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John Fund reports how easy voter fraud can be and how difficult it will be to get Dem office holders to enforce the law.
Liberals who oppose efforts to prevent voter fraud claim that there is no fraud — or at least not any that involves voting in person at the polls.
But New York City’s watchdog Department of Investigations has just provided the latest evidence of how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost undetectable. DOI undercover agents showed up at 63 polling places last fall and pretended to be voters who should have been turned away by election officials; the agents assumed the names of individuals who had died or moved out of town, or who were sitting in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to vote. Those who did vote cast only a write-in vote for a “John Test” so as to not affect the outcome of any contest. DOI published its findings two weeks ago in a searing 70-page report accusing the city’s Board of Elections of incompetence, waste, nepotism, and lax procedures.
The Board of Elections, which has a $750 million annual budget and a work force of 350 people, reacted in classic bureaucratic fashion, which prompted one city paper to deride it as “a 21st-century survivor of Boss Tweed–style politics.” The Board approved a resolution referring the DOI’s investigators for prosecution. It also asked the state’s attorney general to determine whether DOI had violated the civil rights of voters who had moved or are felons, and it sent a letter of complaint to Mayor Bill de Blasio. Normally, I wouldn’t think de Blasio would give the BOE the time of day, but New York’s new mayor has long been a close ally of former leaders of ACORN, the now-disgraced “community organizing” group that saw its employees convicted of voter-registration fraud all over the country during and after the 2008 election.
Greg Soumas, president of New York’s BOE, offered a justification for calling in the prosecutors: “If something was done in an untoward fashion, it was only done by DOI. We [are] unaware of any color of authority on the part of [DOI] to vote in the identity of any person other than themselves — and our reading of the election law is that such an act constitutes a felony.” The Board is bipartisan, and all but two of its members voted with Soumas. The sole exceptions were Democrat Jose Araujo, who abstained because the DOI report implicated him in hiring his wife and sister-and-law for Board jobs, and Republican Simon Shamoun.
Good-government groups are gobsmacked at Soumas’s refusal to smell the stench of corruption in his patronage-riddled empire. …
Richard Epstein posts on how Dems kill jobs.
The latest government labor report indicates that job growth has slowed once again. It is now at a three-year low, with only an estimated 74,000 new jobs added this past month. To be sure, the nominal unemployment rate dropped to 6.7 percent, but as experts on both the left and the right have noted, the only reason for this “improvement” is the decline of labor force participation, which is at the lowest level since 1978, with little prospect of any short-term improvement.
The Economic Logic of Supply and Demand
One might think that these figures would be taken as evidence that a radical change in course is needed to boost labor market participation. The grounds for that revision rest on a straightforward application of the fundamental economic law of demand: As the cost of labor increases, the demand for labor will decrease. There are, of course, empirical disputes as to just how rapidly wage increases will reduce that demand for labor.
The federal government has apparently (and foolishly) assumed that these effects will be small, and that the unemployed can somehow be better helped by government interventions into the labor markets. However, only a free market in labor is able to balance changes in both supply and demand, so as to reduce the incidence of unemployment. Government efforts to impose various minimum wages will, happily, have little adverse effect if the market wage is greater than the government mandate. But the same form of increase could have devastating effects on labor markets when the required wage is set too high relative to market wages. The number of workers eager to take jobs at these higher levels will be great, but the number of jobs available at that wage level will shrink. Unemployment levels will increase, and working off the books could increase.
The correct policy choice is strong deregulation of labor markets, which will spur higher labor market participation, albeit at somewhat lower wages. But once people get into the labor force, they can hone their skills in ways that will allow them to command higher wages. Government mandates can never lead to sustainable wage increases. Higher levels of labor productivity can. …
Bret Stephens has a good take on the Gates book.
There are evangelizers who prefer the company of the heathen and prudes known to spend their nights in strip clubs—presumably to keep a watchful and warning eye on the ways of the wicked.
And then there is Robert Gates in Washington.
The former defense secretary devoted most of his adult life to climbing the structures of power in Washington, D.C. He was deputy CIA director under Ronald Reagan and CIA director under George H.W. Bush. He then served at the Pentagon for 4½ years under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama —holding the job longer than all but four of his predecessors. He was retired with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Now he wants you to know he was offended, irritated, enraged, scandalized, “too old for this $%*&,” and just plain itching to quit nearly every day he spent at the top. …
… Deep in the book Mr. Gates writes that “A favorite saying of mine is ‘Never miss a good chance to shut up.’” His memoir is one big missed chance.
And Jonathan Tobin says the timing of the book helped the president.
President Obama earned some civility points yesterday by refusing to fire back at Robert Gates after the former secretary of defense disparaged aspects of his leadership style as well as taking shots at Vice President Biden and Hillary Clinton in his new memoir. While Obama admitted he was “irked” by the timing of the publication of the book, he praised the former secretary as an “outstanding” cabinet member and friend. Though Democrats were blasting Gates for writing a book that was mined for negatives quotes about their two leading presidential contenders in 2016, even a Republican like John McCain said that he should have waited until the administration he served was out of office before writing a memoir. …
… Though some of the book doesn’t do much to make the president and his colleagues look good on some points, by waiting until Obama was safely re-elected before coming clean about Obama’s war leadership, Gates did his former boss a huge favor and the voters a disservice. …