Covid and Corrupt Federal Statistics

James Bovard  – December 28, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

 

Federal agencies don’t count what politicians don’t want to know. President Biden and other Democrats continuously invoke “science and data” to sanctify all their Covid-19 mandates and policies, but the same shenanigans and willful omissions have characterized Covid data.

During his update on his Winter Covid Campaign on Tuesday, President Biden declared, “Almost everyone who has died from COVID-19 in the past many months has been unvaccinated.” This was true from the start of the pandemic in early 2020, until the vaccines’ efficacy began failing badly in recent months. Oregon officially classifies roughly a quarter of its Covid fatalities since August as “vaccine breakthrough deaths.” In Illinois, roughly 30 percent of Covid fatalities have occurred among fully vaccinated individuals. According to the Vermont Department of Health, “Half of the [Covid] deaths in August were breakthrough cases. Almost three-quarters of them in September were,” as well, according to Burlington, Vermont TV station WCAX.

The Biden administration guaranteed that the vast majority of “breakthrough” infections would not be counted when the Centers for Disease Control in May ceased keeping track of “breakthrough” infections unless they resulted in hospitalization or death. Ignoring that data permitted Biden to go on CNN in July and make the ludicrously false assertion: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” But federal data on fully vaxxed Covid fatalities is far flimsier and less reliable than the numbers compiled by some states. Honestly recognizing the limits of vaccines could be fatal to Biden’s push for compulsory vaccinations.

The same policymakers who claim to be guided by data have little or no idea how many Americans have been hit by Covid. According to the CDC, there have been 51,115,304 Covid cases in America. But a different CDC web page estimates that there had been 146.6 million Covid infections in the US as of October 2, 2021. That CDC analysis estimated that only one in four Covid infections have been reported, which would mean that based on the latest official case numbers, more than 200 million Americans have contracted Covid. For Biden and his fellow policymakers, a potential error of 150 million Covid infections is “close enough for government work.” Relying on the lower number is convenient for policymakers who want to continue ignoring the natural immunity acquired by 199 million Americans who survived Covid infections.

Deceptive federal Covid data is not an anomaly. The same charades permeate the official data guiding both domestic and foreign policies.

Federal education policy has perennially been exempt from the fraud penalties that the Federal Trade Commission inflicts on private corporations. The No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2002, promised that federal mandates would make all students proficient in reading and math by the year 2014. Almost half the states responded to the law’s perverse incentives by “dumbing down” academic standards, lowering passing scores on tests to avoid harsh federal sanctions. It was obvious within the first year that the law was backfiring, but the feds covered up the catastrophe to permit President George W. Bush and other politicians to continue lying about saving America’s children.

Food stamps have been one of the most popular ways for politicians to prove their love of downtrodden Americans. Liberals perennially claim that the food stamp program has a fraud rate of only one percent. But that is based solely on the number of violators who get caught, and federal rules discourage states (which administer the program) from vigorously pursuing violators. New Mexico Human Services Secretary Sidonie Squier complained in 2013 that the biggest fraud issue in her state was recipients selling their food-stamp Electronic Benefit (EBT) Cards and claiming that they were lost or stolen. Roughly 70 percent of all the EBT cards issued in New Mexico in 2012 were replacement cards. Squier told Albuquerque’s KOB-TV, “We know that there are some people who lose them four, six, or eight times, and it’s pretty suspicious, but you can’t do anything about it based on the federal rules. They want people to have the cards — they want the cards replaced.”

The Peace Corps, one of the most sainted federal agencies, is also guilty of perennially covering up deadly risks to its recruits. The Peace Corps has long acted as if its volunteers’ good intentions are body armor that shield them against all perils. But its basic model – sending inexperienced young college graduates to live and work alone in many of the world’s most dangerous nations – is failing mightily. The Peace Corps routinely buries evidence of rapes suffered by its volunteers. Michael O’Neill, the Peace Corps’ security director from 1995 to 2002, commented, “Nobody wanted to talk about security [for volunteers]. It suppresses the recruitment numbers.” After a 29-year-old volunteer was gang-raped in Bangladesh, Rep. Ted Poe (R-Tx) condemned the agency’s reaction: “For political reasons, the Peace Corps did everything it could to ignore and cover up the dastardly deed, blaming the crime on the victim.” A 2021 USA Today investigation found that the agency continues suppressing evidence even though almost half of the female Peace Corps recruits “who finished service in 2019 were sexually assaulted in some way.” But this horrendous failure rarely shows up in the agency’s endless press release victory proclamations.

Federal statistics cannot raise the dead, but they can make troublesome corpses vanish. The Obama administration vastly increased drone killings of terrorist suspects in many nations and claimed that almost all the victims were bad guys. A Salon analysis, summarizing an NBC News report, noted, “Even while admitting that the identities of many killed by drones were not known, the CIA documents asserted that all those dead were enemy combatants. The logic is twisted: If we kill you, then you were an enemy combatant.” Daniel Hale, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, leaked information revealing that nearly 90% of people who were killed in drone strikes were not the intended targets. Biden’s Justice Department responded by coercing Hale into pleading guilty to “retention and transmission of national security information.”

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the media has portrayed federal officials like Tony Fauci as America’s “best and brightest.” But Washington is full of Towers of Paternalist Babel built on statistical quicksand. Bureaucracies conspire against admitting their failures, and politicians often rig reporting requirements to hide the damage their laws inflict. Anyone who has blind faith in federal data is unfit to judge public policy in the real world.

Print

READ MORE

James Bovard

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to The Hill, and a contributing editor for American Conservative

Get notified of new articles from James Bovard and AIER.

SUBSCRIBE

More Wetlands Purgatory for American Landowners

James Bovard  – September 3, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

 

How many drops of water does it take to justify federal bureaucrats commandeering your own land? Unfortunately, a federal judge changed the answer on Monday – the latest flip-flop in a saga stretching back more than 30 years and five presidencies.  Federal wetlands policy epitomizes how Washington policymakers don’t give a damn about safeguarding Americans’ rights with clear rules to curb bureaucratic tyranny.

In 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act to, among other things, restrict the pollution of navigable waters. That law gave the Army Corps of Engineers the power to approve or deny building permits, and the EPA received the power to veto Army Corps permits. In 1975, a federal judge revealed that the Clean Water Act also applied to wetlands that were adjacent to navigable waters.

In 1988, Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush declared that “all existing wetlands, no matter how small, should be preserved” and promised “no net loss” of wetlands if elected president. On January 21, 1989, the day after Bush’s inauguration, the EPA and the Army Corps revealed a new and vastly broader definition of wetlands. Land that was dry 350 days a year could be classified as a “federal jurisdictional wetland.” Fairness to Land Owners, a Maryland advocacy group, estimated that the new definition magically increased the amount of wetlands in the U.S. from roughly 100 million acres to 200 million acres, the vast majority owned by private citizens.

Federal bureaucrats concocted bizarre rules to vastly expand their own power over landowners, including the “glancing geese” test. If migrating geese glance down and consider stopping at a water hole, and the geese are on a flight that crosses state lines, then federal agencies automatically have jurisdiction over that water hole and the surrounding land. In a 1992 decision striking down an EPA penalty on a Chicago-area homebuilder, federal judge Daniel Manion declared, “The EPA claims jurisdiction over the intrastate wetland solely on the ground that migratory birds could, potentially, use the wetland as a place to feed, or nest or as a stopover on the way to the Gulf States for the winter months” but “there is not even any evidence that migratory birds, or any other wildlife, actually used [the area] for any purpose.” A federal appeals court decision narrowed Manion’s ruling and permitted the EPA to retain its “glancing geese” test.

Congress specified in the Clean Water Act that normal farming practices and operations should be exempt from federal wetlands restrictions. But the Army Corps of Engineers evaded that restraint by issuing a “clarification” of federal law that announced that, from the Corps’ perspective, cranberries, apples, blueberries, hay, and alfalfa are not agricultural commodities — and thus that those farmers were subject to the Corps’ control.

In 1993, the Clinton administration issued new guidance that banned any activity with “environmental concern” on wetlands. A federal attorney declared that, under the new policy, the Army Corps “could require a permit to ride a bicycle across a wetland.” A White House press release suggested that “Congress should amend the Clean Water Act to make it consistent with the agencies’ rulemaking.” That was a novel perspective on the Constitution, which previously required federal regulations to comply with laws that Congress actually passed.

Thanks to the Clinton regs, the Army Corps and the EPA imposed controls over sections of a development as small as 26 square feet — roughly half the size of a ping-pong table. One Rhode Island town was forced to wait for almost two years to get federal permission to do mosquito-control work on 0.009 acres of wetlands. Asserting federal jurisdiction over a tiny area could effectively prohibit the owner from building on a much greater portion of his property. The legal costs of getting government permission to build on or near suspected wetlands easily exceeded $50,000 — a prohibitive cost for most individual landowners.

Former Justice Department attorney William Laffer observed, “Any time the Army Corps or EPA thinks a parcel of land is beneficial to wildlife, they arbitrarily apply the wetlands definition to prohibit the owner from using the land.” Rep. James Hayes (R-LA) complained, “In Nevada, [housing] developments in the midst of cactus and parched earth are now being classified as ‘wetlands’ because standing water can occur for seven days in a hole dug for a foundation.” The Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would cost at least $10 billion to compensate owners for the loss of their property values as a result of wetlands rulings. However, with the way bureaucrats rig the game, property owners were denied even a single dollar of compensation after being banned from using their land.

Wetlands policy became little more than institutionalized lawlessness. In December 1997, a federal appeals court overturned a landowner’s conviction, ruling that “the Corps’ [sic] regulation of such wetlands is based solely on its definition of wetlands as ‘waters of the United States’” — for which the court found no basis in the Clean Water Act. Five months later, the EPA and Army Corps issued a guidance memo detailing their plans to evade the court decision. Agency personnel were told to completely disregard the decision in any area outside of the jurisdiction of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (i.e., Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and South Carolina). Even within those states, the EPA and Army Corps planned to continue prohibiting owners from using their land when the feds claimed the land would be used “by migratory waterfowl, other game birds… sought by hunters, bird watchers, or photographers.” According to the Clinton administration, it took only a few clicks of a camera to nullify property rights.

In 2012, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision in the regulatory regime, declaring that there was no reason to believe that “the Clean Water Act was uniquely designed to enable the strong-arming of regulated parties [property owners] into ‘voluntary compliance’ without the opportunity for judicial review.’’ In comments to the media when he announced the Court’s decision, Justice Antonin Scalia mocked the EPA’s definition of “wetlands,” noting that the Idaho homeowners had never “seen a ship or other vessel cross their yard.” Justice Samuel Alito, in a concurring opinion, declared, “The reach of the Clean Water Act is notoriously unclear,” and its harsh penalties “leaves most property owners with little practical alternative but to dance to the EPA’s tune.” Alito urged Congress to clarify the legal definition of “wetlands” — and thus to set a limit once and for all to federal regulators’ controls over private landowners.

Congress failed to clarify the law. In 2015, the Obama administration issued its “Clean Water Rule,” perpetuating arbitrary federal jurisdiction over wet spots across the nation. In 2019, the Trump administration issued new regulatory guidance titled the Navigable Waters Protection Rule (NWPR), curtailing the power of federal agencies. This past June, the Biden administration announced its conclusion that the Trump-era rules were “leading to significant environmental degradation.” Jaime Pinkham, acting assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, announced, “Communities deserve to have our nation’s waters protected.” Thus, there was supposedly no alternative to reimposing the regulatory straitjacket on America’s property owners. A Politico analysis noted that Biden appointees sought a new policy “informed by lessons from the previous whipsaw of regulations.” Politico reported that “it’s unclear what will happen to the thousands of jurisdictional determinations that have already been made under the narrower Trump rule” permitting landowners to build or modify their property but that “reversing them is a top priority for environmental groups.”

On Monday, federal judge Rosemary Márquez condemned the Trump-era wetland rules for “fundamental, substantive flaws,” vacating the 2019 policy in part because of “the likelihood that the [Biden administration] Agencies will alter the NWPR’s definition of ‘waters of the United States.’” An attorney for Earthjustice, which filed the lawsuit, boasted, “We came in and said, ‘No, no, no, no, you can’t leave this in place.’ This is hugely good.”

In the 1950s, liberals spurred a backlash against Sen. Joseph McCarthy by highlighting cases of innocent individuals who had lost their jobs as a result of his baseless accusations of communism. Vastly more Americans have lost their livelihoods as a result of federal wetlands prohibitions imposed on landowners with the flimsiest of legal pretexts. Yet there has been little uproar — and scant attention on Capitol Hill — over how bureaucratic tyranny is wrecking the lives of landowners.

Perhaps the best acronym for Biden’s pending wetland regs will be WBTP – for “Welcome Back to Purgatory.” Almost 30 years ago, federal Judge Roger Vinson denounced the federal government’s wetlands interpretations as a “regulatory hydra … worthy of Alice in Wonderland.” Nobody in Washington has cared enough to slay the hydra. Wetlands policy vivifies how the Fifth Amendment’s proviso that property cannot be taken “without due process of law” is void when bureaucrats are unleashed.

Print

READ MORE

James Bovard

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to The Hill, and a contributing editor for American Conservative

Get notified of new articles from James Bovard and AIER.

SUBSCRIBE

 

Federal Farm Policy Is Corrupt Regardless of the Latest Uproar

James Bovard  – July 1, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

Federal agricultural policy has been permeated by political racketeering since President Franklin Roosevelt appointed America’s first farm dictator in 1933. On Tuesday, the Washington Post revealed that Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, purchased a South Carolina grain plant from Archer-Daniels Midland (ADM) for a fire sale price shortly after it became clear that Trump would nominate him. 

ADM initially asked for $4 million for the plant but sold it to Perdue for $250,000 in December 2016. The deal was closed before Perdue was confirmed by the Senate. A few months after Perdue took office, his family trust sold the plant (along with other properties) for a hefty profit, the Post reported. Federal law did not require Perdue to reveal the transaction on his federal financial disclosure forms since it was completed prior to his confirmation. 

The Post noted, “Public officials are barred from accepting anything of value if the benefit is given ‘with intent to influence….’ The Perdue years were good ones for ADM, which hit many targets among the top issues listed on its lobbying forms.” ADM is one of the nation’s largest ethanol and biodiesel producers, and in September 2019 Trump added “hundreds of millions of gallons of ethanol to the U.S. gas supply.” In early 2020, “Perdue announced a $100 million subsidy of biofuels, including ethanol and biodiesel.”

Perdue was dealing with a multinational corporation whose ethics have never been confused with the Girl Scouts. ADM has long been one of the most prominent recipients of corporate welfare. The Post noted that it “has a history of manipulating markets. In the late ’90s, three ADM executives were convicted in a global price-fixing scheme and sentenced to prison terms. It was fined $100 million — the largest antitrust fine in U.S. history at the time.” 

“Ethics reform” is an eternal crusade in Washington, and almost every new presidential administration promises to fix the mess or – in Trump’s lingo – “drain the swamp.” It is unclear at this point whether Perdue violated any laws. Walter Shaub, the chief of the Office of Government Ethics in 2017, suggests that an FBI investigation of Perdue could be appropriate. Perdue did not respond to Post requests for comments, and ADM denies any wrongdoing.

Unfortunately, the media is ignoring the vastly greater corruption of federal ethanol policy. Ethanol is holy water for Iowa farmers who profit from the increased demand for corn. But ethanol epitomizes the political treachery that follows government interventions. 

A 1986 Agriculture Department study concluded that increased production of ethanol costs consumers and taxpayers roughly $4 for each $1 of extra farm income. The report stated: “Consumers would be much better off if they burned straight gasoline in their automobiles and paid a direct cash subsidy to farmers in the amount that net farm income would be increased by ethanol production.” But instead of a straight payoff to an interest group with huge clout in the Iowa presidential caucuses, politicians devised a convoluted Rube Goldberg regime that camouflages their windfalls for wealthy landowners. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama were both champions of mandating more ethanol use. 

Ethanol has long been hyped as a linchpin of national energy independence. But it routinely requires more energy to produce — including tractor fuel, the cost of shipping grain, etc. — than it generates as a vehicle fuel. Besides, since ethanol contains only about two-thirds as much fuel energy as gasoline, it guarantees worse gas mileage — leading drivers to buy more gasoline. It can also damage auto engines. 

Biden’s Agriculture Secretary, former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, is one of the biggest ethanol zealots in the nation. The Biden administration jumped on the bandwagon despite 40+ years’ evidence of its harm to the environment. The Clean Air Act of 1977 actually banned products such as ethanol. When the Clinton administration sought to mandate more ethanol in gasoline, a federal appeals court ruled in 1995 that “the sole purpose of the Reformulated Gasoline Program is to reduce air pollution…. EPA has even conceded that the use of it might possibly make air quality worse.” 

The Congressional Budget Office admitted in 1995, “Ethanol evaporates quickly, especially in hot weather, contributing to ozone pollution.” Stanford University’s Mark Jacobson estimated in 2007 that the use of “E85 (85% ethanol fuel, 15% gasoline) may increase ozone-related mortality, hospitalization, and asthma by about 9% in Los Angeles and 4% in the United States as a whole relative to 100% gasoline.” In 2018, when Trump sought to nullify a Clean Air Act provision for selling 15% ethanol in the summer, the Sierra Club denounced him for “once again ignoring Americans’ health and safety. Despite claims, corn ethanol is not a safe and environmentally-friendly fuel source — it is hugely detrimental to the environment and public health.”

Why all the largesse? As Forbes noted in 2016, “From the 2008 through 2014 election cycles, the [biofuels] industry showered federal lawmakers with $10.9 million in campaign contributions. Even that pales in comparison to the money they spent lobbying the federal government. From 2008 to 2014, the industry spent $188 million on an array of special interest perks.” According to a USDA-financed report from the Food Marketing Policy Center of the University of Connecticut, “For every dollar invested in contributions to political action committees, farm groups obtained on average approximately $2,132 in policy transfers.” (“Policy transfers” is a euphemism for subsidies.)

Unfortunately, the vast majority of farm policy corruption is legal – thanks to laws written by politicians. Buying votes is the only farm policy most members of Congress understand. When politicians and political appointees have free rein to set prices and rig markets, only a damn fool would not expect shady payoffs. Subsidized corporations favor politicians controlling the game, since they are confident they will control politicians. But no one has ever discovered how to make bureaucracies competent. As Texas Commissioner of Agriculture Jim Hightower quipped in the 1980s, “Federal agricultural bureaucrats couldn’t run a watermelon stand if we gave them the melons and had the Highway Patrol flag down their customers.” 

Since the 1930s, federal farm policy has been “socialism for one industry,” with endless interventions to profit the most politically connected groups of growers. Almost a century and a half ago, the Supreme Court clearly recognized the perfidy of such schemes: “To lay with one hand the power of the government on the property of the citizen and with the other to bestow it upon favored individuals to aid private enterprises and build up private fortunes is nonetheless a robbery because it is done under the forms of law and is called taxation.”

Lamentably, this ethical gold standard vanished from American public life long ago. Or maybe politicians simply “defined down” robbery? Regardless of the results of any investigations into the former Secretary of Agriculture, the only way to fix federal farm subsidies is to abolish them.

READ MORE

James Bovard

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to The Hill, and a contributing editor for American Conservative

Get notified of new articles from James Bovard and AIER.

SUBSCRIBE

 

Will the Pandemic Promote Political Power in Perpetuity?

James Bovard  – May 26, 2021 @ America Institute for Economic Research

“It’s like we created another industry in our state. The amount of money is staggering,” Andrew Schaufele, director of Maryland’s Bureau of Revenue Estimates, happily declared last week. The Biden stimulus plan is deluging governments across America with hundreds of billions of dollars of extra revenue that will allow politicians to stretch their power in ways that vex citizens long after the pandemic is over. 

One year ago writing for AIER, I asked, “Will the Political Class Be Held Liable For What They’ve Done?” Lockdowns at that point had already destroyed more than ten million jobs without thwarting the virus – a debacle that “should be a permanent black mark against the political class and the experts who sanctified each and every sacrifice.” No such luck. The article warned that “sovereign immunity… almost guarantees that no politician will face any personal liability for their shutdown dictates.”

The political class is coming out of the pandemic with far more power and prerogatives. Biden’s stimulus windfalls for lockdown governors is like giving $100,000 bounties to drunk drivers who crashed their cars. Government employees have been the ultimate privileged class during Covid-19, collecting full paychecks almost everywhere while many of them stayed home and did little or no work.  

Maryland will receive between $55 billion to $60 billion in federal stimulus funds – equal to “11 percent of the state’s entire economy.” The Maryland legislature “celebrated” by giving bonuses to government employees and by funding many new programs. Many other states have similarly used federal windfalls to launch new initiatives. 

Biden and his Democratic congressional allies are exploiting the pandemic to change the reality of work in America. Biden’s stimulus package included a $300 per week bonus for unemployment compensation that means that anyone who earned less than $32,000 is better off on the dole than taking a job. The unemployment bonuses were provided even while many states had canceled any requirement for claimants to actively seek a job. Alexa Tapia, the unemployment insurance campaign coordinator at the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group, derided work search requirements as “just another barrier being put to claimants, and it can be a very demoralizing barrier.” To assume that people are too fragile to look for a job sounds like a vast expansion of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Federal “generosity” to individuals who choose not to work is devastating small businesses unable to hire employees. 

Schools are some of the biggest beneficiaries of Biden’s handout bonanza. Biden’s Education Department is stocked with zealots who will likely exploit federal funding to dictate new curricula and mandate “equity” rules that could undermine local control of education. The same thing happened during the Obama administration when federal aid was used to bribe states into adapting “Common Core” standards that undermine students’ math competence. 

Teachers’ unions used their clout to keep schools shut down long after it was clear that reopening was safe. The Chicago Teachers Union declared, “The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny,” while the president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles declared that reopening schools “is a recipe for propagating structural racism.” But many teachers are collecting windfall bonuses thanks to the profusion of federal aid regardless of their unions blocking schoolhouse doors. 

Politicians are also exploiting the pandemic to seek to abolish fares for public transit. The Washington Post noted last week, “Transit systems for decades have been saddled with an obligation to partly support themselves through chasing ridership to increase revenue.” “Chasing ridership” is a euphemism for persuading people to voluntarily pay for a service. Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is pushing the Freedom to Move Act for federal subsidies to end local transit fares. But this is simply “Freedom to Move At Other People’s Expense.” 

Free fares could quickly become a Trojan horse. Turning riders from customers into beggars would remove some of the last incentives to provide reliable service. If public transit is made “free,” then the only people that transit officials will need to please are federal bureaucrats, members of Congress, and transit union bosses. Transit systems won’t need to worry about keeping travelers safe; a survey of lapsed New York subway riders found that “nearly 90%… said crime and harassment were important factors in determining whether they return to the system.” 

Making subway rides free would also distract attention from the miserable performance of public transit systems that were losing ridership long before the pandemic. When the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority received a huge boost in subsidies from the Maryland and Virginia state governments a few years ago, it promptly responded by shutting down many subway stations for seemingly eternal maintenance since it no longer needed fare revenue. Many of the same activists who want to make public transit zero cost for users also want to sharply curtail the use of private transit: citizens who refuse to abandon their cars for “free” transit could be next on the enemies list.  

The Biden administration is sparing no expense to make parents grateful to Washington. Beginning July 15, the feds will begin delivering up to $300 per child to Americans’ bank accounts and mailboxes. The Washington Post noted that the administration “estimates 88 percent of all American children are slated to receive new monthly payments — with no action required.” Congress enacted a temporary program scheduled to end after December. But a temporary handout shifts the argument: instead of debating whether a program that deluges non-needy families with cash, the question will be whether needy children can be thrown into the street by cutting off aid. The Post noted that the handouts could “have significant political consequences as the White House seeks to reshape the U.S. economy.” Actually, this is an attempt to vastly change the relationship of the federal government to the American people. 

Throughout history, rulers have used cash to buy submission. “Money is my most important ammunition in this war,” said Gen. David Petraeus, the supreme U.S. commander in Iraq. Presidents and members of Congress have long relied on “money as a weapon system” to buy votes or undermine resistance to Washington. 

Government restrictions almost always follow government handouts. In 1942, the Supreme Court ruled, “It is hardly lack of due process for the government to regulate that which it subsidizes.” Because the Roosevelt administration had decided to drive up wheat prices, the Secretary of Agriculture acquired veto power over the use of every acre of cropland in the nation. In 1991, in a case involving federal subsidies, Chief Justice William Rehnquist declared that “when the Government appropriates public funds to establish a program, it is entitled to define the limits of that program.” 

Every subsidy creates a power vacuum that will eventually be filled by bureaucratic or political ambition. The more things are financed by subsidies, the more activities become dependent on bureaucratic approval and political manipulation. To depend on government subsidies means either to be currently restricted – or to be only one Federal Register notice away from being restricted. Subsidies are the modern method of humane conquest: slow political coups d’etat over one swath of American life after another. The only way to assume that subsidies are compatible with individual liberty is to assume that politicians and bureaucrats do not like power. 

Biden’s profusion of new handouts put a halo over his tax hike proposals and, perhaps more importantly, his plans to unleash the IRS to be far more aggressive against Americans. The more politicians promise to give some people, the more they entitle themselves to seize from everyone else. French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenal wrote, “Redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the state.” “Reciprocal plunder,” in economist Frederic Bastiat’s phrase, becomes the soul of political life.

Post-pandemic policies are far more perilous because few Americans yet recognize how badly their rulers failed them. Instead, “temporary” programs will be extended and further divide Americans into two classes—those who work for a living and those who vote for a living. The more people who view government as their personal savior, the easier it becomes for politicians to demagogue to ever greater power. But as economist Warren Nutter warned, “The more that government takes, the less likely that democracy will survive.”

READ MORE

James Bovard

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to The Hill, and a contributing editor for American Conservative

Get notified of new articles from James Bovard and AIER.

SUBSCRIBE

 

Political Economy vs. Federal Fairy Tales

James Bovard  – March 29, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

 

Build Back Better” is the motto for President Biden’s ambitious plans to remake much of the American economy and society. On Wednesday in Pittsburgh, Biden will reveal his plans for trillions of dollars of new spending for infrastructure and other projects. His devotees in the national media will whoop up his proposals as the greatest thing since the New Deal, or at least since Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act a couple weeks ago.

Once Biden fires the starting gun, a deluge of experts will descend upon cable news shows to tout the vast benefits of the proposed “investment.” There will be a barrage of econometric formulas that irrefutably prove, via 10 or 15 shaky or squirrely assumptions, that vastly increasing federal spending will multiply prosperity across the land.  

Rather than deferring to mathematical formulas, I prefer old time political economy – i.e., analyses premised on the perfidy of politicians and the imbecility of bureaucracies. As a Washington journalist, I have investigated scores of federal programs that sounded great until they crashed and burned (okay, I did give some of them a push). Historical track records of government agencies are a better lodestar than the latest idealistic buncombe regardless of how many MSNBC hosts swoon. 

 “Washington knows best” is the tacit premise for most of Biden’s initiatives. The Biden administration can trust federal agencies to shamelessly fabricate statistics to vindicate any new program, or at least cover up the initial damage. 

Biden is planning on expanding federal job training programs, a beloved federal panacea dating back to the Kennedy administration. In 2014, President Obama admitted that such programs rely on a “‘train and pray’ approach. We train them and we pray that they can get a job.” To hide its dismal record, the Labor Department “defined down success” by counting trainees as hired simply by confirming they had a job interview, by certifying as permanently employed any trainee who spent one day on a new job, and by claiming victory for teaching teenagers how to make change for a dollar. No wonder programs are notorious for leaving trainees worse off than if they had never signed up. 

Biden is stretching the definition of infrastructure to include new spending for early childhood education, seeking to offer free pre-kindergarten for all three- and four-year-old American children. Will Biden’s speechwriters concoct a label as punchy as President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind (NCLB)?” But stretching government control over more years of childhood will turn out no better than Bush’s biggest domestic fraud. NCLB empowered the U.S. Education Department to punish local schools for not fulfilling arbitrary, often imaginary guidelines for “adequate yearly progress.” Almost half the states responded by “dumbing down” academic standards, lowering passing scores on tests to avoid harsh federal sanctions. Unfortunately, NCLB’s disasters have not deterred politicians from hustling further federal takeovers of schooling. 

As part of its climate change agenda, Biden issued an executive order on January 27 proclaiming “the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands by 2030.” Farmers and other landowners fear the feds may squeeze out private ownership of vast swaths of the nation’s heartland. Is there any reason to expect Biden’s Climate “Brain Trust” to be wiser than Franklin Roosevelt’s original Brain Trust which launched command-and-control farm policies that still vex America?

The sugar program, for instance, relies on import quotas and other interventions to drive U.S. sugar prices to double or triple the world price, costing consumers $3 billion a year. Since 1997, Washington’s sugar policy has zapped more than 120,000 U.S. jobs in food manufacturing. More than 10 jobs have been lost in manufacturing for every remaining sugar grower in the U.S. 

Peanuts take the prize for perpetual policy perversity. When the U.S. peanut program was launched in the 1930s, the federal government gave favored farmers licenses to grow peanuts and outlawed anyone else from entering the business. To maximize its controls, the USDA used aerial photography to determine if farmers planted a few more square feet than they were allotted. In 2002, Congress spent $4 billion to buy out the peanut license owners and end the program. Problem solved, right? Nope – congressmen still needed campaign contributions. In 2014, Congress created a new program that guaranteed payments far above market prices. The cost of peanut subsidies quickly approached a billion dollars a year, nearly equaling the farm value of all the peanuts grown in the U.S. Farmers dumped surplus peanuts on USDA, which dumped them on Haiti, sowing chaos in local markets. But that wasn’t a problem because Haitian peanut farmers can’t vote in U.S. elections (at least not yet).  

Among other pending marvels, Biden is planning to reform the Postal Service, an agency that has almost perfected statistical chicanery. In the 1980s, it boasted of 95% next-day delivery of first-class mail but the official tests measured only when letters moved from one post office to another, not when they were actually delivered. When the target for overnight first-class delivery was slashed to less than 50 miles in 1989, Postmaster General Anthony Frank promised that the new standards would “improve our ability to deliver local mail on time.” Sen. David Pryor (D-AR) groused, “This is like trying to fool the public by cutting the top off the flagpole when the flag is stuck halfway up.” In 2015, the Postal Service effectively eliminated overnight mail delivery even for local mail in much of the nation. With revised standards, “mail was considered on time if it took four to five days to arrive instead of three,” the Washington Post noted. The Postal Service has gotten away with cutbacks because it has a monopoly: it is a federal crime to provide better mail service than the government.

Biden administration policymakers can take solace knowing that federal agencies will shroud their abuses with statistical smokescreens. Transportation Security Administration agents, for instance, are sometimes derided as hopeless knuckleheads (cynics suggest that “TSA” actually stands for “Too Stupid for Arby’s”). Though TSA screeners dismally failed to detect most of the smuggled weapons and fake bombs in undercover tests, TSA in its early years issued triumphal press releases touting the number of knickknacks confiscated at airport checkpoints. TSA chief James Loy bragged that TSA screeners “have identified, intercepted, and therefore kept off aircraft more than 4.8 million dangerous items.” All the fingernail clippers, cigar cutters, frying pans, horseshoes, and small pointy objects TSA seized proved that the feds were protecting airline passengers better than ever. TSA doubled down by spending billions of dollars on Whole Body Scanners to take nude photos of travelers, after which TSA screeners’ failure rate on undercover tests rose to 95%. But presidents and members of Congress have been exempted from most of TSA’s indignities, so this particular federal gropefest continues. 

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx declared in 2015, “Defective agencies, like defective people, need the capacity for self-reflection and to make room for self-improvement.” But bureaucracies don’t learn from mistakes because they don’t pay for their failures. Government intervention is a cornucopia for politicians and bureaucrats regardless of what happens to purported beneficiaries.

Nor is there a detectable learning curve among the likely hallelujah chorus for Biden’s proposals. Philip Tetlock, a University of California research psychologist, noted “a perversely inverse relationship between indicators of good judgment and the qualities the media prizes in pundits.” Washington policy experts are akin to baseball commentators who never consider players’ batting averages and then are perennially shocked at all of the strikeouts. Rather than soiling their pristine minds with Inspector General and Government Accountability Office reports documenting the failure of similar prior programs, media cheerleaders will showcase the latest White House talking points. 

But Biden can still count on economists riding to the rescue with multipliers, right? Alas, if such multipliers were reliable, America would have reached financial Valhalla many boondoggles ago. Econometric formulas omit the “X factor” for government incompetence. Nobel laureate economist George Stigler noted in 1963 that, for the preceding century, “No economist deemed it necessary to document his belief that the State could effectively discharge the new duties he proposed to give it.” Things haven’t improved much since Stigler’s time. Swedish economist Niclas Berggren observed in 2011 that 95% of paternalist proposals “do not contain any analysis of the cognitive ability of [government] policymakers.” 

The more power a politician captures, the more flattery he hears, and the more deluded he usually becomes. In the same way that Biden feels entitled to deny media access to the most damning scenes of children in overcrowded refugee centers at the southern border, so he will demand that the media ignore the debacles spawned by his new programs. But at some point, there will be too many fiascos to suppress by a president shouting demands for “unity.” 

Nowadays, the federal government is controlling almost everything except itself. Instead of economic salvation, Biden offers standard D.C. issue “no-fault pseudo-benevolence.” How many more trillion dollars will America waste for another Beltway “triumph of hope over experience?”

READ MORE

James Bovard

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to The Hill, and a contributing editor for American Conservative

Get notified of new articles from James Bovard and AIER.

SUBSCRIBE

 

The Year in which Comforting American Myths Were Ravaged

James Bovard – December 30, 2020 

 

Thanks in large part to Covid lockdowns, this year has left vast wreckage in its wake, with ten million jobs lost, more than 100,000 businesses and dozens of national chains bankrupted or closed. Up to 40 million people could face eviction in the coming months for failing to pay rent, and Americans report that their mental health is at record low levels. But the casualty list for 2020 must also include many of the political myths that shape Americans’ lives. 

Perhaps the biggest myth to die this year was that Americans’ constitutional rights are safeguarded by the Bill of Rights. After the Covid-19 pandemic began, governors in state after state effectively placed scores of millions of citizens under house arrest – dictates that former Attorney General Bill Barr aptly compared to “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since the end of slavery. Politicians and government officials merely had to issue decrees, which were endlessly amended, in order to destroy citizens’ freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of choice in daily life. Los Angeles earlier this month banned almost all walking and bicycling in the city, ordering four million people to “to remain in their homes” in a futile effort to banish a virus. 

The Rule of Law is another myth impaled by 2020’s dire developments. Courts have repeatedly struck down sweeping restrictions. Federal judge William Stickman IV invalidated some of Pennsylvania’s restrictions in a September ruling: “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” After the Michigan Supreme Court effectively labeled Governor Gretchen Whitmer a lawless dictator, she responded by issuing “new COVID-19 emergency orders that are nearly identical to her invalidated emergency orders,” as the Mackinac Center noted. How many governors and mayors have you seen on the television news being led away in handcuffs after their arrest for violating citizens’ rights this year? None..........To Read More....