Category Archives: News commentary

Walking through Portland airport recently, the Antiplanner noticed a sign from the Oregon Lottery claiming that 97 cents of every dollar paid for lottery tickets was “returned to Oregon.” As the Lottery’s web site says, “97 cents of every dollar played comes back to Oregon . . . money that goes to jobs, schools, parks and watersheds.”

That number sounded suspicious to me. If 97 cents is kept by the state, and no doubt some additional is used for administering the lotteries, where do they get the money to pay out lottery winners?

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The Oregonian says this is “disingenuous.” The Antiplanner calls it lying, also known as government on an ordinary day.

Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood, who has announced that he plans to leave office at the end of this year even if Obama is re-elected, is spending his last few months in office taking a tour of the United States. He has recently been to Hawaii (and Guam), and he plans to soon visit Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming, which will allow him to say he has been to 50 states.

Back in the 1970s, a man named Ronald Walker helped coordinate President Nixon’s famous visit to China. As a reward, Nixon offered him any job in the administration he wanted, and he asked to be director of the National Park Service. As director, all he did was tour national parks and float rivers, forcing Assistant Secretary of the Interior Nathanial Reed to do Walker’s job for him. As soon as possible after Nixon resigned the presidency, Reed replaced Walker with Gary Everhardt, a career Park Service employee.
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It looks like LaHood is pulling a Walker, at least for the last year of his lame-duck administration. There’s a reason why he hasn’t visited states like Wyoming and South Dakota during his term in office: they just aren’t places where federal transportation funding is a big issue. If he wants to visit those states, he should do it on his own time and his own dime.

Oregon has a 1 percent for art law requiring that one percent of all state construction funds be spent on art works. But that’s not enough for greedy Oregon artists, so they have proposed that Portland impose a $35 tax on every non-poverty-stricken resident over the age of 17 in the city that would be used for art. This is projected to generate $12 million a year for art.

The Antiplanner has no objection to people making art and other people buying it. I’ve purchased a variety of art pieces for my home. But what makes art so important that the government needs to tax everyone to make more?
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Some people might say, “It’s only $35 per person.” But, hey, I love trains and love to help restore old trains. For $12 million a year, I could fund a lot of rail restoration work. But just why should everyone else subsidize my hobby? If this measure passes, it will be just one more reason to anyone who actually works for a living to leave Portland.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker handily survived the recall attempt brought by public employees unions angered over his efforts to weaken their ability to negotiate for higher pay and benefits. This proves that Wisconsin isn’t Greece, the nation whose residents violently object to similar reductions in public sector pay and benefits even as the country is going bankrupt.

Fiscal conservatives can take heart from this, but they shouldn’t learn the wrong lesson. That lesson (the wrong one, that is) would be that, once they take power, they can do whatever they feel is needed without regard to the political consequences. As the Antiplanner has previously noted, Walker’s strategy of reducing spending was fine, but his tactic of taking the unions head on was unnecessarily polarizing.

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In Oregon’s primary election this past Tuesday, Andy Stahl, who frequently comments on this blog, lost his bid to become Lane County (Oregon) commissioner. It is hard for me to tell this story, as I am one of the reasons he lost.

His opponent was Pete Sorenson, a four-term incumbent. I’ve known Pete for about as long as I’ve known Andy (meaning 35 years), and while I can’t say we were friends, we were always friendly. In the late 1970s he worked for Oregon Congressman Jim Weaver and I worked (as a very low-paid consultant) for the Oregon Wilderness Coalition (now Oregon Wild) helping Weaver’s staff justify their boss’s support for wilderness even though he represented the congressional district that cut more national forest timber than any other.

In the early 1980s, Sorenson went to the University of Oregon law school, and I frequently saw him on campus when I was studying economics. Over the next several decades, we would meet at conferences or bump into each other in Eugene and exchange war stories about various environmental issues. When I started proposing free-market reforms of the Forest Service in the late 1980s, he always listened politely and expressed sympathy with my growing fiscal conservatism.

Recently, however, Pete got in trouble over Oregon’s open meetings law. Apparently, he and one or two other county commissioners conspired to make certain budgetary decisions in private against the advice of the county attorney. In a sharply worded decision, an Oregon judge found that Pete and another commissioner “willfully violated” the law, though he found the third commissioner innocent. Neither of the guilty commissioners ever expressed any contrition or remorse, instead insisting they were being persecuted as the most liberal members of the commission.

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When a president takes a stand on a highly controversial issue like gay marriage in an election year, you know he is doing it solely to motivate his base. How so? The job of the president has nothing to do with who can and cannot get married, so in announcing that he supports gay marriage, President Obama is not announcing that he will or can actually do anything about it.

The Antiplanner thinks of gay marriage as one of three litmus sets for whether someone is a libertarian. Are you fiscally conservative but you support gay marriage and drug decriminalization? Then you are libertarian. Some libertarians disagree with one another on other issues such as abortion, immigration, and the war on terror. But I don’t think anyone would call themselves libertarians if they opposed gay marriage or drug decriminalization.

Drug decriminalization–especially for minor drugs like marijuana–is also supported by most of those on the left. Here is an issue the president can actually do something about, as he commands numerous agencies–the FBI, BATF, DEA, etc.–that enforce federal drug laws. At the very least, he can order those agencies to respect state laws in states that have legalized medical marijuana.

Yet Obama has “massively escalated the federal government’s attacks on medical marijuana businesses,” says the director of the Marijuana Policy Project in the Washington Post. His administration has ramped up the war on pot in Colorado despite the fact that even most Republicans in Colorado support medical marijuana.

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