Image of the Day: Big Government’s Reverse-Midas Touch
From our friends at American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a vivid illustration of big government’s reverse-Midas touch — notice what all of these things have in common:
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From our friends at American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a vivid illustration of big government’s reverse-Midas touch — notice what all of these things have in common:
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Amid the dire mainstream media cacophony, there’s more good news to report. Not that any of those outlets will so much as mention this, but a new nationwide Rasmussen survey finds that Americans continue to support smaller government over big government, and the disparity has only increased in recent months:
Voters still place preference on a smaller, more hands-off government than on a larger, more hands-on one. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 57% of likely U.S. voters would prefer a smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes over a larger, more active government with more services and higher taxes. That’s up from 52% in March.”
Who knows? Perhaps even the mainstream media themselves are responsible, in a boomerang effect. Regardless, it’s welcome and encouraging news on a summer Friday.
George Will sums up the follies of the year that was. The only downside of the column is that space prevented it from being much, much longer.
“This list of 2015 ludicrousness could be lengthened indefinitely, but enough already,” Will writes. “The common thread is the collapse of judgment in, and the infantilization of society by, government.” Take Will’s advice, pour yourself a stiff drink, and hope for a better year to come.
As 2015 draws to a close and the presidential election year of 2016 arrives, a new Gallup survey offers an overarching theme and context for the campaign. Namely, after seven years of Barack Obama, who made it his goal to reverse Ronald Reagan’s legacy and rehabilitate Americans’ faith in big government, the public continues to identify it as the nation’s greatest threat:
Americans overwhelmingly name big government as the biggest threat to the country in the future. The 69% choosing big government is down slightly from a high of 72% in 2013, the last time Gallup asked the question, but it is still one of the highest percentages choosing big government in Gallup’s 50-year trend.”
Notably, the percentage of Americans identifying big government as the nation’s biggest threat was just 35% in 1965, when the “Great Society” onslaught of spending and regulation and administrative state growth commenced. Just as conspicuously, that percentage stood at 53% when Obama assumed office in 2009, but quickly shot upward to a record high of 72% as his own big-government agenda kicked into gear.
In addition to once again confirming Obama’s reverse-Midas touch, it demonstrates that the more that Americans get to know big government, the less we like it. That provides an important lesson to frame the upcoming 2016 race.
Following on Ashton’s post below, there’s yet another Obama Administration initiative that will reach deep into the pockets of the food industry.
As Politico notes, the FDA is overhauling the labeling requirements for nutritional information on consumer products. The new labeling requirements will more conspicuously display calorie counts, change the definitions of serving sizes, and mandate the description of added sugars. Unsuprisingly, this push is being spearheaded by the First Lady’s office (which invites the question of who empowered Mrs. Obama to do anything in the lawmaking department).
There’s certainly some limited utility to this nutritional information, though I imagine it probably would have emerged (albeit perhaps in a slower fashion) from market demand as Americans became increasingly diet conscious. That said, these changes are incredibly minor. Here, courtesy of Politico, is what the current labels look like by comparison with the new ones:
Now, you may be thinking “What’s the harm?” And that’d be a reasonable response if this was a cost-free exercise. According to the FDA, however the cost to the food industry to make this change will run around $2 billion. That, by the way, is enough to finance about 150,000 lap band surgeries.
It says something remarkable about the Obama Administration’s failure to engage in even the most basic cost/benefit analysis that that would be a less crazy way to tackle this supposed problem.
Farm subsidies are wrong on principle. It’s fundamentally unjust to take money from taxpayers and funnel it to other citizens just because of the industry in which they work. If farmers need that money to stay afloat, that’s a sign that their business model isn’t working and that they either need to adjust or leave the practice entirely. If they are self-sufficient, then they don’t need the money in the first place.
Even if you accept the case for farm support in the abstract, however, you have to be mortified at how it plays out in practice. As Susan Ferrechio notes in the Washington Examiner:
To illustrate just how far the subsidy program has strayed from its original purpose, [watchdog group] Open the Books calculated payments going to three major cities with few, if any, modern ties to farming: Washington, D.C., New York City and Chicago. Taxpayers sent $30 million to those residents over the past four years to compensate them for converting farmland to conservation areas and for growing soybeans, cotton, corn, rice and other crops.
The big-city farm subsidies show that savvy landowners are legally maximizing a return on their real estate investments at the expense of taxpayers, [Open the Books founder Adam] Andrzejewski said. They buy land, hire a farm manager and collect a check from the federal government, he said.
This would be a good time to remember Nancy Pelosi’s complaint during last fall’s budget negotiations: “The cupboard is bare. There’s [sic] no more cuts to make.” Perhaps the cupboard deserves another look.
It’s becoming clear that the Obama Administration is beginning to lose hope that they can salvage Obamacare and are now just trying to contain the political fallout. From CBS:
After the slow start to enrollment in the Obamacare marketplaces for 2014, the Obama administration is set to delay enrollment for 2015 by a month.
The move will give insurers more time to evaluate the 2014 market and set 2015 premiums accordingly — it also moves the enrollment period past the 2014 midterm elections. It’s the latest Obamacare adjustment that, whatever its aims, is clouded by the continued political controversy over the health law. At least one Republican, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, called the decision “a cynical political move.”
The Health and Human Services Department confirms to CBS News that it plans to reschedule the 2015 open enrollment period for Nov. 15, 2014 – Jan. 15, 2015. Previously, the enrollment period was slated to run from Oct. 15 – Dec. 7, 2014. Insurers also now have until May 2014, rather than April 2014, to submit applications to offer health plans in the marketplace. The changes don’t impact the Obamacare marketplace for next year.
Make no mistake, “Set premiums accordingly” means raise prices based on the internal logic of Obamacare. The Administration knows that Democrats will take a drubbing at the ballot box if yet another round of bad news and increased premiums coincides with the final days of next year’s midterm elections. This is nothing more than a face-saving measure, and one so laughably transparent that it’s not liable to do Democrats much good (especially if Republicans make the Administration’s intentional attempt to conceal health care rates a campaign issue).
It’s a shame the Obama Administration has gotten on the wrong side of so many doctors. They could use some triage right about now.
We’ve spent virtually the entire month of October hearing about the practical defects of Obamacare—everything from the failures of the exchange website to the widespread cancellation of insurance plans that don’t comply with the health mandates. Apart from those functional considerations, however, there’s another major drawback to the law: it places America’s health care providers into a Faustian bargain with Washington.
Recall that in order to get many health insurance companies onboard to support Obamacare, the White House made what was essentially a quid pro quo deal: in order to cover the increased costs of covering the chronically ill that the plan would bring into the system, the individual mandate would ensure that young, healthy, actuarially sound Americans would be swept into the system too (the failure of the exchanges, however, is already steering this arrangement towards being upside down financially).
One of the downsides, however, of putting the industry at the government’s mercy is that the feds hold the whip hand when they fail to follow the party line. From CNN:
White House officials have pressured insurance industry executives to keep quiet amid mounting criticism over Obamacare’s rollout, insurance industry sources told CNN.
After insurance officials publicly criticized the implementation, White House staffers contacted insurers to express their displeasure, industry insiders said.
Multiple sources declined to speak publicly about the push back because they fear retribution.
But Bob Laszewski, who heads a consulting firm for big insurance companies, did talk on the record.
“The White House is exerting massive pressure on the industry, including the trade associations, to keep quiet,” he said.
Laszewski, who’s been a vocal critic of Obamacare, said he’s been asked by insurance executives to speak out because they feel defenseless against an administration that is regulating their business — and a big customer.
Government-backed plans accounted for about half of health care policies last year, a number that is expected to grow over the years.
He who has the gold makes the rules, as the saying goes. It turns out there was an additional cost to Obamacare that the insurance companies didn’t factor in: their autonomy.
Regardless of what you think of the political strategy at work, the federal shutdown we’ve been enduring over the last few days has been an object lesson in how much government we could cut without ever missing it — as I detail in my column this week. In the piece, I look primarily at the bloat in the federal employment rolls, but today brings some underreported news on another key metric: federal regulations.
Last year, the federal government completed work on 1,172 new regulations (less than 30 percent of the full portfolio it was working on). That comes out to about 23 new regulations every week, many of them with massive price tags attached (57 of last year’s new regs were estimated to have costs of at least $100 million apiece). Thus, this bit of news from The Hill is a pure delight:
The Federal Register is practically dried up due to the ongoing government shutdown. There are only two new rules announced for Monday’s edition, and both of them are relatively minor.
The two rules? One limits the hauls of vermillion snapper that commercial fisherman can take in through the rest of the year; the other sets up a temporary safety zone around a bridge in Texas where the Coast Guard is making repairs. Were that this was the way the Federal Register looked every week.
The bad news: government is growing. The worse news: the source of this growth is unelected bureaucrats and tinkerers not directly responsible to American citizens. From Ben Goad and Julian Hattem at The Hill:
… [N]ew federal rules are accumulating faster than outdated ones are removed, resulting in a steady increase in the number of federal mandates.
Data collected by researchers at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center shows that the Code of Federal Regulations, where all rules and regulations are detailed, has ballooned from 71,224 pages in 1975 to 174,545 pages last year.
As that timeline suggests, this is a bipartisan phenomenon. We cannot lay the blame purely at Barack Obama’s feet, though the data seems to indicate he’s first among equals:
To be sure, the explosive growth in federal rule-making did not begin with the Obama White House. The 13,000 rules finalized during the president’s first term, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), were slightly fewer than those published during former President George W. Bush’s first term.
Yet the quantity of federal regulations is increasing by some measures at a quickening pace.
More “major rules,” those with an annual economic impact exceeding $100 million, were enacted in 2010 than in any year dating back to at least 1997, according to the CRS.
And over Obama’s first three years in office, the Code of Federal Regulations increased by 7.4 percent, according to data compiled by the Chamber of Commerce. In comparison, the regulatory code grew by 4.4 percent during Bush’s first term.
As the piece goes on to note, the two oversized blank checks to the administrative state from the Obama years have been Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, two cases in which the law really is, in large measure, whatever the regulators say it is. The actual legislation is little more than scaffolding.
In a just world, this would be a bipartisan concern. Even if one agrees with the policies coming out of the bureaucracy, after all, the price is losing any meaningful leash on government. Liberals, however, long ago made the decision that limiting government would only be important to them on a handful of boutique social issues and any instance involving law enforcement or national security. When it comes to the administrative state — well, they’re getting everything they want without having to dirty their hands with the democratic process. Why alter such a sweet deal?
There are a lot of reasons to lament the rise of the administrative state. There’s the lack of accountability that comes from policy decisions being made by unelected bureaucrats. There are the cozy relationships that often form between regulators and those they regulate. There’s the avalanche of rules and regulations that make the law so vast as to be virtually unknowable. But one factor that’s become especially salient during the Obama years is the fact that administrative caprice undermines equality before the law. Case in point: the outbreak of waivers for favored clients of the Obama Administration.
While we’ve heard about this trend most often in regards to Obamacare, it’s also become a serious issue in education. As noted in Ezra Klein’s Wonkbook:
No Child Left Behind technically expired in 2007. But Congress didn’t manage to do anything about it. They just kept appropriating money for the zombie bill. And so the outdated provisions of this out-of-touch bill began strangling the education system.
NCLB says that fully 100 percent of school districts need to meet tough proficiency goals in reading and math in 2014 or they lose tons of money. It’s not going to happen. They’re not going to hit those targets and that’s been clear for years now. Everyone knows NCLB needs an overhaul. But, you know, Congress.
So the Obama administration has started waiving NCLB for states that propose sufficiently rigorous alternative plans. So far, 39 states and the District of Columbia have been let out of No Child Left Behind. On Wednesday, they were joined by eight individual school districts in California — Los Angeles, Long Beach, Santa Ana, Fresno, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and Sanger. That’s the first time that’s ever happened.
“This is a pretty troubling development,” Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, told The Post. “The states have always traditionally been in control of accountability for most school districts. . . . The idea that the secretary of education is controlling the accountability system in eight districts in California is kind of mind-boggling.”
Of course, the Obama administration says, with some justification, that it would’ve been even more troubling to leave the million kids in these districts in the grips of a law that no longer makes any sense.
Luckily, we have a mechanism for amending or repealing laws that don’t make sense: it’s called Congress. If you can’t get a fix through, too bad. You don’t get to change the rules when you don’t like the outcome.
The Obama Administration shouldn’t be in a position to determine “sufficiently rigorous alternative plans” and favor some states over others. That’s a legislative judgment that needs to be worked out on Capitol Hill. And even that, frankly, is too much. Ideally, education should be managed exclusively at the state and local level. The bowels of the federal administrative state, however, are the last place from which control should be emanating.
From Obamacare to the current Gang of Eight immigration bill, the only thing more threatening to consensual government than enormous pieces of legislation is the even larger corpus of rules and regulations that they inevitably breed. Consider this analysis of Dodd-Frank, as reported by The Hill:
Rules implementing the Dodd-Frank financial reform law could fill 28 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, according to a new analysis of the Wall Street overhaul [by the law firm Davis Polk]…
All told, regulators have written 13,789 pages and more than 15 million words to put the law in place, which is equal to 42 words of regulations for every single word of the already hefty law, spanning 848 pages itself.
And if that seems like a lot, keep in mind that by Davis Polk’s estimate, the work implementing the law is just 39 percent complete.
I don’t think you have to be a limited government conservative to realize that government of this scope just can’t work. We no longer have a meaningful legislative branch if members of Congress are only responsible for writing 2 percent of what eventually becomes the law (the easiest 2 percent, it should be noted — it’s in the rules and regs, not the statutes, that oxes really get gored). There will be no one capable of enforcing all of these provisions, nor anyone capable of complying with all of them (though you can bet that they’ll be an army of consultants offering compliance services for a pretty penny).
Make what you will of the fact that the most provocative stories in the Washington Post come from the Style section, but this one is a doozy:
KERMAN, Calif. — In the world of dried fruit, America has no greater outlaw than Marvin Horne, 68.
Horne, a raisin farmer, has been breaking the law for 11 solid years. He now owes the U.S. government at least $650,000 in unpaid fines. And 1.2 million pounds of unpaid raisins, roughly equal to his entire harvest for four years.
For what offense has our scofflaw earned the contempt of the state? I’ll tell you, but you should probably take a moment to get any sharp objects out of your immediate vicinity:
He said no to the national raisin reserve.
“I believe in America. And I believe in our Constitution. And I believe that eventually we will be proved right,” Horne said recently, sitting in an office next to 20 acres of ripening Thompson grapes. “They took our raisins and didn’t pay us for them.”
The national raisin reserve might sound like a fever dream of the Pillsbury Doughboy. But it is a real thing — a 64-year-old program that gives the U.S. government a heavy-handed power to interfere with the supply and demand for dried grapes.
It works like this: In a given year, the government may decide that farmers are growing more raisins than Americans will want to eat. That would cause supply to outstrip demand. Raisin prices would drop. And raisin farmers might go out of business.
To prevent that, the government does something drastic. It takes away a percentage of every farmer’s raisins. Often, without paying for them.
This, by the way, is not a novel approach for the feds. Back in 2007, George Will noted the practical realities that had galvanized the otherwise moderate (then)Senator Richard Lugar to oppose farm subsidies:
Time was, Riley Webster Lugar, a Hoosier farmer, vociferously disapproved of the New Deal policy of killing baby pigs to control supply in the hope of raising prices. When his son Marvin ran the family farm, if a cashier giving him change included a Franklin Roosevelt dime, he would slap the offending coin on the counter and denounce the New Deal policy of supporting commodity prices by controlling supply — by limiting the freedom to plant.
Today, Marvin’s son Dick is carrying on two family traditions — running the farm and resenting the remarkable continuity connecting today’s farm policies with the New Deal’s penchant for economic planning. The grandson, now 75, is again trying to reform what Franklin Roosevelt wrought.
Lugar is gone from the Senate now, but let’s hope that members of Congress taking up a monstrosity of a farm bill can find the time and will to carve up all provisions that irrationally demand artificial scarcity as a means to abundance.
Here’s a quick rule of thumb for the IRS scandal dogging the Obama Administration: things will only get worse. The most recent domino to fall: those claims that the abuse was quarantined to the agency’s Cincinnati office just don’t hold up. From the Wall Street Journal:
Two Internal Revenue Service employees in the agency’s Cincinnati office told congressional investigators that IRS officials in Washington helped direct the probe of tea-party groups that began in 2010.
Transcripts of the interviews, viewed Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal, appear to contradict earlier statements by top IRS officials, who have blamed lower-level workers in Cincinnati.
Elizabeth Hofacre said her office in Cincinnati sought help from IRS officials in the Washington unit that oversees tax-exempt organizations after she started getting the tea-party cases in April 2010. Ms. Hofacre said Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington, closely oversaw her work and suggested some of the questions asked applicants.
“I was essentially a front person, because I had no autonomy or no authority to act on [applications] without Carter Hull’s influence or input,” she said, according to the transcripts.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. A low-level government employee is the most risk-averse creature on the planet. That doesn’t prevent them from being wildly incompetent or occasionally venal, but it’s not the stuff of which sweeping ideological crusaders are made. That tends to require direction from above. How far up the chain it goes remains an open question.
GDP grew by two percent in the third quarter of this year. That’s not a particularly impressive number, but in this economy — with its now-ubiquitous diminished expectations — it falls under the category of “We’ll take what we can get.” The Mercatus Institute’s Veronique De Rugy and Keith Hall have scratched beneath the surface of those numbers, however, and what they’ve found is even more disheartening than the rate itself:
According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the economy grew by a modest 2 percent in the third quarter of 2012. While this was stronger growth than the preceding quarter, all of the increase in GDP growth came from the biggest increase in federal government spending in over two years. Federal government spending rose 9.6% at an annual rate in the third quarter…Growth in the private sector fell by 0.1 percent to 1.3 percent in the third quarter—down from 1.4 percent in the second quarter.
But the private sector, we remind you, “is doing just fine.”
Here’s a story that will restore your faith in the next generation — and the power of civil society.
Students and teachers throughout the nation are bridling at school nutritional requirements imposed by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a piece of legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in 2010 (it barely merits mentioning that the bill’s head cheerleader was First Lady Michelle Obama). So what could possibly go wrong with some well-intentioned efforts at keeping kids fit? Well, plenty. Here’s Suzanne Perez Tobias, writing for the Wichita Eagle:
The major sticking point: a new federal rule that sets calorie maximums for school lunches — 650 calories for elementary-schoolers, 700 for middle-schoolers and 850 for high-schoolers.
Protesters in Kansas and elsewhere say 850 calories isn’t enough for some high-schoolers, particularly athletes who can burn calories by the thousands.
The students’ reaction? Well, at one Kansas school they created a nice little bit of satire set to the tune of the hit song “We Are Young” — and so far it’s generated more than half a million views. Watch and try not to admire the pluck:
Last week, here on the blog, I went to town on Senator John McCain for what I viewed as his asinine, borderline incoherent rants about Citizens United specifically and money in politics generally. At the time, I noted offhandedly that while McCain has always been horrible on the issue of political free speech he has much to recommend him in other areas. Happily, only a week later, he’s in the news for one such virtue : his opposition to wasteful spending.
McCain was on the warpath against the waste in the Senate’s version of a farm bill passed late last week, going so far as to produce a top 10 list for Twitter of the most egregious proposed expenditures. The items:
#1 – Creates new USDA office to inspect catfish. FDA already inspects catfish, so this one’s a real bottom-feeder.
#2 – $200 mil Market Access Program promoting brands overseas. Example: Holding “liquor mixology demonstrations” in Russia.
#3 – $25 million to study health benefits of peas, lentils and garbanzo beans. Pretty sure they’re healthy.
#4 – Subsidies for mohair (AKA goat wool), which have cost taxpayers $20 million+ since 1954
#5 – New subsidy for popcorn producers. Yes, popcorn subsidies – after popcorn prices rose 40% in recent yrs.
#6 – $10 million to establish new USDA program to eradicate feral pigs. Talk about pork!
#7 – $15 million to establish a new grant program to “improve” the U.S. sheep industry. A ba-a-a-a-a-a-d idea.
#8 – $700 million for “Ag and Food Research Initiative” funding grants to research pine trees in FL & study moth pheromones
#9 – $40 million in grants from USDA to states to encourage private land owners to use land for bird watching or hunting
#10 – $200 million for “Value Added Grant Program” often used to give grants to wine producers (& cheese makers too) “
All jokes his.
Thanks to McCain, some of the provisions (like the catfish inspection) were stricken from the bill. We’ll have to wait for the legislation to be finished to see how bad the final damage is, but we already know this: the outcome will be better than it would have been had John McCain not been part of the process. For that (and for his statement, quoted in the New York Times over the weekend, that he is ““hard-pressed to think of any other industry that operates with less risk at the expense of the American taxpayer”), he deserves our thanks.
Now if only he’d shut up about campaign finance reform …
Over the weekend, Newsday’s Lane Filler had a terrific editorial piece on one of the absolute worst trends in modern American politics: Government’s growing tendency towards preventing failure (read: insulating people from the consequences of their actions).
But as Filler correctly points out, this trend isn’t just limited to big financial firms on Wall Street. We only pay special attention to “too big to fail” because it’s a relatively new development. In many ways, our entire social contract has come to be defined by the same ethos. An excerpt:
Every social program, as much good as it might do, strikes a blow against moral hazard. Unemployment insurance, which many people have received for as long as two years during the current recession, helps folks get through tough times, but economists agree it also keeps some of them from taking jobs. Few people would take $300 per week to trim hedges if they can get $300 per week to not trim hedges while they wait for a wage offer they can actually live, or even better, thrive, on. Take away the $300, though, and that bad job starts to look better. Extended unemployment benefits aren’t the only reason there are 3.4 million unfilled jobs in the United States, but they are a reason.
Let people know that if their income is low enough, the government will give them food, and they won’t have nearly as much inclination to earn food money as they would if they were down to carpet-lint soup. Provide shelter to those who can’t provide their own, and folks feel less desire to hustle for housing than they would if an underpass in Cleveland were their winter home.
As Filler goes on to note, the same criticism applies to Social Security and Medicare, both of which provide far more in benefits than beneficiaries ever pay in.
None of this, of course, is to argue against a basic safety net. But as many conservative wags have been noting of late, the safety net is coming to look a lot more like a hammock.
Failure, uncomfortable as it often is, is the finishing school of success. Having weakened its instructive powers, we should not be surprised to find ourselves living in a nation of adolescents.
Further evidence that the Obama Administration’s green jobs fetish defies all logic, economic or otherwise, comes from this report from CNS News:
An Obama administration green jobs grant program that spent $11 billion lacks a verifiable job-counting system and likely created only a fraction of the jobs it claims, according to a staff report by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
While Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the grants “created tens of thousands of jobs,” the government’s own National Renewal Energy Laboratory estimates it created 910 direct jobs.
The House report criticized even those numbers, saying: “The job creation numbers that exist for Section 1603 are based on models, not actual data from completed projects. Neither Treasury nor DOE have turned over actual jobs data on the Section 1603 grants program to the committee.”
In the spirit of generosity, let’s assume the 910 number is correct. At $11 billion, that comes out to well over $12 million per job. A ludicrous amount to be sure, but also one that comes with an enormous opportunity cost. Scroll down the page to Ashton’s post on the cost-effectiveness of Washington D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship program and you’ll find that the whole thing (which the Obama Administration has consistently targeted for elimination) could be funded at the cost of less than two of those green jobs.
The character of this administration can be defined by its priorities. Does anything more need to be said than that they would rather slip millions of taxpayer dollars to tech firms who haven’t so much as worked up a business model than to poor children in the inner city? Hope indeed.
There was a time when the New England town meeting was the ultimate example of civic-mindedness; of small town democracy in action. These days, given the political complexion of much of the Northeast, the gatherings tend to be more representative of just how divorced from reality life can become in the fever swamps of the left. Consider this, from Michael Graham in the Boston Herald:
[The city of] Concord voted 403-364 to make it illegal to sell bottled water. Uh, wait. That’s not right. You can still sell bottled water, it just has to be in larger bottles.
So it’s illegal to sell drinks in bottles smaller than 1 liter. No, that’s not it, either. You can still sell Mountain Dew or mango juice in small, plastic bottles. Just not water.
So the new law boils down to “It’s illegal to sell stuff we Concordians don’t like, and right now we don’t like bottled water . . . except when we buy it ourselves. So there.”
What makes this vote on unflavored liquid so deliciously ironic is that it happened around the same time the Massachusetts House was voting against EBT [Electronic Benefit Transfer — essentially debit cards for those receiving public benefits] fraud — a vote that Concord liberals and their fellow travelers oppose.
While the EBT fraud amendment passed overwhelmingly 122-33, all the “no” votes came from the far left. Liberals like Reps. Alice Wolf (D-Cambridge) and Ruth Balser (D-Newton) voted to keep letting EBT cards pay for “firearms, cosmetics . . . strip clubs, travel services, health clubs, tattoo parlors, jewelry, payment of restitution or bail, and gambling,” according to the Associated Press.
The ideological battle lines of 21st century politics are becoming increasingly clear. Conservatives are those who think you should be able to do nearly anything you like with your own money. Liberals are those who think you should be able to do nearly anything you like with someone else’s.
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