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Thursday, January 29, 2009
Environmental virtue, trauma care, emissions
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
When global warming threatens to destroy life on this planet, as Al Gore would have us believe, rush to the intersection of North Highland and Virginia Avenue in Atlanta. That’s now a “carbon-neutral zone.” In a carbon-neutral zone, the owners of small businesses can feel environmentally virtuous and be identified as such, for fees ranging from $10 a year for a small sweet shop to $600 for a restaurant. It’s the environmental version of the good feeling you get for slipping a few coins to a panhandler.
Absolutely, with all deliberate speed the Georgia General Assembly should pass legislation proposed by state Sen. Preston Smith (R-Rome) to make the board of the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council advisory. Quick, yes, advisory. Board members have too many competing agendas. Their primary one should be to help the director, Mack Crawford, accomplish a difficult job without unlimited access to the public treasury.
I’ve never understood why it’s vital to know who owns my mortgage, so long as I have a competent servicing representatives and my payments are properly recorded. Every time I hear a complaint about the inability to determine the actual mortgage-holder, I’m inclined to believe some deadbeat’s looking for a loophole to avoid paying an honest debt.
UGA’s women gymnastics coach Suzanne Yoculan thinks she’s being kept out of the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame because she’s sharing a home with Don Leeburn, a powerful member of the Georgia Board of Regents who’s still married to somebody else. OK. Reason enough. Next self-declared victim?
Letting California and 13 other states set their own limits on auto emissions does require automakers to build cars for each market, which is inherently inefficient. That, or as the Obama leftists hope, all cars are manufactured to California standards. If that’s the regulation, auto companies should be paid from the public till. This is a future problem, incidentally, with having government get in bed with private companies. Car companies become the manufacturing arms of interest-group political agendas.
Survey sez! Sixty-nine percent of Georgians are willing to pay $25 per year or more to fund trauma hospitals statewide. Ah, but there’s a catch. They mostly want the levy on somebody else — with 74 percent supporting higher traffic fines (as Gov. Sonny Perdue proposes) and 61.3 percent wanting additional taxes on gun sales. The latter prompts the question: Did anybody outside downtown Decatur, Rome, Marietta and Athens get polled? The question on whether people are willing to pay more for this or that should be phrased: “How much in higher taxes are you personally willing to pay to provide…?” Another option is to phrase it this way: “How much are you willing to tax interest groups seeking more of your money for their causes?”
President Obama gets the first dividend check from the Axis of Evil on his new be-nice-and-hope foreign policy. Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defines “change” as abandoning Israel and apologizing to the Islamic world for past sins, while withdrawing U.S. military forces back to the homeland and presumably diverting them to police anti-Muslim hate speech. Live by the buzzword, die by the buzzword.
State Rep. Austin Scott (R-Tifton) wants to be governor. Starting out that journey with a proposal to add a $10 tax to the purchase of auto tags is an odd way to solicit notice.
If a bank’s stock price is lower than its yield on a three-month CD and together they don’t add up to 5, the economy’s bad.
It’s not been widely noticed, but U.S. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) is becoming an important figure in the conservative movement nationally. He’s chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, which had offered a sound alternative to the massive social spending eruption that Pelosi Democrats are passing off as “economic stimulus.” The study committee includes 108 of the 178 House Republicans, same as in the last Congress — except that Republicans lost 20 seats in November. Of 22 Republican freshmen, 20 have joined the policy group Price chairs.
Two coaches who deserved to be fired or removed and were: The one in Texas who had no second thoughts about allowing his girls team to beat another 100-0 and the one in Clayton County who allowed the Jonesboro High School dance team to perform a provocative halftime dance in thigh-high stockings, tiny shorts and tight shirts. The dance team has been disbanded, a proper response from school officials.
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Gas, water and Saturday mail
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Reduce your use of water during droughts and water departments insist on higher fees to cover reduced demand.
Reduce miles driven during a period of $4 gas and politicians and bureaucrats at the state and federal level start pleading poverty, insisting that Georgia needs an additional one percent sales tax statewide and that the federal gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon be increased by 10 cents a gallon now and by up to 40 cents over a decade.
Now comes the U.S. Postal Service pleading once again for more revenue. Total mail volume dropped by 9 billion items last year to 202 billion, largest single drop in volume in history. E-mail, electronic banking, competition and other changes in customer habits account for the drop.
The price of a first class stamp, now 42 cents, is going up again in May, probably by 2 cents, though the agency could cite “special circumstances” and ask for more.
For years, the postal services’ ace-in-the-hole has been a threat to end Saturday service and to close small post offices in every Congressional district. And, indeed, Postmaster General John E. Potter Wednesday asked Congress to lift the requirement that his agency deliver the mail six days a week. Dropping Saturday delivery is most likely, though another day could be chosen — Tuesday perhaps.
I surrender. Standing in a post office line on a couple of occasions recently, I marveled at the pace of work. I imagined that somewhere somebody had agreed that clerks would handle precisely 17.6 customers per hour and under no circumstances were clerks allowed to speed up that process or to handle more. If they approached their hourly limit, they simply walked off the job and left stations vacant, no matter how many people stood in line.
Kill Saturday delivery. Fine. But isn’t it time to open up the first-class monopoly to private sector competition?
