Your Tax Dollars At Work

Jayson at Polipundit has a good summary of what this year's Congress actually accomplished. A lot more than I thought. And a quick look at what the future holds:

If the (non-voting) conservative “base” manages to avoid defeating its own causes in Nov. 2006 (always an open question), the GOP will be able to deliver another 10-15 reform measures next Congress, along with two additional sets of conservative appeals jurists. Regarding the latter point, keep in mind conservatives already own the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals (which contains Texas), the 11th Circuit (Florida), and the D.C. Circuit (the second-most-important federal court in the nation). Conservatives also dominate five other appeals courts: the 4th Circuit (Virginia and North Carolina), the 6th Circuit (Ohio and Michigan), the 7th Circuit (Illinois), the 8th Circuit (the Mid-West), and the 10th Circuit (the Mountain States).

If the Democrats are intent on running a campaign founded on "Put us in charge and we'll impeach Bush" this year then we've got a lot to look forward to.

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It's Official: No Free Boners For Grandpa

Last summer I pointed out that this was coming down the pike, so I get to use the post title again. The story: Congress Pulls Plug On Viagra Subsidies.

The Senate on Wednesday passed without debate and sent to the president legislation that ends Medicare and Medicaid payments for erectile dysfunction drugs as part of a package that extends medical help for the poor and provides unemployment benefit aid to states hit by Hurricane Katrina.

As I said back then: sorry old man, but you're not paying for that little blue pill on my dime.

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Pork-Whacking!! Go, Tom, Go!!

Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn is on the floor of the Senate right now introducing a slew of amendments that would slice away many wasteful projects in the recent Transportation bill.

Club For Growth is blogging his speech.

This is major, folks. And it's causing a huge commotion in D.C. as it is attracting bipartisan support on one side and strong opposition on the other. Coburn's most famous target is the Alaskan "Bridge To Nowhere" but there are many others. Passage of even one of these amendments sets precedent that makes no pet project safe on Capitol Hill.

Stay tuned...

UPDATE: 2:35pm
WA Sen. Patty Murray threatens Senators who vote for the Coburn Amendment. Dum...Dum...DUMMMMMMM!

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Quantifying Poverty: The "Broken Yardstick"

Nicholas Eberstadt has on op-ed in the NYT that looks at the outdated way the Federal Govt. defines "poverty rate". The untold story, of course, is the fact that the Johnson Administration began the so-called "War on Poverty" in 1965 and, forty years and $3 Billion later, Poverty won. An objective analysis of these policies shows what an utter failure they have been.

The Census Bureau's lastest poverty rate estimates released on Aug. 30 determined that the percentage of Americans living in poverty was 12.7% compared to 11.2% in 1974. The problem is that the standards being applied were created in 1974 and don't take into consideration changes in economic trends or standard of living. For example:

The unemployment rate is lower, and the percentage of adults with paying jobs is distinctly higher. Thirty years ago, the proportion of adults without a high school diploma was more than twice as high as today (39 percent versus 16 percent). And antipoverty spending is vastly higher today than in 1974, even after inflation adjustments.

In the face of such evidence, what do you call an indicator that stubbornly insists that the percentage of Americans below a fixed poverty threshold has increased? How about "a broken compass?"

Sometime late in July, I received the very Census form on which this study is based. It was very tedious to fill out for a family of five persons but, after several prodding phone calls from the Census Bureau, I managed to complete it and return it in time for the August 25th deadline. The questions were focused on employment, household income, and home ownership. Here are some of the questions that the form did not ask me:

- How many cars I owned
- What is my weekly/monthly grocery bill estimate and do I belong to any warehouse/wholesale outlets, like Costco or Sam's Club
- How much do I estimate that I spend on entertainment
- How many televisions do I own and do I subscribe to cable or pay TV service
- Do I own a DVD player
- Do I pay for special education services for my dependents
- Have I taken any vacations in the last year and what are the cost estimates for them

I could go on and on, but the bottom line is that the answers to such questions would go a long way to determining my standard of living. I define "poor" as being barely able to meet the minimum standard of living - food, shelter, clothing, etc.

As Eberstadt explains:

The poverty rate is out of step with all these other readings about deprivation in modern America because it was designed to measure the wrong thing. The poverty rate has always been derived from reported household income. (Exigency played a role here: at the start of the war on poverty 40 years ago, those income numbers were already available from the Census Bureau.) But a better gauge of a household's material deprivation is not what it earns, but what it spends. When we look at spending patterns, we immediately see a huge discrepancy between reported incomes and reported expenditures for low-income Americans.

Hey, I'm no Rockefeller (or Kerry or Kennedy for that matter) and I have to make hard choices all the time between what I want and what I really need. But I can personally attest to the fact that the gauge that the Federal Government uses to quantify "poverty rate" is - in the words of Eberstadt - the "single worst measure in our government's statistical arsenal".

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