Killing Illinois
The Illinois Policy Institute released this paper today.
If you are from Illinois, this is quite alarming.
Even if you are not from Illinois, this is a real wake-up call. The anti-growth, big government policies persued for decades in Illinois that have led to this decline are what President Obama is pursuing for the rest of the nation. Think about that come November.
Your $250,000 Car
This $250,000 car isn't an Italian import.
It is a plug in from Detroit that's been catching fire. Not in terms of sales, though...only about 6,000 have sold. It has literally been catching on fire.
The Chevy Volt, a plug in hybrid,would merely be chalked up as another "green" and Detroit automaker failure if it weren't for the fact that taxpayers have footed $250,000 per car in subsidies as the folks at the Mackinac Center recently discovered.
Proponents of subsidies like this claim that "everybody is doing it" and that it creates jobs. But who decides which projects get subsidies? Those with political clout, not necessarily those with the best projects at the best price, tend to win out. This has been a halmark of the Obama administration. Decisions on investment in emerging technology are best left to the market where decisions are made most efficiently and, in sharp contrast to the use of taxpayer subsidized "investments," made willfully.
Politically directed investment is dangerous, as demonstrated by the Volt and the Solyndra fiasco. It is also morally wrong. Much like the Cash for Clunkers failure, the Volt subsidy is essentially a wealth transfer from the lower end of the income spectrum to the higher end.
Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize new kinds of electric cars any more than they should be asked to bankroll electric yachts or helicopters.
Stifling Innovation in Illinois
This past spring, Illinois lawmakers passed a job-crippling law known as the affiliate nexus tax. This tax hurts an already struggling economy in Illinois by pushing small businesses out of Illinois or shutting them down altogether.
From the Illinois Policy Institute's recent paper on the topic:
The misguided affiliate nexus law attempts to offer a backdoor “solution” to the thorny issue of online sales tax collections. In 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that out-of-state retailers who do not have “nexus” – a significant physical presence in a given state – are not required to collect sales tax on purchases made by consumers in that state.
Illinois sidestepped this decision by legislating that an advertising relationship with an Illinois-based online affiliate marketer creates enough of a physical presence to compel tax collection from an out-of-state retailer. Online affiliate marketers are individuals, start-ups, established small businesses or nonprofit organizations. These affiliate marketers direct traffic to retailers through a link or coupon website in exchange for a small portion of resulting sales.
The following video explains the issue and how it impacts people.
For the full report, click here.
Debt Tea
Efforts to tie spending reductions to a debt ceiling increase aren’t merely ideological demands made by reckless ideologues.
Voters, particularly those who voted in this freshman class of Republicans, realize that their shot at achieving the American dream is threatened when the government continues to expand in size and scope, draining resources from their more efficient, equitable allocation in the private sector. What’s more, wasteful government spending crowds out both private and public programs that serve as the social safety net for the poor and disadvantaged.
Blago Boondoggle
I appeared on Fox St. Louis regarding the bogus Sparta shooting complex taxpayers have shelled out over $50 million for.
I love shooting as much as the next guy...probably more...but taxpayers shouldn't be in the business of running a trap and skeet facility.
The Moral Hazard of State Bribes
I appeared on ABC-Chicago last night to discuss the moral hazard of state bribes and some other failed “investments” the state of Illinois has made in the name of job creation.
A number of companies have threatened to leave Illinois for more business-friendly states. Unfortunately, this all too often makes good business sense given that Illinois is ranked 48th in economic performance and 47th in economic outlook according to a recent ALEC-Laffer study.
Just recently, Chief Executive magazine ranked Illinois as being the third worst place to do business in the U.S. From the report:
"Illinois has dropped 40 places in five years and is now in a death spiral. Its bond ranking is 49th, ahead of only California. The state may play host to fugitive state senators from nearby Wisconsin and Indiana who avoid voting in their home legislatures, but businesses are heading for the exits."
Many of the companies threatening to leave have run to Governor Pat Quinn for special tax treatment as an incentive to stay. Quinn recently signed an enormous tax "incentive" deal to keep Motorola in Illinois.
The latest in this trend is Sears whose current tax breaks are set run out in 2012. They are looking at possibly moving to Georgia or North Carolina. Governor Quinn says he’s got a good “friendship” with the folks at Sears and wants to do what he can to keep them in Illinois.
If Governor Quinn is serious about doing what he can to retain businesses, he should work with lawmakers to lower the overall regulatory and tax burden on job creators in Illinois. Unfortunately, he did just the opposite of that in January when he signed the biggest tax hike in our state’s history, increasing the corporate income tax by 46 percent and the personal rate by 67 percent.
Ironically, Quinn's recent habit of giving special treatment to certain corporations is an implicit admission that his propensity to tax and regulate and refusal to trim government is further pushing Illinois into an economic death spiral.
While it is completely rational for companies to seek the best deal they can get, this isn’t good public policy. Instead of giving special treatment to companies with the most clout, Quinn and lawmakers in Springfield should focus on reducing the tax burden for all companies – big and small – not just the ones that are friendly with Governor Quinn.
The New Class Warfare
Wisconsin, like my home state of Illinois, is facing a serious budget crisis. Unlike Illinois, Wisconsin has a bold chief executive in Gov. Scott Walker willing and able to confront a crisis with straight talk and serious solutions. Meanwhile, 14 Democratic Senators from Wisconsin have been enjoying some of Chicago's fine dining and playing hide and seek all across our fine state. While most other states in the union are tackling public employee pensions, cutting taxes and razing roadblocks to prosperity, Illinois remains the last bastion of fiscal foolishness as legislators - from not only Wisconsin but also Indiana and Ohio - cross our border to avoid responsibility back home. Interestingly, Illinois has lost taxpayers, employers and jobs to each of these surrounding states for years. In return, we are gaining big government legislators unwilling or unable to confront reality. This is what is referred to in international policy as a "trade imbalance."
This week I was a guest on Chicago Tonight to discuss the Wisconsin budget battle that has made national headlines over the past month. Bob Edgar, president and CEO of Common Cause, joined me on the panel.
Change by Coercion
A great piece today worth reading by friend Tim Carney on the hypocrisy of the liberal protesters outside the "secret" Koch meeting currently underway in California:
At the front gates of the Rancho Las Palmas resort, a few hundred liberals rallied Sunday against "corporate greed" and polluters. They chanted for the arrest of billionaires Charles and David Koch, and their ire was also directed at the other free market-oriented businessmen invited here by the Koch brothers to discuss free markets and electoral strategies
Billionaires poisoning our politics was the central theme of the protests. But nothing is quite as it seems in modern politics: The protest's organizer, the nonprofit Common Cause, is funded by billionaire George Soros.
...In other words, money from billionaire George Soros and anonymous, well-heeled liberals was funding a protest against rich people's influence on politics.
Carney's piece also highlights a very important distinction between free market activism and liberal activism: the latter seeks change not by choice, but change by coercion.
Read more at the Washington Examiner.
A Missing Piece: The Responsibility Ethic
I could wright all day about the faults of the modern Left. I did once, and put it in parts of my book
Was that shameless? I'll tell you what's really shameless: the Left's propensity to point the finger at other people for the destruction progressive policies they tend to perpetrate on this country.
One of the major pitfalls of modern leftism is it's utter lack of regard for the common sense ethic of personal responsibility. Let me refine that. It is not a lack of regard for this virtue, but a complete embrace of its vice that seems to be the modus operandi of Obama, Axelrod, Pelosi, and their ilk. I believe this irks average Americans almost more than any single policy issue. It's a matter of character.
Nowhere is this more clear in recent history than with the Obama administration's inability to take responsibility for, well, anything. Now that he's had two years under his belt with the media cheerleading all the way, President Obama's approval numbers are still poor. As jobless claims gradualy eek up despite unprecedented intervention into the private sector, net "neutrality" and perhaps soon cap-and-trade by fiat, he reminds us that he's 'digging us out of a hole.' Presumably, he's referencing the hole creating by "backwards" policies like free-markets and capitalism, not poor policy and perverse incentives pushed by his administration in the last two years or by allies like Barney Frank for the past decade.
Then this from Nancy Pelosi just a couple days earlier: the midterm election spanking the Democrats took? It was Bush's fault.
In any case, I hope they really believe what they're saying. If they do, the only holes they are digging are their own political graves.
A New American Tea Party
O’Hara at The Daily Caller
- How to lose jobs and alienate taxpayers
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- A civic reawakening: The Tea Party movement
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Patronizing and Wrong
President Obama's reelection campaign recently released "The Life of Julia," a slide show demonstrating how President Obama has made virtually every aspect of every woman's life better. At each point in "Julia's" life, viewers are also reminded that Mitt Romney would destroy all this good work and thus the lives of millions of women.
This is not hyperbole on my part - watch the slide show.
This is an unbelievably disturbing combination of gross policy distortions and patronizing of women fueled by a philosophy of total government dependency and what can only be described as clinical narcissism.
Check out these great perspectives from NRO's Kevin Williamson and Human Events' David Harasanyi.
Update: For an alternative vision of public policy proposals that would empower Julia, check out the Heritage Foundation great post here.