Out until Monday
I have the rest of the week off. Back Monday.
Trivia
Grant Bosse was the first to correctly answer the last trivia question: Which were the only two teams other than UCLA to win the NCAA national basketball championship from 1964 to 1975. The answer: UTEP (1966) and N.C. State (1974).
He takes home the latest edition of the Trivial Pursuit board game.
New question:
Do moose get larger or smaller the farther South they live?
Recent conversations
Somewhere, these verbal exchanges must have happened recently:
Penn. Republican 1: “Arlen Specter is a Democrat!”
Penn. Republican 2: “I know.”
Penn. Republican 1: “No, officially. He just switched parties!”
Penn. Republican 2: “Dangit!”
___________
Gossip Magazine Reader: “Mia Farrow is on a hunger strike.”
Husband: “How can you tell?”
Judd on Arlen: There’s now no check on the Dems
I asked Sen. Gregg’s office for a comment on the party switch of Sen. Arlen Specter, and here is what the senator had to say:
“I obviously regret Senator Specter’s decision to leave the Republican Party and caucus with the Democrats in the Senate. As he has said, this was done for the purely personal reason that he did not think he could win the Republican Primary or be elected as an Independent in Pennsylvania.
“Unfortunately, the real implication of this decision is that the Democrats will likely now have 60 votes in the Senate and there will essentially be no checks on their initiatives. This means that the agenda which my liberal colleagues are pursuing of dramatically increasing the spending and debt of the federal government — and moving it significantly to left — will go forward without any effective limitation.
“The founding fathers had the good sense not to give us a parliamentary form of government which tends to lurch to the left or right, but rather to set up a government of checks and balances. However, with the Congress and the Executive Branch now in the total control of the majority party, these checks and balances will essentially not exist and a much larger, more expensive and thoroughly debt ridden government will be passed on to future generations.”
I wonder if Sen. Specter would have treated Gregg so kindly had he taken the position of Commerce secretary. Seems to me that Gregg, who gave up a Cabinet position partly out of party loyalty, was quite gracious to Specter, who dumped his party for purely selfish reasons.
So long, Firebird, GTO
The single most enjoyable turn in the automobile industry in the past several years has been the rebirth of the American muscle car. In 2002, GM ended production of the Camaro and Firebird. With the Mustang still not quite right, it looked like the end for big, loud American sports cars. There was still the Corvette, but it looked more European than American. But in 2005 Ford introduced its retro Mustang, the beauty of which revived the American muscle car single-handedly. Dodge followed with its hot new Charger (now driven by NH state troopers) and, last year, a reborn Challenger. Chevy finally brought back the Camaro, and Pontiac was set to follow with a new Firebird and GTO. (Holden built a GTO from 2004 to 2006, but there was no retro muscle-car styling.) Alas, they are not to be.
GM’s December decision to make Pontiac a niche brand producing three cars, including the two muscle cars, has been dumped. The brand will now be folded. I’m no expert in the auto business, but it seems to me there is clear demand for retro muscle cars and GM is losing a money-making opportunity by ditching Pontiac entirely rather than making and selling a few thousand GTOs and Firebirds a year. Maybe the economics of such small production don’t work well in Detroit, but Dodge is still making 600-hp Vipers and Chevy is still making Corvettes. Why surrender this market to Porsche, BMW, Nissan, and Honda?
The sharp-looking Pontiac Solstice got good reviews and was outselling the Mazda Miata for a while. There was and still is some value in the Pontiac brand. It’s disappearance will be a real loss.
Vote Garcia in Salem and Windham
There is a special election today in House District 4, covering parts of Salem and Windham. Running are Democrat Sheila Murray, 63, and Republican Marilinda Garcia, 25. Guess which one has legislative experience? Garcia.
She was first elected in 2006 when she was 23. She served a single term and built an impressive conservative record. After Rep. Mark Pearson resigned in January to work for the town of Hudson, a lot of conservatives in the district, and activists around the state, were thrilled to see Garcia announce for the race.
Voters in this district could hardly have more different candidates, philosophically. Garcia got into the race to fight tax and fee increases and the far-left social agenda House Democrats are pushing this year. Murray got into it to promote more spending, particularly on social services and to pass expanded gambling to pay for it.
Aside from her politics, Garcia is a pretty amazing 25 year old. She graduated cum laude from Tufts and simultaneously earned a Bachelor of Music with Distinction from the New England Conservatory. She is a master’s candidate at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and works as a guardian ad litem in Salem. And she teaches harp at Phillips Exeter. Did I mention she’s 25?
New Hampshire needs a lot more representatives in Concord like Marilinda Garcia.
Gregg compares Obama to Chavez
Judd Gregg let the President have it today.
“I can understand shaking Hugo Chavez’s hand, but I can’t understand embracing his politics … cutting down the minority,” he said. He then said Blue Dog Democrats in Congress had been “bamboozled” by the White House.
Oh, this is going to be a fun week in Washington.
The rich are just lucky
Writing in The New York Times, economist Robert Frank argues that President Obama’s plan to take an extra 4.5 percent of the incomes of America’s top earners is fair because so many people who get rich are just lucky. He cites as examples people “lucky” to be raised by caring, stable parents, and hockey players lucky enough to be born in January, thus becoming the oldest, most developed players on their teams, increasing the odds that they will go pro. This is complete claptrap.
Frank never seems to consider that perhaps those parents raising the “lucky” children work extremely hard to do so and, in the process, transmit their work ethics and other positive behavioral traits to their children, who then work harder in school and at their jobs.
He also claims we are all lucky to be Americans, so we should happily pay more taxes:
“Another important message of recent research is that a person’s salary depends far more on where she is born than on her talent and effort.
“For example, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal long ago, I hired a cook who had no formal education but was spectacularly intelligent and resourceful. Beyond preparing excellent meals, he could butcher a goat, thatch a roof, plaster walls, resole shoes and fix broken alarm clocks. He was also an able tinsmith and a skilled carpenter. Yet his total lifetime earnings were less than even a very lazy, untalented American might earn in a single year. Well-paid Americans owe an enormous, if rarely acknowledged, debt to the social investments that supported their success.”
I think he spent too long breathing that thin Himalayan air. For, by his own admission, he hired that particular cook because the cook was spectacularly useful. He chose him from among many other Nepalis because he performed better than they did. Which means that this Nepali succeeded by being more useful than his peers, which is another way of saying that he was rewarded more than his peers based on merit, not luck. Would Frank happily suggest that the Nepali government take an extra 4.5 percent of his cook’s wages because the fellow was merely “lucky”?
And of course, the obvious question in response to Frank’s claim is: Why do people in Third World countries earn less than we do? It’s not luck. It’s because their governance and economic systems, which they chose, function worse than ours do. There is a reason why there has never been a famine in a capitalist country, but communism and tribal dictatorships still produce mass starvation.
Frank claims that “the social investments” that “support” the success of well-off Americans are the product of mere random chance. That’s preposterous. The wealth that was used to fund those investments was the product of our capitalist system, which is structured to provide strong incentives for creativity, hard work, capital formation, etc. It’s not random chance that Americans are richer on average than the Nepalese. It’s a result of differing systems of governance and economic organization. God didn’t place those systems on Earth at random. We created them. In the case of the United States, we fought several wars to create and preserve the system we built. We didn’t win our freedom and our prosperity through the lottery. We earned it.
Mandatory helmets for mountain bikers
A Marlborough man lost control of his mountain bike and died after falling down an embankment. He wasn’t wearing a helmet.
State Sen. Peggy Gilmour says the state should mandate adult seat belt use because “We have an opportunity to save lives and prevent untoward suffering and disability. Seat-belts are not an issue of individual liberty when the rest of society must pay the cost of someone else’s lifelong disability.”
A man has died because the state doesn’t mandate that adult bicyclists wear helmets. The state has missed “an opportunity to save lives and prevent untoward suffering and disability” here. If you believe in a seat belt mandate, how can you refuse to protect mountain bikers by not requiring them to wear helmets? What is the argument that supports mandating seat belts but not bicycle helmets? By Gilmour’s standards, the state should mandate both. If the state has the duty to protect people by making them use safety devices when they engage in risky behavior, there is no logical or moral justification for choosing to protect drivers and not mountain bikers.
Oh, please, please, please…
Massachusetts might raise its sales tax by two percentage points, from 5 percent to 7 percent. This comes on the heels of Massachusetts attempting to collect sales taxes from New Hampshire tire shops. If this passes, a lot more people will shop for tires (and everything else) in New Hampshire. The tax on a $600 set of tires would go from $30 to $42. The tax on a $250 iPod would go from $12.50 to $17.5o. The tax on a $16 cd would go from 80 cents to $1.12. This increase would send droves of Massachusetts residents over the border to New Hampshire. So… let’s all hope it passes as soon as possible.
Concord’s stupidest regulation
The City of Concord allows businesses to have electronic sign displays, but only if the electronic message displays nothing more than the date, time and temperature. Why this makes sense to anyone is a subject worthy of scientific study. How is a driver less distracted by the lit-up words, “10:30, April 24,” than by the words “$9.99 dinner specials”? Does the city think drivers will get too distracted by the thought of tasty, inexpensive meals or cheap dry cleaning that they’ll cause accidents?
Anyway, the Red Blazer restaurant has found a clever way around this dumb rule. Management noticed that the regulation does not require the display of the correct date, time and temperature. As the Monitor reported, the restaurant displays the wrong date. When customers come in, they find on the specials menu that the displayed date has some significance, such as the day Fenway Park opened. Pretty clever.
Now watch the city amend the regulation to mandate that the date, time and temperature be accurate.
Judd Gregg’s letter to Geithner
Sen. Judd Gregg has written to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to urge the secretary to use any TARP money returned to the government to pay down the debt. Here is the text of Gregg’s letter:
Dear Mr. Secretary:
I am writing this letter to express my views about the Department of the Treasury’s handling of taxpayer dollars provided under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) – namely, the importance of protecting the taxpayer and paying down the public debt.
As one of the four key Congressional negotiators of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA) of 2008 (Public Law 110-343) last fall, I am well aware of the circumstances surrounding its enactment into law, including the tension between deploying assistance to the financial markets in an expeditious and productive manner and protecting taxpayers by maximizing the return on investment to them. By now it is well understood that implementation of the law has taken a few turns from what the congressional drafters had contemplated, with perhaps the prime example being the initial use of TARP assistance taking the form of equity injections into banks. Nonetheless, I have been an advocate for the necessity of the federal government to take these steps and have largely supported the Treasury Department’s efforts (with a few exceptions) to relieve the immediate financial crisis threatening the nation’s economic health.
Recent events, however, have led me to question whether all of the requirements of the bill, as well as its overall spirit, are being dutifully followed. I understand that a limited number of banks have already returned the equity investment made by the TARP program. Other banks are currently seeking to do so, although there appears to be some confusion surrounding under what circumstances the Treasury Department is willing to allow that to happen. I certainly hope that repayments will be permitted, especially for financial institutions that are deemed well capitalized after the stress tests. That being said, section 106(d) of EESA states: “Revenues of, and proceeds from the sale of troubled assets purchased under this Act, or from the sale, exercise, or surrender of warrants or senior debt instruments acquired under section 113 shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury for reduction of the public debt.” Also, other provisions of the EESA state that the TARP program’s impact on taxpayers should be minimized, an important consideration that President Obama himself emphasized when – as then Senator of Illinois – he spoke in favor of the EESA and the TARP program on October 1, 2008.
In light of the public’s concern about the federal government’s growing debt, I believe that we must return TARP monies to the taxpayer as soon as those resources have accomplished the financial assistance they were intended to provide to each affected institution to get capital flowing again. The current desire by some banks to pay back TARP assistance, which should generate a profitable return for the taxpayer, now presents a good opportunity to carry this out, as consistent with the requirements under the EESA and section 7001 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Further, while the Treasury Department may have the legal authority to do so, I believe it is in the best interest of the taxpayer at this time that the Treasury Department not redeploy any portions of financial assistance under the $700 billion limit that have been issued and then returned.
Thus I would appreciate it if you could explain how the Treasury Department is implementing the EESA’s provisions regarding debt reduction and taxpayer protection, whether other provisions of law intersect with these requirements, and how the Treasury Department is resolving any issue of interpreting the various provisions of law and conflicts that may exist among them.
Thank you for your consideration of this request.
Sincerely,
Judd Gregg
U.S. Senator
