{"id":113471,"date":"2014-04-20T20:34:39","date_gmt":"2014-04-20T20:34:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=113471"},"modified":"2014-04-20T20:34:39","modified_gmt":"2014-04-20T20:34:39","slug":"government-hypocrisy-thinly-disguised","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/government-hypocrisy-thinly-disguised\/","title":{"rendered":"Government Hypocrisy, Thinly Disguised"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carl M. Cannon<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last week, the headlines defied parody. In Washington, the U.S. Census Bureau conceded that it has changed its annual survey questions to make it impossible to determine whether Obamacare is succeeding in increasing the number of Americans who have health insurance.<\/p>\n

\u201cIdeally,\u201d an unnamed agency bureaucrat wrote, \u201cthe redesign would have had at least a few years to gather base line and trend data.\u201d Gee, you think?<\/p>\n

\n

Meanwhile, City University of New York has offered liberal columnist and Princeton professor Paul Krugman $225,000 to join a new center focusing on \u201cincome inequality.\u201d The obvious irony was somehow lost on administrators at CUNY, where the salary\u2013for nine months\u2019 work\u2013is double what the highest-paid professors receive. Krugman\u2019s contract is also vastly more than the $3,000 the school pays adjunct professors to teach one course. Then again, Krugman\u2019s new position doesn\u2019t involve any actual teaching, according to a letter obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.<\/p>\n

\u201cI admit that I had to read it several times to be clear,\u201d Krugman wrote to administrators at the taxpayer-financed institution. \u201cIt\u2019s remarkably generous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Generosity of spirit was on display in Moscow where Vladimir Putin staged his annual call-in show with the\u00a0Russia<\/a>n people. In an unexpected twist\u2013unexpected by the audience, that is\u2013American fugitive Edward Snowden was looped in via video-conferencing.<\/p>\n

Snowden\u2019s question was what is known in journalism as a softball: Does Russia snoop on its citizens the same way the\u00a0United States<\/a>\u00a0government does? Earlier in the week, The Washington Post and The Guardian shared a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on Snowden\u2019s leaking of data on the vast U.S. spying program and his subsequent defection. This award put the Pulitzer board in tacit concurrence with those who see Snowden less as a traitor than as a whistle-blower who provided a valuable service.<\/p>\n

Putin ratted out this conceit himself. \u201cMr. Snowden, you are a former agent, a spy,\u201d the former KGB official said to his cyber-guest. \u201cI used to work for an intelligence service. We can talk one professional language.\u201d<\/p>\n

That \u201cprofessional language\u201d evidently includes spewing transparent whoppers with a straight face (not unlike those U.S. Census bureaucrats). Spying? No way, Putin said. Russian law forbids it. Those who listened for a follow-up question about the Gulag Archipelago waited in vain.<\/p>\n

Here in my hometown of San Francisco, two political events unfolded last week that illustrated the street theater quality of big city American politics. This first one literally took place in the street: a demonstration organized by the Service Employees International Union against Twitter.<\/p>\n

The janitors, nurses, and others said they were marching to protest tax breaks that San Francisco officials gave to Twitter to keep the company in the city. The marchers\u2019 own route betrayed their cause: In the place of the once-dangerous and unsightly mid-Market Street slum stood a 754-unit condominium development, several new artistic venues, 18 technology companies and 17 small businesses\u2013including a craft beer hall.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe welcome the tech industry coming in,\u201d one local labor leader told the San Francisco Chronicle, \u201cbut there is also a downside to the revitalization of a certain part of the city.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s right, of course. If the city\u2019s notorious Tenderloin district is revitalized, where will tourists go to take in the smell of stale urine or watch idle men smoke on street corners? And who needs those union jobs created by the city\u2019s tax abatement efforts anyway?<\/p>\n

San Francisco is also wrestling with a kerfuffle over vacation home rentals. Airbnb, an online networking website, has been helping residents rent out their abodes to visitors. Landlords have complained that cumbersome laws prevent them from evicting tenants who violate their leases by subletting through Airbnb. Obviously, the landlords have a point\u2013especially since so many are burdened by San Francisco\u2019s stringent rent control regulations\u2013but what really animated local officials was that the city is \u201closing\u201d the 15 percent tax it charges on each hotel room rented in the city. New rules proposed last week would fix that issue.<\/p>\n

The underlying issue is more basic. Rent control warps real estate markets, consigning local officials to ever-more regulations to address various inequities that crop up from time to time. What all of these foul-ups have in common, from the Census Bureau to San Francisco\u2019s real estate woes, is government overreach.<\/p>\n

Thirty miles down the freeway at Stanford University\u2019s Hoover Institution, any number of economists could explain the problem. Hoover is often described as \u201cconservative,\u201d but this characterization is so imprecise as to be misleading. For starters, Hoover scholars are not social conservatives. What they do is champion the idea of free markets while pointing out the pitfalls of giving government too much power over the economy.<\/p>\n

Hoover fellow John F. Cogan, a veteran of the Reagan administration\u2019s Labor Department and Office of Management and Budget, is currently researching a book on the history of entitlement programs. What he is discovering is that today\u2019s pattern has existed since the formation of the United States itself: An entitlement program with a noble purpose is proposed\u2013say, to aid wounded combat veterans of the Revolutionary War\u2013and Congress enacts it.<\/p>\n

Then other claimants emerge, with compelling reasons why they, too, are deserving of relief. Soldiers, for instance, who weren\u2019t wounded, but who served in wartime and couldn\u2019t find employment in peacetime. Politicians cannot resist such entreaties, so the program grows, and keeps growing. Constituencies arise around these programs, along with special interests with fiduciary interests in perpetually expanding them.<\/p>\n

And so it goes. Peter Berkowitz, another respected Hoover scholar (and an RCP contributor), has urged conservative candidates and office-holders to go beyond platitudes about repealing entitlement programs. \u201cBig government is here to stay and it\u2019s not going away in the foreseeable future,\u201d he says. \u201cSo we abandon talk of small government and talk instead about\u00a0limiting<\/em>\u00a0government, and making government more efficient \u2014 and smarter.\u201d<\/p>\n

We could start with the Census Bureau.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Carl M. Cannon is the Washington Bureau Chief for RealClearPolitics<\/a>. Reach him on Twitter\u00a0@CarlCannon<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carl M. Cannon Last week, the headlines defied parody. In Washington, the U.S. Census Bureau conceded that it has changed its annual survey questions to make it impossible to determine whether Obamacare is succeeding in increasing the number of Americans who have health insurance. \u201cIdeally,\u201d an unnamed agency bureaucrat wrote, \u201cthe redesign would have had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":113472,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-113471","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}