WE were alerted to a new article at Freedom Foundation about Puget Sound Partnership's latest "environmental" project. It seems they just haven't been able to accomplish anything approaching the mission they were created to do, and so they decided re-branding would help. It reminds us of when the United States Postal Service was hemorrhaging money to UPS, FedEx and that newfangled e-mail thang. What did the post office do? Why, instead of solving their systemic problems, and maybe addressing the realities of a changing world, they redesigned their eagle logo, to make it faster looking. And raised the price of stamps.

So in the fine tradition of government agencies, Puget Sound Partnership is getting a new look, for $60,000.00, give or take. Now, WE realize that's less than one modest house in the Seattle area, but still. If the Puget Sound is really so all-fired threatened, it seems like a real, functional agency would want to spend every dime fixing that. Oh, yes, image does affect contributions, but this is taxpayer money we're sending down the rat hole, and contributions to PSP have never been great. 

WE only mention this because PSP has a nasty habit of poking its funnel into local Whatcom County government affairs all too frequently, politically molesting citizens who are happy the way things are, and just want to be left alone. 

So, what is this agency, and how effective are they? Well...

If you have the belly for it, you can find out how that re-branding is going to shape up. Continue reading...

    You may have been getting up every morning this year thinking you've been working for yourself or an employer for a mutually agreed upon amount.  And, 'bet you've actually felt your "YTD" (year to date) earning figures were gainful.

But from January 1 until today, you haven't been working for yourself you've been working for the state. Nobody - not you or anyone else - has been getting rich from your labor.  Everybody in the state's been spinning their wheels till now.

There used to be a saying:  "Thank God we're not getting all the government we pay for."

WE're beginning to wonder if that old line can ever make sense, now that government operates with a no-limit credit card mentality - ramping up charges to us and turbo-charged debt, debt, debt.  (WE're getting plenty more "governance" than our earnings can ever cover, do ya think?)  Ever see the Washington State DEBT CLOCK?

Federal spending is bad enough, but Washington State is one of the absolute worst in the nation where it comes to burdening citizens with obtuse taxes and fees. Check out the figures presented by the Tax Foundation that have been posted on the Freedom Foundation blog, which lays it all out for you pretty clearly.

   The Excavators' focus is devoted to local issues, and sometimes it takes a mighty strong grip on the steering to keep stories close to home. WE're diverging only an itsy-bit by sharing this brief but brilliantly written history lesson. Think about about how incestuously nanny local and state programs have become. The truth of this article is self-evident. If you've followed local politics an iota (left or right) you may recognize how history repeats (or politics work), with the new control-happy majority at county council in post-election payback mode, joined at the hip to the ideological moonbats who have run Bellingham threadbare.
  This article is about far more than the Affordable Care Act. It's about the wages of growing the public addiction to "subsidized" programs* that weaken the foundation of society itself, and calling it progress.
______
   *On March 25, Whatcom County Council approved expanded definitions for the use of "economic development investment" (EDI sales tax) funds for the construction of private single and multi-family homes under the figleaf of "affordable housing." Freddie and Fannie What, here we come.

Dependence Day:  The corrupting effects of Obamacare
Jay Cost - February 24, 2014, Vol. 19, No. 23

On February 4 the Congressional Budget Office dropped a bombshell. Analysts there found that Obamacare’s structure will create an enormous implicit tax on work, such that people on the lower end of the economic scale will have an incentive to quit their jobs or scale back to part time to maximize their premium subsidies. In an earlier study, CBO had estimated that this disincentive to work would destroy the equivalent of less than a million full-time jobs. Now, it projects that an equivalent of more than 2 million jobs will be lost as people voluntarily leave the workforce.

Many liberals celebrated this development. They trumpeted the new possibilities: Parents will have more time to spend with their children, young people more time to go back to school, and so on. As liberal pundit Matthew Yglesias wrote, “If Obamacare really does cause millions of people to voluntarily leave full-time employment, that shows us how much avoidable suffering the earlier system was causing.”

But conservative critics have the better argument. Perhaps the best rejoinder came from Keith Hennessey, former director of the National Economic Council and now a lecturer at Stanford University. At his blog, he finds that the law can trap people just as easily as it can liberate them. A family of four making $35,000 a year would face a steep implicit tax by adding income from a part-time job; in that scenario, the family isn’t working less for the sake of the kids, but “because the government raised [their] marginal effective tax rate and made work less financially rewarding.” This is an excellent point, and speaks to the potential damage that this implicit tax will wreak.

The economic arguments against this disincentive to work, while significant, are not the entirety of the case to be made against it. Indeed, they may not even be the strongest. There are important civic ideals at stake that, while often overlooked, get to the very heart of the nation’s experiment in republican self-government.

What does it mean to be a citizen of a republic? For centuries, philosophers have generally concluded that citizenship has two essential qualities—freedom and equality. In other words, nobody in a republic is your master or lord, and nobody enjoys a higher civic status than you. The state, insofar as it compels you, does so on behalf of everybody. Governmental coercion is legitimate only if it is on behalf of the public good.

In practice, this ideal has been exceedingly difficult to realize. History has shown time and again that republics are often, if not inevitably, corrupted by factional forces who capture the government and twist it toward their own, selfish ends.

The Constitution, with its labyrinthine system of checks and balances, is an effort to mitigate this danger. Importantly, the anti-Federalist insistence on a Bill of Rights was seen as an extra safeguard against corrupting influences. By their reckoning, even if government fell into the “wrong hands,” it would be limited in what it could do to you, and by extension to the republic itself.

Nowadays, we are wont to correlate liberty with dynamism. A free society is one where risk takers can innovate, create new solutions to problems, and make everybody better off. There is no doubt that all of this is true. Even so, it would be anachronistic to see the Founding generation as making the same arguments. Liberty was essential primarily because of its civic benefits, above all as a bulwark for true republicanism against the despotic pretensions of the likes of King George III.

We cannot reconcile these republican notions with Obamacare’s disincentives to work. If we take the Framers’ hard-earned lessons seriously, the sort of clientelistic relationship that exists under Obamacare is incompatible with authentic citizenship. The problem arises from two different directions.

First, a government captured by factions will simply have more power than it previously did. Once people come to depend on those benefits, they will have little choice but to abide by whatever strings the government chooses to attach.

Second, the government will now have less to fear from its opponents. Dependency degrades the capacity of the citizenry to operate as a check on the antirepublican tendencies of the government. As Madison and Jefferson argued toward the end of the 1790s, this was the last, best hope for true republicanism. In their telling, a junto of financial elites from the Northeast had seized control of the government, perverting public policy towards their own, selfish ends. The only recourse was the ballot box, where they hoped to mobilize the people at large to stand up for the public interest. If the government has turned citizens into clients, how will the citizens then stand up to the government should it misbehave?

All of this might sound far-fetched, but these very dangers arose in the 1880s and 1890s, as the government began dispensing pensions to Civil War veterans. The Republican party essentially captured the votes of the pensioners and forced them into an alliance with the manufacturing and financial sectors of the economy, against the agricultural interests with which many pensioners might otherwise have been affiliated. It was, in a word, a massive logroll. The pensioners voted for ever more generous benefits, but they also voted for protective tariffs and the gold standard. These economic policies socked it to the poor farmers in the South and West, and the gold standard probably would never have survived had it not been coupled to the pensions and the tariff. The sum total was an electorally unbeatable coalition that was nevertheless of questionable public utility; yes, the economy developed during this period, but its development was highly uneven, with poor farmers left on the outside looking in. The South in particular would not see any real benefits from economic modernization until after World War II.

There is a similar dynamic today, though it is less pernicious. The entitlement state is unsustainable in the long run. Eventually, it will wreck the public finances of the nation, yet it remains unreformed because a vast array of groups are dependent on the status quo. It is difficult to expect citizens to rebuke the government when supported by it. This makes it harder, not easier, to realize the public good.

This is not to say that we should hold these republican values above all others. In practice, we have rightly made trade-offs; senior citizens who can no longer care for themselves, or vets too sick to work, are tended to. There is a broad consensus that people who cannot depend on themselves for food, shelter, and medical care should depend on the government, concerns about republican citizenship notwithstanding.

But note: This is not what Obamacare does. Its disincentives to work are not geared toward the sick, the elderly, the disabled, but toward working-age, able-bodied adults. These are people who can work, but who will choose to substitute governmental dependence for self-reliance. This runs contrary to the broad consensus about the appropriate boundaries of the welfare state.

Who is to say that some coalition will not gain control of the government to leverage the Obamacare clients for their own political gain, just as the Gilded Age Republicans did with the Civil War vets? And, should that happen, how can these people be expected to do their duty as citizens to stand up for the public good? It is worth noting that the Republican regime of pension benefits, protective tariffs, and the gold standard did not fall apart until after most of the vets had passed away.

On any given policy question, it is easy nowadays to overlook the civic implications. We take our civil society for granted; we can hardly imagine our government turning against its own people, so we just assume that this republic we inherited will be here for generations to come. 

But the Founders understood better, and history shows us differently. Republican government is easier to philosophize about than to maintain. It requires, above all, an active, engaged, and independent citizenry that can be called upon to vindicate the public good when it is threatened by factional designs. While we admit of important exceptions to this principle, Obamacare nevertheless violates it by encouraging dependency among citizens. This is a dangerous development for a republic such as ours.

Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.

The latest bad healthcare idea (Bloomberg):  throw in a nice bag of weed in Washington or Colorado.  Make it cool or make it hurt...  Some "choice," there.

    Just as WE hear that quite a few Whatcom County citizens of all political stripes have lost their healthcare plans here, the Weekly Standard posted a short piece about a New York Times feature, that in the Big Apple elite Obamacare supporters are feeling "mugged by reality" as they lose their own health plans and access to doctors:

‘But What Is the Reality of It?’
William Kristol, Editor
December 30 - January 6, 2014, Vol. 19, No. 16

If you have a taste for Schadenfreude (and who doesn’t, especially in this holiday season?), you’ll enjoy Anemona Hartocollis’s article in the New York Times of December 14. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s health care plan. But now, to their surprise, thousands of writers, opera singers, music teachers, photographers, doctors, lawyers and others are learning that their health insurance plans are being canceled and they may have to pay more to get comparable coverage, if they can find it.

The article goes on to detail the Obamacare-induced travails of members of New York’s “creative classes” (a phrase the Times fails to put in quotation marks) and concludes:

“We are the Obama people,” said Camille Sweeney, a New York writer and member of the Authors Guild. Her insurance is being canceled, and she is dismayed that neither her pediatrician nor her general practitioner appears to be on the exchange plans. What to do has become a hot topic on Facebook and at dinner parties frequented by her fellow writers and artists.

“I’m for it,” she said. “But what is the reality of it?”

Ms. Sweeney’s statement-and-question says it all. It’s the voice of liberalism in the age of Obama. She’s for Obamacare, but didn’t know what it was. Now, Ms. Sweeney realizes (sort of) that she’s been mugged by reality. But she’s not quite ready to come to grips with reality. She’s not quite ready to press charges against Obama, or against liberalism.

But at least she’s asking a reality-based question.

In 2014, it’s the job of conservatism, and of the Republican party, to answer Ms. Sweeney’s question. It’s the job of conservatives and Republicans to explain the reality of Obamacare—that it’s bad for health care, bad for jobs, and bad for freedom. It’s the job of conservatives and Republicans to offer escapes from Obamacare, to the extent possible (see the piece by Jeffrey H. Anderson and Spencer Cowan in this issue). It’s the job of conservatives and Republicans to set forth workable alternatives to Obamacare for the future, as Paul Ryan and others intend to do early in the new year.

And it’s the job of conservatives and Republicans to press charges. It’s their job to make the case against Obamacare on the broadest possible terms, as an example—as the example—of unintended-consequences-producing, rule-of-law-undermining, freedom-denying, big-government, liberal social-engineering. Obamacare embodies liberalism’s fatal conceit. It’s the job of conservatives and Republicans to make it liberalism’s fatal overreach.

So, to answer Ms. Sweeney’s question: The reality of it is that Obamacare is a disaster. And it’s a disaster because, as Margaret Thatcher put it, “The facts of life are conservative.”

If conservatives and Republicans can explain the facts of life in a language intelligible to contemporary Americans, the year 2014 could be an inflection point in the saga of modern American liberalism, modern American conservatism, and modern American politics. It could be a moment of genuine hope and positive change. Perhaps, to adapt a rhetorical flourish, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when the rise of the nanny state began to slow and our nation began to heal. It could be the moment when we regain our footing and find our way back to the always difficult but ultimately rewarding path of individual liberty, honorable self-government, and national greatness.

As you know, WE consider ourselves a local concern, but the Affordable Care Act is something that can cause big problems locally. ObamaCare has been promoted as a way to make health care affordable to everyone, but the true objective might be quite different. This article by Andrew C. McCarthy at National Review Online caught our eye. 

(Continue reading at National Review Online ...)

Over the weekend, the Bellingham Herald endorsed Rud Browne, Barry Buchanan, Ken Mann and Carl Weimer, saying (and WE quote) "[Kershner, Elenbaas, Knutzen and Luke] want government to "get out of the way" at a time when more is required."  (Emphasis ours.)

The Bellingham Herald has unwittingly made voters' choice dead simple.

If you want your life here to be governed more, vote for Browne, Buchanan, Mann and Weimer.

If you want this area's government to have tangible limits, vote for Kershner, Elenbaas, Knutzen and Luke.

The rhetorical goal was, as always, the mobilization of partisan bias:  to identify restraint as outside the mainstream.

Allow us to share one basic principle about government:  Up to a certain point, government services actually do provide more freedom and self-determination when they're carefully contained. Government work that serves essential needs more efficiently than we could meet them alone allows us to attend to our own endeavors without being unduly or unjustly burdened. But beyond that point, government crosses the line to burdensome and oppressive governance. Instead of leaving us free to mind our own business, government starts sticking its nose into our business. WE believe government crossed into the realm of oppressive governance a long time ago.

There have always been loopy blue laws, but WE thought the nation got past most some time ago. Alas, the lust to rule seems like a hiccup in human nature.  Take a trip to the Nanny State and explore how easily good intentions slip to petty tyranny, and "nudge" becomes "shove."  The appetites of some to govern is a wonder to behold.

If personal and civil liberty mean little to you, and the thought of a ballooning local bureaucratic state seems safe - well, you know who to vote for.  The Herald told you so.

Could this problem be solved with more freedom, instead of less? ~ Penn Jillette

   Breitbart.com posted this some months ago, but by all accounts Bono's still walking this talk:

BONO SEES THE LIGHT - APPLAUDS CAPITALISM

Capitalism is no longer a four-letter word for U2 frontman Bono.The Irish rocker told a tech conference in Dublin last week he has a new appreciation for open markets thanks to his charitable work co-founding the One campaign, a movement to end disease and hunger in Africa.

[Bono] said it had been “a humbling thing for me” to realize the importance of capitalism and entrepreneurialism in philanthropy, particularly as someone who “got into this as a righteous anger activist with all the cliches.”

“Job creators and innovators are just the key, and aid is just a bridge,” he told an audience of 200 leading technology entrepreneurs and investors at the F.ounders tech conference in Dublin. “We see it as startup money, investment in new countries. A humbling thing was to learn the role of commerce.”

Bono also shared why he leans on enlightened minds from both the Left and the Right for his charitable missions.

“People go, ‘Huh? Why?’” said Bono. “Our single idea is that normally these issues we fret about, which are seen as left-wing subject matter, we figure, ‘Why divide our audience in half?’ So we work with left and right.”

* * *

Why bring it up?  There are a number of new "get a grip!" efforts underway in Whatcom County, including the sparkling new whatcomworks.com website that's chock full of practical information.  "Conservatism" or "preservatism" is pretty rad nowadays, compared to chicken-little sustainability mentality.  Maybe there's hope after all that citizens will wake-up to the sheer creepiness of the "descent" movement which continues to lurk darkly under the cover of the word conservation.

The local Whatcom Tea Party got its start in 2009 as the "Bellingham Tea Party," then it grew and expanded county-wide.  It's just updated its website with a new look and format.  Their web address, if you want to check this out, is still whatcomteaparty.org.

This update is news?  Well, in a way, yes.  What's newsworthy is seeing that liberty continues to ring modern despite efforts to diminish and quash the movement.  Perhaps you missed the recent hearings in D.C. about the IRS asking "are you now of have you ever been" questions of patriotic groups.  That was followed by the irritating news that the NSA has been mining masses of domestic phone and bank metadata.  Closer to home, many have been chaffed by this county's being a testing ground for some of the most oppressive regulations in the state - often framed as "more than necessary" and voluntary.

Despite the growing bureaucracy's heavy handed policies into ag and woody rural areas, the joyful rural body politic of self-reliance and individualism lives on. Four years since the campaign began, tens of thousands of "We The People" signs stand fresh, with more popping up every day.  Hope for justice and reason  springs eternal.

As for the website update, WE were pleased to see that the following  short feature remains on the tea party's home page:

WE concur.  Rights are so fundamental to our being they can't be taken, but they're vulnerable to battery and denial. The big question that bureaucrats pursue is, "What rights can be bent to achieve the greater good?"  As it's an election year, ask candidates questions about crossing the line if you can.  They may just blink at you, but ask.  The tea party's site is a good place to bone up on the basics;  check it out.  It's relevant.

WE don't know if the Herald will share this message, so here you go.  (Do check out that list if you can.  Look at the major hits on services to the elderly, medical services, architecture and engineering, computer businesses, publishing, finance, accounting ... leaving few unscathed all the way down to teensie businesses.  All this to feed rivers of grant money, hand over fist, into preferred programs.)