Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2007 > August
August 2007
James Brown, peanut butter, fat
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• But not Vick. That comment window reopens Dec. 10. Pick another.
• Vick’s male parent is, however, another matter. Every troubled kid needs a dad who’ll pile on when he’s down.
• Please continue watching the front driveway. Either the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes crew or the mobile lab offering DNA tests to identify all the children in America caused by James Brown will be arriving shortly. Those identified, and abandoned without acknowledgement, should be doubly compensated from the Brown estate for the lives they missed.
• Ken Bernhardt, a marketing professor at Georgia State University, proves that his expertise is marketing and not peanut butter. In response to the question of whether Peter Pan peanut-butter lovers will return, Bernhardt opined: “People that like peanut butter don’t stop liking peanut butter if one brand goes out. So they’ve switched. The key is, how do you get them to switch back?” The way to get real peanut butter lovers to return to their favorite brand is to put it back on the shelves. Then tell us it’s there.
• Georgia ranks 12th in obesity among 10- to 17-year-olds and 46th in education, as measured by SAT scores. This is a parent problem: Make ‘em put down the fork, pick up the book.
• Clayton County becomes the first, or maybe second or third, county in Georgia to outlaw the death penalty via jury nullification. The jury opted for life without parole for Robert Dwight Foster of Covington, who beat a sleeping 5-year-old to death and seriously injured her 10-year-old brother with a tire iron because their mother had broken off a romantic relationship with him.
• Headline: “Elected office has its benefits.” Those being pensions and health care for part-timers. Run for public office. Part-timers should be getting pensions and insurance from their day jobs. If they have them.
• Truism of the week: “People don’t own rights to the view,” said John Lowery, president of Wellstone Communities LLC, of the Lanier Golf Club in Forsyth County. His company is planning to pay a reputed $24 million for the course, which would be redeveloped as housing. Neighbors object. Half the redevelopment battles are fought over view, the other half over congestion. Can’t keep what you don’t pay for.
• Fidel Castro has a favorable opinion of only one of the 10 U.S. presidents who’ve served during his reign. Ronald Reagan. Just fooling. Georgia’s native son’s the winner of the Friends of Fidel competition.
• A Democratic bias? The three TV networks’ morning news show are “overwhelmingly focused on Democrats” and “are actively promoting the Democrats’ liberal agenda,” reports the conservative Media Research Center. Analyzing 517 campaign segments on the three between January and July, the center found: 55 percent focused on Democrats, 29 percent Republicans; 69 percent of questions to D’s reflected a liberal premise, as did 82 percent of the questions to R’s; D candidates got 4 hours and 35 minutes of interview airtime, compared to 1 hour and 44 minutes for R’s. Rudy Giuliani was branded a liberal 11 times, Barack Obama once, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards never; Hillary got 61 exclusives, Edwards 44, Obama 41. Among the R’s, John McCain got 31, Giuliani, 26, and Mitt Romney, 19.
• Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) urges President Bush to appoint a replacement for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who “will unite the nation.” Code translation: somebody the Democrats want.
• A Swiss-based group that believes “the proliferation of small arms and light weapons represents a grave threat to human security” reports that in the U.S. there are 90 handguns, rifles and shotguns per 100 civilians, highest in the world. In Canada, Switzerland and Austria it’s 31. So? The relevant info is this: “There’s no clear relationship between more guns and higher levels of violence,” said Keith Krause, who heads the survey group. And why should I have three when somewhere in America there’s a poor victim who needed one? Oh, the guilt.
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Craig, Vick and images
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
People in public life who commit offenses that reflect profoundly flawed judgment — U.S. Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) or Michael Vick — can limp on in the public arena, but they can never regain the credibility they’ve lost.
Look at Craig, for example, and you see a guy who had the world engaged in reckless misconduct. The image of a U.S. Senator in a grungy airport bathroom behaving in a way that caused a cop to think he was soliciting sex is repulsive. It’s hard to envision him again in a position of authority. That’s true to a lesser extent of Vick, who achieved his position on the basis of talent, not respected judgment, except of course whether to pass or run under pressure. But nevertheless, see Vick in uniform now and the immediate image that comes to mind is of fighting pit U.S. Sen. Robert C. Bryd (D-W. Va.) so graphically described on the Senate floor.
The bathroom conduct, to which Craig pleaded guilty, will and should end his Senate career. As noted Wednesday by Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), “Senator Craig pleaded guilty to a crime involving conduct unbecoming a senator” and “should resign.”
The question, though, is a broader one. Can an individual, especially one in public life, express values that he or she sometimes fails to live up to in private life, without being considered a hypocrite? I say yes. All of us, for example, can recognize and preach the virtue of a lifelong commitment to a single spouse, especially when children are involved, though one — or more — of our marriages fail. It’s human to aspire to be better than we are, even when our own flawed judgment and choices occasionally reveals otherwise.
As a political party, certainly, Republicans or Democrats can construct public policies in support of family values, as they define them, while individuals within those parties fail personally.
It’s not Craig’s sexual preference or solicitation — something he disputes — that renders him unfit for public office. It’s the recklessness of the offense that calls his future judgment into question. Between Craig and Vick, it’s easier to imagine Vick again on the football field than Craig continuing in the Senate. Vick is a kid who never held an off-the-field position requiring good judgment. Craig did.
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Corruption. What’d we expect?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The indictment Tuesday of a Fairburn businessman for allegedly bribing a former Atlanta Public School system technology director is an example of what can go wrong when unaccountable people are spending free money.
A federal grand jury indicted R. Clay Harris of Fairburn for allegedly paying $230,000 in bribes to Arthur Scott, the former APS technology director. Scott pleaded guilty in May to taking a total of $323,000 in bribes. His wife, Evelyn Myers Scott, pleaded guilty to wire and mail fraud conspiracy. Scott is cooperating with investigators and neither he nor his wife has yet been sentenced.
Harris’ technology company, Multimedia Communications Services, received more than $11 million over a two-year period from a federal E-rate program directing money to schools and libraries to build the infrastructure for high-speed Internet access, reports the AJC’s Ken Foskett and Paul Donsky.
The money came from a tax levied on consumer telephone bills and the spending program was administered by a quasi-governmental agency attached to the Federal Communications Commission.
It was a program on automatic pilot. Money accumulated and was spent, about $2 billion a year. The Atlanta school system spent more than $73 million, mostly federal money, between 1998 and 2002. Atlanta, under Scott’s direction, built one of the costliest and most sophisticated networks of any school district in the country. Harris’ company was among those given no-bid contracts.
Vendors were routinely paid too much and the system spent millions of dollars on gear that it didn’t need, Foskett and Donsky found in an series that prompted the federal investigation.
Here are the lessons:
No tax or “fee” should be levied for a specified purpose. If it’s important to do and a tax is warranted, it should go into the general treasury to be appropriated annually based on demonstrated need.
When individuals or local governments are spending “free” money, the sky’s the limit. Prices don’t matter, nor does actual need.
When it’s somebody else’s money, nobody’s in charge. Clearly they weren’t in the Atlanta school system.
When an obscure, unaccountable bureaucracy is doling out money with no expertise and no oversight, corruption is inevitable.
When politicians are spending based on good intentions, while providing for no accountability, the program is a boondoggle and can never be anything else.
No-bid contracts, except in dire emergencies or where no competitor exists, are invitations to cronyism and corruption. The era of set-asides and other competition-limiting purchasing practices should come to an end. Every contract should go to the lowest bidder capable of providing the goods or services.
Nobody accountable. No oversight. No bid. What’d we expect?
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Health care 101: Non-emergencies don’t belong in ER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A place where reporters are assembled should ordinarily be a place to commit news. But Georgia Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle’s speech last Thursday to the Atlanta Press Club generated relatively little — page 5 in the local news section — for a health care proposal loaded with merit.
Most intriguing in his approach is that it does place the emphasis where it belongs: on the individual and in the private sector. Its promise, conceptually at least, is that a decade from now the momentum it spawns will be revolutionizing a consumer-driven health care system, not advancing the national creep toward HillaryCare. It’s a baby step, but a baby step in the right direction.
Components would be an effort to divert non-emergencies from emergency rooms, expanded information so that insurance consumers could make better, more appropriate purchasing choices, and competition.
“Over 20,000 Georgians visited the emergency room last year with dental problems,” said Cagle. “The top condition treated in Georgia’s emergency rooms last year was an upper respiratory infection — mainly just a cold.” Treating that cold at a doctor’s office could cost $100; at the emergency room, $1,400. Non-emergencies added $33 million to emergency room expenses last year, he said.
His proposal would be to create something he calls Safety Net Clinics for indigents, something similar to the clinics for paying patients now being added by chains such as Walgreens, Publix and CVS, which has 224 MinuteClinics across the nation and is opening 28 in the metro area.
Like any good conservative about to create a spending program with strong potential to grow, Cagle intends five pilots, staffed by physician-supervised nurses and physician assistants that would be open seven days a week. The Department of Community Health would draw up a list of the most common ailments inappropriately taken to emergency rooms, and those would be treated at the clinics, which are intended for indigents and the working poor who earn less than 300 percent of the federal poverty scale. That’s about $62,000 for a family of four. Treatment would not be free. Co-payments, based on income, would be required.
The clinics would be supported with a combination of charity, volunteers and taxpayer funding. Physicians would earn tax deductions for volunteering.
The model for Cagle’s proposal is not CVS, but the Good News Clinic in his hometown of Gainesville. Organized in 1991 by Suzy Hall, it’s since grown to the largest in Georgia, seeing 20,000 patients a year, he said.
While it’s not a part of Cagle’s proposal, emergency room fees for non-emergencies should be sufficiently high to direct the routine aches to the clinics.
A second part of his proposal is to expand the information through a Georgia Health Marketplace, an expanded state Web site that would allow insurance companies and physician groups to market their coverage options directly.
The state should gather and pour out tons of available information on the health care system, including costs, outcomes and every other bit of information that will drive competition by informing consumers, some of which it’s doing already.
The next step, then, is to increase affordability, by allowing consumers to shop for policies across state lines, free of mandates interest-groups have coerced state legislatures into adding on. Mandates add between 20 percent and 45 percent to the cost of policies, according to actuaries with the Council for Affordable Health Insurance. Allowing individuals to deduct health insurance premiums from their state and federal income taxes, as businesses can do, and making coverage portable is vital, too. But real reform here requires Congressional action.
Cagle does propose that policies sold here would be portable, meaning workers would own the policies and be able to take them to new jobs without being concerned about not being able to get complete coverage there because of pre-exising conditions.
The proposals, he said, allow “people to make educated choices based on personal need.”
Make no mistake.
We are in a race between HillaryCare and solutions like those Cagle proposes.
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Help the Dems find a bumper sticker
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sometimes the best ideas come from people outside Washington, says Democratic political strategist James Carville. So help. Please.
“We need a turn of phrase that really jumps out and tells you right off the bat what this election is all about,” said Carville, who’s credited with providing Bill Clinton “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee wants a bumper sticker phrase that describes the stakes in the ‘08 election. The bumper-sticker phrase would also appear on its literature.
The DSCC has four suggestions with a voting deadline of midnight tonight. Those include: “W is Out: Send the Right Wing With Him,” “No Republicans Left Behind in D.C.,” “What Have Republicans Done for You Lately?” and “2006 Was Just the Beginning: More Dems in ‘08.”
Having read Washington’s work effort, all of us should fully understand the call for the nation’s help. So let’s do it.
A colleague starts it off. His suggestion: “Death to America.” Another option: “George Was Right (McGovern Not Bush).”
I am more charitable. My suggestion, drawn from the Baptist hymnal: “I Surrender All” The song had such a powerful influence on the life of its author, Judson W. Van DeVenter, that he decided to change careers, becoming an evangelist. This bumper sticker could be career-changing for Senate Democrats, too, especially when it sinks in on the nation that this is their Iraqi policy.
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President is right to follow history in Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Reduced to vetoes, a bully pulpit and rear-guard action against a Democratic Congress, the president has found new life during the dog days of August, rising to the challenge on Iraq.
His speech Wednesday to the Veterans of Foreign Wars should be required reading. For those not alarmed by the prospect of good news or enamored with the prospect of our defeat, the wartime president’s reminder of the parallels among World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the current “struggle for civilization” offered a much-needed reality check to the nation — and to Republicans gone wobbly, like Sen. John Warner of Virginia.
Just as Democrats are reshaping their own from-the-fringe message on Iraq in the face of measurable, albeit modest, improvements in the Iraqi security situation, Warner, the second-ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, rushes in to assert that the president should start bringing troops home by Christmas. That, said Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, who commands troops south of Baghdad, would be “a giant step backward.”
Even Democrats are backtracking in the face of evidence that the surge is working. “It would be a tragic waste and lasting strategic blunder to let the hard-fought and important gains slip away, leaving chaos behind to haunt us and our allies for many years to come,” wrote Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) in Friday’s Seattle Times. Baird was among those who previously supported hasty retreat.
The plain fact is that Americans don’t want to lose and know instinctively that any premature abandonment, however couched, will be hell to pay for a generation to come. Projecting weakness and a lack of resolve is national suicide. The veterans to whom Bush spoke Wednesday know that and affirmed it by their enthusiastic response.
“Iraq is one of several fronts in the war on terror — but it’s the central front,” said Bush. “It’s the central front for the enemy that attacked us and wants to attack us again. And it’s the central front for the United States and to withdraw without getting the job done would be devastating.” The veterans’ applause underscored agreement.
He was particularly effective in pointing out history’s unkindness to doubters and critics in the media and politics, many of whom, like Georgia’s esteemed U.S. Sen. Richard Russell, were considered sages of their time. Critics, he noted, insisted that democracy couldn’t succeed in Japan because their religion, Shinto, “was too fanatical and rooted in the emperor. Unless the emperor was put on trial, “any steps we may take to create democracy are doomed to failure,” he quoted Russell as saying.
“Today, in defiance of the critics and the doubters and the skeptics, Japan retains its religion (and its emperor) and cultural traditions, and stands as one of the world’s greatest societies,” said Bush.
In Korea, he said, “Republicans really never had a clear position. They could never decide whether they wanted … to withdraw … or expand the war to the Chinese mainland.” Critics carped about tactics and strategy, predicting doom.
But for the Americans’ “willingness to stick with the South Koreans after the war, millions of South Koreans would now be living under a brutal and oppressive regime” and “the Soviets and Chinese communists would have learned the lesson that aggression pays.”
The loss of will in Vietnam, a great stain on this nation’s honor, betrayed people who believed in us, leaving them abandoned with disastrous consequence for untold thousands. The same would happen in Iraq.
“In Iraq, our moral obligations and strategic interests are one,” Bush told the veterans. “More than 1,500 al-Qaida terrorists and other extremists” have been killed or captured every month this year.” The question, though, is whether politicians in Washington will pull the rug. His answer was clear: “As long as I’m commander-in-chief, we will fight to win.”
No matter how many Republicans bolt, nor how many commentators and Google-trained experts second-guess, Bush should heed the lessons of last century’s wars, all of which could have been declared lost before they were won. Democrats have invested in defeat. But that’s not what the American people want — and they’ll never knowingly embrace a party that offers it.
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Michael Vick; Clark Atlanta; and Grady
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• Poor people who escape the ghetto life on talent and luck should never take the boys from the old neighborhood with them. They end up like Michael Vick.
• A sheriff who can’t spell “assassination” orders one. Any of us could be killed by an ignorant, penny-ante street thug. DeKalb Sheriff-elect Derwin Brown was. The only difference is that Sidney Dorsey had been given a public office. He should die still imprisoned — unless, of course, fuzzy-memory witnesses come forward in 20 years to recant.
• Stop the presses! Set up the gallows. Various interest groups, including one funded by money extracted from the tobacco industry in the 1998 settlement with the states, are appalled and outraged that R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. is attempting to sell cigarettes to women. They specifically object to its Camel No. 9 brand, which is packaged in “shiny, sleek black boxes bordered with fuschia and teal” with ads “that include florals, hints of lace and the slogan ‘Light and Luscious.’ ” The nanny-staters won’t be satisfied until the industry is driven from these shores. And another thing: Courts should never direct settlement money to interest groups, or to create foundations with an advocacy purpose.
• Leona Helmsley is alleged to have said “we don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.” She may never have said it, but the observation does help to explain the folly of Democrats professed desire to tax “the rich.” They sweep up a world of little people in higher taxes before they ever touch “the rich.” Helmsley died this week at 87.
• It’s OK to erect 45-foot wind turbines in residential neighborhoods in Atlanta, but not big houses on lots that once held smaller ones. One is about “energy independence,” and the other is about putting the rich in their places. Come to Far North Vinings. Big houses are welcomed next to my starter move-up.
• Subprime lenders aside, what business would invite customers to move into its housing and consume services before determining whether they could pay the bill? That’d be Clark Atlanta University, which invites students to move into its dorms before arranging necessary financial aid. “It’s crazy,” said one. “Why would you accept someone and put them in housing, and you haven’t even processed them yet?”
• Borrowing money to pay off high-interest credit cards may make sense. Borrowing high-interest money to pay off no-interest credit cards, as some Grady Hospital board members propose, makes none. The no-interest debt is owed Emory and Morehouse. Grady’s interest would be less if Fulton and DeKalb agree to put their tax digests up as collateral, which would be dumber. Memo #4 to state officials rushing in: These drunks are in denial, still swearing they don’t touch the stuff. They’re not AA candidates yet.
• The problem with the ex parte rule the Public Service Commission adopted this week is that it fails to include interest groups, such as the American Association of Retired Persons, the Sierra Club and others with an agenda. The rule prohibits private conversation between commissioners and utility representatives after evidence is heard. But interest groups not officially joined to the case aren’t covered. Surely that’s an oversight.
• Atlanta City Councilman C.T. Martin wishes to ban exposed underwear in public places. Don’t dismiss him. Work with him. He’s one of the lone voices concerned about the culture’s influence on children. “Little children see it and want to adopt it, thinking it’s the in thing,” said Martin. “I don’t want young people thinking that half-dressing is the way to go. I want them to think about their future.” Come to think of it, I’ve never seen the attire in any place where people are successful.
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Metro transportation tax? No thanks.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Atlanta Regional Commission Wednesday urged the Georgia General Assembly to levy a new one-percent sales tax in 10 Metro Atlanta counties to fund “transit, road and commuter programs.”
For me, no thanks.
Georgia needs an ambitious and comprehensive transportation plan spelled out in advance of any transportation-related tax. Put a plan on the table, something akin to the proposal offered earlier this year by former state Department of Transportation Chairman David Doss of Rome, and then develop a strategy for paying for it. One key, too, should be cost-benefit analysis to make certain that every dollar levied is giving us the most congestion relief for the buck.
A payment plan should involve, too, a combination of taxes and private-sector toll projects.
While Metro Atlanta certainly has nightmarish congestion bottlenecks that can steal hours of our lives weekly, the rest of Georgia also has needs that should be addressed. The ARC wants the money collected here kept here, but most of us who travel throughout the state recognize the importance — and in many cases the bang-for-the-buck value — in putting money throughout Georgia. If there’s any tax to be considered, it should be one levied and spent statewide.
While the ARC is passing resolutions, it should pass one urging city and county officials not to approve high-density projects that create traffic beyond a road’s carrying capacity. Add capacity first and then add density.
The 10-county region includes Cobb, Cherokee, Gwinnett, Rockdale, DeKalb, Clayton, Henry, Fayette, Douglas and Fulton. The ARC wishes to be in charge of spending the 1 percent sales tax. Again, no thanks. People who levy and spend should be elected representatives who can be ousted from public office when they spend contrary to the public will.
It’s hot and we’re all dying. Call Al.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The global warming industry is a titter at the prospect that an assembled panel of experts testifying under the Gold Dome cast doubt on the statistical models that Al Gore and other predictors of environmental doom represent as the gospel. “In the media, we hear the gloom and doom side,” said the chairman of the Georgia House’s energy, utilities and telecommunications committee, Rep. Jeff Lewis (R-White), but “there is alternative information out there.”
Georgia’s hearing Tuesday included three of the nation’s leading experts questioning the certainty of global warming. One of them, John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said the data does not support dire predictions that greenhouse gases will produce a massive warming of the earth’s temperatures over the next century. In fact, he said, temperatures in Georgia and Alabama have cooled over the past century. “I plow through the data from scratch,” said Christy. “I don’t see the catastrophes happening.”
“I believe this issue is being driven by hysteria right now,” said Patrick Michaels, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Libertarian-leaning Cato Institute in Washington.
While mass hysteria is the rule, some rational voices are being heard. Robert J. Samuelson, a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Washington Post, took the magazine to task in the Aug. 20-27 issue for its presentation of the global warming story. Presenting it as good guys-vs. bad “can lead to a vast oversimplification of a messy story,” he wrote. Warming has occurred, he wrote, but the “question is what to do about it.”
Count me among the global warming skeptics. Hurricane Dean hits Mexico. A week ago we couldn’t have predicted that with absolute certainty. The results we get are based on the data fed into the models. The hysteria is way premature.
State lawmakers must rid pension plans that bilk taxpayers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The system abused by former Fulton County Superior Court Clerk Juanita Hicks and her hand-picked successor is flawed on so many levels that, but for the self-interest of beneficiaries in elected office, it would have been fixed decades ago.
Hicks, 58, who retired Feb. 21 after 18 years in office, with a final salary of $143,372, is a double-dipper — a triple-dipper, really, since she was given a $55-per-hour job assisting her chosen successor. In addition to a county pension of $105,588 and her salary assisting successor clerk Cathelene “Tina” Robinson, Hicks qualifies for a second public-financed pension from the Superior Court Clerks Retirement Fund.
One overriding message should be carried away from the public attention of the Hicks arrangement. The message is intended for the Republicans who now control the governor’s office and both houses of the Georgia General Assembly. It is this:
Before you take ownership of a corrupt system, change it. You’re five years in power, three into complete power. One day, and perhaps one day soon, you’ll be just like the Democrats who slopped at the public trough. You’ll begin to feel entitled, and to protect that entitlement, you’ll use the public purse to reward personal and political friends and interest groups, just as the Democrats did.
Georgia has a long, sordid history of pension rip-offs. Eons ago the courthouse gang convinced legislators to set up fee-funded pension systems for them, even though laborers and hired hands in some smaller counties had to wait until recent decades for retirement plans. The same is true of sheriffs and judges and tax commissioners.
Local tax commissioners, in fact, found a way to weasel in on the more lucrative Employees Retirement System of Georgia, the state employees’ plan.
A 1952 constitutional amendment that followed adoption of a 3 percent statewide sales tax in 1951 carefully retained a .25-mill state levy that previously had been collected at 5 mills. That quarter-mill, about $30 per year for the average property owner, made local tax commissioners agents of the state — and therefore eligible for a retirement bonanza. Those officials are eligible for both a state and local pension for the same day on the job.
Sheriffs are eligible for multiple plans — their own, the county’s and the Peace Officers’ Annuity and Benefit Fund — all three funded by taxpayers directly or via add-ons to fines. Fees ranging from $3 to 5 percent of fines and bond forfeitures are added to fund the Peace Officers’ fund and $2 or more to fund the sheriff’s second or third same-day-on-the-job benefit.
Layers are added on, but no Legislature ever goes back and deals with the inequity created by rewarding public officials with political pull.
The problem with getting a permanent fix is that legislators and employees are all beneficiaries of the plans they control. After public attention was drawn to rip-offs almost a quarter century ago, the existing abused plan for state employees was closed and a new retirement system was created.
The new system remained relatively untainted by sweetheart provisions until the new employees hired after 1982 started to think about retirement.
They, too, routinely persuade legislators to add special clauses to cover a personal situation. So we have, and have always had, a state retirement system that’s constantly being revised for the benefit of a few individual employees.
The only solution is to give workers cash for retirement, cash that they control in 401(k) accounts, so that they’re not coming back in 10 years or 20 years insisting that plan covering 77,000 state employees be revised to provide a sweetheart arrangement for some employee or official with a friend at the statehouse.
At the end of every day, the state and its employees should be even, fair and square, with salary and benefits completely known. A defined-contribution pension plan, unlike the current defined-benefit plan, would eliminate all temptation to toy with a mature pension system in ways that rip off taxpayers.
All of these secondary pension systems funded with fines and fees should be closed immediately to new public officials, and the add-ons either eliminated or used to fund something that matters — the state trauma network, for example, which is projected to cost $100 million.
One pension for one day of work.
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Sam Nunn? Who he?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The question today is timing in politics. Former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, a revered figure in Georgia politics while serving in the Senate between 1972 and 1997, is tossing around the prospect that he’ll enter the presidential race as an independent.
“It’s a possibility, not a probability,” he told the AJC’s Jim Galloway. “My own thinking is, it may be time for the country to say ‘Time out. The two-party system has served us well, historically, but it’s not serving us now.” He cites as evidence a “fiasco” in Iraq, excessive federal spending, the absence of a serious energy policy, and a presidential campaign devoid of serious discussion of those matters. He’s among those who argues that the the far left and right dominate the debate.
Nunn’s right about the issues not being addressed responsibly. But I don’t remember another looming crisis, Social Security’s solvency, being addressed responsibly by any Congress or presidential candidate over the decades Nunn served in the Senate.
Since Ross Perot brought us Bill Clinton, I’ve sworn off third parties. They’re spoilers. And whether it’s Michael Bloomberg or Sam Nunn, they’re good for something under 20 percent of the vote. Nunn was needed in, say, 1992, By now time’s passed him by, in national politics at least.
The question, though, is timing. Ten weeks is an eternity in politics. Ten years — the time Nunn’s been out — is a double lifetime. I’m curious how many Georgians still have a strong impression of him. The state changes awfully fast.
Newt Gingrich and Fred Thompson also may have waited too long. With every passing week, and the first of the primaries less than five months away, it’s harder to imagine either of them in the Republican race. I think by now the field is set in both parties.
Does Nunn excite any takers here? Was there a time he could have been a serious contender?
Block cronyism and pension double-dipping
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At the age of 58, Fulton County Superior Court Clerk Juanita Hicks retired with a pension payout equal to 88 percent of her annual salary of $143,372. At the behest of her hand-picked successor, she promptly returned to work as a $55-per-hour consultant.
This is an incredibly stupid system — gamed, mined and exploited relentlessly by well-connected public employees. It’s stupid in design, stupid in operation.
That the governor and the General Assembly allow to go on should outrage every working stiff in Georgia.
One outrage is that Hicks and most, if not all, of the other Superior Court clerks in Georgia, as well as sheriffs and other public officials, are allowed to double-dip daily, to count every day on the job for credit in at least two publicly financed pension systems.
Taxpayers directly provide one, with a generous benefit formula that gives Hicks an annual payout of $105,588 per year. And they indirectly provide another. Fees of $1.75 each from fines, $1 from every civil case, and 50-cents from every real-estate filing are collected and paid into a separate retirement fund for the clerk and deputy.
That’s a kitty, separate and distinct from the county employees retirement fund, that provides a minimum of $1,700 per month to clerks who have 12 years of service and have reached the age of 55.
The first outrage, then, is that Georgia allows double-dipping — and, furthermore, legislatures have for decades been compliant in continuing the abuse. There’s an in-the-shadows system in play for the Superior Court Clerks’ Retirement Fund of Georgia and for similar special-beneficiary funds that keeps them ever from rising to the public’s radar.
The system is to raise fees until the pot builds up and then to get legislative agreement to raise payouts because doing so will require no new or higher fees. The Legislature compliantly nods and rubber-stamps the hike. It’s a never-ending, never-examined cycle.
The key reason is that beneficiaries such as Superior Court clerks are politicians with their own voting blocs. Easier to pay them off with double-dipping pension systems than to take them on and risk their ire. So nobody does.
The Legislature needs to reform the system by closing the single-beneficiary pension systems where those on the public payroll are eligible for inclusion in broader public retirement systems. Close them all to new clerks and phase them out. It’s absurd for taxpayers to fund two or more pension plans for the same day of work.
The second and easier legislative fix prompted by the Hicks revelations is to end the practice of allowing Superior Court clerks to appoint their successors. It’s a system that invites cronyism and the kind of sweetheart transaction evident in the appointment of Hicks to the $55-per-hour job. As reported by the AJC’s Steve Visser, the job “has no written goals or deadlines and has delivered no tangible work product in six months of employment.” Hicks’ time sheet show her working from mid-afternoon or early evening to midnight or later.
Under existing law, in any county with a chief deputy clerk’s position, that person “shall succeed the clerk of the superior court if a vacancy occurs” and serve until Jan. 1 following the next general election. The incumbent, is thus allowed to appoint a successor, an absurd arrangement that opens the door to corrupt agreements.
In counties without that position, the probate judge calls a special election to fill the vacancy.
Since Fulton has the chief deputy clerk position, Hicks gave the job to Cathelene “Tina” Robinson, who in turn brought Hicks back onto the payroll. While the General Assembly is fixing what’s broken, it should too outlaw the practice of expending public money to hire back retired elected officials. To afford Hicks’ hourly charges, Robinson kept two clerk slots vacant. The county signed off on the deal because the superior court clerk is an elected position.
On a larger scale, the state really does need to move out of the defined benefit pension business, which invites the Legislature to create special deals for individuals and interest groups. Give employes retirement money up front, in the form of 401(k)s for example, so there’s no temptation to come back and game the system for unearned and undeserved benefits. Meanwhile, fix the systems Hicks and Robinson reveal to be broken.
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Home-grown terrorists still on the job
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Bingo! A headline homer, from the front page of the AJC: “Democrats’ Iraq plans slower than their slogans.”
• Democrats just can’t let revisionist history go. With the resignation of Karl Rove, they dig deep into the grievance satchel to pull out the 2002 campaign commercial that reminded Georgians that we’re in a war with bad guys while incumbent U.S. Sen. Max Cleland was worrying about whether security agents were to be unionized. The Dems blame Rove — in the same vein that they blame President Bush for fallen bridges. It was a fair commercial. Cleland had but himself to blame. He became a national Democrat — and those don’t win statewide in Georgia.
• Memo #3 to state leaders: Picture your white bread Republican selves at the Grady summit table where the “stakeholder” crowd rushes in to insist that the “community” has been ignored and decisions are being made by “people who don’t use Grady.” One of said Republicans, state Sen. David J. Shafer of Duluth, proposes a state law to direct Fulton and DeKalb to turn over Grady operations to a nonprofit hospital management corporation. Good idea, but something for the locals to do on their own. Shafer proposes oversight with some from outside the two counties being appointed, and also giving the House speaker and lieutenant governor appointees. An awful idea. Local politics. Local solution.
• Home-grown terrorists, sympathetic to al-Qaida but not actually connected, are a legitimate fear, as law-enforcement officials now warn. Jailhouse Muslims who have an ax to grind with “the system” combined with the run-of-the-mill kooks, such as the Columbine or Virginia Tech shooters, represent a pool awfully susceptible to al-Qaida jihadism. New York police identify 10 recent plots developed largely or completely by home-grown militants with little or no al-Qaida support.
• When my band of right-wingers take over and institute draconian laws requiring small children to say “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir” to adults, we show our compassionate side by giving a break to some criminals too dense to form criminal intent. First up for a full pardon is the Rochelle woman who called police to report that the $25 crack cocaine she bought was fake. Treatment, not jail for her. Gimme a hug.
• Some blacks of prominence, such as those who rushed to defend Michael Vick, can be injudicious to the point of being simpletons when they offer affection in hopes of future cash. Latest to join the circle is Macon Mayor Jack Ellis, who sent couriers bearing praise and a declaration of “solidarity” to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The Macon Telegraph reports: “Ellis praised the controversial leader, who has subsidized the cost of heating fuel for some American low-income citizens, as a champion for the common man who could offer aid to Macon’s residents.” The mayor, finishing out his last term, has converted to Islam in Senegal and is changing his name to Hakim Mansour Ellis. Cities, counties and states shouldn’t have foreign policies.
• It really is scandalous that taxpayers provide two or more public pensions to many public officials, including former Fulton County Superior Court Clerk Juanita Hicks, for the same day on the job. She gets $105,588 in pension benefits at age 58 after only 18 years on the job. That’s from the county. She also gets a minimum of $1,700 per month from a second public pension system for the same day of work. It’s the Superior Court Clerk’s Retirement Fund, financed by an additional levy on court filings. It’s a loophole the Legislature should close.
• Earmarks, such as the “Bridge to Nowhere,” that individual members of Congress insert in appropriations bills, should be stopped altogether. But ample loopholes accompanying Democratic hype about doing it indicate it won’t be soon. By the way, the white elephant proposal of a rail line to Lovejoy, which won’t die started as an earmark — meaning that while Georgians sit gridlocked in traffic congestion, money that could have brought some relief was earmarked for a slow train to Lovejoy.
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FairTax, GREAT tax
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The candidate not yet in the race, Fred Thompson, indicates he’ll support the FairTax., In a letter to the national FairTax campaign, Thompson said the next president “should enact a fundamental overhaul of the tax code that makes it fairer, simpler, and more pro-growth.”
While there are a “number of ways to do that,” Thompson said the “principles and ideas found in the Fair Tax are a good place to start.” The FairTax would replace income and payroll taxes with a national sales tax. Five of the Republican presidential candidates and Democrat Mike Gravel support FairTax, but Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani have not taken positions.
In Georgia, House Speaker Glenn Richardson, a Paulding County Republican, is proposing a similar concept. His is called the GREAT (Georgia’s Repeal of Every Ad-valorem Tax) Plan. Georgia is first in the nation to consider eliminating property taxes on homes, land, commercial real estate, inventory, vehicles, boats and airplanes, said Richardson. Florida took a run at it with a special session in January, but instead wound up with a proposed constitutional amendment to exempt up to 80 percent of the property taxes on homes, but raw land is excluded.
As with the FairTax, there’ll be plenty of opportunity to debate the specifics of Richardson’s plan. Essentially, he’d eliminate most all of the existing 127 sales tax exemptions, groceries included. Grocery taxes of up to $3,500, taxes on prescription drugs and some other life essentials related to medical care, would be refunded on the state income tax. Sales tax exemptions for governments, agricultural products, raw materials used in manufacturing and business-to-business transactions would be retained.
The tax on income and sales would be 4 percent. The current top rate on income taxes is 6 percent.
To make up the income from lost property tax collections, the 4 percent sales tax would be extended to services: Dry cleaners, lawn, professional fees for medical attention and legal advice, hair care, and in general the full range of services consumers purchase.
One specific question here today: Is a tax on services a good idea, even if it comes in lieu of something else, the property tax, for example? Frankly, I’d have great reservations about introducing a tax on services. And why? For the simple reason that it’s an easy tax to raise, especially if marauding liberals can use it to punish a disfavored occupation or industry, as they’ve done with tobacco. A penny here, a dollar there on “the rich” and suddenly we’re back to unchecked government.
Illegals threat to young Americans?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a possible presidential candidate, unloaded on President Bush and Congress Tuesday for taking an August vacation “while young Americans in our cities are massacred” by illegal immigrants.
The “war here at home” against illegals is “even more deadly than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Gingrich in a newsletter. “The federal government’s incompetence, timidity and uncoordinated efforts to identify and deport criminal illegal aliens have had devastating consequences for innocent Americans.”
He was referring specifically to the execution-style murders of three college students on a school playground in Newark, N.J. One suspect in the killings, Jose Lachira Cartanza, is an illegal immigrant from Peru who was out on bail on charges of raping a child when the killings occurred. Gingrich said another suspect, an illegal immigrant from Nicaragua with a lengthy arrest record, had been ordered deported in 1993, but never left. The Newark newspaper reported, though, that the suspect had been granted permanent legal resident status in 2001.
A declared presidential candidate, Rudy Giuliani, promised again Tuesday to stop illegal immigration by beefing up border security and by tracking visitors. “We can end illegal immigration: he said. “I promise you, we can end illegal immigration.”
Giuliani would require a tamperproof ID card with fingerprints for foreign workers and students linked a central database that could track arrivals and departures. Guiliani said, too, he would allow a pathway to citizenship only for illegals who report their status, who learn English and who go to the back of the line to apply.
He was responding to criticism from Mitt Romney that as mayor of New York City Giuliani “instructed city workers not to provide information to the federal government that would allow them to enforce the law. New York City was the poster child for sanctuary cities in the country.”
Gingrich called for withdrawing federal assistance to any city, county or state that refuses to participate in checking the status of those who are arrested for committing a felony. Furthermore, he said, “after they finish time for their crime, they will be retained until deported.”
Gingrich wants Bush to call Congress back into special session for three days to pass a bill honoring the three students that would include the federal aid provision, along with an order to the FBI and Homeland Security to outsource development of a system for verifying the status of those arrested for felonies that could be up and running by Jan. 1.
While Gingrich exaggerates the murder-and-mayhem danger posed by illegals, Congress does need to punish “sanctuary cities” by denying federal aid to local governments that refuse to cooperate in the enforcement of federal laws and regulations.
Even before returning to the notion of comprehensive immigration overhaul, there are a number of things that can be done to enforce border security, deport those who commit crimes and those found to have overstayed visas, even before an arrive-and-leave tracking system is perfected.
Gingrich has a good political ear. The tone of his comments tell us a great deal about the country’s frustration in finding ways to come to grips with lackadaisical enforcement of border security and immigration law.
Insurance mandates hurt business
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Just the number of employees identified by the Department of Labor as working for small businesses in Georgia total 1.5 million. Another state department, relying on incorporations, puts the number at 967,000.
In either case, these are staggering numbers for a state on the verge of launching a three-way pact with small-business employers and their workers to buy health insurance. Using $20 million saved from better management of Medicaid and other federal money, altogether totaling $50 million, Gov. Sonny Perdue hopes to start sign-ups next July 1. The $50 million, targeted to workers earning up to $62,000 per year for a family of four, is projected to cover 30,000 employees. The number of eligible uninsureds is thought to be 380,000.
They’d be offered at least two options, one of which is the equal of the State Health Benefit Plan for public employees. Another would provide less generous benefits at a cheaper cost but would still require all the mandates that legislators have heaped on that drive up the cost of coverage.
David Raynor, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, noted in testimony last week before a legislative committee that small businesses unable to afford coverage were drawn to a 2005 bill authored by State Sen. Cecil Staton (R-Macon). His bill would have allowed the little guys to purchase basic policies free of most add-ons mandated by previous legislatures — coverage for contraceptives, for example.
As it went through a Republican-controlled Legislature, many of the mandates were added back, “eliminating the cost benefit,” said Rayner.
“Not one single policy has been written in the state of Georgia as a result of Senate Bill 174,” said Staton on Monday. “After some interest groups got to adding back in the mandates, it essentially gutted the bill.” By some estimates, said Staton, a policy rid of legislative medicine would have been 15, 20 or even 30 percent cheaper. “Just because somebody can’t afford a Cadillac, you shouldn’t be able to say they can’t have any transportation at all,” he said.
Eliminating mandates pushed by interest groups would undoubtedly help make insurance affordable for small businesses.
Allowing them to buy policies anywhere in the nation, without regard to Georgia’s mandates, would make it more affordable, too.
Another bill that would have helped was introduced this year by State Rep. Tom Knox (R-Cumming). It encouraged consumers to create health savings accounts combined with high-deductible health insurance plans, one of the key elements of Perdue’s small-business proposal.
The policies were made more attractive by eliminating the state tax on premiums. Perdue vetoed it because that provision would “cost” $61 million over six years. Review of the tax should come “as part of — and not independent from” comprehensive health care transformation, he wrote.
Health savings accounts, combined with high-deductible policies, should be aggressively sold to the young, the largest bloc of uninsureds. According to Census Bureau data, 11.2 percent of those under 18 weren’t covered in 2005. It was 30.6 of the 18-24 age group, and 26.4 of the 25-34. Then it drops to 18.8 for 35-44 and 13.6 for the 55-64. Only 1.3 percent those over age 65 aren’t covered.
Incidentally, too, there’s a gradual shift onto the government rolls. In 1992, President Bill Clinton proposed to make 55-64 early retirees eligible for government-subsidized health care. At the time, 17 percent of them relied on taxpayers. It’s now up to 19.1 percent.
Any tax dollars spent to create a new category of public assistance should go primarily to encouraging innovation and competition, not to encourage greater reliance on government.
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Happy? Karl Rove’s gone.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s notes from the weekend. Pick a topic:
• Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney posted a solid win in the Iowa straw poll Saturday, prompting former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, who finished sixth, to throw in the towel. If forced to predict now, I’d bet on Romney to win the nomination, though Rudy Giuliani’s substantially ahead in the polls, nearing 30 percent support while Romney is about 10. Romney grows on you. But if there’s another terrorist attack in this country, Giuliani’s the guy. Thompson was a better governor than his performance in the presidential debates would suggest. The dye job didn’t help, either, if this high-minded corner is allowed to be petty about a Republican’s hair.
• Happy? Karl Rove’s gone. Partisans in Congress and in the media can now focus all of their energies on Vice President Dick Cheney as the evil genius manipulating George W. Bush. Rove’s off to write a book. What Bush really needs now is a veto pen, not political advice. Veto, veto, veto.
• Former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega is due to be released on Sept. 9 from prison, where he’d served 18 years for drug trafficking. Panama doesn’t want him back. But it’s clear he still has friends there. Here’s what having buddies in high places can do:
Noriega was sentenced in absentia in Panama to 60 years in prison for embezzlement, corruption and murder for crimes committed during his six-year reign. Panama’s now banned such trials and set the maximum he could serve at 20. But, under legislation passed in January, he gets to deduct the 18 years he served in the U.S., so the most he could serve is two. And the law allows anybody over 70 to apply for house arrest rather than prison. Noriega’s 72. Better to send him to France, where he’s wanted for allegedly laundering about $3.15 million in drug profits. The case is up for a hearing in Miami today.
• One reason education reform never really gets rolling is that the education workplace unions are masters at planting poison pills. Case in point: Alabama set out in 2004 to “reform” the teacher dismissal process. A provision inserted into the law allows teachers fired for cause to continue getting paid until an arbitrator upholds their dismissal. But a teacher fired for alleged criminal conduct can’t be reviewed by an arbitrator. So a teacher facing criminal charges of raping a student, fired in 2005, has been paid almost $100,000 since — and remains on the public payroll. Conservatives should think in terms of changing the system, not tinkering with it. Tinkering doesn’t work. It doesn’t last.
Perdue’s insurance fix shouldn’t become another entitlement
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gov. Sonny Perdue last week proposed the most significant expansion of the state’s role in funding health care since the creation of PeachCare a decade ago.
He would spend up to $50 million in state and federal funding to subsidize a third of the premiums for employees of small businesses — those with 50 or fewer employees — with incomes below 300 percent of the federal poverty level. That’s $30,600 a year for a single adult and about $62,000 for a family of four. The employer and employee would each pay a third, as well.
The numbers will take a while to settle. The governor thinks that 380,000 uninsured Georgians work for small businesses and that his plan would enable 30,000 of them to buy insurance.
Ken Stewart, the commissoner of the Department of Economic Development, testified before a House-Senate committee Thursday that 600,000 businesses exist in Georgia and that 95 percent of them have fewer than 50 employees. The Georgia Department of Labor put the under-50 number at 252,172, with 1.5 million employees. It reports, too, that 36.9 percent of firms with fewer than 50 employees already offer employee coverage.
The numbers now are not so important as the policy. Offering a taxpayer subsidy to private individuals and companies requires compelling public purpose. And once over that hurdle, it requires, too, a carefully drafted law that specifically targets and tightly contains this genie.
It’s contained initially the way PeachCare was when Congress created the State Childrens Health Insurance Program. That is, it was specifically declared not to be an entitlement, with spending capped. The PeachCare target population was the working poor with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level who couldn’t afford health insurance.
Three significant changes have occurred since. One is that pressure immediately built to expand eligibility. In Georgia, that was done with the first onrush of excess tax collections. The second is that this Congress is turning PeachCare into an entitlement, and raising the eligibility level to about $83,000 for a family of four, meaning that taxpayers will foot the bill for what is becoming a middle-class welfare program, no matter the cost. The third change is that parents are dropping private insurance in favor of the cheaper and better taxpayer-funded program. Half or more of the children signed up were switched from private insurance.
Perdue intends to cap Georgia’s contribution at $20 million, which would come from savings achieved through better management of the Medicaid program. Once created, however, the pressure is immediate, persistent and intense to expand, just as was the case with PeachCare.
To be considered, too, are the behaviors we buy. At present, almost 40 percent of small business owners have sacrificed and made the responsible choice to provide medical insurance to their workers. The inevitable result of a program that offers a 33 percent subsidy is that all eligible employees will be shifted into the public program — those with and those without insurance.
It’s possible, too, that individuals will create sole proprietorships and at-home businesses for the sole purpose of qualifying.
Provisions will be made to check abuse with audits and eligibility reviews — necessary, but a workload that will require additional employees.
Clearly there is a problem that needs attention if in fact employers are not providing health insurance and employees are not buying because they can’t afford it. “I don’t know if just waiting and not doing anything is going to help,” said Dr. Rhonda Medows, commissioner of the Department of Community Health. “We are going to end up paying more in uncompensated care.”
The verdict? Depends. Can it be contained? Is it the beginning, as a key House member, State Rep. Earl Ehrhart (R-Power Springs), asserts of a new entitlement? And what behaviors — desirable and not — are we buying?
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ID cards, Usher as hero, 5-acre fuss
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham plans to introduce legislation to replace paper Social Security cards with plastic biometric cards. It’s so employers can be sure immigrants are here legally. The country’s not ready, and may never be, for a national identification card. Otherwise the REAL ID driver’s license law, to take effect nationally Dec. 31, 2009, wouldn’t have drawn opposition from more than a dozen states. The biometric identification card was to be for immigrants, not citizens.
• Well, no, Atlanta City Councilman H. Lamar Willis, he of the H. Lamar Willis Foundation, hasn’t “taken responsibility” for the error of misinforming donors that their contributions would be tax-deductible. Taking responsibility would be giving them the option of getting their money back and, as a second option, paying their income tax liability.
• Too bad that churches and shopping centers don’t get together on parking. Neighbors of First Baptist Church of Atlanta in DeKalb County object to its plans to take out a heavily wooded five-acre site on North Peachtree Road for a 625-space parking lot. Small churches should be in neighborhoods, big ones in commercial areas with parking.
• Former DeKalb County schools Superintendent Johnny Brown, paid $410,000 in 2004 to go away, says now he “found DeKalb County to be just a wonderful experience.” I’d get plain teary-eyed at the memory of a place that gave me almost half a mil not to work there.
• The most vulnerable Republican in the Georgia Legislature should be given an assignment: introduce bills to outlaw possession of dogs for fighting and to make it illegal to be a spectator at a dogfighting match. It’s a no-brainer.
• Usher is my new entertainment-industry hero. He married his pregnant girlfriend, Tameka Foster, setting a fine example for all the world. Straight-up, did the right thing.
• Sorry, IKEA. Sorry, pandas. But Trendy H&M has taken your PR team. It’s opening in Atlantic Station after having “achieved a cultlike following worldwide,” and jubilation in these parts approaches giddiness. You’d think Atlantic Station had landed its own Bass Pro Shops.
• Insensitivity is a cardinal sin, to be sure. But I’m about to OD on entertainers, sports figures and other celebrities who claim to be driven to win by a loved one’s disease, accident, illness or suffering. It’s become a marketing ploy.
• It’s hot. A bridge falls somewhere in America. Two more reasons to blame George Bush.
• See, Mr. Speaker and Mr. Lieutenant Governor, what you both fail to understand is that Grady’s not about whether a hospital survives. It’s about racial spoils and power. White-bread Republicans who inject anything but other people’s money can’t win. The solution is local.
• Way to go, Mayor! Doraville’s Ray Jenkins reinstates police chief John King, who was fired by city council for being out of the loop or a “part-time” chief or something equally unspecific. He’d served an 18-month tour in Iraq. Said the mayor: “I’m willing to put myself on the line for him. He went to Iraq and fought for me and now I’m going to fight for him.”
• You knew it would be just a matter of time before one of the Democratic presidential candidates rushed to the aid of people who bought more house than they could afford and may, additionally, have lied about their income to get it. Now one has. Hillary calls for penalties against “predatory” lenders and a $1 billion federal fund to help buyers avoid foreclosure. If enough people behave irresponsibly, Big Government will ride to the rescue. And what’s a “predatory” lender? Some individuals — like the former closing attorney from Cumming, Christopher Halcomb, sentenced Thursday to 37 months in prison for submitting false information to obtain loans — are crooks. But “predatory” lending is a PR term.
• Is Hillary Clinton really allowed to refer to herself as “a girl”? My sensitivity meter’s gone haywire, my paradigm’s busted and my Political Correctness 101 test needs to be regraded. I may have passed the course.
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Mortgage door closed? Good.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The market has been brutal, as free markets usually are, to mortgage lenders that played fast and loose with easy money. Brokers and lenders were too quick to put unprepared and uncreditworthy buyers into financial arrangements that virtually guaranteed disaster for both lender and borrower when the unexpected happened. And it did. Rising foreclosures among subprime borrowers and the resultant reaction of Wall Street investors has consumed one lender after another, with American Home Mortgage Corp. of Melville, N.Y., being the latest to file for bankruptcy.
The front-page headline in today’s AJC print edition is “Door closes on easy mortgages” with the smaller headline declaring that “Folks with faulty credit locked out.”
Yes. True. And is that bad? Not at all. Home ownership is and should be the American Dream, as well as a key foundation of public policy. It makes for secure families and stable communities. Homeowners don’t burglarize their neighbors and, in general, they behave in ways that preserve the value of their investment, a cornerstone of good citizenship.
All that said, however, the recklessness of both buyers and lenders in recent years was a disaster waiting to happen. It’s outrageous that lenders would make long-term loans to individuals without asking to see a W-2 or tax returns to verify claimed income. That allowed borrows to take on far more risk than they could handle, especially with adjustable-rate loans. Allowing borrowers to get into expensive homes with none of their money at risk assured, too, that they’d shut the door and walk away when squeezed. And giving interest-only loans to borrowers who showed no prospect of being able to pay off the loan when due was irresponsible, too.
Lenders could do it because they packaged the loans and sold them to investors. In essence, everybody got the benefit up front with the risk pushed into somebody else’s future.
So the door is closed to easy mortgages and folks with faulty credit are locked out. No problem. Home ownership requires personal responsibility. It requires thrift. It requires contingency planning and all of the other qualities that build financially-stable families and communities.
This last cycle taught irresponsibility. It taught people to think of homeownership as a lottery ticket: Put down the dollar and hope for the big payday. It taught people to grab a lifestyle they couldn’t afford and then to think of themselves as victims when the crash came. It taught people that the didn’t need to save for a dream because some greedy lenders and brokers could fake the paperwork to make it happen. It taught precisely all the wrong lessons.
Now the door’s closed and a brutal market is eviscerating lenders. Good. Sanity’s back.
My great fear now, however, is that somebody in Congress will decide it’s time to intervene to “save” borrowers or lenders.
Health insurance for the little guys
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gov. Sonny Perdue Tuesday unveiled a proposal to spend $50 million in state and federal money to help small businesses provide health insurance coverage for their employees. The plan has to be approved next year by the General Assembly.
It has already drawn criticism from the chairman of the House Rules Committee, Rep. Earl Ehrhart (R-Powder Springs), that it’s a new entitlement, so passage is not a slam-dunk. There’s plenty of time to examine the ramifications and the wisdom of taking on a new spending program that does have a powerful impetus to grow.
A Perdue proposes it, small businesses with 50 or fewer employees that don’t now offer health insurance could get taxpayer-subsidized coverage. Taxpayers would pay a third, the employers a third, and the employees a third. Provision would be made to keep employers and employees from dropping coverage. Employees would have to have been uninsured for six months before becoming eligible for the subsidized coverage. And they couldn’t participate if a spouse had an insurance option at his or her place of work or if they earned more than 300 percent of the federal poverty level. That’s about $30,600 for an individual and $62,000 for a family of four.
A number of questions and concerns arise. Tomorrow I’ll have a chance to sit down with some of the experts to get answers. Feel free to raise your concerns or offer your questions. This is a major new direction for the state — not nearly as sweeping as health care coverage proposals in states like Massachusetts and Wisconsin. Wisconsin is considering “free” health care for everybody. But the idea of giving public grants to some private companies and not others to help pay their operating costs, even if done indirectly, is a giant step for Georgia.
Leaders’ silence is a dodge that cheats our children
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The great void that exists in the most urgent problem facing the American family, and the black family in particular, is the absence of voices. The silence of leaders, the averted gaze of those who are otherwise judgmental, is the greatest disservice black America does its children.
About 70 percent of black children are born to unmarried parents. Among whites, it’s almost a quarter, among Hispanics, almost half.
The number has grown so large that no politician, nor any black leader dependent on a following, dare speak. So they rally, recycle and re-enact, occasionally pausing to dally in the trivial and the absurd — rushing to the defense of a millionaire athlete indicted in a dogfighting scheme, for example, as both the NAACP and the SCLC are doing. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference had indicated it would “honor” Michael Vick at its national convention but Monday evening said that it would not.
That’s a national convention, mind you, where the litany of black America’s concerns is cataloged for the media, policymakers, opinion leaders and government. “This is not just about Michael Vick, but anyone who might have made mistakes,” SCLC President Charles Steele told the AJC’s Ernie Suggs. “We can’t throw a life away.”
Yet we do.
More than two-thirds of all black children in America are born into a state that virtually guarantees financial and emotional distress long before they are old enough to encounter overt discrimination.
It’s a mystery, in part at least, why so few activists and opinion leaders in the middle class take the risk to confront the obvious. One is that most everybody is vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy, either because they’ve had a failed marriage or made a mistake in their youth, and in this society hypocrisy is a capital offense. The concern here, though, is not the failed marriage or the youthful indiscretion. It’s the willful act of self-centered adults inflicting harm on children.
The chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, Leah Ward Sears, spoke last month as part of a series of lectures on the family at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, an institution endowed by Lewis Miller, an Ohio inventor and the father-in-law of Thomas Edison. She spoke on the decline of marriage and its consequences for children. She was not talking specifically of black children, but rather of the 36 percent of all children born to unmarried women, as well as the children of divorce and those being raised by a single adult.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I foresee a day when marriage, an historically child-centered relationship, would become almost completely adult-centered, promoting and protecting the freedom of adults to indulge their desires, sometimes to the detriment of the well-being and eventual development of children,” Sears said. “But the numbers, which are staggering, indicate that we are at that point.”
Fatherhood, she noted, “is being pushed even farther into the margins of society.”
“Families, neighborhoods, communities and ethnic groups or social classes in which marriage is common have powerful advantages for children over those in which marriage is no longer the normal paradigm for having and raising children,” Sears said. “To ignore the decline of marriage, therefore, not only puts individual children at risk, it also sets in motion a self-perpetuating cycle of disadvantage. …”
While many single parents work hard and sometimes successfully, children born to unmarried women are found in any number of studies to be at increased risk of poverty, school failure, abuse, delinquency, emotional distress and mental illness. While the absence of a second income may account for half of a child’s lower achievement, most of the remaining disadvantage is due to inadequate parental guidance and attention and weak ties to community resources.
America has put its children on two tracks. One leads to a world where “marriage is the usual and generally reliable framework for raising children,” the other to “communities in which marriage has virtually disappeared as a reasonable and normal precursor to childbearing.”
Two Americas. One programmed at birth to succeed. The other to fail.
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How to spend my billions?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Monday extra. Pick a topic:
• Liberal bloggers attending the second Yearly Kos convention booed Hillary for saying she’d take campaign money from lobbyists. “Yes, I will,” she said. Lobbyists “represent nurses, they represent social workers, they represent, yes, they represent corporations that employ a lot of people.” John Edwards and Barack Obama said no. “We don’t want to trade their insiders for ours,” said Edwards. Of course they take money from interests that lobbyists represent. And they take campaign help from unions and other interests — phone banks, for example — that have monetary value to candidates. I’m with Hillary. Put it on the record, in the open, and voters can decide whether a candidate’s bought.
• Among 10th District Congressman Paul Broun’s first votes is one in support of medical marijuana, which he later defended He’s “intensely and unalterably” opposed to recreational drug use and will never vote to legalize it, he said. The amendment he voted on would prohibit the feds from attempting to stop state medical marijuana programs, said Broun. Rocky start here. Better not move the fine china yet.
• Democrats and their media enablers in a snit over Photo ID are as out-of-sync with mainstream Georgia as they are with mainstream America on surrender in Iraq.
• While stands of exotic woods, like those used in finishing the interior of the Performing Arts Centre in Cobb County, should be managed responsibly, they should of course be used to serve mankind’s desires. Aesthetically, a tree that dies in the forest unseen and unpreserved never lived. The forests are not museums.
• Most interesting quote of the weekend, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, comes from Bill Gross, a billionaire bond king at Pimco, who’s long been known for his liberal politics. Gross writes: “Trust funds for the kids, inheritances for the grandkids, multiple vacation homes, private planes, multi-million dollar birthday bashes and ego-rich donations to local art museums and concert halls are but a few of the ways rich people waste money — and I admit, I am guilty of at least one of these on this admittedly short list of sins. I have, however, avoided the last one. When millions of people are dying from AIDS and malaria in Africa, it is hard to justify the umpteenth society gala held for the benefit of a performing arts center or an art museum . A $30 million gift for a concert hall is not philanthropy, it is a Napoleonic coronation.”
Better for the rich to spend their money now — ideally on social ills — than to use it to endow foundations that then spend eternity promoting more and bigger government.
SCHIP bloat portends start of HillaryCare
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Do we really want to put middle-class children on welfare?
The U.S. House and Senate did that last week, approving a $50 billion expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) that makes 71 percent of the children in the country eligible for taxpayer-subsidized medical care. Included are “children” up to the age of 21, whether they are in this country legally or not. The president has promised to veto both the $50 billion House version and a $35 billion Senate version passed Thursday night. He’d recommended a $5 billion expansion, or 20 percent.
Over the decade since the program was created in 1997, it’s cost federal taxpayers about $40 billion. The House would expand that to almost $130 billion over the next 10, extending eligibility to families of four with incomes of up to $83,000. HillaryCare, here we come.
SCHIP is the federal-funding portion of PeachCare. That’s a taxpayer-subsidized program that entices eligible parents to drop or forgo employer-offered medical coverage for their children in favor of the cheap, and usually better, coverage taxpayers provide. In Georgia, a family of four with income in excess of $48,000 per year can get top-drawer medical coverage for as little as free (children under 6 are covered at no cost). The maximum any family would pay, regardless of the number of children, is $70 per month.
When PeachCare and programs like it were created less than a decade ago, the intent of Congress was to offer coverage to children in families with incomes of 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or $41,300 for a family of four. Georgia, flush with money, upped that to 235 percent. The Legislature this year considered aligning eligibility with the program’s design intent, which is where most other states are. But the governor and Legislature could never get their act together.
The Georgia program was in financial distress, prompting legislative action. Federal taxpayers provide 73.3 percent, Georgians 26.7.
Nationally, 37 percent of all children are in families with incomes of up to twice the federal poverty level, but 45 percent are in taxpayer-subsidized plans, either Medicaid or PeachCare-like programs. The House bill would make 90 percent of the children who now have private health insurance eligible for public assistance.
As the Congressional Budget Office has noted, up to half the children signed up for PeachCare are the result of parents dropping or forgoing private health insurance coverage to buy the better and cheaper subsidized coverage.
The Washington-based Heritage Foundation notes that in 1998, 28 percent of children were covered by Medicaid, the taxpayer-provided medical care program for the poor, or by PeachCare-like programs. The rest either had private health insurance or lacked coverage. In 2005, 45 percent had shifted to taxpayer coverage. By 2012, it projects that only 29 percent of children won’t be on public assistance.
The new House bill also eliminates the existing law requirement that states verify citizenship, thus denying benefits to people in the country illegally. Admittedly, Georgia did a lousy job of verifying eligibility, but that was nonetheless the law. “The last thing we need to do,” said U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.), “is to create a new incentive to enter this country illegally.”
The House bill also lifts the spending, originally capped to the funds Congress authorized, so that PeachCare becomes an entitlement. “There’s no question this is a huge expansion of eligibility, and the removal of the lid on spending turns it from a grant program into an entitlement,” said Westmoreland.
During the PeachCare debate, few Republicans in Georgia seemed to get that the legislation proposed by House Speaker Glenn Richardson would return eligibility for all new enrollees in the program to its original intent.
The stakes always have been the race between public- and private-sector solutions. Congress has just checked the private sector while greatly expanding the public. Bush has, of course, to veto it.
Don’t put the middle class on welfare. Don’t entice responsible adults to dependency.
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Hopelessly unscholarly standards
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s week-ending free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• No greater mistake could the state make with the HOPE stipend than to lower academic standards because about 18,000 fewer students met somewhat higher eligibility standards this year. When dolts get academic “scholarships” while requiring remedial instruction in college, the program’s a joke. Standards, in fact, should be raised so that even fewer students qualify. Nobody’s son misses out because of HOPE’s grading change. They miss out because they don’t study.
• My views on public nudity have changed. If the alternative is the fall fashions being touted for children and teens. … “This season,” writes the AJC’s Nedra Rhone, “anything goes.” Plaids, stripes. No sooner had Southerners saved New Jersey transplants from their mixed patterns, plaids and stripes indiscretions than the abomination is being pushed on children. For shame.
• Headline: “State may intervene on Grady.” Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle sends a letter to Fulton and DeKalb officials warning that if the locals don’t change the hospital’s governance structure, he’ll press the state Legislature to act. Fair warning to state officials: Don’t make Grady’s problems the state’s. You’ll lose and get hammered in the process. Fulton and DeKalb have to fix Grady and present a “solution” to the state that can be applied across Georgia.
• Think Grady’s governing board has a clue? Wrong. It went behind closed doors for three hours this week to discuss the hospital’s predicament, and then hired the Troutman Sanders law firm to analyze the changed-governance proposal. A report is expected in two months. This board shouldn’t spend five minutes behind closed doors. It lives on public money. And the governance proposed is now commonplace across Georgia. The board chair, state Rep. Pam Stephenson, headed the State Health Planning Agency. The board can know all the pros and cons by Saturday morning. Memo No. 2 to state officials: Don’t take ownership of Grady’s problems.
• Of course a billion-dollar project in DeKalb that adds 1.5 million square feet of commercial space will worsen traffic. Duh. Metro Atlanta’s greatest mistake is allowing density beyond the carrying capacity of roads. The city of Sandy Springs is what happens when people come to believe they have no control over the density pushed on them.
• Georgians own a prized piece of coastal real estate that grows more valuable daily. Why, then, would the Jekyll Island Authority offer even a dime in incentives, much less a $10 million rent break, to one of the nation’s largest developers? No public body should offer tax giveaways, in whatever form, to entice developers to build what the free market is on the edge of doing anyway.
• Quote from former Atlanta City Councilwoman Gloria Bromell-Tinubu: “Slavery is the worst thing and homelessness is the second-worst thing that can be witnessed upon anyone.” Except that people who aren’t mentally ill make choices that take them to homelessness, while slavery is inflicted upon them. Simply feeding and housing vagrants solves nothing and invites more. The need is to move them to self-reliance, if that’s what they want. Otherwise, move them off the street.
• A magazine I never knew existed made news with a Top 10 list that means nothing: college mottos. Blame CNN. They started this 24/7 news business. Thereafter all information, important or not, competes. For the record, Clark Atlanta University was ranked No. 9, with “I’ll find a way or make one.”
• Impeach U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales! The headline says it all: “Gonzales admits obfuscating.” A damnable, indictable offense, for sure. But wait. Don’t go there. Delaware’s U.S. Sen. Joe Biden would face capital punishment. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) gets life, plus 20. And soon, nobody’s left to govern.
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Obama’s war
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Forty-three percent of the Democrats surveyed in a weekend Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll prefer Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. She’s up from 39 percent in June. Obama slipped three points, from 25 in June to 22 in July.
The next poll taken should reflect more slippage. Barack on Wednesday revealed that as President he’d send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists. “Let me make this clear,” said Obama, “there are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and [Pakistan’s] President [Gen. Pervez] Musharraf won’t act, we will.”
Barack and other Democrats have managed to appeal to those, especially on the Left, who want to be out of Iraq at any cost by being career second-guessers. Whatever President Bush did wrong, they would have done right. Whatever strategy had failed to achieve desired results, they would have avoided. Like most commentators, they’re brilliant in hindsight.
And then comes that moment, as it has for Obama, where they have to move from being critic to doer. It’s a Holy Cow! moment, the moment where people begin to realize the ramifications of this person or that in the White House. For Obama, that’s foreign policy and national security.
What he posits for the Waziristan tribal region controlled by bandits, terrorists and warlords in that vast mountainous “no-man’s land” between Afghanistan and Pakistan is an option, alright. And indeed it may be Obama’s plan. But if it were that simple and if Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts there could be pinpointed, we could already have taken him out with a drone. But it’s not. Musharraf hasn’t acted aggressively enough and, in fact, has ceded control there to the warlords.
But the additional fact is that he hangs by a thread and is always one security lapse away from assassination. An invasion by American troops would finish him off and our problems in the region would be complicated considerably. Complications there would no doubt hasten the day the U.S. would be forced to abandon Iraq, or at least shift substantial forces. Maybe that’s what Obama had it mind, but if so it’s the thought process of a guy who shouldn’t be in the White House.
Obama had already exposed his youth and inexperience in the YouTube debate by saying he he would be willing to meet without preconditions with the leaders of rogue states like Cuba, North Korea and Iran. Hillary pounced, calling that stance naive and irresponsible. His response was to say you-too on Iraq and to call her “Bush-Cheney lite.”
Advantage Hillary. But pitfalls remain for the entire crew of Democratic contenders. When they stop second-guessing and start spelling out what they’d do differently, the warts appear. No wonder they’re so desperate to have it all over by election day.
Taxpayer money lobbying for more
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The top story in today’s AJC reveals the King of the Freebies under the Gold Dome not to be some sleazy subprime lenders trying to ease poor people into debt, but none other than the University System of Georgia’s lobbyist, Tom Daniel. Over the past 30 months he’s reported spending $139,000 on legislator freebies, reports James Salzer. That would make the university system the big spender during the 2006 session and the third biggest in 2007.
The money spent for tickets to sporting events, meals and lodging doesn’t come from taxpayers, not directly at least, but from donations to the system, schools and their foundations. Altogether, the university system has 18 staffers registered to lobby whose salaries are paid by taxpayers.
The pertinent question is raised by a strong-willed fiscal conservative, State Rep. Dan Lakly (R-Peachtree City): “Why are we spending taxpayer money to get more taxpayer money?”
I’m drawn to Lakly’s question. My years around the General Assembly convince me that public employees exert enormous influence over legislators. They do it a couple of ways. One is to control information and to frame it for legislators in a way that leads them to the conclusion the staff wants. If the staff doesn’t believe in a policy — abstinence-only education, for example — they simply present it as so awful or ineffective that only the boldest, most daring legislators would risk advocating the policy. They also parcel out information, forcing legislators to spend an exorbitant amount of time digging for it, making them ask the question in just the right way to get the answer all intelligent people know they want.
The other way public employees control policy is by filling the hall of the Capitol with lobbyists who represent their associations. Getting any new education idea into law is virtually impossible because an alphabet-soup of associations representing school boards, superintendents, teachers, educational leaders and a host of others stand ready to rally special interests to protect the franchise.
Often it’s the big spenders from the private sector who draw the attention. But on most days, the really influential lobbyists are there, directly or indirectly, on taxpayer money asking for more.
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