Thanks to Jim Bognar for the catch. The Benton County Commissioners made yet another submission to the US Dept. of Transportation. This time they are asking to withdraw their request for central time. By my count, that’s the fourth position they’ve submitted to the USDOT. First they requested central time. Second, they decided they hadn’t properly voted on the request and asked that the request be withdraw. Third, they voted for Central Time and made their submission. And now, fourth, they have asked to withdraw their request. I’m tired of redrawing the map, so I’m leaving it as it is.
Greenspan
Alan Greenspan is retiring and George Bush has appointed a successor. The successor is to be Ben Burnanke. Preliminary indications are that he is qualified which is, obviously, a break from Bush’s usual choices in appointments. Apparently Mr. Bush couldn’t find any old frat brothers who had led a town chamber of commerce or something.
In any event, I recalled a March 15, 2005 entry where I had discussed Mr. Greenspan a bit. This was back when Bush was pounding the drum on Social Security. Remember Social Security? If you’ll recall, it was a crisis. Such a crisis, apparently, that no Social Security legislation has even been introduced to the Congress. So much for spending that political capital. Not being one to work any harder than I have to, I thought I’d just repost the Greenspan entry.
From March 15, 2005:
Greenspan ducks and weaves on deficits
As a fiscal conservative, I have to take Alan Greenspan to task for his testimony before the Senate, at least as it was reported in the New York Times, when he was charged with being complicit in the return of large deficits.
Greenspan has come under fire for his support of Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security. The premise for Bush’s plan is that there is a Social Security crisis because expenditures will exceed income in 2018 or thereabouts. That really isn’t a crisis for Social Security because it has a stockpile of Treasury Bills it’s been buying with the surplus revenues received through Social Security payroll taxes over the years.
That could be a problem for the federal government when Social Security cashes in on the Treasury Bills. The reason the federal government is in bad shape is because of the rampant deficit spending in which it has engaged for the past 25 years, with a brief respite in the second half of the 90s. The return to deficit spending over the past 5 years is due in good measure to the Bush tax cuts. The Bush tax cuts were greenlighted by Greenspan. That Greenspan would participate in trying to disguise the federal general fund’s problems as a Social Security problem is particularly repugnant since Greenspan, during the Reagan years, was responsible for increasing the payroll taxes as a way to make Social Security fiscally solvent.
Now, consider what a remarkable bait and switch Greenspan would have pulled off if Social Security benefits are reduced because of Bush’s talk of a crisis:
What has just happened if that comes to pass? Greenspan has helped use the more regressive Social Security taxes to pay for Bush’s tax cuts for the very wealthy. Quite a trick.
Now, on Greenspan’s defense for greenlighting the Bush tax cuts:
he supported Mr. Bush’s tax cuts because almost all budget analysts were forecasting trillions of dollars in surpluses that never materialized.
As events turned out, federal deficits rose as tax revenues plunged for three years in a row and spending grew on everything from war costs in Afghanistan and Iraq to education and homeland security. What was expected to be a $5.6 trillion surplus by 2011 is now expected to be at least a $4 trillion deficit by 2015 if Mr. Bush’s tax cuts are made permanent.
“We were confronted at the time with an almost universal expectation amongst experts that we were dealing with a very large surplus for which there seemed to be no end,” Mr. Greenspan told members of the Senate Select Committee on Aging.
Why that’s just hogwash. It was pretty clear by 2001 that the dotcoms were tanking. Throughout the 2000 Presidential Campaign, Bush repeatedly said that the economy was about to falter.
I may be bragging, but I knew deficit spending was just around the corner. And Greenspan’s presumably smarter than I am. I probably can’t lay this one at Greenspan’s feet, but I do recall that a proposal to amend the tax cut legislation was voted down that would have added a trigger removing the tax cuts if deficits returned. So the tax cut proponents were quite cognizant of the likelihood of deficit spending being caused by those tax cuts.
I’m afraid I tend to go on and on about deficit spending. For at least the past 15 years, it’s been my #1 political concern. I vote for the candidate that, in my opinion, is most likely to pay down the debt. That’s why I voted for Perot in ’92 and ’96 (silly as it seems now). From my perspective, the Boomers are mortgaging GenX’s future, and that’s simply unacceptable.
Posted by Doug at March 15, 2005 08:04 PM
———————————
Back to the present day, 10/24/05. I’m digressing a bit, but I just came across a New York Times Magazine article that touches on the subject of Red-Ink Republicanism. It’s an interview with Florida Senator Connie Mack.
[The President] would like to eliminate the estate tax permanently.
I think there is a likelihood that Congress will deal with that issue before this term comes to an end. I would vote to eliminate, as we refer to it, the death tax. I think it’s an unfair tax.
Really? I think it’s a perfect tax. The idea behind it was to allow people to postpone paying taxes until they die, at which point they presumably no longer care. Why do you call it unfair?
Well, let’s say, if you are in the farming business and you have the desire to pass this farm on to your children. The problem is that when your parents die, you have to come up with cash to pay the estate tax. One thing you don’t have is cash. You’ve got plenty of land. So I just don’t believe it’s a fair tax.
That strikes me as a red herring. The issue is not really small farms, but zillion-dollar estates made up of stocks and bonds.
I don’t know what the percentage breakdown is. I still go back to the same notion that these individuals who have accumulated these resources have paid taxes on them many times in their life, and then to say, when you die, now you pay more taxes on it? There is a limit.
Well, the U.S. government has to get money from somewhere. As a two-term former Republican senator from Florida, where do you suggest we get money from?
What money?
The money to run this country.
We’ll borrow it.
I never understand where all this money comes from.
When the president says we need another $200 billion for Katrina repairs, does he just go and borrow it from the Saudis?
In a sense, we do. Maybe the Chinese.
Is that fair to our children? If we keep borrowing at this level, won’t the Arabs or the Chinese eventually own this country?
I am not worried about that. We are a huge country producing enormous assets day in and day out. We have great strength, and we have always adjusted to difficulties that faced us, and we will continue to do so.
There you have it. Screw the children. Who cares if the Arabs or the Chinese own it. As long as we get our tax cuts *now*.
This morning, I was listening to a radio interview with a woman who had studied the GI Bill, and it occurred to me that previous generations successfully grew the economy. Our generation is mining it.
Whereas previous generations saved and sacrificed and plowed some of the fruits of their labor into the economy so that it increased, it seems that our current political leadership is willing to strip our economy and extract as much value as possible out of it before it plays out and crumbles.
Can you imagine the current leadership proposing something as audacious as the GI Bill? Making the rich pay more for their country so that those of humble means who have served their country well can get a free ride to college? I’m sure you’d hear the ominous rumblings about “class warfare” were the suggestion to be made.
I’ve wandered a bit far afield from Mr. Greenspan. I could probably use an editor.
Sometimes you just have to chill
Because it’s not all about news & politics. And, I think my kids are adorable. Biased? Yup.
Colleges protest CALEA
A pretty good article on protests by colleges on CALEA. CALEA is the “Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.” It was passed back in 1994 to require communications providers to make their systems wiretap friendly, particularly as new technologies were implemented.
I remember an uproar about CALEA back when I first started on the Internet (which was in ’94) but haven’t followed the issue closely since then. Apparently implementation has dragged out. The article is about the protests of colleges with respect to the expense and other burdens CALEA puts on their systems.
The federal government, vastly extending the reach of an 11-year-old law, is requiring hundreds of universities, online communications companies and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications.
The action, which the government says is intended to help catch terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers.
. . .
The order, issued by the Federal Communications Commission in August and first published in the Federal Register last week, extends the provisions of a 1994 wiretap law not only to universities, but also to libraries, airports providing wireless service and commercial Internet access providers.
It also applies to municipalities that provide Internet access to residents, be they rural towns or cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco, which have plans to build their own Net access networks.
. . .
The 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, requires telephone carriers to engineer their switching systems at their own cost so that federal agents can obtain easy surveillance access.
. . .
Technology experts retained by the schools estimated that it could cost universities at least $7 billion just to buy the Internet switches and routers necessary for compliance. That figure does not include installation or the costs of hiring and training staff to oversee the sophisticated circuitry around the clock, as the law requires, the experts said.
“This is the mother of all unfunded mandates,” Mr. Hartle said.
Even the lowest estimates of compliance costs would, on average, increase annual tuition at most American universities by some $450, at a time when rising education costs are already a sore point with parents and members of Congress, Mr. Hartle said.
. . .
If law enforcement officials obtain a court order to monitor the Internet communications of someone at a university, the current approach is to work quietly with campus officials to single out specific sites and install the equipment needed to carry out the surveillance. This low-tech approach has worked well in the past, officials at several campuses said.
But the federal law would apply a high-tech approach, enabling law enforcement to monitor communications at campuses from remote locations at the turn of a switch.
It would require universities to re-engineer their networks so that every Net access point would send all communications not directly onto the Internet, but first to a network operations center where the data packets could be stitched together into a single package for delivery to law enforcement, university officials said.
. . .
Law enforcement has only infrequently requested to monitor Internet communications anywhere, much less on university campuses or libraries, according to the Center for Democracy and Technology. In 2003, only 12 of the 1,442 state and federal wiretap orders were issued for computer communications, and the F.B.I. never argued that it had difficulty executing any of those 12 wiretaps, the center said.
“We keep asking the F.B.I., What is the problem you’re trying to solve?” Mr. Dempsey said. “And they have never showed any problem with any university or any for-profit Internet access provider. The F.B.I. must demonstrate precisely why it wants to impose such an enormously disruptive and expensive burden.”
. . .
And, of course, all of this puts aside the civil liberties questions about just how easy it ought to be for the Justice Department to tap our phones.
Fort Wayne News Sentinel runs astroturf editorial garbage
In yesterday’s News Sentinel, you’ll find an editorial entitled Saving money while rebuilding. It’s an unsigned editorial attributed to “The Lima News, Ohio Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News”. The first paragraph is:
One of the smartest things President Bush did to reduce recovery costs in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was to suspend Davis-Bacon Act rules in the hardest hit states. But Congress is frantically trying to overrule the president, which would add billions of dollars to the already staggering recovery costs.
Funny thing is that, this same language appears in a number of other unsigned editorials across the country. According to the blog Southern Studies, the editorials show up in California, Colorado, and North Carolina in papers owned by a company called “Freedom Communications, Inc.” Looks like the Lima News is also owned by Freedom Communications Inc.
So, I guess the News Sentinel’s biggest mistake here is not culling its newswire feeds very well. Unsigned editorials coming from far flung corporations with unknown loyalties ought not be passed off as the thinking of local editorial staffs.
State Bar Association meeting
As I mentioned, I went to the Indiana State Bar Association meeting today. I didn’t go to any of the social functions, but rather went to a few of the CLEs. I found them more enjoyable than average. Maybe it was the more social setting, maybe it was the shorter classes (four classes of one or two hours) rather than a day long seminar on one class. Maybe I was just goofy because I had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to take care of my daughter before driving down to Indy.
Anyway, the classes I took were on civility in appellate practice and also unpublished opinions; the new design-build option for public works; increased exemptions and the new bankruptcy law; and a ‘better business’ seminar focused on client service.
The roundtable on appellate practice was a good discussion. The consensus was that there was much less of a problem with lack of civility at the appellate level than at the trial level. There was some discussion about sloppy or misleadingly inaccurate or incomplete references to the record or caselaw. I pointed out that I figured this was a self-correcting problem because I regard it as an opportunity. If opposing counsel leaves himself open like that, I’ll point it out in a courteous manner. At the end of the day, you want the Court to rely on your brief when it has a question. If you make them uneasy about relying on the other guy’s brief because he’s telling half-truths, you’re well on your way to winning the case.
I couldn’t help but thing of Marcia Oddi and the Indiana Law Blog when the discussion came to unpublished opinions. Judge Baker indicated that when he got started, the thinking behind not publishing some opinions was that many of them are redundant and not publishing them was a way of saving attorneys from having to buy a lot more books and having to wade through a lot more case law without the extra volume particularly advancing the law in any significant way. Nowadays, the extra paper isn’t really a concern, but the extra work for little pay-off might still be a valid concern. My take is that it would be nice to have them easily available online — give us utlanders some parity with Indy attorneys who can drop by the Clerk’s office. Aside from that, I think I’d be o.k. with unpublished decisions as something you could cite to the court as persuasive, but non-precedential authority. This might not exactly square with my theoretical notions about the common law, but as a practical matter, it might be a good way to avoid responsbility for a mass of mostly redundant case law.
The design-build law seminar was a nuts & bolts affair. Basically, it took a look at the new law that allows public entities to do one-stop shopping for their (wait for it) designers and builders. The contractor and the architect can be one company. This introduces more of a subjective factor into figuring out how to award bids. Before you had your designer prepare the specs and basically you allowed builders to compete almost solely on price. More or less an apples to apples comparison. Lumping the designer and builder into one entity, there is more of an apples to oranges comparison going on, low price is not the only consideration, and there are potentially more ways to game the system. On the other hand, it streamlines things and potentially allows overall savings in public works projects, particularly smaller ones where the bifurcated bidding process is a greater percentage of the total cost of the project.
The bankruptcy seminar was entertaining, but contained an awful lot of inside baseball. If you didn’t have some familiarity with the new bankruptcy law and/or exemption law, I don’t think you’d get much out of it.
The better business, client service seminar was basically an extended reminder to say thank you to your clients for choosing you instead of someone else, keep the lines of communication open, and try to do the little things that will make your clients happy without burdening your bottom line overly much.
Dvorak on the Regulatory Flexibility Committee
Rep. Dvorak has a good post on the latest meeting of the Regulatory Flexibility Committee. That immediately drew my interest since I had the opportunity to serve as staff counsel for that august body back in 1998 or so. Back then, and I presume today, it was made up of the members of the House and Senate Commerce Committees.
I’m not sure it was well served by me back then. At the time, the big question on the table was whether and how to “deregulate” the electric industry. (I put the deregulate in “scare quotes” because there were still all kinds of regulations in mind. I thought of it as “reregulation”. The usual alternative was “restructuring”.) I gave myself a crash course in electric industry issues. But, I was 2 years out of law school, and had no experience with regulatory issues generally or electric issues specifically. So, my usefulness was necessarily limited. I tracked down the speakers suggested by the chairman and was able to explain the difference between “transmission” and “distribution” as it pertains to electricity. At the end of the day, the Committee and the legislature generally got the right result on the issue. They left well enough alone. Indiana had comparatively low electric prices. They didn’t do anything experimental and, consequently, we haven’t experienced any California-style electric gougings. And, I do specifically recall Enron’s lobbyist being at the hearings. So don’t think it couldn’t have happened here. With that digression, I feel like Grampa Simpson. (“We wore onions on our belts, which was the style at the time . . .”) Then again, I’m only up right now because my 2.5 month old daughter decided 5 a.m. was a really great time to be *wide* awake. So, I suspect sleep deprivation on my part may play a part in this post.
Anyway, back to Representative Dvorak. He reports that the issue on the table for RegFlex in this interim was to decide “consider recommending proposed legislation concerning telecommunications reform.” No consensus on the issue was reached. He suggests that it might be more helpful for legislators to receive an education on the latest technological breakthroughs — and even education on the basics of some of the more common technology. He endorsed the sentiment
Too often the discussion of telecommunications policy turns on phrases like “overregulation,†and “investment incentives.†These are critical issues, to be sure, but like the term “last mile,†such phrases frame the issues in network-centric terms. As more and more intelligence migrates to the edge of the network, users of the network need to be part of the policy debate. Let’s put the user back into the picture.
That paragraph is a reminder that the frame of the debate often determines the outcome. One of my first exposures to that premise, particularly with respect to telecommunications, was from Indiana University Communications Professor, Harmeet Sawhney, author of (among other things), Information Superhighway: Metaphors as Midwives. I couldn’t find the article online, but in my search stumbled across one of his course descriptions at IU:
In this seminar we will examine the rise of the networked society and the physical infrastructure that undergirds it. We will start by discussing the social, economic, and cultural forces that set into motion the movement towards the networked society. We will then analyze how large-scale networks, the physical infrastructure of a networked society, are conceptualized and created. How metaphors shape our thoughts? How are investment decisions made when there is so much uncertainty about future demand? Why are the hierarchical networks getting transformed into flatter structures? After examining the infrastructure development process, we will discuss the new modes of
social organization made possible by large-scale networks. Why are we seeing the advent of networked organizations and other networked configurations? How are these configurations different from the earlier ones? What is their impact on our everyday lives?
It’s probably too much to ask that all legislators involved in telecommunications policy making take a semester-long course with Professor Sawhney. But I think the state would be well served if they could. But, like I said, sleep deprivation is a factor here.
Indiana State Bar Association Meeting
Just figured I’d mention that I was headed to the State Bar Association meeting tomorrow. There are probably enough of us legal-type bloggers that we should’ve organized an Indianabarbloggerfabcon or something. Oh well. I will be educating myself on changes to the bankruptcy law, something about public works process, and, I think, appellate procedure. You can tell I really get the most out of my CLEs. I wonder if I could get the bar association to give me a few CLEs for doing this blog. Lord knows, I get more education out of it than I do from the classes. But I most certainly digress.
A time zone poll!
Richmond radio station, WFMG has a poll on preferences for Eastern Time v. Central Time. Currently leaning Central by a vote of 7 to 4.
Nuvo.net: Puritan Politics
I haven’t had time to properly digest it, but Nuvo has an article entitled Puritan Politics: Reforming Indiana’s sex, family and marriage laws with faith-based legislation. (Thanks to Lawgeekgurl for the reference over at Torpor Indy.)
My quick review suggests that the article is worth reading. It covers some of the anti-homosexual and anti-sex education efforts by the evangelical crowd, including, unsurprisingly, Senator Miller’s recent efforts at keeping reproductive assistance away from singles and other non-traditional families.
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