Seven Hundred Billion Dollars and xx/oo cents.
I can’t understand why it’s better for the U.S. taxpayer to buy more than two-thirds of a trillion dollars of bad debt, than to fill in the hole that the banks dug for themselves, with the banks still at the bottom of it. It’s clearly above my pay grade, but maybe a reader who didn’t drop economics in college can explain it to me.
I don’t know high finance, but I do know accountability. And this bill includes none:
Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
“What authority?”, you might well ask.
The Secretary is authorized to take such actions as the Secretary deems necessary to carry out the authorities in this Act. . . .
Where do I get one of those jobs where I have carte blanche to spend 700 billion dollars of someone else’s money “as I deem necessary” with absolutely no risk of prosecution?
Posted in
government teat,
immunity
In what some enterprising capitalist thought was a neat idea, Houston’s Federal Detention Center is no longer going to be used for pretrial detainees, but rather for people who have already been sentenced. In other words, instead of a detention center it’s going to be a prison. Smack dab in the heart of downtown Houston.
This shouldn’t come as any big shock to anyone who has watched our county government planting jails on prime downtown waterfront property. Where Bexar County San Antonio (Texas’s next most populous city) has the Riverwalk, with restaurants, bars, and commerce, we have a monument to incarceration.
Posted in
Houston Life,
government teat
Western Justice points out that the John R. Justice Prosecutors and Defenders Incentive Act of 2008 has been signed into law. I’m sure I’ve missed hoopla about this elsewhere, since there was lots of hoopla about it last May. Now that I have more than six readers, I’ll ask again the two multiple-choice questions that I asked then:
1. The people who decide where the money is spent in your jurisdiction know that the federal government is going to give every public defender a $12,000 annual subsidy. Do they a) raise defenders’ salaries nonetheless; b) keep defenders’ salaries where they are; or c) lower defenders’ salaries by $11,999, figuring that defenders were paid enough before and should be happy with a net $1 raise?
2. Having cut defenders’ salaries by $11,999, do the people who decide where public money is spent in your jurisdiction use it a) to feed the hungry and house the homeless; b) on hookers and crack for the monthly county commissioners’ retreat; or c) to buy AR-15s for the SWAT team and build a new jail, in order to prove their tough-on-crime credentials?
Almost anywhere in America, the correct answers are “c” and “c.” If you live in one of the exceptions, I’d love to know where it is.
Posted in
government teat,
public defenders
