What good does it do us to hate Scott Peterson?

This may be the most difficult blog post I have ever written.  Not for what it contains, but for what it implies.

I’m reading “The 7: Seven Wonders That Will Change Your Life” by Glenn Beck and Keith Ablow, more due to my respect for the authors than any specific interest in the topic.  The fourth “wonder” in the book is Compassion, and Ablow shares this story:

You may remember the story of Scott Peterson, the Modesto, California, man who, on Christmas Eve of 2002, reported his pregnant wife, Laci, missing, then led the search for her. In fact, Peterson had killed Laci and disposed of her body in San Francisco Bay. He’d been having an affair at that time with a massage therapist...

What other explanation could there be for a man killing his pregnant wife on Christmas Eve other than being born with pure evil inside?

In my book Inside the Mind of Scott Peterson, I think I provide a much more credible answer. Scott Peterson was taught that human life—including his own—had no value. Back in 1945, his maternal grandfather was murdered for about five hundred dollars by a disgruntled former employee. Peterson’s mother, Jackie, was only two years old at the time. Despite her own mother still being alive (though widowed), she was placed in an orphanage that has since been called a “cesspool of pedophilia.”

When she left that orphanage as a teenager she gave birth to two children out of wedlock and quickly put them up for adoption. She didn’t give it a lot of thought. She finally married Lee Peterson, a man who had divorced his wife partly because he didn’t like the kids they’d had together. Together, Lee and Jackie had a baby. They named him Scott.

There was just one small problem: they had a funny habit of leaving him behind in places like a neighborhood restaurant, where the manager would have to call out to them, “Jackie! Lee! You left Scott!”

That’s just one part of Scott Peterson’s ugly biography. Sound like the kind of life story that leads a person to value a mother? A baby? Or does it sound like the kind of life story that leads to the creation of a person who instinctively despises new life?

What good does it do us to hate Scott Peterson?

I hated Scott Peterson as the story of his crime played out in the media and courtroom in 2002-2004.  I hated Scott Peterson for killing a beautiful woman who had agreed to be his wife “for better or worse”.  I hated Scott Peterson for killing a baby he never met.  I hated Scott Peterson for having an affair and using some warped logic to justify (if that’s the right word) murdering his wife and unborn son in order to be with the other woman.

But after reading the above background of Scott Peterson, what good does it do to hate him?  The hatred yesterday was at a much lower level than it was when his picture was in the news every day, but it was there.  Today, after reading the above, I cannot sense any hatred.  I don’t what the emotion I now carry is.  Pity?  Fear?  Anger?

Ablow continues, with an explanation:

None of our views on compassion should be taken to mean that we advocate forgiving people for harming others without them facing the consequences of their actions. Compassion does not mean that justice need not be served. We can be compassionate about the traumas suffered in childhood even by someone who, in part because of those traumas, grows up to become a murderer. But that does not mean the murderer goes free. Much to the contrary, once we look honestly at the horribly fractured psyche in that individual or someone who rapes or someone who abuses children or someone who blows up a building full of innocent people or someone who defrauds others of their life savings, we realize the very real danger such people represent in society and the very real need to contain them—sometimes forever. But when we do so, we must not hobble ourselves by hating them.

You can pity someone and still punish that person. You can forgive someone and still resolve to keep yourself safe from any further injury from that person’s pathology.

Yes, I now pity Scott Peterson.  He was raised by people who didn’t teach him a value for life.  He grew up without a sense of joy and love for others.  He was narcissistic and interested only in his own good time.  That doesn’t mean that society shouldn’t punish him for his crimes.  But it makes me think of how many other people are out there, being raised by people titled “parents” but have no interest in doing that job?  How many more crimes will be committed by these people over the years?  What can society do to protect itself from these people and, more importantly, break the cycle that causes them to turn out this way in the first place?

Taxation: The People's Business by Andrew Mellon

I recently read a reference to Andrew Mellon’s plan for tax reform of 1924, published as a book titled Taxation:  The People’s Business. 

The history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business.

If you’d like to buy a copy, I found one for sale on Amazon.com for $400.  Wow!

$400 sounds like a collector's price for a museum quality edition...Would you prefer to get it for free?  If so, go to Barnes and Noble and download their Nook ebook reading application for whatever device you own.  Then, use the application to Shop for the book, and you'll find that it is FREE to download.

The ebook is obviously scanned (poorly) from a hardcopy that used fonts the OCR software was not properly correcting for.  Sometimes you need to read a sentence over a few times to determine what one or two words are supposed to be.  Also, the included charts and tables are so poorly formatted, they are useless.

That said, the text is fantastic, and should be required reading by every person involved in tax policy.  As you can see from the quote above, Mellon latched onto the key concept behind the Laffer Curve almost 60 years before Arthur Laffer published that concept.

I will post some interesting quotes from the book over the next few days, but wanted to have this post available for anyone who wanted to get the book to read or reference.

Solar Panel Maker Moves Work to China

NYTimes.com has an amazingly candid look at a company moving to China…and leaving 800 unemployed in Massachusetts:

Beyond the issues of trade and jobs, solar power experts see broader implications. They say that after many years of relying on unstable governments in the Middle East for oil, the United States now looks likely to rely on China to tap energy from the sun.

Evergreen, in announcing its move to China, was unusually candid about its motives. Michael El-Hillow, the chief executive, said in a statement that his company had decided to close the Massachusetts factory in response to plunging prices for solar panels. World prices have fallen as much as two-thirds in the last three years — including a drop of 10 percent during last year’s fourth quarter alone.

So, $45 Million in “assistance” from the state of Massachusetts, and who know how much in Federal aid (tax breaks, “stimulus” dollars, etc.) has gone down the drain as another company moves out of the US.

Ever since Jimmy Carter started the flow of tax dollars to subsidize the development of “alternative energy” producers, the only reason these companies existed was to suck up those subsidies until something better came along.  There is no economic reason for them to exist, so these companies float from one government subsidy to another, searching for better terms for land or taxes or their own energy needs at each location.

It makes sense for these jobs to go to China:  The advantage China has over the US is a huge labor pool which is available for much lower costs than in the US.  Labor intensive jobs will move there, or anywhere the costs of labor are lower, as long as the total costs of the final product are lower than they are if built in the US.

The lesson the US politicians must learn is that they cannot change the tide by passing a law – the Laws of Economics are much more powerful and they always win.  We’re almost 40 years into the lesson plan for this industry, and Obama is still talking about “investing in green energy”.  The professor has not learned this lesson.

75% Want Health Care Law Changed - Rasmussen Reports™

The word from Rasmussen Reports is that the health care law as written is popular with only 18% of survey respondents.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 75% of Likely U.S. Voters want to change the law, while only 18% want it left alone. Those figures include 20% who want the law repealed and nothing done to replace it, 28% who want it repealed and then have its most popular provisions put into a new law and 27% who say leave the law in place but get rid of the unpopular provisions.

It is worth noting that a majority (55%) take one of the middle ground approaches—repeal and replace or leave it and improve.

What concerns me is the fractured nature of the 75% who want it changed – how do we reach agreement on what needs to be changed, how to change it, and what to do first?  While others have written about this already, I have a few ideas of my own….

I think there are several ‘clusters’ of repeal/replace options which should be debated independently of each other.  This would allow creation of alliances of support for changes in one area that may not area on changes in another area.  Separate bills for each change would enable legislators with different political philosophies to work together as needed to make the most change possible.

Here are some of the clusters I can envision:

• Dropping elements of the current bill which are bad ideas in hind sight.  This one should be an easy winner, since even Obama agrees that some requirements in the original legislation (like the small business 1099 reporting requirement) were bad ideas.
• Eliminating much of the bureaucracy that current bills calls for.  Everything from IRS reviews to HHS tribunals, there is too much in the law which is intrusive, unjustified and disruptive of the doctor-patient relationship.  Not only that, the requirements for things like electronic record keeping and direct payments from checking accounts are unreasonable given that the government is unable to keep military or State Department secrets, and has utterly failed in restraining identity theft and use of forged Social Security numbers.
• Adding things that Democrats generally don’t like.  This would be difficult given the current make-up of the power arrangement in Washington (more on that later), but it should be part of the discussion.  The two key elements here are tort reform and buying insurance across state lines, but the discussion should include other “competition” topics such as publishing prices for medical procedures, publishing data on hospital and doctor results for common procedures, etc.
• Encourage intelligent planning and competition in the healthcare industry.  In the past, the government has operated as an obstacle to competition, and this is one of the best examples:  In the 1970s, as hospitals were looking at costly expansion to cover cardiac care, burn units, trauma units and more, the four major hospitals in Phoenix decided that rather than each adding all of these services, they would specialize and refer patients to the hospital capable of offering advanced services as needed.  The Justice Department stepped in and threatened to sue them for restraint of trade, price fixing, etc. unless they dropped those plans and each developed all of the services.  The result is that there is no way each hospital can cover the costs of all of these services, resulting in higher costs for all patients in order to make up the difference.  Intelligent planning would allow for regional hospitals to specialize as long as the population base would have access to all required services.

I’m sure there are other clusters, these are just a few to start the dialog.  As the Rasmussen Reports survey indicates, those under 30 want to leave the bill in place and modify it, while those over 50 want to repeal the bill and start from scratch.  We need to find a middle path, and I’m hoping this post assists in clarifying what that path might look like.

Ending the War on Drugs Will Do More for Blacks Than Marching

John McWhorter, Professor, The Languages of America, Columbia University, Contributing Editor, The New Republic and City Journal, has a proposal:  End the War on Drugs so the black men will be required to seek legal employment.  He rambles on over a variety of other topics, but this is the inner kernel of his argument:

The War on Drugs discourages young black men from seeking legal employment. Because the drugs' illegality keeps their price high, there are high salaries to be made in selling them…

You can find a podcast of him reading a longer article on the same topic at the CATO Institute website (search for January 11, 2011).

Regardless of the arguments he presents, I think that McWhorter is being too optimistic about what would happen if drugs – including cocaine, heroin, meth, etc. – were legal and cheap.  He claims that, since the profit will be taken out of drug dealing, the gangs, the turf battles, the guns and violence that hangs over black communities around the country would end.

I’m not a social scientist (and I don’t believe McWhorter is, either) and I haven’t done much more than read the newspapers over the years to develop my sense of criminals in the US.  But I’m thinking that the scenario he presents is unrealistic.  If a gang hierarchy existed to distribute illegal drugs and that source of income disappeared, I suspect they will move on to another source of income.  Just like the bootleggers of Prohibition moved on to bookmaking, illegal gambling, prostitution and other income sources once liquor became legal again.

What might these newly de-profited gangs move into?  How about “protection rackets” – where a shopkeeper is threatened with arson or vandalism if he didn’t pay the gang?  How about car theft and chop-shop operations?  Why not counterfeiting tickets for sporting events?  It would seem to me that the expected logical result of making drugs legal and cheap would be for those involved in the illegal side of the drug trade to move into other illegal operations.  Why is that not reasonable to expect?

Maybe not.  Maybe the dealer who was making $1,000 a day selling drugs wouldn’t be satisfied making $400 a day selling counterfeit tickets.  OK, but McWhorter thinks he would be satisfied making $150 a day working at Wal-Mart!  Really?  Why does that make sense?  Maybe I’m the one missing an obvious response to ending the war on drugs…help me find it by leaving your comments below.

Volt wins Car of the Year honors

Will someone explain to me how Government Motors pulled this off?

The 2011 Chevrolet Volt got another marketing jolt Monday, when it was named the North American Car of the Year at the North American International Auto Show at Cobo Hall.

And it’s not just this show/award:

It's the latest in a string of accolades for the Volt, which went on sale in limited markets in December and costs $40,280. It was named the Green Car of the Year at the Los Angeles Auto Show in November and Motor Trend and Automobile Magazine named the Volt the 2011 car of the year the same month.

What was the criteria for these awards?  The article says that “…Forty-nine auto journalists from the U.S. and Canada made the picks. The vehicles are judged on innovation, design, safety, handling, driver satisfaction and value.”  Really?  So let’s think about this.  If the six categories are given equal weight, what is so unusual about the Chevy Volt?

• Innovation?  Hardly!  I suspect you could have built a car capable of 40 miles on battery power and a gas engine backup about 40 years ago.  Certainly 20 years ago.
  
• Design?  I don’t know…lots of other four-door compacts out there.  It looks like a Toyota, Nissan, BMW, Volkswagen, all-alike.  I see nothing noteworthy.
  
• Safety?  Sure, it’s safer than a car you would have built 40 years ago, but what makes it any better than any other compact being manufactured today?
  
• Handling?  It has a steering wheel, four tires and a rear-view mirror.  How different/better than average is it?  (Ah, and most American cars fail, Fail, FAIL in handling compared to imports, so maybe the Volt is “as good” as an import…)
  
• Driver Satisfaction?  They’ve delivered about 300 of them in the last six weeks, so how much satisfaction can the drivers have?  Call me back when the average Volt has 50,000 miles on it and let me know.
  
• Value?!  VALUE?!  Hell no!  What “value” is there in an average car with 40-year old technology and sells for $40,280??  A brand new loaded Prius sells for $25,000 – and it really uses new technology!

So, PLEASE someone – anyone – tell me why this car wins any awards other than “Taxpayer Boondoggle of 2010”?

Update:  Some want to know why I’m not recognizing that Government Motors has paid back (some) of the taxpayer money it received, and has re-issued stock to the public.  OK, fair question:  They haven’t paid back the taxpayers for the opportunity costs of the BILLION$ they were given.  And they probably never will.  Giving taxpayer money to any private company has a totally incalculable impact on the financial markets and economy of the country.  But no one talks about those opportunity costs and the choices made by competitors, suppliers, dealers, customers, etc., etc., and the implications of those choices.  So, no, the fact that they have repaid a tiny amount of what they were given (without anywhere near enough transparency, review, hearings or approvals) does not dissuade me from referring to them as Government Motors.

Obama to hand Commerce Dept. authority over cybersecurity ID

CNET News is reporting that…

President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.  [emphasis added]

Really?  The same government that can’t be bothered with reports of people using Social Security numbers that belong to others is going to create Internet IDs for everyone?

And what is an Internet ID?  Another email address?  A logon and password to www.irs.gov?  An entry in some government database…for…what…purpose?

I don’t know the details and it already seems like a bad idea.  What are your thoughts on this?

California Gov. Jerry Brown's new budget: the pain for L.A. city and county

Not thirty minutes after my prior post and the Los Angeles Times posts this new column:

Take, for example, just three of the proposals local officials confirm they expect to see in Brown's first budget: drastic cuts to Medi-Cal and the CalWORKS welfare-to-work program, and the diversion of so-called low-level offenders from the state prison system to local jails.

[Los Angeles] County Chief Executive William T. Fujioka told me this week that his office has been in talks with Sacramento for a couple of weeks on how to handle the staggering additional costs Los Angeles will be forced to assume. "They're just pushing these problems down to the local level with no real thought about the consequences, and I find that amazing," said Fujioka, who, at 60 and a veteran of both city and county politics, is no stranger to bitter budget warfare.

Fujioka expects Sacramento to pay 40 cents out of every dollar of additional costs the County will incur with regard to additional prisoners in County jails.

Local officials are also expecting Brown to eliminate Community Redevelopment Zones and Enterprise Zones.  These are special tax districts that allow revenue generated to stay in the Zone rather than flowing to Sacramento.  By eliminating them, Brown will have more money to spend while leaving less money for the cities that established those Zones.

[Los Angeles’] 32 districts pumped $178 million in direct investment into the city's economy. Although $100 million of that went to encouraging job-creating businesses, $50 million paid for more affordable housing across the city. Moreover, according to Essel, because every dollar spent by the CRA generates an additional $5 to $6 in private investment and payrolls, abolition of the CRA would take at least $890 million out of the city's economy in the new state budget's first year.

And so it starts.  Sacramento will tell cities and counties to take on these services, but keep the money that local taxpayers assume will be used to pay for those services.  The best part is how the column ends:

Both Essel and Fujioka, like other local officials with whom I spoke this week, believe that the brutal cuts Brown is proposing are meant to set up the anticipated spring election in which the governor will go to the people and ask them to approve the extension of existing tax surcharges. Playing chicken with voters whose own finances are, in many cases, stretched to the breaking point could be a dangerous proposition.

But that's what Governor Moonbeam is planning.  Does he have a back-up plan?  Heck, why should he?  I doubt any of Jerry’s wealth is tied up in California investments!

Jerry Brown: California's new governor takes a hard look at Prop. 13

If you live in California and are not paying attention to the rhetoric (as reported by the Los Angeles Times) of Jerry Brown, I hope your wallet is in Nevada:

Brown said implementation of the property-tax limits that Californians hold dear has contributed to the state's financial mess. The new governor said his budget proposal next week would include plans to return to cities and counties many government functions that Sacramento took over after Proposition 13 passed.

The measure "started the centralization of power," Brown told reporters before entering the closed-door meeting. Afterward, he expanded on that idea, saying Proposition 13 "took away the power of counties to tax, for the most part; it sent the decisions up to Sacramento. So we want to redistribute all that."

Now, I don’t claim to have perfect recall of the events of 1978, but notice how the Times words this sentence:  “…government functions that Sacramento took over after Proposition 13 passed”.  It’s not that Prop 13 put those functions in the control of Sacramento, it’s that the politicians took over those functions.

The power of politicians, in large part, is measured by their ability to send (taxpayer) money to their districts.  So even if the money was in the district and stayed in the district, by being able to legislate that X dollars would go to their constituents allowed the politician to crow about the achievement come re-election time.

There are several things wrong with this political calculus:  First, the original tax collection in the cities and counties allowed the revenue to be tagged for specific purposes, whether schools or fire department, libraries or parks, etc.  When the money went to Sacramento those labels were wiped off and the money was re-distributed as block grants, that the local politicians were able to distribute as they saw best, not necessarily as the voters had intended.  (This was recently demonstrated in Orange County when voters passed a special tax to fund police, fire and prosecutorial services.  The politicians gave none to the fire department once the money started pouring in, and voters are still unclear about why.)

Second, the process of collecting money locally, sending it to Sacramento and then re-distributing to local districts costs money.  It doesn’t matter if it’s 1%, 0.1% or 0.01% – the amount that the process costs means the taxpayers in the district are getting less than they paid for – because they didn’t plan to pay anyone in Sacramento for the handling of their tax dollars.

Also, what about the sticky fingers of the “senior” politicians in Sacramento?  Certainly they have the clout to re-direct some money from several districts to aggregate a larger total for their own special projects.  Or what if they felt that a comparatively prosperous school district, such as Beverly Hills, wouldn’t miss a few million dollars that would make a significant improvement in Downey or San Diego or Oakland?  Who would argue that the rich “should pay their fair share” in making schools better elsewhere?

So why should taxpayers be concerned that Governor Brown wants to undo this power grab?  Well, let me count the reasons:

1. There is no guarantee that programs re-authorized to the cities and counties will receive all the funding associated with those programs.  In other words, the “overhead” applied in Sacramento might still be charged.
   
2. Who will decide which programs stay in Sacramento and which are “returned” to local control?  In the same Times article, Brown admits will be a "complex reordering" of government that would address some of the problems the measure created.  Why only some of the problems?  Well, further in the article Brown explains that his proposal would meet stiff opposition. "It will be controversial, and it will be a struggle," he said.  He said this before unveiling any of the details – what does he know that he won’t tell the public?
   
3. One of the key provisions of Prop 13 was the two-thirds legislative majority needed to increase tax rates, and this provision has been in the craw of Sacramento politicians for over 30 years.  I have no doubt that Brown will want to gut this requirement, and if that happens no wallet in the state will be safe.  The two-thirds requirement ensures that Republican legislators must be willing to agree with any tax plan the Democrats offer.  Two years ago several Republicans who were not going to be re-elected because of term limits were bribed by Democrats to support their budget/tax plans.  That was a rare occurrence, but removal of the two-thirds majority requirement will ensure that tax rates will be increased ceaselessly.
   
4. And, since when does a politician propose taking away the power of politicians?  No, until I see the written plans and the analysis of the impact, I will not cheer anything that Moonbeam Brown proposes to “fix” the power grab in Sacramento.

In the next few weeks there should be a budget proposal from the Governor, and a statement about what his special election plans are.  We should all read the fine print before applauding anything – because the details will mark the difference between recovery in California, or additional movement toward the cliff that looms ahead.