Appearing on Fox News last night, Cato scholar Neal McCluskey weighed in on Obama’s upcoming address to students:

The Washington Post reports on the results of a survey of federal agencies on their hiring needs conducted by the Partnership for Public Service:

The federal government needs to hire more than 270,000 workers for ‘mission-critical’ jobs over the next three years… Mission-critical jobs are those positions identified by the agencies as being essential for carrying out their services. The study estimates that the federal government will need to hire nearly 600,000 people for all positions over President Obama’s four years — increasing the current workforce by nearly one-third.

Given the mind-set of most government managers I’ve encountered, I’m a little surprised they didn’t define all 600,000 as “mission critical.” But 270,000 or 600,000, that’s a lot more folks living at the expense of the economically productive class of people in this country called taxpayers.

According to the Post:

The nation’s unsettled economy and high unemployment rate may ease the government’s task, as workers turn to the federal sector for job security and good benefits.

As my colleague Chris Edwards has been pointing out, the average federal employee is doing quite well in comparison to the average private sector employee when it comes to compensation. See here, here, and here.

But here’s the line that made my skin crawl:

It [federal government] has to win the war for talent in order to win the multiple wars it’s fighting for the American people,’ said Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, the think tank that conducted the survey of 35 federal agencies, representing nearly 99 percent of the federal workforce.

I could be wrong but I don’t think Stier is referring to Afghanistan and Iraq, so what are these “wars” for the American people? Is he talking about the government’s counterproductive “war” on poverty? Its failed “war” on drugs? Its “war” on [insert societal ill here]? There’s a war going on alright: it’s the federal government’s war against the productive men and women out there who have the fruits of their efforts gobbled up by that Leviathan on the Potomac. The last thing the economy needs are the best and brightest this country has to offer wasting their abilities in some bureaucracy when they could be out starting businesses, creating new technologies, etc., etc. As Chris Edwards likes to point out, would we rather Bill Gates had put his talents to work at the U.S. Department of Commerce?

Heh, great photoshop work from the folks at the Voice for School Choice in SC.

The Houston District Attorney’s office has apparently sent out this notice:

Schools: If you have any information on someone who is attending a Houston County public school who either resides out of Houston County or out of their zone, please give us as much information as possible. Your contact information is not required; but, we will contact you if you desire. You may call 478.—.—- and leave a message or use our form below. All information provided is confidential.

Apple wants to sell more iPods. Facebook wants to sign up more members. In the free enterprise system, the incentives are aligned so that what’s good for consumers (access to things they want) is also good for producers. Not so in public schooling. Good public schools can’t get paid for serving kids outside their catchment area, so when folks try to escape lousy local schools by sneaking their kids into better ones, it actually hurts the better schools financially. So, rather than encouraging good schools to grow and take over bad ones, the status quo encourages good schools to stay as small as they can, and serve as few kids as they can. Great, huh?

Can we break up the monopoly now? Please?

A story in the Washington Post today is headlined: “Obama Would Keep $85 Billion in Tax Breaks for Working Poor.”

The “tax breaks” in question are expansions in the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. The Post story repeatedly calls the expansions “tax breaks” and “tax cuts.” The budget expert quoted in the story calls them “tax cuts,” and so does a House staffer and a spokesperson for the president.

But these are not tax cuts. They are expansions in the refundability of provisions in the tax code. That means that households that pay no federal income tax will receive larger welfare checks from the government under these Obama proposals.

Obama has proposed a slew of “tax cuts” that are partly welfare payments. The chart below shows the share of the 2010–2019 dollar values of these proposals that are actually increased federal spending, and not reductions in taxes. (Calculated from OMB’s May summary tables).

The Post reporter and the budget analyst quoted in the story are both fiscal experts, and they know that these “tax cuts” are not really tax cuts. But there is a growing problem in fiscal discussions that words are getting flipped upside down to mean the opposite of what a layman would understand them to mean. A classic example is how the dollar value of true tax cuts is nearly always referred to in news articles as a “cost” rather than a “saving.”

Steny Hoyer’s use of the phrase “paid for” in the health debate is another example of how Washington-speak is confusing the heck out of people.

I’ll be speaking for the Freedom and Free Societies Program at Cornell University next Thursday, September 10. Details here.

I’ll also be speaking at Vanderbilt and in Nashville on September 29. Details to come.

Earlier this week, the AFL-CIO, building upon a suggestion made last week in the UK, proposed that the federal government impose a 1/10 of 1 percent tax of all stock trades. The union group argues that such a tax would reduce non-productive speculative activity in the stock market.

First of all, we have all sorts of transfer taxes on housing, and yet we still had a housing bubble. So much for small taxes stopping speculative activity. If an investor expected to double his money, it seems quite a stretch to believe that such a small tax would discourage him.

More importantly, our recent financial crisis was not triggered by too much equity (like stocks) but by too much debt. In taxing stock transactions, we only add to the already favorable treatment of debt compared to equity, encouraging even greater leverage in our financial system.

The real purpose of this tax on speculation becomes apparent when the AFL-CIO suggests what the money should be used for…building new infrastructure that would require the hiring of unionized workers. The AFL-CIO should stop hiding behind the spin of stopping speculation and directly engage in the real debate: the massive size of our federal government and the unsustainable fiscal path we are on.