But there could be an even greater cost from the bill to millions of middle-class investors saving for their retirement or the education of their children. The bill has the Federal Housing Administration guarantee the refinancing of a mortgage in return from a “haircut” from the owners of the loan. The bill requires loans to be guranteed at no more than 90 percent of the value, meaning a 10 percent loss for investors. But this haircut will “shave” billions of dollars off from funds saved for retirement or education.

This bill not only “robs Peter to Pay Paul,” through taxpayers bailout of bad loans by banks and borrowers. It can also be said to “abrogate Paul’s contract to Peter.” This is because many of the mortgages often aren’t owned by the banks that service them, but frequently by millions of middle class investors through their interests in entitities that have mortgage-backed securities (MBS).

Many middle-class folks who have 401(k) accounts, mutual funds, money market funds or defined-benefit pensions are indirect holders of MBS. In fact, according to investment bank Credit Suisse, 14 percent of MBS are owned by pensions and mutual funds that serve middle-class savers.

So, let’s do some math. The bill authorizes the FHA to guarantee up to $300 billion in mortgages. With the 10 percent haircut, the loans were originally worth $333 billion. So $33 billion represents the potential lost savings by the private sector. Now assume a random 14 percent of the loans in this program represent those owned by pensions and mutual funds. 14 percent of $33 billion is $4.6 billion.

The bottom line is that middle-class savers and investors could be left with almost $5 billion less for retirement and education of their children. Another compelling reason this bailout is not worth the cost.

The sputtering economy has caused an increase in prices of many staples including gasoline, rice, ice cream, even beer. Now some lawmakers in New Jersey are considering taking food taxes a step further and install a proverbial “sin” tax on fast food.

Yes, the idea of marking up your favorite fast food burger or pack of fries is actually being tossed around, and it’s not settling well with many residents.

“They’re taxing everything. Now you’re gonna tax fast food? That’s crazy,” said Newark resident Miriam Robertson.

This proposal shows how government naturally begets government.  Provide health care, so every unhealthy private action suddenly becomes a matter of public concern.  Money must be raised, creating an opportunity punish the irresponsible.  Taxation naturally becomes social engineering.

CPS workers have an incentive to seize children, since the federal government gives states incentives for seizing and adopting out children, and CPS workers are more likely to be fired for failing to prevent child abuse than for wrongly seizing children, even if the seizure itself causes the child devastating psychological harm.

I wrote earlier about how temporary seizures of infants based on erroneous accusations later found to be false can become permanent, when courts rule that the infant has become attached to her foster family and thus should not be returned even if the alleged abuse that led to the seizure did not actually occur.   I also discussed the violation of due process involved in the mass seizures of children in the strange FLDS religious sect, hundreds of whom were seized based on a single, anonymous, allegation of abuse by a caller pretending to be a teenager in the sect, and who continue to be held without any hearing on whether they individually are endangered (although the removal of some of the children might well be warranted if it occurred after a full judicial hearing).

Reports the Economist:

The problem with this, say Scott Adams and Chad Cotti, economists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is that smoking bans seem to have been followed by an increase in drunk-driving and in fatal accidents involving alcohol. In research published in the Journal of Public Economics, the authors find evidence that smokers are driving farther to places where smoking in bars is allowed.

The researchers analysed data from 120 American counties, 20 of which had banned smoking. They found a smoking ban increased fatal alcohol-related car accidents by 13% in a typical county containing 680,000 people. This is the equivalent of 2.5 fatal accidents (equivalent to approximately six deaths). Furthermore, drunk-driving smokers have not changed their ways over time. In areas where the ban has been in place for longer than 18 months, the increased accident rate is 19%.

The findings, say the pair, are consistent with the suggestion that smokers are driving farther to alternative places to drink. This may be because they are driving to bars with outdoor seating, or to bars which are not enforcing the smoking ban.

Another explanation is that some smokers are “jurisdiction shopping” to places where they may puff. Accident rates can be especially high where border-hopping to still-smoky bars is possible. Accidents in Delaware county in Pennsylvania increased by 26% after the next-door state of Delaware introduced a smoking ban in 2002. Similarly, when Boulder county banned smoking, fatal accidents in Jefferson county, between Boulder county and Denver, went up by 40%. How this weighs up against the long-term health effects of smoking bans is unclear. But it serves as a warning to well-meaning legislators.

Makes you wonder what government is going to do for an encore!
 

Taking an infant away from its mother can be very damaging to the infant.  (For example, my daughter, a very finicky eater, will not let anybody other than my wife or me feed her, and she usually only lets me feed her if it’s early in the morning.  We have to work diligently to get her to eat enough).  That’s especially true for nursing infants.

Being placed in foster care can be cause devastating psychological harm to a young child, as Judge Kleinfeld noted in Doe v. Lebbos.

Moreover, erroneous child abuse charges can have legally permanent, irrevocable consequences that devastate a family.  In Arlington County, Virginia, parents proved themselves innocent of a false, anonymous charge that they were starving their child (who was actually at her proper weight when CPS workers snatched her), but the judge later refused to return the child to them, permanently cutting off their parental rights based heavily on his conclusion that the child — seized as a newborn — had developed a bond with her foster parents as a result of being snatched.  (That ruling is on appeal).

Federal law provides financial incentives for CPS agencies to seize and adopt out children, which may lead to overzealous child-snatching.

Reports the Sunday Times:

THEIR high-pitched skirl has put fear into the hearts of Scotland’s enemies and sent sensitive tourists reaching for the cotton wool.

Now, however, the bagpipes are to be quietened by an edict from Brussels.

From this month, pipers must adhere to strict volume limits or risk breaking European Union health and safety laws. Bands have been ordered to tone down or wear earplugs to limit noise exposure to 85 decibels.

Typically, a pipe band played at full volume peaks at 122 decibels outdoors, noisier than the sound of either a nightclub or a chainsaw, which rises to 116 decibels.

The prospect of more subdued bagpipes will be welcomed by some, but musicians have warned performances will suffer.

Pipe majors claim it is virtually impossible to play quietly or to tune a band when the musicians are wearing earplugs, raising the prospect of a cacophony at showcase events such as the Edinburgh military tattoo.

The rules in effect limit practice without earplugs to about 15 minutes a day.

While piping schools have begun issuing students with hearing protectors, pipe majors are preparing to make a stand.

Ian Hughes, head of the RAF Leuchars band at an airbase in Fife, claimed the new legislation in effect outlawed bagpipe playing for the first time in more than 250 years.

The last time was after the Jacobite rising of 1745 and the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s clansmen at the battle of Culloden.

How did Europe survive the bagpipers over the last three centuries without the EU’s regulatory assistance?

It shows that if County social workers seize your baby, based on false allegations of neglect, and put your baby in foster care long enough, you might never get your child back, even if you prove yourself innocent, because the courts will say it’s in “the best interests of the child” that your baby stay with the foster parents he’s gotten used to living with.  (Taking that logic to its ultimate conclusion, a kidnapper who kidnapped a newborn from a hospital and then escaped prosecution on a technicality could keep the child, because the child would have bonded with the kidnapper by the time the kidnapper was apprehended).

That’s the gist of a recent Arlington, Virginia circuit court decision described in today’s Washington Examiner. County social workers took a baby away from her parents based largely on false, anonymous allegations that she was being starved, even though she was at her proper weight at the time they seized her from her parents.  And although those allegations were later ruled false by a CPS hearing officer, the judge permanently removed her from her parents anyway, claiming she had bonded with her new foster parents and thus might be traumatized if she were returned.  (He also cited evidence that her natural parents were not model parents, but that is not the test for terminating parental rights under the Supreme Court’s decision in Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1982).  If it were, millions of healthy children could be removed from their families by social workers).  Parents Nancy Hey and Christopher Slitor spent a staggering $350,000 in legal bills in their losing fight for their child.

I personally am worried about this court decision, even though I and my family have never been accused of child neglect or abuse, because my wife, at the suggestion of our pediatrician, called Arlington County social workers because our baby is extremely difficult to feed, and they then visited our house earlier this year.  (Our baby Sarah is 70th percentile in height and skull size, but only 10th percentile in weight).  I thought nothing of this visit at the time, since our baby is lively and healthy and has never been neglected or abused, and my wife is a good mother (who conscientiously cared for many children as a nanny, and helped raise her own nephew).  

Although the circuit court decision is apparently justified by the so-called “best interest of the child,” its long run effect is to harm children by discouraging even fit, non-abusive parents from seeking advice or information from doctors or social workers when their children have behaviors or injuries that might sometimes be associated with parental abuse or neglect.  Good parents will now worry about talking to doctors (who are required by state laws to report any possibility of abuse or neglect to social workers) or social workers lest it lead to unwarranted (and unreversible) seizures of a child by social workers. 

Parents already have to worry that if they take their child to the doctor, and reasonably disagree with the doctor’s preferred treatment, overzealous social workers will temporarily seize their child.  That’s what happened to Corissa Mueller, who took her baby daughter Taige to the doctor because the baby had a high temperature, and then had social workers temporarily seize the child after she rejected the doctor’s preferred treatment (a spinal tap) in favor of a reasonable alternative she felt posed fewer health risks.  (The Center for Individual Rights, my former law firm, is representing Mueller in a constitutional lawsuit against Idaho state social worker April Auker for her role in the seizure in Mueller v. Idaho.  A federal judge in Idaho refused to dismiss the lawsuit, citing a 1999 ruling in favor of parental rights by the federal appeals court in that region, the Ninth Circuit.)  Since conditions in foster care are often bad, even temporary seizures of a child can cause devastating emotional and psychological harm.

The Arlington County court ruling, now on appeal, radically increases the risk to parents of taking an injured, ill, or behaviorally-disordered child to a doctor, by allowing an erroneous temporary seizure of a child based on suspicions of abuse to become permanent merely because of the passage of time, even if the child turns out never to have been neglected or abused.  Arlington County seems to be moving towards the situation in some foreign countries like England, where children are removed permanently from their parents based on the most meager suspicions of abuse, fueled in part by the bounties that social workers and local governments receive for seizing children from their parents and then adopting them out.

Since it would be too much to ask that the disinformation tribe actually disband, we’ll hope for second best and wish The Junkman another successful twelve years.

Legislation to force institutions of higher learning in Maryland to create “cultural diversity” programs is making its way through the General Assembly with little opposition from lawmakers — who should be defending academic freedom, not crushing it. HB 905, which passed the House of Delegates 122-to-9, requires all colleges and universities that receive state aid to submit a yearly report on what they’ve done “to promote and enhance cultural diversity.” A companion bill sailed through the state Senate on an equally lopsided 41-6 vote.

The Examiner condemns this as an assault on academic freedom, noting that “all of Maryland’s institutions of higher learning, public and private, will be forced to bow before the same multicultural idol.”

The “diversity” requirement will probably end up enriching the worst kind of scam artists, the “diversity consultants” (like the notorious racist and race-baiter Glenn Singleton) who will now be hired by foolish college administrators to “promote” diversity. Diversity training often backfires on the institutions that hire diversity trainers, and sometimes even leads to discrimination and civil-rights lawsuits against those institutions, by both minority and white employees.