You may have seen this image on social media offered as evidence that Fox News is just propaganda:
In combination with other similar observations, this is why I’ve been feeling down today. People are actually insisting that the single television news outlet not promoting the same content as all the others is the one spreading propaganda. My goodness! That is the opposite of how propaganda works and the opposite of why it’s dangerous!
We’ve reached the point that many people think a refusal to goosestep is fascism, which is a sure sign that fascism is making gains.
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I overheard a comment on social media the other day from a Providence resident acknowledging that she really didn’t understand how the finances work, but that she was voting for Providence’s pension obligation bond because she wanted to move the city in “a positive direction.” The problem with this common sentiment is that if you don’t understand how a policy works (let alone third-order side effects and tradeoffs), you can’t know whether it represents a positive direction.
For that very reason, the emphasis that litigious students and even Republican legislators have placed on civics education has been misplaced. Teaching students how to be activists is dangerous if we can’t assume they already know how to figure out (and therefore have to be told) what solutions might be helpful, how to think through unintended consequences, and even how to determine what is true, in terms of both facts and beliefs.
The defined-benefit pensions that government workers enjoy in Rhode Island are guaranteed payouts from taxpayer funds. In a perfect world, government agencies would put those funds aside (as accurately as they can predict the payout) while the person is working so the money is 100% there by the time the person retires. However, the economies of America and the West more broadly have been on such a strong and unprecedented growth trend since the invention of market economics that it has made sense to invest that money rather than simply putting it in a vault, which allows the government employer to reduce the amount that must be saved in the here and now.
Because the payments are supposed to be absolutely guaranteed, the government should pick an investment return, when planning, that is essentially a sure bet over the long term. Historically, this has meant between three and five percent returns, on average, every year. In reality, Ocean State governments have planned using eight percent or more as the prediction, so even if they put in every dollar the plan called for (which they haven’t) their plans have been overly optimistic by double. This has created an unfunded liability. In this case, “liability” does not mean the amount that they have committed to pay out in the future. (Government agencies will go to great lengths to avoid telling you exactly what that number is.) Rather, the “liability” is the amount of money the employer should have invested and earning a profit so it will grow enough to match obligations in the future.
Let’s put some numbers on this for illustration. If you start with $10 and you need $85 twenty years from now, you can add just $1 per year if you plan to get an 8% return, on average. If you only average a 4% return, however, you won’t have $85 at the end; you’ll only have $49, and you’re going to have to come up with the extra $36 somewhere else. Now, if on top of only getting 4% returns, you also only put in 50-cents per year through year 10, you are only 60% funded, and even if you start putting in your full dollar, you’re only going to have $41 at the end.
What Providence is doing is borrowing the money to invest at a profit so that it is where it would have been if all of its assumptions had been true. The problem is that nobody will lend money to a government for this purpose unless they are guaranteed to get more back than they put in. So, they will demand at least the profit that the government should be using to plan its pension payments in the first place: between three and five percent. That means the government is now obligating itself to pay the pensions, the initial amount of the bond, plus interest on the bond. This requires either even higher investment returns.
Instead of making good use of money it has put aside for a future benefit pay-out, the government has now required itself to become a very successful investment firm. Why does anybody think government agencies are competent in that field?
The truth is that nobody does. Like the social media commenter, they just don’t understand how the finances work and people with a personal interest in pretending this plan makes sense are telling them that it does. The relative handful of people who voted in favor of this plan may have just guaranteed that the city will go bankrupt, which is not a very positive direction at all.
Featured image from the original edition of Oliver Twist.
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Gun-control advocates are very pleased with the speech that actor Matthew McConaughey made from the White House podium, but as is typical, people tend not to look beyond agreement to important secondary considerations.
By his choice to be a national activist on this issue, rather than a state one, McConaughey blurred his core issue in the broader issue of our entire system of government. His performance would have reached a wider array of sympathetic ears if he’d focused on Texas law.
Similarly, by marching out with Biden’s lead propagandist and speaking from her podium, he mixed the issue with partisan politics.
Failing to think about such things is why we’re so divided and spiraling downward so quickly.
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They just know that imposing a bond is a more-sure way of saddling taxpayers with the payoff to their labor union allies. (Actually, most don’t know much on either front. They just go along because they’ve bought into the baseline propaganda that progressives are always on the side of goodness.)
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You can tell our country’s radicals — from Joe Biden on down — are going for the kill this time because they aren’t moderating on energy, even as gas prices shoot up and inflation decimates the wellbeing of Americans. Instead, they talk about how it’s simply a “transition.” Note the phrasing of progressive Democrat State Senator Dawn Euer:
Our energy sector is in the midst of a transition to address the climate crisis. HOW we do this is key. We need renewable energy without baking in extra profits to the utility on the shoulders of ratepayers.
We’re “in the midst of a transition,” as if it’s just some natural trend with predictable outcomes. Naturally, one wouldn’t expect a politician to be sufficiently straightforward to acknowledge that her political party is forcing us to go through this painful transition based on questionable projections and an uncertain result.
Democrat Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo deployed some similarly telling (if dishonestly contradictory) phrasing while facing some unexpected pushback from CNN’s Jake Tapper:
“We will get inflation under control, we just have to stick with it and see it through,” Raimondo said. “The reality is, the cause of this inflation is the supply-chain problems that were caused by COVID we’re still struggling with. Putin’s war is driving the price of food and gas up. And—we can’t deny that. We know Americans are struggling.”
What does it mean to “see inflation through”? That sounds like “transition” language, treating inflation like the pain of setting a dislocated bone. This will only hurt for a moment, and then you’ll be good as new. But we won’t; we’ll all be poorer. Of course, this being Raimondo, she talks out of both sides of her mouth, advancing the “transition” talk while also blaming an isolated event.
Back to Euer. She made her comment related to a Providence Journal article about her legislation reducing the amount that energy companies can charge ratepayers to subsidize wind energy. Combine Democrats’ demonstrated lack of concern about sky-high energy prices with their anti-profit talk, and one gets the impression it’s simply the profits to which they object. If they’re the ones laying burdens on Americans’ shoulders for their own political gain, that’s just fine; if businesses require financial incentives to go along, then that’s beyond the pale.
The problem is if there are insufficient incentives to generate energy, less of it will be generated, which will drive up the costs as a natural trend.
The curious thing about Euer’s insistence on the “how” of an energy transition is that those like her, who are playing games with our economy and our lives, display no understanding of how things work. The harm they are sure to cause is anything but natural, and they’ll never accept the blame.
Featured image by Nicholas Doherty on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Pressure for gun-control
- Pawtucket students take a progressive fieldtrip
- Cicilline loses his cool
- Raimondo rides the escalator of an incompetent administration higher and higher
Featured image by Leon Seibert on Unsplash.
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Guest: Mike Cerullo, Mental Health Practitioner
Host: Darlene D’Arezzo Time: 30 minutes
Description: Cerullo discuses some significant changes in mental health practice, training and care in Rhode Island in recent years. Topics covered include training and care of first responders-fire, police, EMT; the prisons as major care centers; increase in rate of suicide; challenge of getting to treatment; effect of marijuana; laws pertaining to marijuana use; concerns about legalizing recreational marijuana use; and more.
John Loughlin speaks with Dr. Tim Shafman about cancer and Glenn Valentine of the RI Firearm Owners League about the prospect (and legality) of proposed gun regulation.
Featured image by Bo Harvey on Unsplash.
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The day of the school shooting in Ulvade, Joe Biden took to his national platform to blame people who disagree him about the Second Amendment and the practical steps to stop mass shootings: “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?”
That talking point has filtered down throughout the organized movement to take further steps to infringe on the right to bear arms. In a WPRI article by Adriana Rozas Rivera and Amanda Pitts (which is notable for its lack of the bias that has been near universal, lately), a gun-control spokesperson read from Biden’s notes, so to speak.
As they do just about every year, Rhode Islanders who value their Second Amendment rights put on their yellow shirts and rallied at the State House. In a contrary statement, the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence expressed disappointment that “the gun lobby” is so intransigent.
We shouldn’t allow that turn of phrase to slip by without remark. When our flesh-and-blood neighbors are jammed into a faceless abstraction like “the gun lobby,” which implies cynical manipulation of our political system, they are easy to dismiss because dehumanized. Note the difference from other generic terms like “supporters,” “opponents,” “advocates,” or “activists.” None of these words implies invalid or ulterior motives, and all of them describe people, whereas “lobby” means a cold machine.
“Lobby” implies advocacy for personal profit, often without true belief in the cause. It implies that lobbyists’ views shouldn’t be given the full weight due to active citizens but should be discounted — perhaps disregarded. When applied to people who are not professional lobbyists and deployed alongside terms like “racist” or “fascist,” the word serves to give members of an opposing movement permission to invalidate the rights of their neighbors, including rights to property and safety.
Such rhetoric is in direct line with the demand from Rhode Island’s obnoxious Democrat Congressman David Cicilline that his fellow Congressmen “spare [him] the bullshit about constitutional rights.” The words clearly articulate a disregard for rights, and the swear disregards decorum, which governing bodies maintain in order to allow cooperation and a sense of fair play.
There will be no fair play. One can easily imagine support from Cicilline for the confiscation of property and incarceration of his political opponents. Whether he’ll stop short of calling for gulags for such loathsome creatures as the “gun lobby” is a question we should pray never to see answered one way or the other, and the right acknowledged in the Second Amendment is absolutely crucial toward holding that possibility at bay.
Featured image by Vincent van Gough on WikiArt.
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