Posts Tagged → budget
Shatter that glass ceiling
The so-called “debt ceiling” is a fantasy of a fantasy. It is the undefined, almost whimsical notion that even when the United States citizenry’s representative government has in-effect borrowed trillions more Dollars than The People can ever hope to repay, it is still yet possible to raise that ceiling even further and borrow more, and spend a hell of a lot more, than ever before.
And so we are told in the sternest of tones by DC Beltway bobbleheads like Chuck Todd at NBC, that we must raise this “debt ceiling” or risk going into default. Default! Like our creditors will demand a refund! Which we all know will never, ever happen, because the entire house of cards upon which the planet’s entire interrelated economy is based will come crashing down, to the loss of most, including the communist Chinese, who have the most to lose.
So, default on the debt ceiling is never going to happen. Invoking it is just a scare tactic by DC Beltway banditos to try to screw us citizens out of more money and power. Forget it, let the debt ceiling break. Hell, go ahead and shatter it. Nothing will happen.
Unsurprisingly, massive RINO US House Speaker Kevin “Sweetcheeks” McCarthy has done ye olde reach across the aisle bipartisan BS and agreed to most of what the America-detonating Biden Anarcho-Administration has demanded, in the name of the sacred debt ceiling. Including funding for 87,000 new gun-wielding corrupt IRS agents who will be crawling up my butt and yours looking for loose pennies, and jailing us en masse for penny ante mistakes. And no cutting of the lawless FBI or the rogue DOJ budgets.
The problem with “Republicans” like Kevin McCarthy (and Tom Ridge, Tom Corbett, and 99.9% of the PA GOP here in PA) is that they believe in government first and foremost. They have no problem growing government or in ceding its unaccountable bureaucrats more and ever more power and centralized control over all us citizens. So long as they get a seat at the table and grow their own power and influence, they don’t give a darn about anything else. Shame on all of them. Shame shame shame on all of you fake conservatives.
No, I am wrong. Let me rephrase this. Shame on all of you fake Republican Americans, because you are directly empowering communists destroying America.
Congressman Scott Perry, if you are reading this, please remove Sweetcheeks McCarthy from the Speakership. Cut 80% of the FBI and DOJ budgets. Put your foot down and give these America destroying lowlifes a severe brake check. If they veer off the road and smash the debt ceiling and leave the budget talks a smoking ruin as a result, good; you get extra points. Because American citizens will benefit the most.
PA wildlife: damned if we do, damned if we don’t
Like every other state in the Union, Pennsylvania protects, conserves, and manages its wildlife through a combination of user-pays fees like hunting and fishing licenses on the one hand, and a helping of federal funding collected from user-self-imposed federal taxes on hunting and fishing equipment like boats, guns, ammunition, fishing rods etc on the other hand (the same people who buy the hunting and fishing licenses).
Yes, 100% of the nation’s citizenry benefits from the self-imposed taxes and fees paid by just 1% of the population: the hunters, trappers, and fishermen. Yes, you read that right: just 1% of the population is carrying 100% of the public burden.
And yes, as you are correctly about to say out loud, you and I will not see this bizarre and totally unsustainable arrangement in any other area of public policy. Not in roads, not in schools, not in airports, not in museums, not in anything else official and run for public benefit. And so, yes, it is a fact that wildlife agencies across America are perennially underfunded, and have been for so long that it’s now accepted as the way America does its wildlife business. Here in Pennsylvania, despite endless rising costs and endlessly more expensive public pensions, both houses of the PA legislature have long blocked the PA Game Commission from getting a hunting license increase in decades. So the PGC is even more behind the financial Eight Ball than most other state wildlife agencies. Hunters and wildlife managers in other states look at Pennsylvania and shake their heads. It doesn’t have to be this way, but it is.
Despite the obvious imbalance and weakness inherent in such a unique and faulty funding arrangement, for fifty years this approach worked pretty well, nationally and in Pennsylvania, with some states occasionally putting new money into holes that opened up in the regular wildlife funding support. Those states with significantly increasing human populations tend to be forced into dealing with inevitable wildlife-human conflicts more than other states, and when Mr. and Mrs. America are increasingly hitting deer with their cars, you can bet that they will demand their home state do something about it. So more money is found.
So along comes the Pennsylvania Auditor General, to investigate the management and expenditure of money at the PGC. And why not, right? The PGC is a public agency, and hunting license revenue is a public trust. So sure, go ahead, look into it, audit the agency. And so it was done, and some interesting things emerged just a bit over a week ago.
In the “Atta boy” column is the fact that there appears to be no corruption, graft, or misuse of scarce sportsmen’s dollars at the PGC. By all accounts, PGC is transparent and well run. Given how much the sportsmen are always scrutinizing the agency, we all figured as much. But it is nice to have our beliefs and trust confirmed like this. We love the PGC even more today than before the audit.
In the “Aww shucks” column is the revelation that PGC staff do not immediately deposit oil and gas royalty checks when they are received, nor does the PGC ascertain for itself if those royalty payments are accurate in the first place, instead trusting the oil and gas companies to do what is right on their own. Hmmmm….This is a potential problem area, and we are all glad the auditors found it. Anyone who knows the PGC can bet money on the fact that PGC staff are right now doing all of this payment followup with a vengeance. Look out, oil and gas companies!
But then there is the big weird issue, the biggest issue of all, where the auditors “discover” that the PGC is sitting on $72 million in the bank. And accordingly, the auditors immediately and erroneously ascribe this to bad money management. After all, they say, public money is meant to be spent. “If you got ’em, smoke ’em,” goes the ancient and totally irresponsible government approach to managing public dollars. After all, under normal budgeting culture, agencies that do not spend the money budgeted to them risk losing those dollars in the next budget cycle. Failure to spend money is correlated with a failure to implement an agency’s mission, and for senior agency managers, there is the usual ego factor; the bigger the budget, the bigger the…you know. This is the old approach to managing government funds, and it is wrong, and it certainly does not fit the PGC’s reality or targeted way of doing business.
Let’s ask you a question: If you knew your family was going to be receiving less and less money going forward, and yet your family costs would be held steady, wouldn’t you begin to bank any extra money you had, in preparation for lean times ahead? If your family is responsible, then yes, this is what you do, it is what we all do. And it is what the PGC has done, thankfully.
But as a result of the audit, this single fact is being used to beat on the agency, to coerce the PGC to adopt unsustainable policies and irresponsible money management, despite the agency sailing through ever less sustainable funding waters every day. Seems like now every elected official and every Monday morning quarterback sportsman has some variation on the foolish theme that PGC has more money than it knows what to do with. Wrong!
So the real outcome of the audit is that Pennsylvania wildlife are damned either way, because the PGC is the useful straw man whipping boy for every aspiring demagogue in Pennsylvania politics. No matter what the PGC does, our wildlife resources are going to suffer. If PGC carefully, frugally husbands its limited resources, preparing for rainy days and needy wildlife, then the agency’s critics say the agency is miserly and hoarding, and they seek to punish the agency. And on the other hand, if the PGC immediately spends every dime it has, and has no money left over to deal with yet more unfunded mandates like Chronic Wasting Disease, then critics say the agency is wasteful and ineffective, and they seek to punish the agency.
And either way, the net result is the PGC’s critics damn and condemn our wildlife. Because that is the true result of all this second-guessing and monkeying about with the PGC budget and funding streams. Plenty of elected officials use their criticism of the PGC to artificially burnish their “good government” credentials, when in fact they are demanding the worst sort of government, and a total disservice to the sportsmen and wildlife everyone enjoys.
Many years ago, sportsmen were organized enough to react strongly to political demagogues who threatened our wildlife resource (and PA’s $1.6 billion annual hunting economy) with their petty politics. This latest iteration of the politics of wildlife management indicates that we need to get back to the old days, where sportsmen were unified and forceful, even vengeful, in their expectation that their elected officials would not politicize or hurt our commonly held wildlife resource.
PA’s Keystone Fund: Symmetrical Program in an Asymmetrical Political World
If there is one rule or overarching principle that taxpayers want applied to how their hard-earned money is spent by government bureaucrats, it is symmetry.
If taxpayers put money in, they expect to get money, or value, back out.
Gasoline taxes? Show me the newly paved highway! Etc. Real simple symmetry.
This is the most elementary social contract between citizens and their self-selected governments, and today ain’t Ninth Century Europe, where armed tax collectors come knocking and begin turning the humble home inside out in search of hidden wealth to take, er…collect.
Today, when the government takes your money by threat of coercive force, you grudgingly turn it over, expecting to at least see some benefit from it.
At budget time is when the legislature and the executive negotiate over how the collected resources of a state or nation are going to be spent. Right now it is budget time in Pennsylvania, and there are no guarantees. Neither the governor nor the legislature has my trust.
Both are up for re-election.
In the middle of it all we have the Keystone Fund, Pennsylvania’s conservation engine. The Keystone Fund is used to run most of Pennsylvania’s “Ranger Rick” – style conservation programs. State parks, state forests, land acquisition, new kiosks, etc. Good stuff. Worthy stuff. The kind of stuff that makes the taxpayer say “Hey, I finally got my money’s worth back!”
The Keystone Fund is funded by taxpayers, but also in large part by the net returns from timber and natural gas sales from public lands. There is an appealing, nearly holy symmetry to any government program that uses money from its own programs to pay for its own programs.
It is the way government should be run!
Now, the Keystone Fund is at risk because it is a symmetrical program living in an asymmetrical political world populated by career politicians who disburse public funds to win public favor, and votes.
Instead of returning the proceeds from timber and gas sales back into the very natural resources that produced them, we now see the likelihood that elected officials will use this income stream to buy off their favorite constituencies. So they can get votes, and get re-elected.
How sad to see one of the very few examples of good public policy, the Keystone Fund, fall victim to something so crass, vulgar and common as an elected official.
To quote Mark Twain: “I think I can say, and say with pride that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.” (Speech 7/4/1873)
Harrisburg politics as usual from someone we should not expect it from
“Politics as usual.”
That is a statement, a curse, a wry observation, an accusation, a vexation to the free citizen, and most surely, it is a threat to good government.
Wherever there is “politics as usual,” we find double standards, empty promises, hypocrisy, a lack of forethought, an absence of careful or diligent thought, and an act of putting political gain ahead of citizen gain. And please don’t kid yourself that only “their” political party does it. Both main political parties engage in politics as usual, and even some of the fringe political parties are awash in it, because for their single issue cause to succeed they must overlook tons of contrary evidence to keep selling their purist issue.
This past week saw a classic example of politics as usual, and it disappointed me, because the person who engaged in it ought to know better. I certainly believe that he is better than that, and that he has a capacity to act bigger than his silly politicized statement.
What happened was that Governor Tom Corbett line-item-vetoed some “legislative” funding (that is taxpayer dollars used by the legislature for their office coffee, cars, walking-around-money, and parking on Capitol Hill), and state senator Rob Teplitz claimed that it would damage Harrisburg’s recovery plan.
Nothing could be farther from the truth, because that money vetoed out of the budget belongs to taxpayers and has zero to do with Harrisburg’s recovery. Only an overly creative imagination can find some vague link between the loss of cheap cash for legislators and the loss of economic advance for Harrisburg City.
Making it worse is that Senator Teplitz voted against the state budget to begin with. If he votes against something, how can he then claim that someone else shouldn’t vote against it, too?
The simple reason that Teplitz said this is for cheap political gain, a lame attempt to damage Corbett among voters in Harrisburg City. This qualifies as politics as usual, and it is destructive of the political process because it cheapens the political process. It dumbs it down. Instead of talking about Big Important Issues, we end up talking about nonsense that has nothing to do with anything material or substantial, and voters walk away from it.
When voters walk away from the political process, America is damaged. Maximum voter participation is needed for the nation to function properly.
Teplitz should know better than to do this. He is a bright guy, and I think he is a good guy. Although principled, he is overwhelmingly partisan, and that is why this kind of silly waste of time came naturally to him. Like all other partisans, Democrat and Republican, Teplitz only really cares about the party enterprise. He forgets about the citizens, their Constitutional rights, their personal money they remove from their pockets and place in the state coffers.
It is no secret I hope to be the Republican nominee in 2016 for the 15th PA senate district. If he runs for re-election then, Teplitz will be my opponent. I have no problem publicly singing his praises where he has earned them, and I can attest to several good things he has done for me and other people in the district. If Teplitz has had one strength so far, that I have seen, one truly laudable characteristic, it has been his willingness to wade into bad government, force a meeting or two, confront recalcitrant bureaucrats, and represent well a constituent’s interests. That is a real skill, and we should all recognize it.
That is why Teplitz disappoints so badly with his spurious attack on Corbett. I just know he can be bigger and better than this politics as usual.
Good move by Gov. Corbett
If I hear one more false accusation that Tom Corbett is short changing government schools, I am gonna buttonhole that next person who says it. It is not true that government school funding was or has been cut by the Corbett administration. Like so many things that former governor Ed Rendell had done, those previous annual education budgets were temporarily bolstered by one-time FEDERAL money. That funding was never intended to be continuous, and if it is not continuous, then it is in Barack Obama’s hands, not some governor who has zero control over federal spending.
Whatever your beef with Tom Corbett may be, and Lord knows, people have legitimate beefs with him, he is not responsible for “cutting education funding.” That is a lie.
Today, Corbett did the right thing by signing the legislature’s proposed budget, but using his line-item veto power to exclude the state legislature’s hoggish claim to some $72 million taxpayer dollars. I have seen the state legislature hog over $100 million, and even higher, for their pet projects that the careerist leaders and their “pets” use to spend on projects to buy votes and get re-elected.
Corbett is angling for the legislature to return and fix the state pension crisis.
Good move, Tom Corbett.