America’s “Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy”: Part III

In a two-part series back in 2020 (here and here), I analyzed the unseemly behavior of politicians. For Part III of that series, let’s start with my CNBC discussion earlier this week about insider trading by lawmakers.

The interview focused on legislation proposed by Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) to ban members of Congress and other senior government officials from owning individuals stocks.

The goal is to prevent lawmakers from being able to obtain unearned riches by, for instance, buying a company’s and then enacting legislation to increase its value.

• Perhaps by imposing regulations that hurt its competitors.
• Perhaps by imposing protectionism that hurts its competitors.
• Perhaps by imposing taxes that hurt its competitors.

Or they can do things that directly help the company, like making sure it gets lucrative government contracts.

As you can see from the interview, I’m somewhat sympathetic to the Hawley-Gillibrand legislation, but I’m not confident it will make a big difference. So long as we have a big government, that creates too many opportunities for politicians to use their power for personal profit.

So what’s the answer?

Robert Stein wrote a few years ago in National Review that you can try to solve the problem on the back end.

…between 1998 and 2004, more than 40 percent of departing House members and 50 percent of departing senators became lobbyists. …here’s my suggestion: Once someone is elected to federal office — the House, Senate, or White House — they will get that office’s pay for life, guaranteed, plus inflation, no matter how soon they retire or how long they linger in office. However, all other income (except for withdrawals from previously accumulated retirement funds and Social Security) will be taxed at 100 percent. No speech fees, no lobbying, no consulting, no corporate boards, no book deals, no film deals, no university positions. No other jobs, either. Basically, no nothing. Unless, of course, you just want to work as a labor of love, in which case be my guest. …The proposal would certainly eliminate former federal officeholders’ incentive to earn other income, to be “productive” citizens. But what is it that former politicians produce? To my eye, it looks like what they’re best at is collecting rent on their previous positions by finding ways to tilt the market away from freedom and toward a system rigged in favor of their clients, or collecting bribes through loopholes for having done so while in office.

Stein acknowledges his proposal is not very libertarian, but he concludes by claiming that “confiscating the private-sector pay of former elected officials may be one way to expand the size of the private-sector for the rest of us.”

Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, proposed something similar a few year earlier.

…we see the “revolving door” in almost all industries and sectors of government, and it’s a corrupting influence… It’s easy to see why companies want to hire people like this. First of all, the architects of complicated regulatory schemes are often the only ones who understand them. But more significantly, when you’re the architect of a regulatory scheme, it’s handy for companies if it’s already in your mind that you might get a lucrative job from them later… I propose putting a 50% surtax — or maybe it should be 75%, I’m open to discussion — on the post-government earnings of government officials. So if you work at a cabinet level job and make $196,700 a year, and you leave for a job that pays a million a year, you’ll pay 50% of the difference — just over $400,000 — to the Treasury… I doubt we can put political corruption out of business, but this should make it at least a bit rarer.

If the goal is to reduce corruption and money in politics, Steven Greenhut of Reason shares my view that the best answer is to shrink the size and scope of government.

…campaign-finance reform is the “thing” that never goes away. The problem—at least with political spending—is government… Reality check: Those groups whose existence is most dependent on the government are going to spend oodles on lobbying that government. …Maybe we can all embrace a reform idea that would actually work: reducing the size and power of government. Sadly, that is the one idea that will frighten the kind of politicians and activists who support campaign-finance reform.

Amen.

Let’s conclude by looking at a strange approach that is being tried by Spain.

Here are some excerpts from an article in the New York Times by Nicholas Casey.

Carlos Alburquerque isn’t your typical rehab candidate. He’s a 75-year-old grandfather living in Córdoba, a city in southern Spain. …But his isn’t your typical rehab program: It’s an 11-month boot camp to reform corrupt Spanish officials and “reinsert” them into mainstream society. …Mr. Alburquerque…is serving a four-year prison sentence for stealing around 400,000 euros, nearly a half a million dollars… He will sit in a circle with other convicted officials for group therapy sessions… corruption has captured the public imagination here. Flip open a newspaper or turn on the radio: You will hear of schemes, scandals and skulduggery which almost always lead back to the public purse. …biggest challenge may be convincing Spain’s corrupt officials that there actually might be something wrong with them.

For what it’s worth, I hope it is successful but I don’t expect good results from Spain’s therapeutic approach.

The bottom line is that big government enables big corruption. That’s the problem that needs to be addressed.

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The Sleazy Combination of Big Business and Big Government

I gladly defend profits. I even defend profits for big companies.

But I usually include an all-important caveat that profits are only good if earned in a competitive marketplace.

At the risk of understatement, I get angry when big companies get money because of special favors from government. That’s because goodies from politicians and bureaucrats unavoidably come at the expense of consumers, taxpayers, and small businesses.

Sadly, there are many examples of big business and big government being in bed together.

Now we can add to the list. In a column for the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney shines a light on a new case study of big business using big government to thwart choice and innovation.

He starts by describing a development in the air travel industry that most people would see as a good thing.

SkyWest is a small air carrier that operates flights for some of the big airlines. They want to branch into a new field: operating regularly scheduled flights on small planes from private terminals. JSX Air is one company that already offers this product. Legally known as a “public charter” or “scheduled charter” operator, JSX flies small planes out of private terminals, but at fares far closer to commercial coach than to private air travel. …The main advantage is a more reasonable boarding process — particularly, no TSA security theater. …it also allows you to bring on your own snacks, drinks, and jars of local marmalade — all of which our Transportation Security Agency has deemed too dangerous to fly.

But not everyone approves.

The massive legacy airlines hate this, because it is a competitor who is more much pleasant to fly, operating at about the same costs. Thus the airlines and their pilot union are trying to get Uncle Sam to clamp down on public charters.

And what are their arguments?

The unions have hired revolving-door former congressman Peter DeFazio as their lobbyist, opposing this license. Their argument includes attacking the business model already used by JSX. …Their main argument is that SkyWest and JSX would be allowed to use veteran pilots who are over 65 — which is the mandatory retirement age for pilots of larger aircraft. Also, pilots who don’t yet have 1,500 flying time are allowed to captain smaller planes but not large planes, and so SkyWest could use these slightly greener pilots, too. The pilots and the airlines will make safety arguments against the expansion of public charters, but these fall short. Already rich people can fly without TSA screening out of private terminals, and already rich people can charter jets with 66-year-old pilots or captains with only 10,000 miles. So the big airlines’ argument amounts to: This is safe enough for rich people, but not for our potential customers.

Is it possible that it is marginally more dangerous to fly on a plane with an older pilot or a pilot with fewer than 1,500 hours of flying time?

I have no idea, but I think consumers, shareholders, Boards of Directors, and insurance companies should be the ones driving the decision, not bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists, or rival companies.

Tim identifies the real issue.

The anti-SkyWest and anti-JSX campaign is really about using the government to outlaw competition.

Amen. We need genuine free enterprise, not cronyism.

P.S. The controversy over “stakeholder capitalism” is partly about the unseemly alliance between big government and big business.

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More Government = More Corruption

My Democratic friends correctly argue that Republicans have a corruption problem and my GOP friends correctly argue that Democrats have a corruption problem.

I wish both sides would recognize that the real problem is big government.

As I wrote last year, “unethical people are naturally drawn to politics and unethical interest groups naturally seek to obtain unearned wealth (a process known as “rent seeking“).”

And I shared lots of examples.

• This is true for tax policy.
• And I mean very true for tax policy.
• This is true for trade policy.
• This is true for bailout policy.
• This is true for regulatory policy.
• This is true for spending policy.
• This is true for health policy.
• This is true for business policy.
• And it’s true for environment policy.

Today, let’s review some wise – and blunt – analysis from Steven Greenhut.

In an article for Reason, he connects the dots to show that the level of corruption is linked to the size and power of government.

Whenever some astounding corruption scandal explodes onto the front pages, the public is aghast and policymakers cobble together new reforms that promise to keep such outrages from occurring again. …Soon enough, however, we learn about new abuses—or some other scandal grabs the headlines. …corruption is inherent in a system where officials dole out public money and regulate almost everything we do. …The most corrupt nations are, of course, those where dictators, politburos, bureaucrats and security officials can do as they please—and where lowly citizens lack the right to free speech or due process. Our current government may be a far cry from the one the founders designed, but it attempts to limit government power, which is the main source of corruption. …corruption fundamentally is a problem of government power, as official actors use immense powers to help themselves and their allies. If we want less corruption, the solution is obvious: We need less government.

Amen. When government’s footprint is smaller, there’s less opportunity for graft.

The moral of the story is that Washington’s revolving door of legal corruption needs to be welded shut.

Thought that may be too much to hope for.

So maybe a more realistic goal is to simply not add more grease to the door so it spins even faster.

Perhaps we can learn from Estonia?

P.S. Today’s column focus on what small government is a good goal if we want less corruption, but don’t forget that there is also a very strong economic case for smaller government.

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More “Politician of the Year” Candidates

When I’m sharing examples of politician humor, I’m indirectly wading into a serious debate.

• Are bad people naturally drawn to the corruption of politics?
• Or, do good people get corrupted after getting into politics?

I don’t pretend to know the answer, though I suspect it’s a combination of both.

What I do know is that we always have lots of options when deciding who deserves to be named the “Politician of the Year.”

I already wrote last October about Eric Adams, the Mayor of New York City.

Today, we have two more options.

The New York Times has a fascinating look at how a freshman Republican apparently created a fictional life story during his successful campaign for Congress.

Here are some excerpts from the story, authored by Grace Ashford and Michael Gold.

By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats. But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters. Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.There was also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Mr. Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: The Internal Revenue Service could locate no record of a registered charity with that name.

Seems like Santos has a good head start on other newcomers to Congress. Does he deserve to be “Politician of the Year”?

Perhaps, but there’s another contestant to consider.

As reported by Thomas Catenacci of Fox News, the Secretary of Transportation is a big believer that global warming is a major problem.

But that does not stop him from using taxpayer-funded private jets to advance his political ambitions.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, an advocate of increased government action to curb carbon emissions, has taken at least 18 flights using taxpayer-funded private jets since taking office, Fox News Digital has learned. Buttigieg has traveled across the country — visiting Florida, Ohio and New Hampshire, among other states — and out of the country using a private jet fleet managed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), according to flight tracking data… APT executive director Caitlin Sutherland told Fox News Digital… “for someone so holier-than-thou on reducing emissions, Buttigieg sure doesn’t seem to mind the pollution caused by his literal jet-setting,” she continued. “This is hypocrisy at its finest, and these troubling expenses to taxpayers must come under immediate scrutiny.” …The states Buttigieg visited have largely been considered swing states in recent federal elections. 

I have an entire page dedicated to “Honest Leftists,” but maybe I also need a page for “Hypocritical Leftists.” Buttigieg definitely qualifies.

Though the real scandal isn’t his use of private jets rather than commercial flights. It’s the fact that he’s the head of a department that shouldn’t even exist.

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Earmarks Enable a Bigger Burden of Government

As we have seen in nations such as Greece and Argentina, voters sometimes cannot resist the temptation to support profligate politicians – a process that can lead to “goldfish government.”

In effect, voters choose fiscal suicide.

There’s even a quote, often mistakenly attributed to Ben Franklin, that this is the Achilles’ Heel of democratic governments (for what it’s worth, it appears that a Scottish historian, Alexander Fraser Tytler, was the real source).

Is the United States traveling down that path? Based on long-run fiscal projections, I’m not optimistic.

The good news is that there is still time to fix our problems.

The bad news is that the crowd in Washington is not interested in doing the right thing.

If you think I’m being unduly pessimistic, consider what House Republicans did earlier this week. As Kimberly Strassel explained in her Wall Street Journal column, they decided that the swamp is actually a hot tub.

Self-awareness isn’t one of the modern GOP’s strong suits, as House Republicans proved again this week. …Leader Kevin McCarthy in September unveiled to great fanfare the party’s Commitment to America, which vowed that Republicans would “curb wasteful government spending”… Then came Wednesday’s first test of whether this was all hot air… Rep. Tom McClintock moved to repeal the recent party rule allowing earmarks. The caucus routed his motion, voting it down 158-52. Commitment to America? More like Commitment to Spoils.

She added some historical context.

The GOP swore off earmarks in 2011, when it stood for something… But when a Democratic Congress in 2021 announced intentions to bring them back, GOP trough-feeders rushed to sign up. …And the addicts aren’t interested in rehab.

Her conclusion does not pull punches.

If Republicans can’t muster the backbone to get rid of earmarks that are an affront to spending discipline, good governance and federalism, voters won’t muster the enthusiasm to keep them in charge.

Back during the era of the Tea Party, Republicans did the right thing.

Nowadays, motivated by various forces such as big-government Trumpism and big-government national conservatism, Republicans do the wrong thing.

And if you wonder whether earmarks are wrong, here are some excerpts from a column in National Review by Romina Boccia.

Earmarking contributes to excessive spending and is a distraction from more fundamental governing responsibilities, such as reining in deficit spending… Supporters of earmarks insist that they are central to Congress’s exercising its constitutional power of the purse. …To the degree that Congress leaves too much discretion to the executive to determine federal funding allocations, it should address that issue directly… Looking at the details of where the money flows, it becomes clear that earmarks mostly authorize pork-barrel spending. …Such a misdirected focus inevitably invites fraud, waste, and abuse. …The 117^th Congress included 4,963 earmarks worth a total of $9.1 billion in fiscal-year (FY) 2022 appropriations bills. From feral-swine management to aquarium subsidies to museum and theater funding to local bike paths, FY2022 earmark spending spanned the gamut of parochial interests. 

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyhow), earmarks are directly linked to corruptions.

Politicians swap earmarks for campaign cash (and sometimes they even cut out the middleman!).

Defenders of this sleazy process sometimes claim we should not worry because earmarks represent just a small slice of a bloated federal budget.

But what they don’t realize – or what they don’t want the rest of us to understand – is that earmarks are a “gateway drug to big government addiction.”

So ask yourself a question: Do you think politicians who get lured into this oleaginous game will have any interest in controlling the overall burden of government spending?

P.S. Just in case everything I just wrote did not convince you that earmarks are a problem, then maybe this headline from September will be more compelling.

Such a depressing headline.

Such a depressing scam.

Such a corrupt system.

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Brett Favre, Redistribution, Welfare Reform, and Government-Enabled Corruption

I have repeatedly opined that big government enables corruption.

And I have also asserted over and over again that big government is a racket for the benefit of insiders.

So you can understand why I get upset when the rich and powerful use the coercive power of government to line their pockets at the expense of ordinary taxpayers.

Now I have a new reason to be angry.

Reporting for the New York Times, Neil MacFarquhar describes a scandal involving Mississippi bigwigs feeding at the public trough.

John Davis, who served as executive director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services under former Gov. Phil Bryant, pleaded guilty to both federal and state charges of embezzling federal welfare funds. Millions of dollars were transferred to friends and relatives, court documents say. According to a lawsuit filed by the state in May, around $5 million was diverted to Ted DiBiase, a flamboyant retired wrestler once known as “The Million Dollar Man,” and two of his sons… Much of the money went to fictitious services, bogus jobs, first-class travel arrangements and even one son’s stay at a luxury rehab center in Malibu, Calif., that cost $160,000, the suit claims. Similarly, the state claims that Marcus Dupree, a former high school football phenom and professional running back, who was paid to act as a celebrity endorser and motivational speaker, did not perform any contractual services toward the $371,000 he received to purchase and live in a sprawling residence with a swimming pool and adjacent horse pastures in a gated community. Mr. Favre, who earned more than $140 million in his Hall of Fame career, was paid $1.1 million for speeches he never gave, the suit said. He also orchestrated more than $2 million in government funds being channeled to a biotechnology start-up in which he had invested, according to the suit. …The case follows a state audit released in May 2020 suggesting that as much as $94 million of TANF funds might have gone astray.

Sounds like a typical story about big government and corruption, right?

That’s certainly true, but some of our friends on the left argue that it is also evidence that Bill Clinton’s welfare reform backfired.

Experts said the fraud was rooted in changes enacted in such programs in 1996, when cash benefits paid to poor families were replaced by block grants issued to states.

Since I have defended Clinton’s welfare reform (along with some of his other good policies), the above excerpt caught my attention.

So I looked for more information.

In a piece for the American Enterprise Institute, Angela Rachidi explains the underlying issues.

A scandal involving former NFL quarterback Brett Favre and the federal welfare program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) exploded…following new revelations that Mississippi officials, including the former governor, misdirected federal TANF money to enrich themselves, their celebrity friends, and other well-connected individuals. …the scandal draws attention to the TANF program. Critics have partly blamed the welfare reform law from 1996, which created TANF, for allowing such fraud. …Instead of an entitlement where government officials distribute money to all eligible people, TANF is a block grant provided… As awful as this scandal is, the fraud and abuse on display in Mississippi is not unique to TANF and not caused by its block grant structure. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that from 2015–2017 the annual average amount of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits (or food stamps) “trafficked,” meaning retailers taking a fraudulent profit, was $1.2 billion. The GAO also found that improper payments in Medicaid, including payments for services not provided, totaled $36.7 billion in 2017. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice charged a nonprofit organization in Minnesota with a $250 million scheme that took federal pandemic-relief money earmarked for a child nutrition program and instead pocketed the funds.

In other words, corruption is an inherent part of government programs, whether the money is distributed as block grants or sent directly to recipients.

But not all government spending is created equal. Some ways of spending money do more damage than other ways of spending money.

Ms. Rachidi points out that welfare reform produced good results.  I don’t know if it saved money for taxpayers, but it led to progress as measured by variables such as labor force participation and child poverty.

None of this excuses what happened in Mississippi, but the context is important. Welfare reform, which created TANF, transformed a broken entitlement program—Aid to Families with Dependent Children—into a more effective system that gives states flexibility to address the underlying causes of poverty, including limited employment and unmarried parenthood. These reforms have significantly reduced dependence on cash welfare and increased employment among single mothers, which helped dramatically lower child poverty over the past two decades.

The obvious takeaway, as I pointed out back in 2015, is that we should we should be expanding on Bill Clinton’s success by replacing other federal entitlements with block grants.

The federal government maintains a Byzantine maze of redistribution programs, so there are lots of opportunities for progress. Medicaid is an obvious example, along with food stamps. Especially since both programs are riddled with fraud.

P.S. Unsurprisingly, Joe Biden wants to move in the wrong direction.

P.P.S. In my libertarian fantasy world, the federal government would have neither entitlements nor block grants. That also happens to the world envisioned by America’s Founders (and the reality Americans enjoyed up until the 1930s).

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Politician of the Year

Because of their despicable tendency to buy votes with our money, I view politicians with considerable disdain. But when a politician goes above and beyond the call of duty by doing something laughably awful, I give them special recognition.

Here are some past winners of my “Politician of the Year” award.

• Gavin Newsom, Eric Garcetti, and Stacey Abrams
• Elizabeth Warren
• Richard Blumenthal
• Nancy Pelosi and Mayor Jim Kenney
• D.C. Councilman Jack Evans
• Malaysia’s Prime Minister
• France’s President
• President of the Philippines

Today’s column adds someone to this rogue’s gallery. Congratulations to the Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams.

In a story for the New York Post, Susan Edelman reveals a cozy and corrupt arrangement between the Mayor and one of his top appointees.

Schools Chancellor David Banks quietly promoted Mayor Adams’ girlfriend to a top job at the Department of Education, just months after Adams hired Banks’ girlfriend as a deputy mayor, The Post has learned. Banks named Tracey Collins — Adams’ longtime partner and NYC’s unofficial First Lady — the DOE’s “senior advisor to the deputy chancellor of school leadership,” Desmond Blackburn. She started the new job in July, and got a giant, 23% raise to $221,597 a year, records show. Hizzoner named Banks’ girlfriend, Sheena Wright, and four other women deputy mayors last Dec. 21. Deputy mayors made $251,982 in FY 21. …David Bloomfield, a Brooklyn College and CUNY Grad Center education professor, said, “It’s not only a bad look, smacking of favoritism and cronyism. It displays a degree of insularity and groupthink that’s adverse to organizational effectiveness.”

Needless to say, everyone involved claims that the appointments were based on merit.

DOE spokesman Nathaniel Styer said Collins, “a veteran educator with 30 years of experience,” replaced another senior advisor, Mariano Guzman, who retired. Styer said Collins “went through a rigorous process that did not include City Hall’s oversight. …City Hall spokesman Fabien Levy said, “Mayor Adams was not involved in the hiring for this position and has a strict firewall when it comes to any matters involving her employment.”

Needless to say, these claims don’t pass the laugh test. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature understands that Mayor Adams and Chancellor Banks are helping to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers.

But I want to make a different point.

If you paid close attention to the above excerpts, you noticed that the girlfriend of Mayor Adams is making more than $221K to serve as “senior advisor to the deputy chancellor of school leadership.”

I realize this is just a stab in the dark, but that job should not even exist, just like the job of “deputy chancellor of school leadership” should not exist (and the same is true if there’s a “chancellor of school leadership”).

In other words, all of these slots are sad examples of the self-serving bureaucuratization of government schools.

And let’s not forget about the girlfriend of Chancellor Banks, who is getting nearly $252K to be one of a plethora of deputy mayors.

Once again, I’m going to take a wild guess and assert that none of the deputy mayors serve any necessary function. These slots almost surely are patronage appointments that allow insiders to get fatter and richer at the expense of taxpayers.

That’s the real scandal, financed by you and me.

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Government Inefficiency, Captured in a Headline

Way back in 2009, in the early days of writing this column, I shared an image that aptly summarizes the bad things that happen when politicians interfere with economic liberty.

The simple message is that more government is almost always the wrong answer.

• Wrong on taxes
• Wrong on money
• Wrong on trade
• Wrong on red tape
• Wrong on intervention
• Wrong on health

Today, we’re going to look at an example of how government spending is the wrong answer.

Here are some excerpts from a story in the Washington Post, but the headline tells you everything you need to know.

The offer to military veterans left unemployed by the coronavirus pandemic was tantalizing: A year of online courses courtesy of the federal government. Graduates would be set up for good jobs in high-demand fields… Schedules were disorganized and courses did not follow a set syllabus. School-provided laptops couldn’t run critical software. And during long stretches of scheduled class time, students were left without instruction… The disarray…is the most painful example of broader problems with the $386 million Veteran Rapid Retraining Assistance Program, or VRRAP. …nearly 90 schools have had their approvals yanked, according to VA officials, including several that were actively serving about 100 veterans. …only about 6,800 veterans had enrolled in the program, far fewer than the 17,250 Congress created it to serve, the agency said; just 397 had landed new jobs.

Some of you may be tempted to conclude that the program was a success since it did result in 397 jobs.

Others will conclude it was a failure since the budget was $386 million, implying each job cost taxpayers nearly $1 million.

I sympathize with the second conclusion, of course, but here are two questions that need to be answered.

1. How many of those 6,800 veterans would have landed new jobs if they didn’t participate in the program?
2. How much economic activity would have been generated if the $386 million was left in the private sector?

Suffice to say, the answers to those questions would show more jobs and more prosperity if the program was never created.

Incidentally, the story, authored by Lisa Rein and Yeganeh Torbati, includes this depressing bit of information.

The troubles with VRRAP were achingly predictable: A similar program rolled out in 2012 — the Veterans Retraining Assistance Program, or VRAP — also failed to attract students and was widely regarded as a flop.

In other words, it was already known that this specific type of program would be a flop.

Heck, there are decades of evidence that all types of government job-training programs are a failure.

So why did Congress approve this scheme?

Unfortunately, the story only tells us that this program was part of Biden’s failed $1.9 trillion stimulus boondoggle, but it does not tell us which politicians on Capitol Hill pushed the plan.

I’m sure we would find those politicians got a lot of campaign contributions from that the interest groups that financially benefited the boondoggle.

All part of Washington’s corrupt version of recycling.

P.S. Since today’s column highlighted how a headline can have a powerful message, here are some previous headlines that caught my attention.

• Least surprising headline
• Disappointingly inaccurate headline
• Insufficiently accurate headline
• Grossly dishonest headline
• Most predictable headline
• Multiple headlines that say the same thing

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Big Government, Big Business, and the Clowns at the Chamber of Commerce

Supporting free enterprise does not mean supporting big companies.

Why? Because as John Stossel and Tim Carney discuss, big businesses are more than willing to get into bed with big government and oppose capitalism.

The goal should be genuine consumer-driven, market-based competition. And that means that politicians should not put their thumbs on the scale in favor of specific companies or industries.

Unfortunately, that certainly has happened in countless cases.

At varying times, both Republicans and Democrats have provided special favors to Wall Street, General Motors, airlines, health insurance companies, Boeing, Big Pharma, and banks.

These odious examples help to explain why companies give money and support to politicians from both parties.

But sometimes that approach backfires. Let’s consider how the Chamber of Commerce can be blamed for the looming enactment of Biden’s horribly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.

The Wall Street Journal opined on this issue today.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce…bet in 2020 that supporting “centrist” House Democrats would protect against anti-business policies has been a bust. …How does that calculation look now…? Every one of the 15 voted for the $1.9 trillion spending bill in March 2020, despite Chamber opposition to sweeping jobless benefits that stoked labor shortages and stimulus checks that fed inflation. They also voted for the PRO Act, a radical pro-union rewrite of labor law. …Now comes the big moment of truth as the Schumer-Manchin tax and spend bill heads to the House… The chance of Democratic defections is slim. Despite aggressive Chamber lobbying, all 15 rolled over for the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill last year.

Amazingly, the Chamber bent over backwards to endorse these politicians, notwithstanding their consistent track record of support for bigger government.

Nearly all had publicly expressed support for scrapping the 2017 corporate tax reform, and for new climate, banking and healthcare regulations. The only reason most qualified for endorsements is because the Chamber altered its voting scorecard to allow extra points for “leadership” and “bipartisanship.” …It’s not too much to say that the Chamber was crucial in midwifing Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 222-211 seat majority.

The Washington Post wrote last year about the Chamber’s controversial decision to side with Democrats.

Here are some excerpts from the story by Tory Newmyer and Aaron Gregg.

 …the Chamber has been the object of sharp attacks by leading conservatives. …The decision to endorse so many freshman Democrats, rather than give them time for their voting records to take shape, was a dramatic break from past procedure. …the conservative backlash has led to alarm even among some of the organization’s closest allies. A veteran U.S. Chamber board member, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal, said: “It is a legitimate question how well-thought out this strategy is. People are concerned, and they’re discussing where else they can send revenues to support free enterprise.” …Seeing Chamber-endorsed Democrats support pro-union legislation “is like the national right to life organization saying they now support some abortions,” said a former U.S. Chamber executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person feared reprisal.

If you want examples of conservative hostility, here’s a tweet from Hugh Hewitt.

The ⁦@USChamber⁩ opposes President Biden’s massive tax hikes. Too bad none of the Democrats they supported over GOP candidates last year care. The whole management team should quit or be fired. They got played. Badly. https://t.co/Cty77pXgjV

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) April 1, 2021

And here’s a tweet from Oren Cass.

One of the major recent developments in American politics is the nasty divorce underway between the Republican Party and conservatives on one side and the Chamber of Commerce and big business on the other. What's causing the breakup? 🧵

— Oren Cass (@oren_cass) November 15, 2021

Interestingly, this is not the first time the Chamber of Commerce has sided with the left.

In a column for National Review earlier this year, Nate Hochman recounts what happened during the Hillarycare fight back in 1993.

In March 1993, the Chamber of Commerce surprised many of its allies by coming out in favor of Clinton’s plan for universal coverage with an employer mandate, reversing its earlier opposition to both proposals. …The Chamber’s attempt to curry favor with the new administration provoked a furious conservative backlash. Congressional Republicans — led by John Boehner of Ohio, then the head of the 75-member House Conservative Opportunity Society — organized a mass boycott of the Chamber, urging local and state chapters to disaffiliate in protest. The campaign was devastatingly effective: By the time the dust had settled, the Chamber had lost one-fifth of its membership.

As far as I’m concerned, any business owners who favor free enterprise should not support the Chamber of Commerce. It would be heartwarming to see the organization lose members.

But this brings me back to what I wrote at the start of today’s column. Many business owners don’t support capitalism. They prefer cronyism.

That’s particularly true for large companies, which often see big government as a way of thwarting competition from small companies (such as Amazon’s support for a higher minimum wage).

P.S. The Chamber of Commerce is not the only business association governed by fools. Yes, I’m referring to the Business Roundtable.

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Big Government, Biden, and Big Corruption: Part II

Yesterday’s column explained that lobbyists are big winners when the size and scope of government increases.

• For instance, a bigger budget means special interests hire lobbyists to obtain ever-larger slices of pork.
• Moreover, added red tape means lobbyists get more clients seeking to manipulate the regulatory process.

And Biden’s grossly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act will make both of those problems worse, enabling more corruption.

But there’s a third problem to consider. Biden’s agenda also calls for a massive expansion of special tax privileges.

From a libertarian perspective, I like when the law allows people to keep more of their money.

As an economist, however, I don’t like when people are lured into make inefficient choices simply because of a convoluted tax system.

And, as a decent human being, I despise a process that enriches lobbyists, politicians, and other insiders. This corrupt process is succinctly captured in this flowchart put together by my former colleague Chris Edwards.

Chris’ main point is that we should be reforming and simplifying the tax code rather than dramatically expanding the budget of a corrupt Internal Revenue Service.

You can’t argue with that goal (assuming you want what’s best for the nation). Even folks on the left should agree.

The bottom line is that a complicated and convoluted tax code is great for lobbyists and a boon for corruption.

P.S. If you want to know the world’s most surprising loophole, click here.

P.P.S. Assuming loopholes are properly defined, the ideal policy is to eliminate them in tandem with enactment of lower tax rates.

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Big Government, Biden, and Big Corruption: Part I

Since I went to the archives for a video yesterday, let’s do the same thing today. Here’s my 2009 video about the close link between the size of government and the level of corruption.

I’m recycling this video because President Biden and his allies in Congress are poised to enact a revised version of the “Build Back Better” plan to expand the burden of government.

The legislation has all sorts of awful provisions, such as shoveling more money at a corrupt IRS, hurting jobs with higher taxes on “book income,” price controls on prescription drugs, and green-energy pork.

But today’s column will focus on process rather than policy.

To be more specific, I want to emphasize the video’s message about bigger government leading to more corruption.

And I’m going to cite an unexpected source – a left-leaning news outlet – to make my point.

In an article for the Washington Post, Yeganeh Torbati and Jeff Stein share various examples of how Biden’s misnamed Inflation Reduction Act is fattening bank accounts of lobbyists.

As Democrats hurry to finalize $739 billion climate, health-care and tax legislation…, business lobbyists and issue advocates are…using television and newspaper ads and personal outreach to try to sway Democrats to their side before the Senate votes. Much of the fiercest lobbying has focused on the bill’s health-care provisions. …The bill also provides hundreds of billions…to fight climate change… The Zero Emission Transportation Association…is asking senators to consider extending the deadlines by a year or more… Small businesses successfully stripped higher taxes on pass-through entities, while bigger firms succeeded in keeping the corporate rate at 21 percent.

The story focuses on the battle over the legislation, so allow me to add two points.

• First, fighting over what is in the package is just the tip of the iceberg. Assuming the bill becomes law, there will then be countless opportunities for lobbyists to get rich by manipulating the regulations that will define how the law is implemented, as well as yearly opportunities for lobbyists to cash in by influencing how money is spent.
• Second, not all lobbyists are bad. If a group of people hire lobbyists to get money or favors from the government, that is obviously immoral. But if a group of people hire lobbyists in hopes of protecting themselves (i.e., they don’t want to be taxed or burdened with more red tape), that is completely legitimate.

I’ll close by reiterating a point in the video.

Whether lobbyists are on the right side or wrong side, the ideal scenario is to shrink government. For instance, a simple and fair flat tax would radically reduce the incentive for influence-peddling.

Getting rid of various needless departments (Education, Transportation, Agriculture, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, etc) also would diminish opportunities for graft and sleaze.

P.S. If you want some lobbyist-themed humor, click here and here.

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Plenty of Fat and Waste to Cut at the United Nations, Part II

Compared to international bureaucracies such as the IMF and OECD, the United Nations has very little power to impose bad policy.

But that does not mean it should be immune from criticism. There’s an anti-market ideology at the UN and I have specifically condemned the bureaucrats for sloppy and misguided work on taxes (here and here), poverty (here and here), and guns (here and here).

Needless to say, there’s also a lot of waste and corruption at the UN.

I wrote about that topic back in 2017, so let’s take a follow-up look at how our tax money is being spent.

Let’s start with a just-released report in the New York Times. Written by David Fahrenthold and Farnaz Fassihi, it is a depressing snapshot of how money is squandered by insiders at the bureaucracy.

At the United Nations, two officials had a problem. The little-known agency they ran found itself with an extra $61 million, and they didn’t know what to do with it. Then they met a man at a party. Now, they have $25 million less. …experienced diplomats entrusted tens of millions of dollars…to a British businessman after meeting him at the party. They also gave his daughter $3 million to produce a pop song, a video game and a website promoting awareness of environmental threats… Things did not go well. …U.N. auditors said the man’s businesses defaulted on more than $22 million in loans — all money meant to aid the developing world…diplomats and former U.N. officials say the tale also demonstrates what critics say is a serious problem with the U.N.: a culture of impunity among some top leaders, who wield huge budgets with little outside oversight. …The top official at the Office for Project Services, Grete Faremo of Norway, remains in her post.

Some of the previous scandals at the UN have involved more than money.

Kathryn Snowdon’s 2018 report in the Huffington Post is very disturbing.

Charity workers from 15 international aid organisations have been implicated in a sex-for-food scandal at refugee camps in west Africa, according to a new leaked report… The 84-page document…identified more than 40 aid organisations “whose workers are alleged to be in sexually exploitative relationships with refugee children”. …Researchers spoke to 1,500 people, and said claims against 67 people were passed to senior UNHCR officials, but…none were prosecuted.

Some readers may wonder if the UN’s failures are the result of inadequate funding.

Hardly. As explained in National Review by Brett Schaefer, the bureaucracy is adept at playing games to ensure it always has plenty of cash.

Between 1960 and 2016, there have only been two times when an initially approved U.N. regular budget was lower than the preceding budget. …the U.N. General Assembly approved a $285 million (5 percent) cut in the two-year regular UN budget for 2018-2019, U.N. watchers took notice, but cautioned that…the U.N. adjusts its two-year budget at the mid-point to account for new expenditures and expenses. …Not only did the “cut” announced by the U.S. Mission to the United Nations…disappear, but the regular budget is actually $130 million higher than the final budget for 2016-2017. …this outcome is typical. …In 2012, the Obama administration bragged that the agreed-upon budget was “the first U.N. regular budget since 1998 – and only the second in the last 50 years – that has gone down in comparison to the previous budget’s actual expense.” The 2012 budget, however, also ended up being significantly higher than the initial budget after mid-biennium additions.

Here’s a chart from the article showing overall spending on the left axis, along with the additional spending that sneaks in during the mid-point of the budget cycle.

Brett explains there is a tiny bit of good news.

…the U.N. regular budget will shift to an annual budget starting in 2020. …This change will help, but will not cure the fundamental problem.

I confess, by the way, that I have no idea if that change actually happened.

But I feel confident in predicting that the UN’s budget has gone up rather than down.

Last but not least, even Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations concedes the United Nations has a dubious track record. Here are some passages from his 2020 article published by Project Syndicate.

The United Nations has fallen far short of its goals to “maintain international peace and security,” “develop friendly relations among nations’’ and “achieve international cooperation in solving international problems.” …The UN Security Council, the most important component of the UN system, has made itself largely irrelevant. …The organization’s own shortcomings haven’t helped: a spoils system that puts too many people in important positions for reasons other than competence, lack of accountability, and hypocrisy (such as when countries that ignore human rights sit on a UN body meant to uphold them).

I’ll close with the observation that I’ve met plenty of nice and sincere people when participating in programs at the United Nations.

But the understanding of economic policy at the UN is utterly abysmal. Until and unless that statist mindset is eliminated, giving more money to the bureaucracy would be rewarding the pursuit of bad policy.

P.S. Maybe international bureaucrats would have a better understanding of economic policy if they weren’t exempt from the income tax.

P.P.S. The United Nations almost surely wastes the talents of some very capable people.

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Harboring Criminals at the IRS

At the risk of understatement, I am not a fan of the Internal Revenue Service. But, as shown in this closing segment from a recent interview, I get especially outraged when IRS bureaucrats engage in criminal behavior and nobody cares.

This should outrage everyone that we have officials at a powerful agency illegally leaking confidential information.

My daughter’s dogs even registered their disapproval during the interview (I’m dog sitting for a few days).

We don’t know how many IRS bureaucrats were involved, and we also don’t know whether the motive was money, ideology, or partisanship.

Maybe all three.

This is very reminiscent of what happened about a dozen years ago when other IRS bureaucrats stifled Tea Party groups in order to boost President Obama’s reelection prospects.

Despicable then, and despicable now.

A few months ago, the Wall Street Journal editorialized about this latest scandal.

Democrats want to give $80 billion to the Internal Revenue Service to audit millions of Americans each year. Yet…after the progressive website ProPublica first published the secret tax information of rich Americans, the tax agency still can’t explain what happened. …IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig…promised when the leak occurred…to find out what happened, but in September he told Senators, “We do not yet have any information concerning the source.” Since then it’s been crickets. …The leak is a crime, but tracing it isn’t merely a matter of criminal enforcement. The breach highlights the general failure of the IRS to protect taxpayer data.  …As troubling is the limp response by the IRS. A separate GAO report this May found that the tax agency failed even to enforce its own authentication protocols, which would help to detect breaches when they occur. …The new money for the IRS is harmful on its own terms, but it’s all the worse when it is provided without strings to an agency that has no idea who is stealing private tax data.

Amen.

Hopefully Republicans won’t be stupid (again) and go along with big budget increases for the corrupt IRS bureaucracy.

By the way, ProPublica this morning published a new story based on their stolen data.

Written by Paul Kiel, it claims rich people pay a very low tax rate.

If your company’s stock shoots up and you grow $1 billion richer, that increase in wealth is real. …From 2014 to 2018, the 25 wealthiest Americans grew about $400 billion richer, according to Forbes. To an economist, this was income, but under tax law, it was mere vapor, irrelevant. And so this group, including the likes of Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett, paid federal income taxes of about 3.4% on the $400 billion, ProPublica reported. We called this the group’s “True Tax Rate.”

There are two points worth making after reading this nonsense.

1. The left generally makes misleading claims about the tax rate on rich people by ignoring the fact that any dividends and capital gains they receive also are subject to the corporate income tax. The bottom line is that Warren Buffet does not pay a lower tax rate than his secretary.
2. The new version of this claim, as illustrated by the ProPublica excerpt, is that the rich have a low tax rate because they aren’t hit with a tax when their assets increase in value. But that’s because an increase in wealth is not an increase in income, just as a decrease in wealth isn’t a loss of income.

If ProPublica wants to add a wealth tax on top of the current income tax, they should be honest and openly make that argument.

Instead, they opted to concoct and disseminate a make-believe tax rate.

The takeaway is that the IRS budget should not be increased, period. And it definitely should not be increased because that would reward criminal bureaucrats.

P.S. Don’t forget that the IRS has embraced a ludicrous claim about a $1 trillion tax gap.

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Big Government and Big Corruption

When the Center for Freedom and Prosperity released this video back in 2009, we wanted people to understand the link between big government and big corruption.

Simply stated, unethical people are naturally drawn to politics and unethical interest groups naturally seek to obtain unearned wealth (a process known as “rent seeking“).

• This is true for tax policy.
• And I mean very true for tax policy.
• This is true for trade policy.
• This is true for bailout policy.
• This is true for regulatory policy.
• This is true for spending policy.
• This is true for health policy.
• This is true for business policy.
• And it’s true for environment policy.

The obvious takeaway is that making government bigger is going to mean that these unsavory groups will have even greater ability to engage in corruption.

None of this is a surprise to libertarian-oriented people. And it’s definitely not a surprise to the Washington insiders who benefit from this racket.

But it’s always a surprise when left-leaning journalistic outfits accidentally stumble on the truth. As evinced by excerpts from this story from Jonathan O’Connell and Anu Narayanswamy in the Washington Post.

President Biden’s domestic…drew unprecedented attention from Washington lobbyists and special interest groups last year. The lobbying industry had a record year in 2021, taking in $3.7 billion in revenue as companies, associations and other organizations pressed Congress and the Biden administration over trillions of dollars in new pandemic spending and rules… The jump in 2021, when lobbying spending was about 6 percent higher than 2020, came as the government’s pandemic interventions and record expenditure took center stage, including an additional $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief and a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package.

Needless to say, the explosion of lobbying is a predictable response to politicians having an additional $3 trillion-plus of other people’s money to distribute to their political supporters.

Not to mention the massive expansion of regulation and red tape, some general and some because of the pandemic.

What worries me is that this expansion will be permanent.

Thousands of companies and organizations appeared to hire lobbyists for the first time during the pandemic, as more than 3,700 companies and other groups that spent no money lobbying the government in 2019 paid lobbyists last year. ..,Among the new entrants are dozens of health-care, technology, tourism and recreation companies, including individual museums, theaters and entertainment firms. …Some of those groups may have hired lobbyists as a temporary measure initially but decided to increase their spending as the pandemic continued, said Dan Auble, an OpenSecrets senior researcher. …“I think it’s likely there are some people who came to Washington a couple of years ago and have stuck around, or industries that realized the benefits they could accrue by having an active presence in Washington.”

I’m somewhat nauseated by “the benefits they could accrue by having an active presence in Washington.”

That phrase is like thieves discussing the benefits they could accrue by having an active presence near ATMs.

But notice that I didn’t write that I was totally nauseated. That’s because lobbying is not inherently unethical. There are groups that feel compelled to hire lobbyists merely because they want to protect themselves from being hurt by high tax rates, pointless red tape, and misguided trade rules.

They simply want to be left alone.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a society where good people didn’t have to worry about predatory politicians (and a world where bad people didn’t have the ability to steal from others by using government?

P.S. Here’s a good video about how Washington gets fat and happy from corruption. And here’s an amusing video about “Kronies.”

P.P.S. I’ve been accused of corruption and I wasn’t upset. That’s because I realize I’m different than most everyone else in Washington.

P.P.P.S. One of the messages in the above video is that you can’t control corruption merely by passing more laws dealing with issues such as campaign finance.

P.P.P.P.S. At the risk of stating the obvious, corruption in Washington is a bipartisan problem.

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What Is “Rent Seeking”?

I’ve written columns about wonky economic concepts such as “deadweight loss” and “public goods.” Today’s topic is “rent seeking,” which is part of “public choice” and is described by Professor Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University.

To elaborate, here’s a video from Professor Michael Munger from Duke University.

The basic message of both videos is that “rent seeking” occurs when interest groups manipulate the political system to obtain undeserved riches.

And there are all sorts of examples of policies that exist solely because interest groups get politicians to tilt the playing field – including trade barriers, farm subsidies, occupational licensing, and bureaucrat salaries.

As pointed out in the videos, these rent-seeking policies reduce prosperity.

But what’s the origin of the term? In the modern era, it’s often associated with Gordon Tullock, one of the founders of public choice school of economic analysis.

But the term actually was coined a couple of hundred years ago by David Ricardo, as explained by Professor David Henderson of the Naval Postgraduate School.

Rent seeking” is one of the most important insights in the last fifty years of economics and, unfortunately, one of the most inappropriately labeled. …People are said to seek rents when they try to obtain benefits for themselves through the political arena. …But why do economists use the term “rent”? Unfortunately, there is no good reason. David Ricardo introduced the term “rent” in economics. It means the payment to a factor of production in excess of what is required to keep that factor in its present use. …What is wrong with rent seeking? Absolutely nothing. I would be rent seeking if I asked for a raise. My employer would then be free to decide if my services are worth it. Even though I am seeking rents by asking for a raise, this is not what economists mean by “rent seeking.” They use the term to describe people’s lobbying of government to give them special privileges. A much better term is “privilege seeking.”

To elaborate, there’s nothing wrong with rent seeking as defined by Ricardo.

But rent seeking is now associated with “privilege seeking,” which obviously is very unsavory.

Ben Casselman of FiveThirtyEight also wrote on rent seeking.

Imagine you run a barbershop and you learn that someone is planning to open a rival business down the street. What do you do? One option, of course, would be to compete the old-fashioned way by offering lower prices or better service. But the old-fashioned way is hard! Wouldn’t it be nice if you could keep your competitor from setting up shop in the first place? There’s evidence that a growing number of businesses in the U.S. are trying to do exactly that. And while that may be good for them, it’s bad for entrepreneurs, workers and the economy as a whole. …Economists call this kind of behavior “rent-seeking,” which is another way of saying “gaming the system to make more money than you’ve earned.” …There is evidence that rent-seeking, in various forms, is becoming more common in the U.S. economy. In a recent paper, economist Dean Baker argued that rent-seeking has driven much of the recent increase in income inequality. And while Baker is a liberal, conservatives are also concerned about rent-seeking, such as land-use restrictions that make it hard to build housing in high-priced coastal cities.

The bottom line is that politicians spend much of their time buying their way to reelection by providing undeserved goodies to various interest groups. You can call it rent seeking. You can call it corruption. Or you can call it politics.

But one obvious takeaway is that shrinking the size and scope of government is the only effective way of reducing rent seeking.

P.S. If you’re in the mood for more economic wonkiness, here are several videos that explain “Austrian economics” and two videos that explain the price system.

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Foreign Aid, Corruption, and Big Government

Given my libertarian sensibilities, I would probably object to foreign aid programs even if they worked.

But I don’t have to deal with that potential quandary because we have ample evidence that you don’t get prosperity by giving money to politicians in poor countries.

Indeed, such policies arguably exacerbate poverty by enabling bad policies such as a bigger burden of government spending.

And when government gets bigger, that creates more opportunities for corruption (the same problem exists in developed nations).

Yet the crowd in Washington seem willfully blind to these problems.

For instance, in a column for today’s Washington Post, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and USAID Administrator Samantha Powers opine on the topic of global corruption and never even acknowledge that more government enables more corruption.

Around the world, in countries as varied as Russia, Venezuela and China, the wealthy and the well-connected launder their assets through complex networks of shell companies or transactions involving art, real estate and, occasionally, cryptocurrencies. …what links all corrupt acts is that they take resources from citizens, undermine public trust and — ultimately — threaten the progress of those who fight for democracy. …Autocrats use public wealth to maintain their grip on power, while in democracies, corruption rots free societies from within. …Moving forward, the U.S. government will require many U.S. and foreign companies to report their true owners to the Treasury and to update us when they change hands. We’re also working toward new reporting requirements for real estate transactions and will be enlisting other nations to address these issues. …the United States will deepen and expand support for those fighting kleptocrats and bad actors through a new anti-corruption response fund. …we’ve seen politicians win landslide victories by running on anti-corruption platforms. We want to support their reforms.

Rather than deal with the underlying problem of excessive government, Yellen and Powers focus on the symptom of politicians with stolen loot.

They specifically want readers to think politicians in the developing world won’t steal as much if there’s more red tape that makes it hard for them to invest their loot in the United States.

But since existing laws and regulations against money laundering have been an expensive failure, their proposals seem like a triumph of hope over experience.

If they really wanted to help poor people in the developing world, they would junk the current approach and instead use foreign aid as a reward for good policy (as measured by getting higher scores in the Economic Freedom of the World index).

But they are pursuing the opposite approach.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal is not impressed by how USAID has been leveraging foreign aid to promote bigger government.

Here are some excerpts from her column on how the bureaucracy is using its supposed anticorruption project as a tool to help the left take power in Guatemala.

Some Americans think of foreign aid as nothing more than money down the drain. If only. U.S. government spending in Latin America is being used by an activist bureaucracy to promote its leftist agenda. If it succeeds, U.S. taxpayers will end up subsidizing instability and economic misery. A U.S. Agency for International Development “anticorruption” forum last week is the latest example. Featured participants included former Guatemalan Attorney General Thelma Aldana and former Guatemalan prosecutor Juan Francisco Sandoval. Both are living in the U.S. and have warrants for their arrests for alleged corruption pending at home. …Rep. Norma Torres (D., Calif.), a champion of the Guatemalan left, was also a panelist at the USAID event, which brings us to the forum’s common denominator: a political agenda…to clear a path for Guatemala’s Jacobins. …Your tax dollars at work.

P.S. During the era of the “Washington Consensus,” there were people in the foreign aid establishment who understood that free markets and limited government were the only effective way of helping poor nations. Today, by contrast, international organizations openly push for bigger government.

This video show why groups such as the IMF and OECD are wildly wrong.

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New Leak of Taxpayer Info Is (More) Evidence of IRS Corruption

I sometimes try to go easy on the IRS. After all, our wretched tax system is largely the fault of politicians, who have spent the past 108 years creating a punitive and corrupt set of tax laws.

But there is still plenty of IRS behavior to criticize. Most notably, the tax agency allowed itself to be weaponized by the Obama White House, using its power to persecute and harass organizations associated with the “Tea Party.”

That grotesque abuse of power largely was designed to weaken opposition to Obama’s statist agenda and make it easier for him to win re-election.

Now there’s a new IRS scandal. In hopes of advancing President Biden’s class-warfare agenda, the bureaucrats have leaked confidential taxpayer information to ProPublica, a left-wing website.

Here’s some of what that group posted.

ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. …ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period. We’re going to call this their true tax rate. …those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.

Since I’m a policy wonk, I’ll first point out that ProPublica created a make-believe number. We (thankfully) don’t tax wealth in the United States.

So Elon Musk’s income is completely unrelated to what happened to the value of his Tesla shares. The same is true for Jeff Bezos’ income and the value of his Amazon stock.*

And the same thing is true for the rest of us. If our IRA or 401(k) rises in value, that doesn’t mean our taxable income has increased. If our home becomes more valuable, that also doesn’t count as taxable income.

The Wall Street Journal opined on this topic today and made a similar point.

There is no evidence of illegality in the ProPublica story. …ProPublica knows this, so its story tries to invent a scandal by calculating what it calls the “true tax rate” these fellows are paying. This is a phony construct that exists nowhere in the law and compares how much the “wealth” of these individuals increased from 2014 to 2018 compared to how much income tax they paid. …what Americans pay is a tax on income, not wealth.

Some journalists don’t understand this distinction between income and wealth.

Or perhaps they do understand, but pretend otherwise because they see their role as being handmaidens of the Biden Administration.

Consider these excerpts from a column by Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times.

Jeff Bezos…added an estimated $99 billion in wealth between 2014 and 2018 but reported only $4.22 billion in taxable income during that period. Warren Buffett, who amassed $24.3 billion in new wealth over those years, reported $125 million in taxable income. …some of the wealthiest people in the United States essentially live under a different system of income taxation from the rest of us.

Mr. Appelbaum is wrong. The rich have a lot more assets than the rest of us, but they operate under the same rules.

If I have an asset that increases in value, that doesn’t count as taxable income. And it isn’t income. It’s merely a change in net wealth.

And the same is true if Bill Gates has an asset that increases in value.

Now that we’ve addressed the policy mistakes, let’s turn our attention to the scandal of IRS misbehavior.

The WSJ‘s editorial addresses the agency’s grotesque actions.

Less than half a year into the Biden Presidency, the Internal Revenue Service is already at the center of an abuse-of-power scandal. …ProPublica, a website whose journalism promotes progressive causes, published information from what it said are 15 years of the tax returns of Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and other rich Americans. …The story arrives amid the Biden Administration’s effort to pass the largest tax increase as a share of the economy since 1968. …The timing here is no coincidence, comrade. …someone leaked confidential IRS information about individuals to serve a political agenda. This is the same tax agency that pursued a vendetta against conservative nonprofit groups during the Obama Administration. Remember Lois Lerner? This is also the same IRS that Democrats now want to infuse with $80 billion more… As part of this effort, Mr. Biden wants the IRS to collect “gross inflows and outflows on all business and personal accounts from financial institutions.” Why? So the information can be leaked to ProPublica? …Congress should also not trust the IRS with any more power and money than it already has.

And Charles Cooke of National Review also weighs in on the implications of a weaponized and partisan IRS.

We cannot trust the IRS. “Oh, who cares?” you might ask. “The victims are billionaires!” And indeed, they are. But I care. For a start, they’re American citizens, and they’re entitled to the same rights — and protected by the same laws — as everyone else. …Besides, even if one wants to be entirely amoral about it, one should consider that if their information can be spilled onto the Internet, anyone’s can. …A government that is this reckless or sinister with the information of men who are lawyered to the eyeballs is unlikely to worry too much about being reckless or sinister with your information. …The IRS wields an extraordinary amount of power, and there will always be somebody somewhere who thinks that it should be used to advance their favorite political cause. Our refusal to indulge their calls is one of the many things that prevents us from descending into the caprice and chaos of your average banana republic. …Does that bother you? It should.

What’s especially disgusting is that the Biden Administration wants to reward IRS corruption with giant budget increases, bolstered by utterly fraudulent numbers.

Needless to say, that would be a terrible idea (sadly, Republicans in the past have been sympathetic to expanding the size of the tax bureaucracy).

*Financial assets such as stocks generally increase in value because of an expectation of bigger streams of income in the future (such as dividends). Those income streams are taxed (often multiple times) when (and if) they actually materialize.

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New Research on the Link between Government and Corruption

Government breeds corruption by giving sleazy people a way of obtaining unearned wealth. Politicians and special interests are the winners and workers, consumers, and taxpayers are the losers.

It’s easy to find examples. Simply look at tax policy, spending policy, regulatory policy, energy policy, industrial policy, agricultural policy, foreign policy, health policy, trade policy, drug policy, and bailout policy. Or anything else involving politicians and their cronies.

Hmmm…, I wonder if there’s a lesson to be learned from that list?

But just in case some people are slow learners, let’s consider some new scholarly research from the Federal Reserve.

The study, authored by Joonkyu Choi, Veronika Penciakova, and Felipe Saffie, explores whether companies that give cash to politicians are then rewarded with cash from taxpayers.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was enacted in the midst of the Great Recession, and over one-fourth of the funds were channeled directly to firms with the primary goal of saving and creating jobs. These stimulus funds were sizable and valuable to firms, with the average grant awarded exceeding $500,000. …With hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, firms may have incentive to exert political influence… Are firms successful in influencing the allocation of stimulus spending? …This paper provides empirical answers… We find that firms’ campaign contributions to state politicians before the enactment of ARRA have a positive and significant impact on the probability of winning ARRA grants… We find that firms that contribute to winning candidates are 64 percent more likely to secure an ARRA grant and receive 10 percent larger grants. …The allocative distortion caused by political connections is sizable. Although only 6 percent of grant recipients contribute during local elections, they account for21 percent of total ARRA grants.

I feel like I need to take a shower after reading those results. Maybe I’m a political prude, but it galls me that politicians and interest groups have so much ability to fleece the rest of us.

And now you know what I refer to Washington as America’s “wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

The obvious takeaway from this research is that we’ll have less corruption if we have less government.

Which was my message in this video.

While I obviously like my video on the topic, I very much recommend this video interview with Andrew Ferguson.

P.S. Speaking of videos, here’s some satire about government corruption.

P.P.S. We shouldn’t be surprised that Obama’s so-called stimulus produced lots of corruption. The same was true with regards to Obamacare and green energy, which were his other main initiatives.

P.P.P.S. In the future, I’m sure we’ll see studies finding lots of corruption in Biden’s recent “stimulus” plan.

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Everything You Need to Know about Government in a Single Story

When I write an everything-you-need-to-know column, I’m inevitably guilty of hyperbole.

All that I’m really doing is highlighting a very compelling example of how politicians make a mess of just about anything they touch.

That’s even true in the rare cases when they’re trying to enact policies I prefer.

The crux of the problem is that politicians like having some level of power and control over various sectors of the economy, for the simple public choice-driven reason that they can then extort bribes, campaign cash, and other goodies.

Which is good news for donors, crooks, and cronies, as P.J. O’Rourke wisely noted.

But it’s bad news for those of us who don’t like sleaze. Yet sleaze is almost inevitable when politicians have power to interfere with private market transactions.

Check out these excerpts from a Politico report.

In the past decade, 15 states have legalized a regulated marijuana market for adults over 21, and another 17 have legalized medical marijuana. But in their rush to limit the numbers of licensed vendors and give local municipalities control of where to locate dispensaries, they created something else: A market for local corruption. Almost all the states that legalized pot either require the approval of local officials – as in Massachusetts — or impose a statewide limit on the number of licenses, chosen by a politically appointed oversight board, or both. These practices effectively put million-dollar decisions in the hands of relatively small-time political figures – the mayors and councilors of small towns and cities, along with the friends and supporters of politicians who appoint them to boards. …They have also created a culture in which would-be cannabis entrepreneurs feel obliged to make large campaign contributions or hire politically connected lobbyists. …It’s not just local officials. Allegations of corruption have reached the state level in numerous marijuana programs, especially ones in which a small group of commissioners are charged with dispensing limited numbers of licenses.

Needless to say, what’s happening in the marijuana industry happens wherever and whenever politicians have power.

“All government contracting and licensing is subject to these kinds of forces,” said Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University who authors a blog on marijuana policy. …“There’s a lot of deal-making between businesses and localities that creates the environment of everyone working their way towards getting a piece of the action,” Berman said. Whether it’s city or county officials that need to be appeased, local control is “just another opportunity for another set of hands to be outstretched.”

The report concludes by noting that corruption can be avoided very simply. Just make sure politicians and other people in government have no power or authority.

States that have largely avoided corruption controversies either do not have license caps — like Colorado or Oklahoma — or dole out a limited number of licenses through a lottery rather than scoring the applicants by merit — like Arizona. Many entrepreneurs, particularly those who lost out on license applications, believe the government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners and losers and should just let the free market do its job.

Amen.

I’ll conclude by noting that politicians are doing the right thing in the worst way.

I want to end the War on Drugs because it is a costly failure. It’s not that I think drug use is a good idea. But I recognize that the social harm of prohibition is greater than the social harm of legalization.

And, as a libertarian, I believe people should be free to make their own decisions (consistent with the libertarian non-aggression principle, of course), even if I happen to disapprove.

Sadly, politicians are not legalizing pot for libertarian reasons.

Instead, they see it as a way of having a new product to tax (and they’re botching that). And, as illustrated by today’s story, they see it as a way of lining their own pockets.

I’m almost tempted to say we’d be better off if marijuana was criminalized so it could be sold on the black market instead.

But the real moral of the story is that government power is a recipe corruption.

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Big Government Enables Big Corruption

Most readers care about economic developments and economic comparisons involving the United States.

Some readers also care about what’s happening in other major nations, such as China, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

Relatively few readers, by contrast, care about economic developments in nations with comparatively small economic footprints, such as Peru.

That’s understandable, but I want to cite Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s recent column in the Wall Street Journal because she focuses attention on the very important – and very unsavory – relationship between big government and corruption.

Her column is about political turmoil in Peru, but what she writes applies everywhere in the world.

…it’s hard to see how an electorate that so often votes for populism at the polls can extricate itself from the grasp of crooked politicians. The hard left’s solution, which is to rewrite the 1993 constitution and give the state a larger role in the economy, would make things worse. …Peruvians are frustrated. They have been told that by voting they can secure an honest government. But elected officials repeatedly turn out to be self-interested and corrupt. …Yet as fast as they throw the bums out and bring in new ones, more scandals arise. At the core of this dysfunction is a state with vast powers to redistribute wealth. …Even voters who say they want less corruption may find that change conflicts with their self-interest. The siren song of populism draws them to politicians who can hand out plenty of government jobs and other goodies in a world of weak institutional checks.

Amen.

I made the same point, for instance, in this 2009 video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. And I was focusing on the United States.

Simply stated, when politicians have more power over the allocation of a nation’s resources, the greater their incentive to abuse that power.

To be sure, it’s not a linear relationship.

A country’s political culture also matters. Some nation’s have developed very low levels of tolerance for corruption, so there’s not a strong relationship between corruption and the size of government.

As you can see from Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, the Nordic nations are among the countries that are especially good in this regard.

But nation’s from the developing world, including the perennial bottom-dweller Venezuela, tend to get poor scores.

The moral of the story is that it’s especially important to limit government (and therefore limit opportunities for corruption) in countries that don’t have high scores.

I’m including this data because Peru, unfortunately, is in the bottom half of nations.

Not a terrible score when compared to Venezuela, but weak compared to Chile.

That being said, I want to close with a dose of optimism about Peru.

Today’s final visual is a chart showing how economic freedom in the country dramatically increased starting in the mid-1980s when the “Washington Consensus” was ascendant. And, just as Prof. William Easterly found in his research, this eventually kick-started much better economic performance.

P.S. It is worrisome that Peruvian economic policy stopped improving beginning about 2005. And based on Ms. O’Grady’s column, it seems unlikely that policy will get better in the near future.

P.P.S. Chile remains (at least for now) the big economic success story of Latin America, though Panama deserves a bit of attention as well.

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America’s “Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy”: Part II

Earlier this month, I reviewed some evidence and analysis about the corruption in Washington.

Today, let’s look at some tangible examples of how the political elite routinely exploit their positions to enrich themselves by pillaging taxpayers.

We could start with the obvious example of Hunter Biden, but he’s just the tip of the iceberg. I noted way back in January that several members of Joe Biden’s family have cashed in on their connection to the former Vice President.

It goes without saying that lobbyists and other special interests are funneling money to the Biden family because they expect that they’ll be rewarded with lucrative contracts and other goodies from the government. Heck, the Biden family is basically cutting out the middleman in this picture.

But this isn’t a partisan issue. Plenty of Republicans also play the same game.

A column by Larry Getlen in the New York Post describes how this racket works.

Rather than risk their careers taking bribes for potentially minuscule rewards, …today’s politicians are savvier, engaging in what he calls “corruption by proxy.” While politicians and their spouses are often subject to rigid regulations on what gifts they can accept and what sort of business they can conduct, others around them — like their friends or children have no such obstacles. So while a politician could theoretically wind up in prison for accepting $10,000 for doling out favors, establishing overseas connections that could land your children multi-million-dollar deals is harder to detect, and often legal. …This ethical looseness is endemic throughout the federal government. …it has spread like a virus through Congress, where the lines between members, their families, and lobbying groups have become indistinguishable.

Senator Mitch McConnell gets some unfavorable attention in the column, along with many other lawmakers from both parties.

And if you want even more examples, you can easily search the Internet if you want to learn about the unsavory actions of other senior officials – including Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein.

The inescapable takeaway is that we have an unholy trinity of politicians, big government, and corruption.

And it’s totally bipartisan.

For instance, the Atlantic put together a very harsh assessment of the Trump Cabinet back in 2018.

Shulkin and Carson face the same problem: dubious use of taxpayer dollars in their duties as secretaries. They can console themselves knowing that they’re in good company. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have been caught in extravagant expenditures, too. Less heartening is the sixth example, Tom Price, who was unceremoniously forced out as secretary of health and human services in September 2017. There are so many cases of huge spending of taxpayer dollars by Cabinet secretaries that it’s easy to lose track of them all—or simply to become desensitized.

The list is damning (and is costing taxpayers a lot of money).

…a trip to Europe during summer of 2017. The government paid not only for Shulkin, but also for his wife, a security detail, and other staffers. Almost half of the trip was devoted to tourism, visiting castles and then the Wimbledon tennis tournament, to which the Shulkins improperly accepted tickets. …Carson’s big problem is a $31,000 dining-table set purchased for his office, which far exceeded regulations on spending for decoration. …Price was forced to resign after spending more than $1 million on travel on private and military jets. That’s the largest single figure to emerge, but only by a hair, while the type of behavior has occurred repeatedly. Documents obtained by the left-leaning watchdog group CREW suggest Mnuchin racked up nearly $1 million in his own travel, including a notorious trip to watch the eclipse at Fort Knox in Kentucky, publicized by his wife Louise Linton’s Instagram feud about it. …Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who took a security detail along when he went on a non-work-related two-week vacation in Greece and Turkey last year. …For still-opaque reasons, the Interior Department paid $139,000 for a door for Zinke’s office… Scott Pruitt, the EPA chief, who has spent more than $100,000 on first-class tickets, an expenditure he attributed to the need for security.

But even more damning is this sentence.

Because fiscal conservatism isn’t an organizing principle for the Trump presidency, it’s easier for Cabinet secretaries to justify big spending.

In other words, taxpayers are getting screwed because Trump has been profligate (even more of a big spender than Obama!).

And let’s not forget that the corruption is so bad that some Trump insiders have wound up in legal trouble.

But remember, this is a problem with both political parties, and it’s a near-inevitable consequence of having a bloated federal government that is collecting and redistributing trillions of dollars (and also wielding enormous regulatory power, which also can be improperly used to reward friends and punish enemies).

Let’s close by adding to our collection of politician humor. After all, if they keep ripping us off, we at least deserve a few laughs.

P.S. The silver lining to all the bad news discussed above is that the American people are aware there is a problem. According to Chapman University’s Survey of American Fears, “For the fifth year in a row the top fear of Americans is corrupt government officials. And as in the previous five years, the fear that our government is corrupt far exceeds all others we asked about. More than 3/4 of Americans said they are afraid or very afraid of corrupt governmental officials in 2019.”

P.P.S. If there was a gold medal for insider corruption, the Clintons would own it (Obama and his people were sleazy, but amateurs by comparison).

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America’s “Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy”: Part I

Earlier this year, I asked “Why are there so many bad and corrupt people in government?” and suggested two possible explanations.

1. Shallow, insecure, and power-hungry people are drawn to politics because they want to control the lives of others.
2. Good people run for political office, but then slowly but surely get corrupted because of “public choice” incentives.

I’m sure both answers apply to some extent. But let’s consider whether one answer is more accurate in more cases?

In an article for Quillette, Professor Crispin Sartwell of Dickinson College looks at this chicken-or-egg issue of whether people are corrupted by government or corrupt people gravitate to government.

“Power corrupts,” as the saying goes, and a corollary is that, other things being equal, the more power, the more corruption. …But perhaps the explanation runs the other way: It’s not only or not even primarily that power corrupts, but that corrupt people seek power, and the most effectively corrupt are likeliest to succeed in their quest. …That is, it is likely that a political career would attract moral corner-cutters. …There may be a certain percentage of people who seek power because they want to do good, or it may be that in the back of their minds, every political leader believes that he intends to do good. But to use power to do good, you’ll have to do whatever’s necessary to get that power. You’ll likely have to compromise whatever basic moral principles (“tell the truth,” for example) you came in with. …political power is a constant temptation to hypocrisy, or just flatly demands it. And when the public persona and the private reality come apart, a human being becomes a moral disaster, a mere deception. That is a fate common among politicians.

Professor Sartwell may not have a firm answer, but one obvious conclusion is that good people will be scarce in Washington.

And it’s not just the politicians we should worry about. The whole town seems to attract dodgy people.

In a 2018 study, Professor Ryan Murphy of Southern Methodist University found that Washington has far more psychopaths than any other part of the country.

Psychopathy, one of the “dark triad” of personality characteristics predicting antisocial behavior, is an important finding in psychology relevant for all social sciences. …While a very small percentage of individuals in any given state may actually be true psychopaths, the level of psychopathy present, on average, within an aggregate population (i.e., not simply the low percentages of psychopaths) is a distinct research question. …The most extreme data point is the District of Columbia, which received a standardized score of 3.48. …The presence of psychopaths in District of Columbia is consistent with the conjecture found in Murphy (2016) that psychopaths are likely to be effective in the political sphere. …The District of Columbia is measured to be far more psychopathic than any individual state in the country, a fact that can be readily explained…by the type of person who may be drawn a literal seat of power.

Moreover, we know that the crowd in D.C. figuratively screws taxpayers, but it appears they’re also busy screwing in other ways.

Residents in Washington, D.C. have the highest rates of sexually transmitted disease, compared to 50 states, according to a recent Center for Disease Control and Prevention report. Out of the four kinds of STDs that the CDC report identified – chlamydia, gonorrhea, primary and secondary syphilis and congenital syphilis – the district scored No.1 in the first three by a large margin… For every 100,000 D.C. residents, 1,083 cases of chlamydia were reported. Alaska came in second with only 772 cases. Similarly, the district had 480 cases of gonorrhea per 100,000 population, double the rate of Mississippi, which ranked second.

Since this report was based on data in 2016, it’s possible another state has overtaken D.C.

But given Washington’s big lead, that would take a lot of risky extracurricular activity.

This tweet caught my eye because it nicely captures how the “experienced” people in Washington often may be the worst of the worst.

Amateur politicians do unethical things that are against the rules.

Professional politicians do unethical things that they've written the rules to allow.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) March 6, 2019

And we’ll close with this quote, which comes down on the side of bad people naturally gravitating to government.

P.S. If you like mocking the political class, you can read about how the buffoons in DC spend their time screwing us and wasting our money. We also have some examples of what people in Montana, Louisiana, Nevada, and Wyoming think about big-spending politicians. This little girl has a succinct message for our political masters, here are a couple of good images capturing the relationship between politicians and taxpayers, and here is a somewhat off-color Little Johnny joke. Speaking of risqué humor, here’s a portrayal of a politician and lobbyist interacting. Returning to G-rated material, you can read about the blind rabbit who finds a politician. And everyone enjoys political satire, as can be found in these excerpts from the always popular Dave Barry. Let’s not forgot to include this joke by doctors about the crowd in Washington. And last but not least, here’s the motivational motto of the average politician.

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Coronavirus and the Risky Mix of Bailouts, Big Business, and Big Government

Since government officials have imposed severe restrictions on economic activity, I’m sympathetic to the notion that businesses should be compensated.

But, as I warn in this CNBC interview, I have major concerns about big government and big business getting in bed together.

As is so often the case with interviews on live TV, there are many issues that didn’t get appropriate attention (either because there was too little time or because I failed to address a key point).

• A major risk of bailouts is that politicians will insist on having a say in how companies operate. Indeed, that’s what Christian Weller was calling for in the final part of the interview. I should have pointed out the huge economic downside of having government in the boardroom.
• There’s a rationale for short-run emergency legislation, but we should be very concerned that self-interested politicians and power-hungry bureaucracies will use the coronavirus crisis as an excuse to permanently expand their power and control over the economy’s productive sector.

P.S. I usually try to avoid making predictions (economists are lousy forecasters), but I feel confident in asserting that my friends on the left – once the coronavirus crisis has ended – will be complaining about big businesses having too much power.

I’m not against large companies, per se. But I don’t want bigger firms to gain an advantage over small companies by getting in bed with government.

If we want fair and honest competition, we need separation of business and state. No bailouts, no cronyism, no subsidies, and no favoritism.

That’s the part folks on the left don’t understand.

P.S. If you want more information on the economic damage caused by bailouts, watch this video and this video.

P.P.S. Speaking of videos, here’s some satire about the toys that politicians get for their children.

P.P.P.S. I wish this was satire, but American taxpayers are helping to underwrite cronyism in other countries.

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More Red Tape = More Corruption

Back in 2014, I shared a World Bank study that measured how tax complexity facilitates more corruption by government officials.

Not that anyone should have been surprised. Complex tax codes enable politicians to extort bribes when writing the law (a problem that definitely exists in Washington) and they makes it possible for bureaucrats to extort bribes when administering the system.

Now the World Bank has a new study showing how a larger regulatory burden enables and facilitates corruption.

The two authors, Mohammad Amin and Yew Chong Soh, wanted to use better types of data to get an accurate assessment of the problem.

Business regulations often create opportunities for public officials to collect bribes… If true, this simple insight provides a practical and powerful way for deregulation to combat corruption and its many harmful effects on the economy. …Regulation is often measured by laws on the books rather than the actual regulatory burden on the firms even though it is the latter that is the primary determinant of corruption… The present paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by using firm-level survey data on the actual corruption and regulatory burden experienced by the firms. …the public choice theory, stresses that regulation is intended to create rents to be distributed between the industry incumbents and the corrupt public officials. In some cases, the main beneficiary of regulation is the industry (regulatory capture view) while in others, it is the politicians and public officials (tollbooth view). …The present paper contributes to the…literature in several ways. …most previous studies have used perceived corruption indices…we depart from the literature by using firms’ experience with corruption instead. … for regulation, we use the actual regulatory burden experienced by the firms rather than rules on the books. This is an important departure from the literature.

For those not familiar with the term, “public choice” refers to research on the self-interested behavior of people in government.

Anyhow, prior research already showed that red tape gave politicians and bureaucrats the ability to extort money from the private economy.

…several studies analyze the possible effects of regulation on corruption. Using macro-level data for a cross-section of 85 countries in 1999, Djankov et al. (2002) look at the relationship between entry regulations and the level of corruption. …Consistent with the tollbooth view, the study finds strong evidence of higher corruption associated with heavier regulation of businesses. Using data from three worldwide firm surveys, Kaufmann and Wei (2000) confirm that when bribe-extracting bureaucrats can endogenously choose regulatory burden and delay, the effective (not just nominal) red tape and bribery can be positively correlated across firms.

The results in the new World Bank study build on the earlier research and confirm (as I noted in a video more than 10 years ago) more power for government means more corruption by government.

Our results show a large positive impact of the regulatory burden on the level of overall corruption as well as petty corruption. For the baseline specification, the overall bribery rate (bribes as percentage of firms’ annual sales) rises by about 0.03 percentage point for each percentage point increase in the regulatory burden. …The results show that irrespective of the set of controls, there is a large positive relationship between Overall Corruption and Time Tax… That is, for each percentage point increase in the regulatory burden, the overall bribe rate increases by 0.028 percentage point. Alternatively, an increase in regulatory burden from its minimum to maximum level leads to 2.8 percentage points increase in the level of overall corruption. This is a large increase given that the mean level of overall corruption equals about 1.1 percent.

By the way, “time tax” is defined as “the average of the percentage of senior management’s time spent in dealing with business regulations”

Here’s a graphic from the study for those of you who like digging into the empirical details.

P.S. The World Bank also released a study last year showing how more regulation reduces business productivity. Needless to say, that ultimately translates into lower wages for workers.

P.P.S. I’ve been asked why the World Bank seems friendlier to good policy than either the International Monetary Fund or Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. I point out that it’s not uncommon to see quality work from the professional economists at all international bureaucracies, even the IMF and OECD. But the World Bank seems to have a higher percentage of quality research. My guess it that this is a result of its focus on poverty alleviation.

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Capitalism Helps People in Poor Nations, Foreign Aid Helps Politicians in Poor Nations

I wrote last October about how poor nations that followed the pro-market recipe of the “Washington Consensus” in the 1980s and 1990s got good results. Johan Norberg addresses the same topic in this video.

Sadly, international organizations are infamous nowadays for the bizarre argument that developing nations should try to boost prosperity by imposing higher taxes and bigger government. I’m not joking.

I was even a credentialed participant at a conference on precisely this topic at the United Nations. It was a strange experience to be surrounded by anti-empirical people, but at least I wasn’t threatened with arrest, as happened at an OECD event.

Needless to say, these folks also think it’s a good idea to use foreign aid to finance bigger fiscal burdens in poor nations.

I’ve previously explained why this is a bad idea, at least if we care about achieving more prosperity for people. Simply stated, there’s considerable evidence that foreign aid retards economic growth by subsidizing bad policy.

Today, though, let’s focus on a different adverse consequence of aid, which is that it erodes the quality of governance.

For instance, the Economist reports on some spiked research from the World Bank, which showed that foreign aid subsidizes corruption.

Their conclusion was dispiriting. World Bank payouts to 22 aid-dependent countries during 1990-2010 were followed by a jump in their deposits in foreign financial havens. The leaks averaged about 5% of the bank’s aid to these countries. …The…working paper…passed an exacting internal review by other researchers in November. But, according to informed sources, publication was blocked by higher officials. They may have been worried about how it would look if the bank’s own researchers said that a chunk of its aid ended up in Swiss bank accounts and the like.

I’m a fan of “Swiss bank accounts” and “foreign financial havens,” but I want them available for taxpayers, not politicians and government insiders.

Sadly, foreign aid helps the wrong people get rich.

Jose Nino draws the most appropriate conclusion.

In 2019, a total of $39.2 billion was spent on foreign assistance, and at a quick glance it has left a lot to be desired. …Foreign aid is not a get-rich-quick scheme for developing countries. Instead of building wealth, it comes with some not-so-pleasant consequences for the recipient nation. …governments receiving aid no longer have to be accountable to their citizens. Knowing that US taxpayers will bail them out, some governments have no incentive whatsoever to innovate or keep corruption in check. …It is the height of naivete to believe that developing countries will magically become rich via wealth transfers from First World countries. It ignores many of the institutions of freedom—private property and federalism—that enabled countries like the US to become the most prosperous societies in human history.

Some folks may think Jose’s conclusion is too sweeping.

So let’s cite some more scholarly evidence.

Three economists, including one from the World Bank, found that foreign aid undermines democracy.

In this paper we investigate the relationship between aid and political institutions. One view of this relationship suggests that aid is needed to advance democratic institutions in developing countries. …A second view holds that foreign aid could leads politicians in power to engage in rent-seeking activities in order to appropriate these resources… By doing so political institutions are damaged because they became less democratic and less representative. Our findings support the second view. Foreign aid damages the political institutions of the country by reducing democratic rules. The magnitudes are striking. If the average share of foreign aid over GDP in a country were 1.9% over the period 1960-1999, then the recipient country would have gone from the average level of democracy in recipient countries in the initial year to a total absence of democratic institutions.

Here’s a graph from the study showing the negative relationship between aid and democracy.

The bottom line is that foreign aid doesn’t work. At least not if the goal is to improve the lives of the less fortunate.

If we want to help poor people in poor nations, the only practical answer is pro-capitalism policies such as small government, rule of law, and free trade.

P.S. Bigger government also enables corruption in rich nations.

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Taxpayer-Subsidized Corruption in Europe

The Department of Agriculture should be abolished. Yesterday, if possible.

It’s basically a welfare scam for politically connected farmers and it undermines the efficiency of America’s agriculture sector.

Some of the specific handouts – such as those for milk, corn, sugar, and even cranberries – are unbelievably wasteful.

But the European Union’s system of subsidies may be even worse. As reported by the New York Times, it is a toxic brew of waste, fraud, sleaze, and corruption.

…children toil for new overlords, a group of oligarchs and political patrons…a feudal system…financed and emboldened by the European Union. Every year, the 28-country bloc pays out $65 billion in farm subsidies… But across…much of Central and Eastern Europe, the bulk goes to a connected and powerful few. The prime minister of the Czech Republic collected tens of millions of dollars in subsidies just last year. Subsidies have underwritten Mafia-style land grabs in Slovakia and Bulgaria. …a subsidy system that is deliberately opaque, grossly undermines the European Union’s environmental goals and is warped by corruption and self-dealing. …The program is the biggest item in the European Union’s central budget, accounting for 40 percent of expenditures. It’s one of the largest subsidy programs in the world. …The European Union spends three times as much as the United States on farm subsidies each year, but as the system has expanded, accountability has not kept up. …Even as the European Union champions the subsidy program as an essential safety net for hardworking farmers, studies have repeatedly shown that 80 percent of the money goes to the biggest 20 percent of recipients. …It is a type of modern feudalism, where small farmers live in the shadows of huge, politically powerful interests — and European Union subsidies help finance it.

Is anyone surprised that big government leads to big corruption?

By the way, the article focused on the sleaze in Eastern Europe.

The problem, however, is not regional. Here’s a nice visual showing how there’s also plenty of graft lining pockets in Western Europe.

P.S. I imagine British politicians will concoct their own system of foolish subsidies, but the CAP handouts are another reason why voters were smart to vote for Brexit.

P.P.S. The CAP subsidies are one of many reasons why the European Union has been a net negative for national economies.

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The Trump-Obama Approach on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Will Lead to Future Financial Instability

The 2008 financial crisis was largely the result of bad government policy, including subsidies for the housing sector from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

This video is 10 years old, but it does a great job of explaining the damaging role of those two government-created entities.

The financial crisis led to many decisions in Washington, most notably “moral hazard” and the corrupt TARP bailout.

But the silver lining to that dark cloud is that Fannie and Freddie were placed in “conservatorship,” which basically has curtailed their actions over the past 10 years.

Indeed, some people even hoped that the Trump Administration would take advantage of their weakened status to unwind Fannie and Freddie and allow the free market to determine the future of housing finance.

Those hopes have been dashed.

Cronyists in the Treasury Department unveiled a plan earlier this year that will resuscitate Fannie and Freddie and recreate the bad incentives that led to the mess last decade.

This proposal may be even further to the left than proposals from the Obama Administration. And, as Peter Wallison and Edward Pinto of the American Enterprise Institute explained in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, this won’t end well.

…the president’s Memorandum on Housing Finance Reform…is a major disappointment. It will keep taxpayers on the hook for more than $7 trillion in mortgage debt. And it is likely to induce another housing-market bust, for which President Trump will take the blame.The memo directs the Treasury to produce a government housing-finance system that roughly replicates what existed before 2008: government backing for the obligations of the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , and affordable-housing mandates requiring the GSEs to encourage and engage in risky mortgage lending. …Most of the U.S. economy is open to the innovation and competition of the private sector. Yet for no discernible reason, the housing market—one-sixth of the U.S. economy—is and has been controlled by the government to a far greater extent than in any other developed country. …The resulting policies produced a highly volatile U.S. housing market, subject to enormous booms and busts. Its culmination was the 2008 financial crisis, in which a massive housing-price boom—driven by the credit leverage associated with low down payments—led to millions of mortgage defaults when housing prices regressed to the long-term mean.

Wallison also authored an article that was published this past week by National Review.

He warns again that the Trump Administration is making a grave mistake by choosing government over free enterprise.

Treasury’s plan for releasing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from their conservatorships is missing only one thing: a good reason for doing it. The dangers the two companies will create for the U.S. economy will far outweigh whatever benefits Treasury sees. Under the plan, Fannie and Freddie will be fully recapitalized… The Treasury says the purpose of their recapitalization is to protect the taxpayers in the event that the two firms fail again. But that makes little sense. The taxpayers would not have to be protected if the companies were adequately capitalized and operated without government backing. Indeed, it should have been clear by now that government backing for private profit-seeking firms is a clear and present danger to the stability of the U.S. financial system. Government support enables companies to raise virtually unlimited debt while taking financial risks that the market would routinely deny to firms that operate without it. …their government support will allow them to earn significant profits in a different way — by taking on the risks of subprime and other high-cost mortgage loans. That business would make effective use of their government backing and — at least for a while — earn the profits that their shareholders will demand. …This is an open invitation to create another financial crisis. If we learned anything from the 2008 mortgage market collapse, it is that once a government-backed entity begins to accept mortgages with low down payments and high debt-to-income ratios, the entire market begins to shift in that direction. …why is the Treasury proposing this plan? There is no obvious need for a government-backed profit-making firm in today’s housing finance market. FHA could assume the important role of helping low- and moderate-income families buy their first home. …Why this hasn’t already happened in a conservative administration remains an enduring mystery.

I’ll conclude by sharing some academic research that debunks the notion that housing would suffer in the absence of Fannie and Freddie.

A working paper by two economists at the Federal Reserve finds that Fannie and Freddie have not increased homeownership.

The U.S. government guarantees a majority of mortgages, which is often justified as a means to promote homeownership. In this paper, we estimate the effect by using a difference-in-differences design, with detailed property-level data, that exploits changes of the conforming loan limits (CLLs) along county borders. We find a sizable effect of CLLs on government guarantees but no robust effect on homeownership. Thus, government guarantees could be considerably reduced,with very modest effects on the homeownership rate. Our finding is particularly relevant for recent housing finance reform plans that propose to gradually reduce the government’s involvement in the mortgage market by reducing the CLLs.

For those who care about the wonky details, here’s the most relevant set of charts, which led the Fed economists to conclude that, “There appears to be no positive effect of the CLL increases in 2008 and no negative effect of the CLL reductions in 2011.”

And let’s not forget that other academic research has shown that government favoritism for the housing sector harms overall economic growth by diverting capital from business investment.

The bottom line is that Fannie and Freddie are cronyist institutions that hurt the economy and create financial instability, while providing no benefit except to a handful of insiders.

As I suggested many years ago, they should be dumped in the Potomac River. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration is choosing Obama-style interventionism over fairness and free markets.

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Red Tape and Corruption

When I wrote last month about the Green New Deal, I warned that it was cronyism on steroids.

Simply stated, the proposal gives politicians massive new powers to intervene and this would be a recipe for staggering levels of Solyndra-style corruption.

Well, the World Bank has some new scholarly research that echoes my concerns. Two economists investigated the relationship with the regulatory burden and corruption.

Empirical studies such as Meon and Sekkat (2005) and De Rosa et al. (2010) show that corruption is more damaging for economic performance at higher levels of regulation or lower levels of governance quality. …Building on the above literature, in this paper, we use firm-level survey data on 39,732 firms in 111 countries collected by the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys between 2009 and 2017 to test the hypothesis that corruption impedes firm productivity more at higher levels of regulation. …estimate the model using sample weighted OLS (Ordinary Least Squares) regression analysis.

And what did they discover?

We find that the negative relationship between corruption and productivity is amplified at high levels of regulation. In fact, at low levels of regulation, the relationship between corruption and productivity is insignificant. …we find that a 1 percent increase in bribes that firms pay to get things done, expressed as the share of annual sales, is significantly associated with about a 0.9 percent decrease in productivity of firms at the 75th percentile value of regulation (high regulation). In contrast, at the 25th percentile value of regulation (low regulation), the corresponding change is very small and statistically insignificant, though it is still negative. …after we control for investment, skills and raw materials, the coefficients of the interaction term between corruption and regulation became much larger… This provides support for the hypothesis that corruption is more damaging for productivity at higher levels of regulation.

Lord Acton famously wrote that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Based on the results from the World Bank study, we can say “regulation corrupts, and added regulation corrupts additionally.”

Not very poetic, but definitely accurate.

Figure 4 from the study shows this relationship.

Seems like we need separation of business and state, not just separation of church and state.

This gives me a good excuse to recycle this video I narrated more than 10 years ago.

P.S. Five years ago, I cited a World Bank study showing that tax complexity facilitates corruption. Which means a simple and fair flat tax isn’t merely a way of achieving more prosperity, it’s also a way of draining the swamp.

The moral of the story – whether we’re looking at red tape, taxes, spending, trade, or any other issue – is that smaller government is the most effective way of reducing sleaze and corruption.

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Foreign Aid Won’t Reduce Illegal Immigration from Central America

Even though I (correctly) doubted the Trump Administration’s sincerity, I applauded proposed reductions in foreign aid back in 2017.

I very much want to reduce poverty in poor nations, of course, but the evidence is very strong that government handouts don’t do a very good job.

Moreover, we also have lots of data showing poor nations can enjoy dramatic improvements in living standards so long as they adopt good policy.

Hong Kong, Singapore, Chile, and Botswana are very good examples.

Yet some people haven’t learned this lesson. Consider the current debate over Trump’s threat to end aid to Central America if illegal immigration isn’t reduced.

A column in Fortune makes the case that handouts to Central America are necessary to reduce human smuggling.

President Donald Trump ordered the State Department to cut funding for Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador this weekend in retaliation for the recent influx of migrants from these nations, reversing a longstanding policy that says aid helps abate immigration. …According to Liz Schrayer, president and CEO of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition—a nonprofit coalition of businesses and NGOs dedicated to American development and diplomacy—pulling back aid “exasperates the exact root causes that are creating the migration numbers’ increase.” …“It will only result in more children and families being forced to make the dangerous journey north to the U.S.-Mexico border,” said the five Democratic lawmakers in a statement.

A piece in the New York Times makes the same argument.

The Trump administration’s decision to cut off aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to punish their governments for failing to curb migration is a rash response to a real policy dilemma. …it will exacerbate migration from the region without twisting Central American politicians’ arms. …The decision to cut off aid is bound to drive up migration numbers.

Ironically, the author admits that aid is ineffective.

…we shouldn’t pretend that the aid itself was doing much good… it is mostly distributed inefficiently in large blocks by foreign contractors.

Though he seems to share the naive (and presumably self-interested) arguments of international bureaucrats about the potential efficacy of aid.

Central American governments and elites have gotten away with abdicating their fiduciary, social and legal responsibilities to their citizens. They have failed to collect tax revenue and to invest in social programs and job creation that alleviate the plight of their poor.

Even some small-government conservatives seem to think that more aid would make recipient nations more prosperous and thus reduce illegal immigration.

What President Trump is doing now — cutting aid — is wrong. …As former White House Chief of Staff and SOUTHCOM Commander, General John Kelly, has noted, “If we can improve the conditions, the lot in life of Hondurans, Guatemalans, Central Americans, we can do an awful lot to protect the southwest border.” …We risk undermining our longterm national interests by cutting foreign aid. We should, instead, spend it wisely in those countries to ensure stable governments that view us as allies and work with them to root out crime, corruption, and cartels. The present policy to cut foreign aid cuts off our national nose to spite our face.

This is not an impossible prescription.

But it’s also the triumph of hope over experience.

In the real world, we have mountains of evidence that foreign aid weakens recipient economies by subsidizing corruption and larger burdens of government.

Let’s look at some analysis on this issue.

In a piece published by CapX, Matt Warner recommends less redistribution rather than more.

…the poor know how to get themselves out of poverty. They just need more opportunity to do it. The question we must ask ourselves is: to what degree are our current development aid strategies aligned with this insight? …If the intervention itself is part of the problem, what can outsiders really do to help? Today there are at least 481 research and advocacy organisations in 92 countries pushing reform agendas to provide more economic opportunity and prosperity for all. The “Doing Business” report provides a blueprint for change. Local reform organisations, supported by private philanthropy, provide the leadership to achieve it and the world’s poor will show us their own paths to prosperity if we will all just learn to get out of their way.

Writing for Barron’s, Paul Theroux notes that Africa regressed when it was showered with aid.

Africa receives roughly $50 billion in aid annually from foreign governments, and perhaps $13 billion more from private philanthropic institutions… Africa is much worse off than when I first went there 50 years ago to teach English: poorer, sicker, less educated, and more badly governed. It seems that much of the aid has made things worse. …Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo calls aid a “debilitating drug,” arguing that “real per-capita income [in Africa] today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population — over 350 million people — live on less than a dollar a day, a figure that has nearly doubled in two decades.” The Kenyan economist James Shikwati takes this same line on aid, famously telling the German magazine Der Spiegel, “For God’s sake, please stop.”

Brad Lips of the Atlas Network explains why aid often is counterproductive.

The international community has donated more than $1.8 trillion to poor countries since 2000 – but this development aid hasn’t lifted many people out of poverty. Arguably, it has made some recipient nations poorer. …the aid has bred corruption, fostered dependence and impeded reforms that deliver sustainable economic growth. …Between 1970 and 2000 – a period in which aid to Africa skyrocketed – annual gross domestic product growth per capita on the continent fell from about 2 percent to zero growth, according to a study by an economist at New York University.

A column in the U.K.-based Times is very blunt about what all this means.

…the international development secretary should have abolished her department as soon as she was appointed to it… We kid ourselves that this aid works, to salve our consciences about being better off. But as we know, the money benefits charities, quangos, bureaucrats, tyrants and the predatory elite, and all these years later your average African is no better off.

Let’s close by looking at a thorough 2005 study from the International Policy Network. Authored by Fredrik Erixon, it documents the failure of foreign aid.

…the ‘gap theory’…assumes that poor countries are trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty because they are unable to save and hence have insufficient capital to invest in growth-promoting, productivity-enhancing activities. But there simply is no evidence that this savings/investment ‘gap’ exists in practice. As a result, aid has failed to ‘fill the gap’. Instead, it has, over the past fifty years, largely been counterproductive: it has crowded out private sector investments, undermined democracy, and enabled despots to continue with oppressive policies, perpetuating poverty. …The reason countries are poor is…because they lack the institutions of the free society: property rights, the rule of law, free markets, and limited government. … many studies point to the fact that government consumption in SubSaharan Africa has increased when aid has increased.

Here’s the evidence showing has more development assistance is associated with weaker economic performance.

By the way, the International Monetary Fund deserves unrestrained scorn for recommending higher tax burdens on Africans, thus making economic growth even harder to achieve.

Now let’s look at how two Asian regions have enjoyed growth as aid lessened.

Last but not least, here’s some very encouraging data from Africa.

I already mentioned that Botswana is an exception to the rule. As you can see, that nation’s success is definitely not the result of more handouts.

The bottom line is that President Trump is right, even if his motives are misguided.

Foreign aid is not the recipe for prosperity in Central America.

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How Washington Profits from “Tax Extenders”

Since I’m a proponent of tax reform, I don’t like special favors in the tax code.

Deductions, exemptions, credits, exclusions, and other preferences are back-door forms of cronyism and government intervention.

Indeed, they basically exist to lure people into making decisions that otherwise aren’t economically rational.

These distortionary provisions help to explain why we have a hopelessly convoluted and deeply corrupt tax code of more than 75,000 pages.

And they also encourage higher tax rates as greedy politicians seek alternative sources of revenue.

This current debate over “tax extenders” is a sad illustration of why the system is such a mess.

Writing for Reason, Veronique de Rugy explains how special interests work the system.

Tax extenders are temporary and narrowly targeted tax provisions for individuals and businesses. Examples include the deductibility of mortgage-insurance premiums and tax credits for coal produced from reserves owned by Native American tribes. …These tax provisions were last authorized as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, which retroactively extended them through the end of 2017, after which they have thus far been left to remain expired. If Congress indeed takes up extenders during the current lame-duck session, any extended provisions are likely to once again apply retroactively through the end of 2018, or perhaps longer. There are several problems with this approach to tax policy. Frequently allowing tax provisions to expire before retroactively reauthorizing them creates uncertainty that undermines any potential benefits from incentivizing particular behaviors.

To make matters more complicated, a few of the extenders are good policy because they seek to limit double taxation (a pervasive problem in the U.S. tax system).

…not all tax extenders are a problem. Some are meant to avoid or limit the double taxation of income that’s common in our tax code. Those extenders should be preserved. Yet others are straightforward giveaways to special interests. Those should be eliminated.

Veronique suggests a sensible approach.

It’s time for a new approach under which tax extenders are evaluated and debated on their individual merits. The emphasis should be on eliminating special-interest handouts or provisions that otherwise represent bad policy. Conversely, any and all worthy provisions should be made permanent features of the tax code. …The dire need to fix the federal budget, along with the dysfunctional effects from extenders, should provide the additional motivation needed to end this practice once and for all.

Needless to say, Washington is very resistant to sensible policies.

In part, that’s for the typical “public choice” reasons (i.e., special interests getting into bed with politicians to manipulate the system).

But the debate over extenders is even sleazier than that.

As Howard Gleckman explained for Forbes, lobbyists, politicians, and other insiders relish temporary provisions because they offer more than one bite at the shakedown apple.

If you are a lobbyist, this history represents scalps on your belt (and client fees in your pocket). If you are a member of Congress, it is the gift that keeps on giving—countless Washington reps and their clients attending endless fundraisers, all filling your campaign coffers, election after election. An indelible image: It is pre-dawn in September, 1986. House and Senate tax writers have just completed their work on the Tax Reform Act.  A lobbyist friend sits forlornly in the corner of the majestic Ways & Means Committee hearing room. “What’s wrong,” I naively ask, “Did you lose some stuff?” Oh no, he replies, he got three client amendments in the bill. And that was the problem. After years of billable hours, his gravy train had abruptly derailed. The client got what it wanted. Permanently. And it no longer needed him. Few make that mistake now. Lawmakers, staffs, and lobbyists have figured out how to keep milking the cash cow. There are now five dozen temporary provisions, all of which need to be renewed every few years. To add to the drama, Congress often lets them expire so it can step in at the last minute to retroactively resurrect the seemingly lifeless subsidies.

In other words, the temporary nature of extenders is a feature, not a bug.

This is a perfect (albeit depressing) example of how the federal government is largely a racket. It enriches insiders (as I noted a few days ago) and the rest of us bear the cost.

All of which reinforces my wish that we could rip up the tax code and replace it with a simple and fair flat tax. Not only would we get more growth, we would eliminate a major avenue for D.C. corruption.

P.S. I focused today on the perverse process, but I can’t help but single out the special tax break for electric vehicles, which unquestionably is one of the most egregious tax extenders.

EV tax credits…subsidize the wealthy at the expense of the lower and middle classes. Recent research by Dr. Wayne Winegarden of the Pacific Research Institute shows that 79 percent of EV tax credits were claimed by households with adjusted gross incomes greater than $100,000. Asking struggling Americans to subsidize the lifestyles of America’s wealthiest is perverse… Voters also shouldn’t be fooled by the promise of large environmental benefits. Modern internal combustion engines emit very little pollution compared to older models. Electric vehicles are also only as clean as the electricity that powers them, which in the United States primarily comes from fossil fuels.

I was hoping that provisions such as the EV tax credit would get wiped out as part of tax reform. Alas, it survived.

I don’t like when politicians mistreat rich people, but I get far more upset when they do things that impose disproportionate costs on poor people. This is one of the reasons I especially dislike government flood insurance, Social Security, government-run lotteries, the Export-Import Bank, the mortgage interest deduction, or the National Endowment for the Arts. Let’s add the EV tax credit to this shameful list.

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