More Predatory and Corrupt Behavior by Politicians

September 22, 2016 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Here’s an interesting issue to ponder. Is corruption rampant in government because the perverse incentive structure of politics turns good people into bad people?

Or do bad people naturally gravitate to government and politics because it’s the easiest (and legal, though generally immoral) way to take money from other people?

I guess this is like a chicken-and-egg question with no clear answer, though Mark Twain preferred the latter interpretation.

Though he was being too narrow. Yes, Congress if filled with people who are willing to use coercion to take money from ordinary people in order to line the pockets of their cronies, but this is also true for politicians and bureaucrats in the executive branch, as well as their counterparts at the state and local level.

Let’s look at a couple of oleaginous examples. We’ll start with a grotesque example of nepotism. Except this isn’t a routine example of daddy giving junior an undeserved job in the family company. In this case, we have Washington-style nepotism. Daddy has ransacked taxpayers to line the pockets of his daughter. The Daily Caller has the unseemly details.

More than $9 million of Department of State money has been funneled through the Peace Corps to a nonprofit foundation started and run by Secretary of State John Kerry’s daughter, documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation show. The Department of State funded a Peace Corps program created by Dr. Vanessa Kerry and officials from both agencies, records show. The Peace Corps then awarded the money without competition to a nonprofit Kerry created for the program. Initially, the Peace Corps awarded Kerry’s group — now called Seed Global Health — with a three-year contract worth $2 million of State Department money on Sept. 10, 2012, documents show. Her father was then the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which oversees both the Department of State and the Peace Corps. Seed secured a four-year extension in September 2015, again without competition. This time, the Peace Corps gave the nonprofit $6.4 million provided by the Department of State while John Kerry was secretary of state.

What makes this story especially outrageous is that John Kerry is a multi-multi-millionaire, having married in the Heinz family fortune.

Does he really need to pick the pockets of taxpayers to boost his daughter’s finances?
Here’s another example. The Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, set up an “economic development program” that predictably turned into a playground for the politically well connected (sort of a state version of the corrupt program in Washington that financed Solyndra and other money-losing schemes).

The New York Times outlines this scandal, though be prepared to shower after reading.

Federal corruption charges were announced on Thursday against two former close aides to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a senior state official and six other people, in a devastating blow to the governor’s innermost circle and a repudiation of how his prized upstate economic development programs were managed. The charges against the former aides, Joseph Percoco and Todd R. Howe, and the state official, Alain Kaloyeros, were the culmination of a long-running federal investigation… The charges stemmed from “two overlapping criminal schemes involving bribery, corruption and fraud in the award of hundreds of millions of dollars in state contracts and other official state benefits,” federal prosecutors said in the complaint. Mr. Percoco, who had served as Mr. Cuomo’s executive deputy secretary, is accused of soliciting and taking more than $315,000 in bribes between 2012 and 2016 from two companies… Until January, when Mr. Percoco left the administration…, he was Mr. Cuomo’s all-purpose body man, political enforcer and shadow.

The good news is that at least some of the people in this disgusting display of cronyism may face legal consequences.

Oh, by the way, Cuomo used to be the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development when regulations were implemented that required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make more dodgy housing loans. This guy is a walking disaster area.

For the umpteenth time, the moral of the story is that the only way to reduce corruption in government is to reduce the overall amount of taxing, spending, and regulating.

Or you can magically wish that only angelic people will gravitate to the public sector. Maybe I’m a cynic, but I’ll go with the former option.

P.S. I wrote a few days ago about the IMF’s hypocrisy in attacking Trump for his views on trade taxes. The bureaucrats are right that we shouldn’t increase the tax burden on global commerce. My complaint was that sauce for the goose wasn’t sauce for the gander. Hillary’s plan to increase the tax burden on work and investment is an even bigger threat to growth, yet the IMF gives her a free pass.
Anyhow, one of the points I made is that trade taxes currently are quite low, so they presumably cause only a minor amount of damage, whereas tax rates on work and investment are relatively high, meaning that further increases would be especially debilitating to growth. I cited some research from a Spanish academic to show how trade policy has improved over time, but didn’t have specific details on trade taxation.

My buddy Bryan Riley from the Heritage Foundation has come to my rescue, sharing an article that includes this chart on historical tariff rates.

The bottom line is that trade taxes have declined by somewhere between 75 percent and 90 percent since the end of World War II. This has been a great victory for economic liberty.
Trump should be condemned for wanting to halt further progress and/or go in the wrong direction by boosting trade taxes.

But, to echo what I wrote the other day, Hillary also should be condemned for proposing a different set of tax hikes that would cause even more harm to economic liberty.

P.P.S. I wrote a column earlier this month entitled “Anatomy of a Brutal Tax Beating” to highlight how an expert at the Tax Foundation completely dismantled a silly and unlearned article by a writer for Vox.

Well, we now have an “Anatomy of a Brutal Education Beating.” Except it’s not right-on-left violence. It’s left-on-left violence. Jonathan Chait writes for New York magazine and he formerly had stints at The New Republic and The American Prospect, so he’s definitely not a libertarian type.
But he’s ethical and doesn’t have a high level of tolerance for other leftists who launch dishonest ideological attacks on charter schools. Here’s some of what he wrote while debunking an article by some guy named Charles Pierce.

Esquire’s Charles Pierce, a fervent charter critic, …does not dispute the findings that urban charters in Massachusetts provide dramatic education benefits. He simply doesn’t care. …In the sentence, Pierce goes on to assert that the cap on charters serves a vital purpose. But the Brookings study, which I doubt he’s read, shows the opposite. …The cap in Massachusetts is completely perverse, in fact. It allows more students to enroll in charters serving suburban students, where the charters do not outperform the neighborhood schools, and prevents more students from enrolling in urban charters, where the schools do exceed the traditional neighborhood schools. …Presented with evidence that certain schools are providing a clearly better education to low-income urban students, Pierce argues that education should be denied because … somebody is making money off of it. It is more important to him to stick it to the capitalists than to allow low-income, disproportionately nonwhite students to have a chance to have a better life. …What’s even more perverse about Pierce’s argument is that it is factually wrong. Charters in Massachusetts are not for-profit vehicles. State law prohibits for-profit operators from running a public charter school… The notion that charters are “companies” and an “industry” with “profits” — that is, the entire basis for Pierce’s opposition — is a figment of the imagination. …Pierce rails suspiciously against the donors to the anti-cap side. …It is strange to accuse people who are giving away their money to the cause of educating poor children of not “giv[ing] a rat’s ass about educating children in Roxbury or Mattapan”.

Wow. Chait drove over Pierce, then hit the brakes, put the car in reverse, and then drove over him again just for the fun of it.

A perfect example of the difference between a sincere person of the left and a hack who is probably just flacking for teacher unions.

P.P.P.S. I can’t resist returning to John Kerry. It’s not merely that he’s a staggeringly rich guy who nonetheless sees no problem with diverting money from taxpayers to his daughter. It’s also that he does everything possible to minimize the amount of tax that he pays. Everything possible.

P.P.P.P.S. This column focused on corrupt Democrats, but this is a bipartisan problem. Indeed, the worst offenders are probably Republicans.