Rebane's Ruminations

Meg, are we in the bag?

George Rebane

Last Wednesday (18aug10) I stood next to my pal Russ Steele when he lit into Meg’s second string field representatives for her refusal to support Proposition 23.  I thought that Russ was appropriately steamed by the ‘pre-natal RINO’ behavior Whitman was communicating across California.  I had taken her to task on this in my 14aug10 Union column (here).

But then, like a dummy, I put my hand up to ask the team what information about California jobs and AB32’s effect on same did Whitman still need in order to throw her weight behind Prop23 to suspend AB32.  I didn’t have a chance, Russ’s incisive indictment had loosened whatever inhibitions might have been in place at that celebratory opening of the Republican campaign headquarters.

The follow-on questions and criticisms from the audience came unprompted, hot, and heavy.  After about a minute I quietly lowered my hand, hoping nobody had noticed such a silly attempt at wanting to be heard in that crowd.  More on the occasion was reported here and here.

The takeaway from the gathering left me pondering about Meg Whitman, the launch of her new career in politics, and what should be my response as a conservative voter with libertarian leanings.  The message to all of her conservative voters is clear – we are in the bag, and now it’s time to go scoop as many people as possible from the ‘decline to state’ and the left.  After all, what rightwinger in their right mind would abstain or vote for Governor Moonbeam?  Get serious.

Well, I am serious.  To me and many others, she has chosen to walk the well-worn path of political expediency – ‘just get me elected, and then trust me to do the right thing for you.’  The problem with that is that that’s the problem.  The halls of the electeds are full of yokels who were put there by us through exactly that kind of argument.  And now we are where we are.

Like so many across the land, I joined the Tea Party Patriots because I believe in a different approach to politics that starts and ends with principle.  And like so many, I admit to having trampled my beliefs by voting for candidates I knew to belong only to the ‘me first’ party.  How long must we; no, how long must I continue doing this?  Is this behavior not a form of insanity, doing the same thing and expecting different results?

Perhaps California needs to crash, and crash hard before we and the rest of the country wake up to the siren song of socialism.  And Governor Moonbeam is just the man at the helm to drive us into the mud about as quickly as anyone.  It may now be the time.

Having said all this, I invite Meg Whitman to bring her considerable talents back into the same circle of principle from which she launched her campaign.  I want her to show the world that she understands the condition of polity in today’s America, and will again stand loud and strong for the prescriptions that we believe will make the country better, the prescriptions that we all thought she believed in.

To put a bow on it, I don’t like being in the bag any more.

Bassackwards (updated)

George Rebane

Former Union editor and Nevada County’s journalist extraordinaire (also self-appointed manager of our morals and keeper of The High Dudgeon) Jeff Pelline has again gotten a bit confused about the why, wherefore, and responsibility of disclosures.  In my recent pieces promoting the passage of Proposition 23 (for example here and here), I do not mention that the Rebanes have contributed to Congressman Tom McClintock’s campaign – TomM, Dan Logue, Doug LaMalfa, and many other conservative politicians are also vocal proponents of Prop23.

On his blog and on RR Jeff has announced our financial support of McClintock in breathless revelations and the surety of a man who sees himself firmly in the footsteps of Woodward and Bernstein.  His attempt to communicate outrage at my implied desire to hide this contribution is not the first time he has shown ignorance about when and where such disclosures are needed.

Jo Ann and I support many charities, institutions, politicians, and initiatives.  And this invariably means that we also put our money where our mouths are – count on it.  On the obverse, we also take no monies or other remuneration to our benefit for promoting and supporting our beliefs and values.  In the case of Prop23, our hoped for benefit in its passage is that of almost all other Californians who are not members of the subsidy sucking sector.

What Pelline and other lightly read journalists seem to be ignorant of is that it is only those getting compensated for promoting views or causes who should declare their benefice and benefactors.  In short, if it looks like you’re spouting off because you’re getting paid for spouting off, you should then disclose it.

For example, every time George Soros states that he is for, say, a higher minimum wage, he has no obligation to concurrently declare that he gives monies to a host of listed organizations and lobbyists who are of a same mind about a higher minimum wage.  How he legally promotes his causes is his business, which someone else can discover and trumpet or not.  In the same vein, conservative columnist and commentator Charles Krauthammer has no obligation to disclose his contributions to recipients who also hold the same views he is promoting.

Another example of this kind of dumbbell journalism occurs when we hear of the efforts to build a better fence along our Mexican border as being akin to our building another Berlin Wall down there.  Such journalists have no idea how the Iron Curtain operated, or what was the intent and purpose of the Berlin Wall .  Of course, one can argue that these journalists do know their history, but then we must conclude that they’re evil instead of stupid.

I make no such assessment of Jeff Pelline, he just keeps getting things bassackward.

[update]  I meant to include a link to an appropriately clarifying essay that I posted almost three years ago about my thoughts on journalism today, my role as commentator, and a summary of belief tenets that anchor such views.  Please see 'I AM NOT A JOURNALIST'.

Is Prop23 Relevant to Nevada County?

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my bi-weekly KVMR-FM 85.9 commentary aired earlier this evening (20 August 2010).  NC Media Watch adds to the relevancy argument here.]

By now everyone has heard of AB32, California’s new law to implement statewide energy cap and trade regulations.  Governor Schwarzenegger signed it and turned it over to the California Air Resources Board or CARB to implement through new regulations, bureaucracies, and fees levied on all levels of life in the Golden State.  The debate about its effect on the state’s economy, already heated before AB32 passed, now became torrid.

The wealth creating businesses and jurisdictions, with energy price sensitive economies, have analyzed and argued that AB32 would devastate an already ailing California economy, and further harm a business climate that puts California at or near the bottom of nationwide economic rankings.  But organizations and jurisdictions that hope for federal subsidies, and subsidy dependent investors hoping to create ‘green’ jobs, are the vocal proponents of larger government and increased taxes and fees that AB32 implementation would entail.  For good or ill, both sides are in solid agreement that AB32 would impact every facet of business and life in our state.

The battle lines were drawn when our Assemblyman Dan Logue introduced AB118 to suspend the implementation of most of AB32 until our 12.3% unemployment rate would come down again to a tolerable and more historical 5.5%.  Logue’s argument was that AB32, no matter how implemented, would be a serious drag on our economy, and to recover we needed less regulation and taxation, not more.  Many studies and analyses supported this argument.  But Logue’s bill failed in tax-and-spend Sacramento.  However, the public opposition to AB32 was overwhelming, enough to morph AB118 into Proposition 23 which we will all vote on in November.  Naturally, this started the pro/con Prop23 war, which brings us to the present.

Don’t worry your pretty little head

George Rebane

Imagine trying to land a 747 when all you can see is out the back where you have been.  This is pretty much the drill in attempting to manage a centrally controlled economy using financial performance data that is more than a day late and a dollar short.  Our socialist inclined friends always feel up to this challenge.  I was reminded of all this when a while back I did some research for my August column in The Union.  But there turned out to be more to it.

 

I introduced a graphic called the Regulatory Impact Curve (RIC) that allowed one to visualize how a government’s imposed regulatory burden affects the growth rate of its underlying economy.  Since the regulatory burden has recently been increasing at a gallop, both nationally and especially in California, I wanted to put a few dots on the RIC to show the relative locations of how recent growth rates have responded.  There should have been no problem getting this data since we have tens of thousands of public service employees in big buildings and bureaus across the land collecting, collating, and coagulating it all into information to be used by businesses and public policy makers.

I simply wanted the 2009 growth rate for California’s state gross domestic product (GDP).  It being August 2010, there should be no problem in going to some government website and copying down the number.  Wrong.  After almost an hour googling data service places that I didn’t even know existed on the web, I gave up.  I found the data for up to and including 2008, but that’s where the ‘actual’ stuff ended, and ‘estimates’ and ‘projections’ for 2009 and 2010 started.

Well, I didn’t really give up.  In my web wanderings I came across the name and phone number of the California Department of Finance.  These people would surely have this 2009 data at their finger tips.  I called and went through the usual byzantine ‘death by menu’ experience; I talked to four different individuals, all with fine sounding titles, none with the answer that I wanted.  A couple of them had to repeatedly ask me what exactly did I want, giving evidence that the main economic growth rate for the state was a notion beyond their ken (but then I remembered that government is the employer of last resort).

Stagnating Workforce

George Rebane

“New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level courses, despite modest gains in college-readiness among U.S high-school students in the last few years.”  So opens a front page report in today’s (18aug10) WSJ.  ACT scores for high school graduates have been below acceptable levels for decades and have been dropping in recent years.

I have worried RR readers extensively on the portents of this persistent spread of national “dumbth” (a la Steve Allen).  We have already transited to an information and service economy, manufacturing forms an ever shrinking part of our employment base.  But where will we get such qualified workers when our schools continue to pump out graduates 40% of whom cannot understand what is on their diploma.

In this decade we are well on our way to half of our workforce (now over 155 million) not being able to sell their labor at wages that will maintain their quality of life.  The government continues to be the employer of last resort, and also the funder of last resort to organizations (e.g. NGOs) filled with people who will not make it in the private sector.  And this cohort of ‘workers’ is expected to enjoy robust growth in the coming decade as the planned increase of government takes effect under already passed and planned federal legislation.

Selecting the Right Business Climate

George Rebane

There are several approaches that a region or community can adopt to build a better business climate.   Every approach is founded on a social ideology that is promoted by its backers as a belief system that has either worked in the past, or one that will work in the future if only we give it a chance.  For example, California has made its selection clear, and it is sadly both unworkable and unsustainable.

Joseph Bast of the Heartland Institute has assembled a body of research on business climates that he summarizes into ten points of public policy for consideration by elected officials.  These are published in ‘Building a Better Business Climate’.  They all seem to be also supported by what I would call common sense.  But in today’s America common sense is no longer a common commodity in the minds of voters.

Policy point number ten is particularly important to smaller communities like Nevada County that have so much to offer to young families whose bread winners do good work with the stuff between their ears.  It is reproduced below in its entirety with my emphasis added.

10. Attract members of the creative class.  A final component of a good business climate is adopting policies that make cities and communities attractive to scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and other members of the so-called “creative class.” These individuals are sought after by companies, with the result that businesses will move to cities and regions where such individuals congregate.

Members of the creative class are younger than the average worker and seek cities with amenities that suit their lifestyles. They change jobs frequently and consequently prefer to live in cities with lots of job opportunities to avoid having to relocate. Creative people spend more time on outdoor recreation and view their cities the way tourists do, as a collection of places to visit to have fun.

Cities and states that keep these preferences in mind can avoid wasting millions of dollars on “economic development” schemes that target the wrong people or attempt to draw them to the wrong places.

In California our progressives are convinced beyond debate that implementation of AB32 will create new and productive green industries by government subsidy and regulatory diktat.   History has shown this approach to be another ‘road to serfdom’.  In November voters will have an opportunity with Prop23 to ‘suspend’ the fall of this executioner’s axe.  Russ Steele of NC Media Watch has the latest doings on Prop23 going on at the state’s Regional Council of Rural Counties meeting this week in Sacramento (here).

A Sackhead Saga

George Rebane

The comment threads of most online blogs can get pretty nasty and off the point – one part displays the person’s upbringing, and the other his ability to noodle about the subject, even if he’s a she.  Such remarks are fostered by the anonymity of online handles (or nom de screed) which commenters adopt when they really don’t want to stand behind their words, especially if these are snarky or silly.  In the past I have characterized such people as sackheads – showing up in a public forum wearing a paper sack with eyeholes to shout or shyly mumble their message.  While RR allows such comments, I and other online commentators encourage readers to engage each other civilly (churchilian repartees invited) under their own names.

RL ‘Bob’ Crabb, Nevada County’s keen observer of life’s foibles and cartoonist extraordinaire, captured the essence of the sackhead saga above in his regular offering that appeared in the 14aug10 Union and is used here with his kind permission.

Mr Crabb is also a published author whose latest book is Once Upon a Village.  He will be at the Nevada County Fair today 15 August from 2-5pm where you can buy your copy and get it signed.  Bob will also be at the NC California Organics outlet (behind the SPD at 135 Argall Way) on 28 August from 5–8pm to reprise the whole thing.  So you have two chances to get his newest tome of memorable cartoons immortalized.  Go ahead, make your day.

Prop 23 = AB32 Relief (updated 19aug2010)

George Rebane

[This is the submitted form of my August Union column which appeared in the newspaper’s 14aug2010 print and online editions.]

Almost all surveys, polls, and analyses say that California is at or near the bottom of America’s economic ladder.  Our perennially inept legislature in Sacramento has worldwide notoriety - we are the international poster child of how not to do it.  It? damned near anything related to public policy.  More and more economists and commentators see us on the threshold of a “failed state”.  Only the progressive elites, public service unions, and their local minions continue assuring us how more regulations and taxes are going to solve all of our problems.

The latest tumor metastasizing our Golden State was the passage of AB32, the claimed cure-all to man-made global warming.  This new law is causing untold grief to our state’s businesses with reams of new regulations already in force, and new ones being discovered and enforced every day.  Many businesses are escaping elsewhere as fast as they can.  Others are cancelling plans for growth, and laying off as many workers as possible to reduce costs as the storm approaches.

The malady has already hit Nevada County businesses like Robinson Enterprises and Hansen Brothers.  The only ones still baying for their bone from Washington are our legions of government funded NGOs and large corporations.  These have learned to play the ‘Washington game’ of preferential subsidies and competition stifling legislation that spells oligopoly.

   

To illustrate the general and broad-based effect of laws and regulations burdening businesses and our economy, I offer the above graphic.  It shows how piling on more reams of state mandates creates ‘friction’ in the growth of an economy.  The horizontal axis shows the amount of regulations enforced by government, and the vertical axis indicates the resulting growth rate of the economy that such regulations enable/inhibit.

It is clear that some modicum of regulations is needed to enforce contract law, protect consumers, and maintain the environment.  Without that an orderly society could not function.  However as we witness today, once we exceed that parsimonious set of laws and regulations, economic growth rate begins to go down.  Twentieth century autocracies have shown that growth rate can go negative leading to the collapse of the state.  This is described by the illustrated Regulatory Impact Curve (RIC), which in its naming, modesty prevented my following the lead of Art Laffer.

When we try to peg California on the RIC, the Legislative Analyst Office in Sacramento has pronounced AB32 to be a net cost to the state.  The LAO goes on to say that California Air Resources Board has done a poor job of analyzing the “economic leakage” that AB32 will cause.  This means that AB32 pushes California to the right and downward on the RIC as indicated.

The jobs lost to this bad law are now in the thousands, and for that reason our Assemblyman Dan Logue is spearheading passage of Proposition 23 on this November’s ballot.  Prop23 would delay the implementation of AB32 until California’s unemployment rate drops from its current 12+% to 5.5%.  A YES on Prop23 appears to be the least we can do to help ourselves during this Great Recession which has been more than mishandled from Washington, and now threatens to become a double dip disaster or worse.  We don’t need to make it worse in a state that is already scraping bottom.  (Prop23 info www.suspendab32.org/resources/ab-32/)

Of course, all this is lost on the left that continues screaming for higher taxes, more state control, and bigger government.  Their cry is loud enough to give second thoughts to established ‘middle of the road’ politicians who should know better.  It has even scared the pre-natal RINO Meg Whitman into opposing Prop23 with the caveat that once she’s governor – wink, wink – she’ll postpone AB32 for one year through an executive order.  That little ploy is designed to endear her to the left, and sweep up the innocents on the right.  Right.

Meanwhile, CABPRO and the Tea Party Patriots are the only local organizations so far to have thrown their weight on the side of Prop23.  Our electeds remain silent to sullen on the matter.  Nevertheless, Supervisor John Spencer will soon ask the BoS to endorse Prop23.   But business development outfits like the ERC are keeping mum.  Does this mean that we in Nevada County have pretty well pulled in our horns and mortgaged our future to ‘Chinese Cash from Washington’?  Exit question – and how long will that last?

George Rebane is a retired systems scientist and entrepreneur in Nevada County who regularly expands these and other themes on KVMR, NCTV, and Rebane’s Ruminations (www.georgerebane.com).

[Exit question #2] – Russ Steele at NC MediaWatch asks ‘What happens if Prop 23 fails?’

[18aug2010 update] - The future of California is clearly visible in Europe (here).

[19aug2010 update] - To once again illuminate the substance of loud, loutish, and shameless leftwing voices which are often found in these comment streams, please examine the US government data on recent California vs national GDP growth rates that the above RIC illustrates - US 0.7%, CA 0.4%.

 

Unbelievable? – maybe not (updated 17aug2010)

George Rebane

Progressives and their ambiguous cousins, the liberals, cannot be this ignorant.  Tonight on Fox News Neil Cavuto interviewed James Roosevelt Jr, FDR’s grandson and former associate commissioner of Social Security.  Junior, sober as a judge, claimed in front of a national audience that SS was completely solvent due to the Treasury bonds worth trillions squirreled away in its vaunted “lock box” – the one shown on PBS as a stack of computer printouts in a file cabinet.

It is remarkable that this individual is still walking the streets on his own recognizance.  Cavuto was careful in showing him deference while successfully fighting back giggles that tend to loosen and explosively expel all the phlegm accumulated in the back cavities of your nose.  Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary interview that maintained all previously established dignities.  But the ignorance displayed does require a bit more consideration – maybe we can look under the hood and see what is there.

Those Convenient Counterfactuals (updated)

George Rebane

Ahh, another glorious Friday, and an opportunity to continue the never-ending debate about President Obama’s series of stimulus packages that have done so much good in this recession, the good that would have gone by the board had not Congress bent to the man’s progressive instincts and Keynesian prescriptions.

 

Here again we see the weekly update of the contribution to Nevada County afforded by the now (in)famous American Redistribution and Re-election Act of 2009 – better known as ARRA.  The monies from this national commons has drizzled down into the nooks and crannies of our country, directed to places, people, and projects where it will do the most good for the ruling class.  But the discernible effects of ARRA have been varied and very debatable.

That ARRA has been a just-in-time blessing for America is touted by no less than the President himself.  Starting in the marbled halls beside the Potomac, the orchestrated cry has rippled down through state capitals and city halls large and small, all the way to remote mountain counties harboring gratefully funded NGOs and the occasional stretch of road or bridge in disrepair.

ARRA’s skeptics have spent the last year or so looking for the benefits of this federal largesse.  They’ve looked at job statistics, trade balances, unemployment numbers, etc without much success in finding the blessings from this new mortgage on the country’s economy.  And as a result, you’d think ARRA’s promoters and true believers would be in shame and disarray.  Don’t let the thought enter your head.

The benefits of ARRA are right there in front of your eyes, you just have to know where to believe.  The skeptics are tagged daily in the media as reactionary knuckledraggers to whom it must explained over and over again that if we had not stimulated with ARRA, then this, that, or the other horrible thing would have happened.  And having now spent the borrowed Asian yen and yuan, voila!, the bad stuff didn’t happen.  What more proof could a reasonable person want?

In systems science such arguments are known as counterfactual conditionals, or simply counterfactuals.  Their use in reasoning, especially about causality, is an important part of leading edge developments in both philosophy and machine intelligence.  To understand them, consider first another kind of conditional – the indicative conditional.  The indicative could be something as bland and tautological as ‘If it did not rain this morning, we would have had some other kind of weather.’ – an obviously true statement.

An example of a counterfactual is ‘If it had not rained this morning, then it would have snowed instead.’  Well, the fact is that it did rain this morning, and it is not certain at all that the alternative to rain would have been snow.  It could have been sleet, hail, clear skies, or … .  A counterfactual is not a reliably true statement, it is a chancy statement at best – at best there may be a measurable probability that the statement would have been true, and that’s all.

So now we understand the blather that comes from Washington and from local jurisdictions and NGOs about the effects of ARRA – ‘If we had not passed ARRA, then two (or three or four or …) million more jobs would have been lost.’  Bull pucky is about all we can sprinkle on such arguments.  No one has made a case for such claims, especially now that we’re seeing the economy continue to struggle and sag.  With at least equal validity one could claim, ‘If we had not passed ARRA, then the recession would now be over.’   (I’ll call that the von Mises argument.)

And claims of how much ARRA money actually has landed in the bounds of Nevada County, and what the greater tragedy would have been had Nevada County not received such stipulated funds, are somewhat beyond comedy.  And the mirth is multiplied by the serious demeanor with which Obama’s local progressives portray the “truth” of their claims, and ascribe all other representations, no matter how qualified and official their source, as “lies”.  The twilight of reason.

[update] A correspondent and RR reader from the Washington area sent this August 2010 DOE Inspector General's report on the progress from its distribution of ARRA funds.  Recommended reading for a dose of high government comedy.  But when you stop laughing, you might want to have your hanky ready for the tears you will then shed for our country and your wallet.