should be.
But we can be positive that they’re too high.
Kansas budget drama unnecessary
Kansas news reports and blogs are still trying to decide who won last week’s showdown between Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius and Republican legislative leaders. GOP message lost in drama provides an example.
But as reported on this blog (Sebelius’ Proposed Cuts Not Likely Enough, Kansas Governor Not Facing Reality of Budget Crisis) and in other places, this crisis was solely of the Governor’s own making.
Her budget proposal for fiscal year 2009 from January met the legal requirement she faced, but came nowhere near facing the economic reality. Had she proposed a reasonable budget in January, this crisis — such as it was — could have been avoided.
Instead, Governor Sebelius left it to the legislature to come up with a bill that met economic reality. Is that leadership? Can we be proud of this?
Kansas voter data difficult to use
At the Kansas Meadowlark, Earl Glynn has an article that illustrates some of the difficulties that researches face when working with voter data. I haven’t done nearly as much of this as Earl has, but I can tell you there have been times when I’ve been quite frustrated with voter data that I’ve received. I’ve had to spend time manipulating data in order to get it into useful formats.
The Meadowlark story is Comparing Voter Registration to Nov. ‘08 Ballots in Allen County. Too Difficult?
Kansas Jackass spotted at Kansas days
Through several methods, including excessive tweeting and plain old gumshoe work, the identity of the anonymous blogger Kansas Jackass was deduced. One tweet by the Jackass told me that the blogger would be entering the event hall at Kansas Days in a few minutes. I waited by the door and had a conversation with the Jackass.
First Amendment Defense Thorny Issue for Kansas Ethics Commission
The Kansas Meadowlark is covering a case before the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission that has free speech implications. The Meadowlark’s report is First Amendment Defense Thorny Issue for Ethics Commission.
What impact do Kansas voters have on judges?
Recently a Kansas blog covered a political event and wrote this in a post titled Defending America Summit Brought out the Wingnuts:
Stephen Ware, Professor at the University of Kansas Law School:
“What’s unusual about Kansas is about how little the people’s wishes matter. There are no checks and balances in the judicial selection process.”
********. It’s called a retention voted [sic]. Don’t like Justice Dan Biles? Vote him out in a year. And, hey, aren’t all professors supposed to be crazy liberals?
I asked Mr. Ware about the value of retention votes in giving a voice to the people. As it turns out, he said, no Kansas Supreme Court justice has ever lost a retention vote, and only one lower court judge has. “This is consistent with the pattern around the country, in which judges hardly ever lose retention votes. That’s mostly because there’s no rival candidate to spark a real debate.”
So it appears that in Kansas, retention votes have not been a meaningful way for voters to engage in the process of choosing their judges. However, I will trust this blogger to educate us about crazy liberals.
This blogger also mentions (A few notes on the Governor’s budget) that the Kansas Senate’s President is Derek Schmidt. Call your office, Stephen Morris.
And the basis for your criticism is?
A blogger in Kansas has an issue with a talk given by Jonah Goldberg at Americans For Prosperity’s Defending the American Dream Summit in Wichita.
As it turns out, the basis for the criticism is …, well, let the speaker himself explain. See the post titled Well-Named.