Police earning revenue from tickets write more when they need the money

I would guess that we in America have the least corrupt police forces in the world. I'll even bet that there is not much overt corruption when this situation happens. But when the incentives are there, there will be pressures (maybe even unconscious ones) that bring out an unjust situation. Heck, maybe this means of revenue is the least-bad of all the funding options for police. But let's not ever forget that bad things will happen whenever the incentive exists, no matter how good the institution.

Here is a summary with a news video. And here are some of the articles themselves: "Are Traffic Tickets Countercyclical?" (summary, with a PDF download link) and "Red Ink in the Rearview Mirror: Local Fiscal Conditions and the Issuance of Traffic Tickets" (PDF).

Help Audit The Fed

There are currently bills in both the House and the Senate to audit the Federal Reserve. It should work transparently, seeing as how it controls our money supply. I hope you support this idea. If so, please take the next 5 minutes and call your congress-people (or call the Congressional switchboard at 202-224-3121) and ask them to support this legislation and maybe even co-sponsor it.

The Federal Reserve has absolute control over our money supply. Whether or not it's good to have them as a central bank, there is no reason that they should be working in secret. (In fact, not too long ago they stopped publishing one of the measurements of our money supply, one which has been accounting for an increasing share of the total.)

There's also a petition you can fill out, which will be passed along. But your quick phone call will do even more to help.

And spread the word.

Celebrating the two-month anniversary of our financial sector bailout with a status report

Today is the two-month anniversary of the huge emergency bailout that was absolutely critical to avoid imminent catastrophe. However, they have not even used half of it yet, and they have spent the first half mostly in places other than where promised. (And when I say "where promised", I mean "where the law directs".)

As much as I am disappointed by widespread support for government overreach, it is good to hear widespread applause when Cody Willard pointed out the flaws in this whole bailout mess. The best and most informative part is the 2 minutes from 3:30-5:30: "Last weekend we we sent more money to Citigroup, one company, than the entire budget for food stamps in this country every year." I've never heard of Cody before today, but it looks like he is worth watching: in a recent post, he points out how our current government "destroys the rule of law". Very true. And I hope that understanding is spreading.

support for First Amendment is poor (but improving)

The First Amendment Center published their 2008 survey results about American's knowledge and opinions of the First Amendment.

Beware: they are frightening! People have very little knowledge of their freedoms, but worse of all they are willing to give up many of them. Thankfully, if you look at the numbers for the past few years, the trend seems to be improving (from my 2-minute scan of the data), though the improvement is very slight. This is not very encouraging news.

(Thanks to the Deseret News for their op-ed warning about American's attitudes.)

Big Bailout Bill

Here is the Library of Congress record of the bailout bill; a search for HR 1424 actually yields 6 versions; I believe this reflects how this bill began as one thing but was then used for more purposes. The White House site announces the bill's signing here, and it has a picture of Pres. Bush signing it. (This picture has it as part of a photo essay, but it keeps moving around.) For more friendly facts and summaries of the bill, you can go to the Open Congress site or GovTrack.us site; the latter includes line-by-line comparisons of versions of the bills.

two great graphics regarding the federal budget and bailouts

• The 2009 federal budget
• This year's federal rescues and expenditures compared
  

How many executive orders have presidents written?

I was curious how many executive orders George Bush has written compared to other presidents. (I got the counts from the "disposition tables" that go back to Hoover.)

There were 5075 up to Hoover; as of June 28 we have 13466.

268 George W. Bush
363 William J. Clinton
165 George Bush
380 Ronald Reagan
319 Jimmy Carter
168 Gerald R. Ford
345 Richard Nixon
323 Lyndon B. Johnson
213 John F. Kennedy
481 Dwight D. Eisenhower
893 Harry S. Truman
3466 Franklin D. Roosevelt
995 Herbert Hoover

my Republican precinct boundaries

I have been voted in as the precinct chair for the Republican party in my area. I believe we're the West Bountiful 2 precinct. The addresses for people in my area stretch:
* from 500 South to 1000 N
* from 560 to 1450 West

My Federal Congressional Delegation

I found my Senators Hatch and Bennett and Representative Rob Bishop here. For the House of Representatives, I'm in District 1 in Utah (the northernmost of the three).

Here are links to email them my opinion:

• Rob Bishop
• Orrin Hatch
• Bob Bennett

growing earmarks in Congress

This story about earmarks in Washington is illuminating, and scary.

"More than 11,000 of those "earmarks," worth nearly $15 billion in all, were slipped into legislation telling the government where to spend taxpayers' money this year", and in spending bills for the 2009 budget year that starts Oct. 1, "the House committee alone has 23,438 earmark requests before it".

Holy cow.

"Rules forbid lawmakers from raising campaign funds from congressional offices, but members and their aides sometimes find ways to skirt them."

Well, duh.

I don't care what anyone says: when you get that much power (and money) flowing through one organization, it's going to be very advantageous for masses of people to work the system any way they can. The article says that "earmarks can do a lot of good"; who cares when you've created a system that pays people very well to twist it for their own ends? Even after we work to make Congress' money transparent (which I highly recommend), we will continue to have a huge organization with all kinds of power that people can trade in ways other than their bank accounts.

Unlimited government is bad government, plain and simple. And we are not limiting the growth of the US government. I believe this is the most important politicial issue of our time in this nation.

Here are 4 government watchdog groups they mention in the article:

• Center for Responsive Politics
• Citizens Against Government Waste
  
• Sunlight Foundation
• Taxpayers for Common Sense
  

unemployment and welfare: government costs and a non-profit approach

Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka in the 80s, reported the following statistics in his short acceptance speech:

"The payroll taxes have gone from 1% of federal revenues to almost 40%...
It costs us about 40 million full-time equivalent jobs. We have about 70 to 80 million full-time people equivalent who would like to work who are not, which is 10 times the official unemployment rate." (More good info here.)

It is so good to find someone of his stature recognizing the drag this creates on our society. (Can you say "wet blanket"?)

Even better, he's chairman of Get America Working, a non-profit aiming at helping all Americans work. Fantastic! (While I'm at it, he also mentioned Youth Venture that is training youth "change-makers".)

history of health insurance in the US

Health Insurance in the United States is one of the best summaries I found for a history of health insurance here.

Interesting tidbit: In 1958, nearly 75 percent of Americans had some form of private health insurance coverage.

Destitute poverty in America: hunger

The following are from How Poor Are America's Poor? Examining the "Plague" of Poverty in America from last August. I'll work to get information directly from the US census and other sources, but it was a challenge to find some of the hunger numbers from their poverty section; that information was retrieved from other sources referenced by the article.

• "There were 37 million poor persons living in this country in 2005"; that's 12.6%. ("This number has varied from 11.3 percent to 15.1 percent of the population over the past 20 years")

OK, fine. I want to help everyone make it out of poverty. But I'm not going too far out of my way and I don't want any government intervention for many of that number:

• 42% own their own homes
• 36% own a computer
  

I grew up without those things; it's not a crisis if you're at that level.

The worst hardships are when it is difficult to keep adequate food, clothing, and shelter. Those are the people with immediate needs that I really want to help with money and direct assistance.

Food:

• No data at all is shown for malnutrition; I'm guessing it's too small for measurement. "The intake of nutriments is very similar for poor and middle-class children and is generally well above the recom­mended daily level. For example, the consumption of protein (a relatively expensive nutriment) among poor children is, on average, between 150 percent and 267 percent of the RDA."
• "For example, two indicators of undernutrition among the young are "thinness" (low weight for height) and stuntedness (low height for age). These problems are rare to nonexistent among poor American children." "The World Health Organization standards assume that even in a very well-nourished population, 2.3 percent of children will have heights below the "stunted" cut-off levels due to normal genetic factors."
We're at 2.6%.

• "Some 1.8 percent of all households [and 6% of poor] report they "sometimes" did not have enough food to eat during the previous four months, while 0.4 percent [and 1.5% of poor] say they "often" did not have enough food."
• "13 percent of poor house­holds with children report that their children sometimes or often did not have enough food to eat during the past four months."
• "For example, across the whole U.S. population, in a given month, one child in three hundred will skip a meal because of the family's lack of money for food. One child in a thousand will go a whole day without eating for the same reason."
  

I'll have to compile info from clothing and shelter another time.

People need help. It's very sad for kids to skip a whole day of food, and it looks like abut 78,000 go hungry for a day in any month. Sad.

But the story is a far cry from the widespread destitution that some people preach: .1% of kids go a day without food. Think of how far we've come! Don't try and let anyone convince you that our government has to get involved and force their solutions to fix this "emergency".

My Utah legislators

I found my Utah state legislators for my part of West Bountiful:
Representative Roger E. Barrus
Senator Dan R. Eastman

I've just written them emails, thanking them for supporting HB 449, which is a start at rejecting the national Real ID.

Davis county caucus information

I finally found the caucus information for our Davis county political parties, and specifically for the Republican caucuses. It looks like they'll take place at March 25 at 7 PM in a public location (to be accessible to everyone); they should post the location my March 1 on that page. See you there!

350% increase in annual income from 1950-2008

"The globalization of capitalism from 1950 to the present has increased annual average income in the world to $7,000 from $2,000. Contrary to popular legend, poor countries grew at about the same rate as the rich ones. This growth gave us the greatest mass exit from poverty in world history."

From: Why Bill Gates Hates My Book By William Easterly