John Stossel - Train Wreck Ahead
Most Americans — even those who are legislators — know very little about the details of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, so-called Obamacare. Next year, when it goes into effect, we will learn the hard way.
John Stossel: Bitcoins
Green Tyranny by John Stossel
Environmental activists and politicians would like you to think that we must love their regulations — or hate trees and animals.
I love trees and animals.
But you can love nature and still hate the tyranny that environmental regulations bring.
The Environmental Protection Agency just announced it will boost gas prices (“only” a penny, although industry says 6 to 9 cents) to make another minuscule improvement to air quality.
In New York City, my mayor wants to ban Styrofoam cups, saying, “I think it’s something we can do without.”
Congress already dictates the design of our cars, toilets and light bulbs.
Originally, environmental rules were a good thing. I love the free market, but it doesn’t offer a practical remedy to pollution. I could sue polluters for violating my property rights, but under our legal system, that’s not even close to practical.
So in the ’70s, government passed rules that demanded we stop polluting the air and water. Industry put scrubbers in smokestacks. Towns installed sewage treatment. Now the air is quite clean, and I can swim in the rivers around Manhattan.
But government didn’t stop there. Government never stops. Now that the air is cleaner, government spends even more than it spent to clean the air to subsidize feeble methods of energy production, like windmills and solar panels. Activists want even more spending. A few years back, the Center for American Progress announced they were upset that “Germany, Spain and China Are Seizing the Energy Opportunity … the United States Risks Getting Left Behind.”
In this case, we’re better off “left behind.” After spending billions, those European governments made no breakthroughs, and now they’re cutting back.
The Endangered Species Act was another noble idea. We all want to save polar bears. But now the bureaucrats make it almost impossible for some people to improve their own property.
Frack to the Future by John Stossel
FrackNation director Phelim McAleer tried to confront Gasland director Josh Fox about this, but Fox wouldn’t answer his questions. Instead, he demanded to know whom McAleer works for. He also turned down my invitations to publicly debate fracking. Many activists don’t like to answer questions that don’t fit their narrative.
Even some homeowners who filed a lawsuit claiming that their water was poisoned by fracking weren’t happy to learn that their water is safe. I’d think they would be delighted, but FrackNation shows a couple reacting with outrage when environmental officials test their water and find it clean.
The real story on fracking, say scientists, is that the risks are small and the rewards immense. Fracking lowered the price of natural gas so much that Americans heat our homes for less, and manufacturing that once left America has returned. For those concerned about global warming, burning gas instead of oil or coal reduces CO2 emissions.
Skeptical Environmentalist author Bjorn Lomborg points out that “green” Europe promised to reduce emissions, but “only managed to cut half of what you guys accidentally happened to do when you stumbled on fracking.”
Still, the process sounds dangerous. It requires chemicals and explosions. So fracking is now scapegoated for the usual litany of things that peasants feared when threatened with curses centuries ago: livestock dying, bad crop yields, children born with deformities.
None of it is backed by scientific evidence. Even environmentalists who usually are too cautious (by my standards) see little danger. President Obama’s first EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, told Congress that the EPA cannot show “that the fracking process has caused chemicals to enter groundwater.”
One of the more outlandish fears is that fracking will cause earthquakes. Silly people at MSNBC say fracking creates “a skyrocketing number of earthquakes.” Yes, cracking rocks does cause vibrations. But then, so does construction with dynamite or jackhammers — not to mention trucks on the highway.
Time and again, as humans make a good-faith effort to find new, cleaner ways to produce the energy a growing population needs, environmentalists find a reason — often very small or non-existent — that makes the new method unacceptable.
They say coal is dirty and normal oil production might overheat the planet. Hydroelectric dams kill fish. Nuclear plants could suffer meltdowns. Windmills kill birds.
Some won’t be happy unless we go back to what we did before industrialization: burn lots of trees and die young.
Nothing is completely risk-free. Companies make mistakes. Chemical spills happen.
But those risks are manageable. They are also far preferable to the risk of paying more for energy — thereby killing opportunities for the poor.
So far, most regulators outside New York, Maryland and Vermont have ignored the silly people. So thanks to fracking, Americans pay less for heat (and everything else), the economy is helped, new jobs get created, we create less greenhouse gas, and for the first time since the 19th century, America may become a net exporter of energy.
Good things happen if the silly people can’t convince all politicians to ban progress.
To Government, Every Penny Is Sacred by John Stossel
President Obama has new priorities. That means new spending.
In his State of the Union, he said, “The American people don’t expect government to solve every problem.” But then he went on to list how, under his guidance, government will solve a thousand problems, including some (like climate change and a loss of manufacturing jobs) that are probably not even problems.
The president bragged about creating “our first manufacturing innovation institute” in Ohio and says that he will create 15 more. Politicians claim actions like this are needed to solve the “decline of manufacturing” in America. John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Pat Buchanan also fret about this. But what they call “decline” is myth. There is no decline in manufacturing.
The Federal Reserve says that U.S. manufacturing output is up from 2000, and up almost 50 percent from 1990. Yes, manufacturing employment is down because automation and government’s labor rules led companies to automate and produce more with fewer employees, but that’s OK.
Manufacturing jobs are no better than other jobs. Few parents today prefer their children work in factories rather than offices.
When the need for people in one type of industry decreases — say, making wagon wheels — they are freed up to work in other areas. What America needs is a flexible economy that provides new jobs. For years, we had that.
Workers who lost factory jobs found new work in the fast-growing service industry. Creating software, movies and medical innovation is just as valuable as manufacturing and often more comfortable for workers. Anyway, politicians don’t know where new jobs will appear.
“Yet the president wants 15 ‘manufacturing hubs,’ which I guess will be like Solyndra cities,” lamented Deroy Murdock, one of three libertarian reporters who came on my show to react to our president’s plans.
Murdock’s right. Politicians should accept the fact that making things is something the market does pretty well on its own. This month, the Energy Department’s inspector general reports that, three years after being awarded a $150 million federal grant, a taxpayer-backed battery plant in Holland, Mich., has not produced a single battery. At one point, the company’s workers were paid to do nothing.
“Then we have a ‘college scorecard’ that Obama will bring,” said Murdock. “U.S. News & World Report updates which colleges do a good job, but (now) government will do that?”
Then came the president’s call for more spending on preschool.
“I am sympathetic to people wanting to shove their kids out the door,” joked Katherine Mangu-Ward, “but Head Start, our pilot program for universal preschool, has a not-great record. We spend $8 billion to get very, very little in terms of results. … We suck at education.”
Well, government does.
Sequester: Not Even a Cut by John Stossel
If you’re reading this, you’ve survived the “sequester” cuts!
That may surprise you, since President Obama likened the sequester to taking a “meat cleaver” to government, causing FBI agents to be furloughed, prosecutors to let criminals escape and medical research to grind to a halt!
The media hyped it, too. The NBC Nightly News said, “The sequester could cripple air travel, force firefighter layoffs — even kick preschoolers out of child care!”
The truth is that the terrifying sequester cuts weren’t even cuts. They were merely a small reduction in government’s planned increase in spending. A very small reduction.
After a decade, the federal government will simply spend about $4.6 trillion a year instead of $4.5 trillion (in 2012 dollars).
And still members of Congress, Republicans included, look for ways to delay the cuts, like spreading them out over 10 years instead of making any now. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., asked, “If we cannot do this little bit … how are we ever going to balance the budget?”
Actually, we don’t even need to balance the budget. If we just slowed the growth of government to 1 or 2 percent a year, we could grow our way out of unsustainable debt.
Paul recommends freezing hiring of federal workers, staying out of most foreign military conflicts and eliminating four Cabinet-level departments: Housing, Education, Energy and Commerce. Why do we even have a Commerce Department? Commerce just happens. The free market provides housing and energy. Education is funded by states.
Those Cabinet departments don’t exist just to help you. The housing budget funds vouchers that give people an incentive not to seek higher-paying jobs, plus advocacy groups and in a few cases even homes for the bureaucrats themselves.
Federal education spending pleases education bureaucrats and teachers unions but doesn’t raise kids’ test scores. Energy subsidies go to “green” crony capitalists like those who ran Solyndra. The Commerce Department awards taxpayer-funded trips to politically connected CEOs to promote their companies overseas.
We could cut still more departments. I’d start with the departments of Labor and Agriculture. Workers can labor and farmers can farm without federal help.
But the chances of bigger cuts — or tackling the biggest threat, Medicare — seem remote when government won’t even ditch budget items like these:
- —$140,000 to study pig feces in China.
- —$100,000 for a video game about aliens saving planets from climate change.
- —$88,000 for a comedy tour in India called “Make Chai, Not War.”
- —$55,000 to study immaturity and drinking.
Did those sound like jokes? They are all too real.
A Real State of the Union by John Stossel
We’ve heard another State of the Union speech, and my president said grand things like:
“Think about … a future where we’re in control of our own energy … I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China … I will not back down from protecting our kids from mercury poisoning …”
Actually, he said that in 2012. I write before this year’s speech, but he says basically the same thing every year: With more spending, government can fix everything.
But I have this dream — one where my president walks to the podium, and he instead says this:
I’m so happy I won again. Now that I don’t have to suck up to my base, I will be the grown-up in the room.
Yes, I know John Boehner claims I said, “We don’t have a spending problem.” Maybe I said that — I don’t remember. But we do have a spending problem.
Now that I’m concerned about my legacy, I looked at the numbers, and they are scary. I made so many promises that there’s no way we can pay for them.
Take climate change. I think it’s real and that man contributes, but even if America spent trillions to try to lower our carbon output, that would only make a microscopic change in world temperatures. The earth wouldn’t notice.
Some of my anti-poverty plans are worse. Now that I’ve been re-elected, it dawns on me that those programs I said need more investment — always more — well, they didn’t work. They perpetuate poverty by making Americans dependent.
The key to helping the poor — and being rich enough to adjust to things like climate change — is growth.
America grew fastest when government was tiny. Government at all levels was only about 8 percent of gross domestic product in 1912. In the hundred years prior to that, we made the Louisiana Purchase and settled the West. Americans went from subsistence-level farms to the highest standard of living on the planet.
Spending shot up during the world wars, but in peacetime it grew very little. Even the big boom in domestic spending during the New Deal resulted in government spending per person that was only about half what it is today — half — even as government went on to build dams, the interstate highway system and spacecraft. Spending was still only about $3,000 per person in today’s dollars.
Then came Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. We would cure poverty! Government grew so much that now, at all levels, it spends $20,000 per person per year.
But we didn’t cure poverty. Americans had been lifting themselves out of poverty — on their own — but when government stepped in, we stopped that progress. We encouraged people to be dependent. The poor stayed poor.
My friend Bill Clinton put us on a better track. He didn’t want to end welfare as we know it — Republicans forced him to make good on his promise — but I now must admit that welfare reform was a good thing. And during the Clinton administration, the economy grew, and we actually balanced the budget.
But then President Bush happened. He added social programs, hired 90,000 new regulators, created a whole new Cabinet-level department (for homeland security), and bailed out banks and automakers. Whew! Then I got elected, and we spent even more.
But now I look at the numbers and get dizzy. We’re eating our future!
So I then asked myself: What was so bad about spending in the Clinton years? He spent $2 trillion per year. That’s a lot. Why do we need to spend more? America doesn’t face greater challenges now than we did then. In many ways, we’re richer now, and life is easier. A government that spends $2 trillion is plenty big. So I announce today my intention to cut the size of the federal government nearly in half — back to Bill Clinton levels. That’s enough.
Oh, and about those drones? I just reread the Constitution, and it says I can’t just kill whomever I want. I’m going to start following the Constitution. I was a law school professor …”
I can dream, can’t I? Maybe President Obama will say that next year.
Ban This! Ban That! Ban This and That! by John Stossel
I like to bet on sports. Having a stake in the game, even if it’s just five bucks, makes it more exciting. I also like playing poker. “Unacceptable!” say politicians in much of America. “Gambling sometimes leads to ‘addiction,’ destitute families!”
Well, it can.
So politicians ban it. It’s why we no longer see a poker game in the back of bars. Half the states even ban poker between friends — though they rarely enforce that.
After banning things, politicians’ second favorite activity is granting special privileges to a few people who do those same things — so big casinos flourish, and most states run their own lotteries. Running lotteries is one of the more horrible things our governments do. The poor buy the most tickets, and states offer them terrible odds. The government entered the lottery business promising to end the “criminal numbers racket.” Now states do what the “criminals” did but offer much worse odds. Adding insult to their scam, politicians also spend our tax money promoting lotteries with disgusting commercials that trash hard work, implying that happiness comes from hedonism.
Hypocrisy.
Politicians also ban some medical innovations that might enhance athletes’ performances. Teams buy high-tech equipment to get better results. Doctors prescribe all sorts of special medications if an athlete is injured. Competitors try dubious vitamins and “natural” food supplements.
But they better not use steroids.
The public supports this ban, but they rarely think it through. Why are steroids bad but eye surgery OK? (Tiger Woods did that to improve his vision.) Athletes will constantly try new ways to maximize their strength and endurance. Why is government even involved?
Don’t get me wrong. If players promise not to use steroids but then use, that’s wrong. Lance Armstrong is despicable not because he injected drugs like testosterone or did blood-doping, but because he proclaimed that he didn’t, then did, then lied and bullied people, and threatened to sue them, to wreck their lives, for telling the truth. That’s evil. Steroids themselves are just another form of eye surgery or better shoes.
If the NFL or Tour de France or the Big Ten wants a no-steroid rule, fine. But in America, if an athlete uses steroids, it’s not just a violation of a private organization’s rules, it’s a federal issue. Congress has held nine — that’s right, nine — hearings on the “problem” of steroids in sports. The pols know that yelling at baseball stars will get the pols face time on TV. There they are, bravely solving America’s problems! But clumsy federal law doesn’t even stop the cheating.
Politicians blithely ban this and that — at the expense of their own constituents. Billions of dollars in banned Internet poker profits move offshore — to countries with sensible rules.
A final stupid sports ban: Connecticut and New York will not allow MMA, mixed martial arts competitions. This booming sport is called “mixed” martial arts because it’s more than just wrestling or judo or boxing, it’s … fighting. To win, one must excel at all martial arts. Yes, it’s violent, but so are boxing and football. Mixed martial arts is actually safer than boxing, because the athletes don’t spend 12 rounds getting hit on the head.
I can go to Madison Square Garden to watch boxers smash each other in the face. I can take little kids there to watch fake wrestling, which looks even more violent.
Obama Is Not King by John Stossel
Watching President Obama’s inaugural, I was confused. It looked like a new king was being crowned. Thousands cheered, like subjects worshipping nobility. At a time when America faces unsustainable debt and terrible economic troubles, why such pomp?
Maybe it’s because so many people tell themselves presidents can solve any problem, like fairy-tale kings — or gods.
Before America’s first inauguration, John Adams suggested George Washington be called “His Most Benign Highness.” Fortunately, Congress insisted on the more modest title, “President.”
At his inaugural, President Obama himself said, “The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few.”
But then Obama went on to say that his privileged few should force the rest of us to do a zillion things.
He said, “We must do these things, together.” But what “together” means to big-government folks is that they have a vision — and all of us, together, must go deeper into debt to pay for their vision, even if we disagree.
We can afford this, as the president apparently told John Boehner, because America does not have a spending problem.
But, of course, we do have a spending problem, and a debt problem, and the president knows this.
Just a few years ago, when George W. Bush was president, the Congressional Record shows that Senator Obama said this: “I rise, today, to talk about America’s debt problem. The fact that we are here to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure and our government’s reckless fiscal policies.”
Right!
Sen. Obama went on: “Over the past five years, our federal debt has increased from $3.5 trillion to $8.6 trillion — and yes, I said trillion with a ‘T’!”
Again, he was right to worry about the debt and right to call it “a hidden domestic enemy … robbing our families and our children and seniors of the retirement and health security they’ve counted on. … It took 42 presidents 224 years to run up only $1 trillion of foreign-held debt. This administration did more than that in just five years.”
It’s hard to believe that Obama chose those words just seven years ago, because now his administration has racked up another $6 trillion in debt.
It’s also a shock that Barack Obama believed this: “America has a debt problem. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”
Yet this year, he demanded Congress raise the debt limit without conditions.
I want the old Barack Obama back. He made sense. The new guy, he scares the heck out of me. Like a king, he assumes that the realm will be better if he can spend as he pleases.
He also issues executive orders when Congress doesn’t immediately do what he wants. To be fair, he isn’t the first president to do that. Or the worst.
John Stossel - Consumer Scare Tactics (by LibertyPen)
Ann Coulter and John Stossel debate over The War on Drugs
Personally idk where I stand on this issue. I myself have always been against drugs and I never got into that stuff unlike most younger people. Yet, I generally believe that one should be free to live his/her life however they see fit as long as it doesn’t hurt others.
At the same time, this is just one of those things that could have SERIOUS consequences if drugs are made more accessible. I’ve heard all the arguments about how it would lower crime but personally I’m not convinced. Let’s be honest here: Lots of these fuck ups are gonna form gangs and rob/mug/kill whether drugs are legal or not.
So yeah, idk where I stand on this issue. Some days I’m for legalizing, other days I’m for keeping them illegal.
Shopping Around for a Better Life by John Stossel
Thanks, California! Thanks for your monstrous spending and absurd regulatory overreach! America needs you. We need Connecticut and Illinois, too! We need you the way we needed the Soviet Union, as models of failure, to warn us what happens if we believe those who say, “Government can.”
Moving to California was once the dream for many Americans. Its population grew at almost triple the national average — until 1990. Then big government, in the form of endless regulation and taxes, killed much of the dream. In the last decade, 2 million people left California.
Many of them moved to Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington or Wyoming. More on what makes those states special in a moment.
When the USSR died, overthrown by its own citizens’ hatred of central planning, I assumed the world would acknowledge that big government is a nightmare. But people don’t. Our brains are programmed to believe that “next time, central planning will help.” So, many people forget the lesson of the USSR.
Fortunately, they can still watch what’s happening right now in California, Illinois and Connecticut. OK, those states are not totalitarian dictatorships, but they tax and micromanage so much that they will soon approach bankruptcy, cut services and stagnate.
And Americans have an advantage Soviet citizens never had: 50 states. If we live in a big-government state, we can move. I did.
I grew up in Illinois. It was nice enough (except in winter). But gradually its politicians gave away its future.
I moved to New York City, no political paradise, but where the big TV news jobs are. And maybe New York’s promises to unions won’t bankrupt us too soon.
I could always move again. I would still be smothered by federal rules, but at least I can move to a place with fewer onerous state rules.
A group called the Free State Project invites us to move to New Hampshire to help create “liberty in our lifetime.” It’s too early to see how that will work out, but that state now has a booming population of libertarians and anarchists. One even got elected to the state legislature after running against his own roommate, also a libertarian, whom he accused of not being anti-government enough.
Americans who want to escape state income taxes and live near better job prospects can move to one of those nine states that I mentioned above.
It’s no surprise they produce more jobs. Without an income tax, those states were forced to limit the growth of their governments, so they did. Every state has schools, social service programs, prisons, etc., but those states find a way to fund those things for less. Then they reap benefits.
John Stossel - Stupid in America (5/6/12)
A Man's Home Is His Subsidy by John Stossel
The Obama administration now proposes to spend millions more on handouts, despite ample evidence of their perverse effects.
Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, says, “The single most important thing HUD does is provide rental assistance to America’s most vulnerable families — and the Obama administration is proposing bold steps to meet their needs.” They always propose “bold steps.”
In this case, HUD wants to spend millions more to renew Section 8 housing vouchers that help poor people pay rent.
The Section 8 program ballooned during the ’90s to “solve” a previous government failure: crime-ridden public housing. Rent vouchers allow the feds to disperse tenants from failed projects into private residencies. There, poor people would learn good habits from middle-class people.
It was a reasonable idea. But, as always, there were unintended consequences.
“On paper, Section 8 seems like it should be successful,” says Donald Gobin, a Section 8 landlord in New Hampshire. “But unless tenants have some unusual fire in their belly, the program hinders upward mobility.”
Gobin complains that his tenants are allowed to use Section 8 subsides for an unlimited amount of time. There is no work requirement. Recipients can become comfortably dependent on government assistance.
In Gobin’s over 30 years of renting to Section 8 tenants, he has seen only one break free of the program. Most recipients stay on Section 8 their entire lives. They use it as a permanent crutch.
Government’s rules kill the incentive to succeed.
Section 8 handouts are meant to be generous enough that tenants may afford a home defined by HUD as decent, safe and sanitary. In its wisdom, the bureaucracy has ruled that “decent, safe and sanitary” may require subsidies as high as $2,200 per month. But because of that, Section 8 tenants often get to live in nicer places than those who pay their own way.
Kevin Spaulding is an MIT graduate in Boston who works long hours as an engineer, and struggles to cover his rent and student loans. Yet all around him, he says, he sees people who don’t work but live better than he does.
“It doesn’t seem right,” he says. “I work very hard but can only afford a lower-end apartment. There are nonworking people on my street who live in better places than I do because they are on Section 8.”
Spaulding understands why his neighbors don’t look for jobs. The subsidies are attractive — they cover 70 to 100 percent of rent and utilities. If Section 8 recipients accumulate money or start to make more, they lose their subsidy.
“Is there a real incentive for the tenants to go to work? No!” says Gobin. “They have a relatively nice house and do not have to pay for it.”
Once people are reliant on Section 8 assistance, many do everything in their power to keep it. Some game the system by working under the table so that they do not lose the subsidy. One of Gobin’s lifetime Section 8 tenants started a cooking website. She made considerable money from it, so she went to great lengths to hide the site from her case manager, running it under a different name.
John Stossel - No Regulation? No Problem
Regulation need not be provided by the government.
