You may have heard that “PERA paints a rosy future” and that “PERA’s future is looking up” from the Denver Post, but I’m afraid it’s not that simple. (Incidentally, you may have heard other things of dubious nature from the Post). I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you ought to listen to what Independence Institute senior fellow and economist Barry Poulson has to say on the matter in the Colorado Springs Gazette. Barry writes that PERA may be the most troubled pension plan in the country. So no, it’s not “rosy” and it’s certainly not “looking up.”

As much as we taxpayers would love to believe that PERA’s fiscal house is in order, it’s not. The numbers don’t lie. Take this for example,

To pay off liabilities in the pension plan over a 30-year period, annual contributions to PERA would have to more than quadruple from the current 11.3 percent of payroll to 53.9 percent of payroll. There is no other pension plan in the country that imposes such a financial burden on future taxpayers. Every household in Colorado would have to pay $1,739 more in taxes annually, just to meet pension obligations.

Ouch. The picture isn’t so bright when you look at the full 30 year figures. However, you can almost avoid the impending disaster, if like the Post, you only look at the next decade. What’s more, those estimates take into account the reforms enacted in SB-1.  Then what are we to do? Barry suggests a “hard freeze.” A hard freeze will be relatively painful for public employees in the short term, but it may be the only option we have left before full implosion. As Barry concludes, we MUST tackle this problem now. It’s not going to get better on its own.

In the la la land of Washington, DC, the secret password has been “debt ceiling” for weeks now. The August 2nd deadline is fast approaching and talks of raising the roof (or ceiling if you prefer), are still raging on with no deal in sight. Because the two sides cannot come to an agreement, we’ve seen the art of the narrative played to perfection by the Obama administration. They’ve made it so that every time someone says the secret password (debt ceiling), they must also say “default” within one or two sentences. By ingraining this one-two punch into the minds of the public, the White House has successfully utilized the fear card. “You don’t want to let us borrow MORE money? How does the United States government defaulting sound to you?” Or, “You want to CUT spending at a time like this? You must want full economic armageddon!” …And so on according to the mainstream narrative.

This economically ignorant line has been parroted from every corner of every media outlet in existence. I dare you to browse the web or flip on your TV or radio and not hear someone say “debt ceiling” and “default” within 3 minutes. But at least we have our own paper of record, the Denver Post, to relieve us of this ignorance… right?

If the debt ceiling isn’t addressed by Aug. 2, there is a great chance that the United States of America, the richest country in the world, would default on its obligations.

NO! NO! STOP! Tell me that’s a typo. That’s gotta be a misprint right guys?

Of course it isn’t. It’s not a misprint, it’s Wednesday’s editorial. Where does a guy have to go to get some sanity around here? Isn’t it obvious that if the debt ceiling is not raised we’d prioritize paying our bills? Okay, so we can’t borrow any more money. Fine. How about we prioritize our debt payments at the top of list – as the first things we pay with the money we have. Then after that, we move on to the most essential functions of government. By the time we run out of money, we’ll have not funded some bottom of the barrel government bloat – like the latest green energy scam or some other wasteful corporate welfare. This is exactly the action that any normal person would take if faced with the same situation. We’d prioritize our obligations by importance and necessity, and when we finally got down to luxuries such as those sports tickets we wanted or that sweet cordless drill, guess what? We couldn’t buy it.

We wouldn’t just throw our hands up in the air say, “I guess I can’t eat now!”

For some much needed sanity on the issue, I found this article on the Mises Institute website titled, A Short History of US Credit Defaults. After going through some earlier defaults in our country’s history, it concludes with this passage about our current situation:

In this event, it is unlikely a default will occur. Historically, governments prioritize debt service above all other expenses. If the expansion of funds via debt becomes impossible, the Treasury will cease paying other expenses first, starting with “nonessential” discretionary expenditures, and then move on to mandatory expenditures and entitlements as a last resort. In extremis, what will happen is that all the losses will be foisted onto the Federal Reserve. The Fed holds something on the order of $1.6 trillion in debt issued by the Treasury of the United States. By having the Federal Reserve purchase blocks of Treasury debt and defaulting on these non-investor-held securities, the United States can postpone a default against real investors essentially forever.

Thank you to the Mises Institute and to anyone else who is not perpetuating this myth. Even better than not perpetuating this silly ignorance, would be to advance a better, more truthful narrative. How about this one?  How about we all jump on the “lower the debt ceiling” bandwagon! Take that!

1. Does anyone know of any polling data which has data on whether Americans who have favorable, or strongly favorable, views of Israel are more likely to support Second Amendment rights, own guns, etc.? I suspect that this is case for non-Jewish Americans. Even for American Jews (who tend to support Israel, and to favor gun control) it would not surprise me if Jewish gun-owners are more pro-Israel than non-owners.

Please supply data, and feel free to comment on data that has been supplied by other commenters. But don’t use the comments just to speculate.

2. From Edmund Burke’s Mar. 22, 1775, speech to Parliament:

Sir, during that state of things, Parliament was not idle. They attempted to subdue the fierce spirit of the Welsh by all sorts of rigorous laws. They prohibited by statute the sending all sorts of arms into Wales, as you prohibit by proclamation (with something more of doubt on the legality) the sending arms to America. They disarmed the Welsh by statute, as you attempted, (but still with more question on the legality) to disarm New England by an instruction. They made an Act to drag offenders from Wales into England for trial, as you have done (but with more hardship) with regard to America.

Does anyone know of good sources discussing the attempted disarmament of the Welsh, and whether it was successful?

Commenters: please stay on topic.

Hey, break out the handcuffs for this Friday’s episode of Devil’s Advocate as I am joined by Colorado State Public Defender Doug Wilson and Adams/Broomfield District Attorney Don Quick for a discussion on criminal justice related bills in the 2011 General Assembly and the ongoing work of the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile justice. That’s tomorrow night, 8:30 PM, on Colorado Public Television 12.

If you’ve got 2 minutes and want to learn about the real stories behind Douglas County’s innovative school voucher program, please watch this video. These stories are often overlooked by the mainstream media. Please share these stories with others. This program could save a child you know.

This December will be the tenth anniversary of the death of my daughter Parker.

I remember at the time wondering if there was even a glimmer of a chance that I could survive ten minutes, no less ten years into the future. Thanks to the kind hearts of more people than I could ever thank, I am still here.

Like so many people who didn’t have children, I thought I had a pretty good handle on the world. After becoming a parent I realized just how little I really knew; being Parker’s dad was humbling. I had no concept how little I understood of love before Parker came. I had such an odd concept of what was important before her. Parker was my only child at the time and the center of the universe. By all appearances she was thriving and perfect.

Just over two weeks before Parker’s first birthday we found she had a lemon-sized tumor in her head. The next day we found that it was cancer and it had spread to her spine. The next day, after a biopsy, we found that it was likely a vicious cancer for which there is no cure. During surgery they implanted a stint to relieve the painful swelling caused by the fluid building around the tumor.

I walked into the recovery room, and there she was. She looked so beautiful in spite of tubes going in and out of her head and arms, and a stifling tangle of wires attached all over her. She looked up at me with an expression that just screamed, “Daddy, why are you letting them do this to me? What have I done wrong?”

Two days later the pathology report confirmed her death sentence. Armed only with a morphine pump we took my little girl home to die. Less than a week before her first birthday she was gone.

I can’t explain, because there no words to explain, the helplessness and powerlessness of holding your only child as she suffers in pain and confusion knowing there is nothing, nothing you can do but watch and pray you could somehow trade places.

I knew this kind of thing doesn’t happen to me and mine; it happens to other people. Now I know it does happen, and it happens to families just like yours too. That’s one of the reasons YOU need to care about the Children’s Hospital. They did the very best they could for my little girl and treated her with the dignity and love she deserved. Parker had the very best doctors and nurses at her call.

I hate to tell you that if this could happen to my family, it could happen to yours. And if that should ever happen you will thank God that people had given to make Children’s Hospital the place it is.

A dear friend, Tracy Smith, every year takes part in a fund-raiser for Children’s – the Courage Classic bike ride. She does so in the name of my little girl Parker. I am asking you personally to make a pledge to her effort. Please do it to help keep Parker’s memory alive. Please do it to save the child like Parker in your life.

Donate here, http://www.couragetours.com/2011/tracy_smith

All my thanks,

Jon

The Colorado Springs Gazette is about as solid on economic issues as a newspaper could ever get. With Wayne Laugesen at the helm of the editorial page, it’s no surprise. However, something must have slipped through the cracks over on the news side this weekend when reporter Emily Wilkins wrote on food stamps in the Springs. The article focuses on the fact that although many people are eligible for food stamps, only about 40% actually apply for them – despite our persistent unemployment and down economy. Great right? Well, not according to Emily Wilkins. Instead of praising folks for not going on the dole, she laments this fact. The article paints the picture that it’s unfortunate that many of the folks eligible for food stamps in the Springs are choosing to either hunker down, take responsibility, and work hard through this tough time or rely on private charity for help (or both). I happen to believe quite the opposite. Like Seth Richardson in this fantastic Broadside blog response, the nearly 60% who are not taking more money from taxpayers should be commended.

What’s more, the article espouses an egregious economic fallacy: that taking money from taxpayers and giving it to a select group of people to buy food promotes “job growth” and helps “economic development.” Worse still, the article goes on to explain that the unused dollars from the majority who do not apply for food stamps “translate into wasted dollars that would otherwise spur economic activity.”

Let me get this straight. The money that was not taken from taxpayers by force and transferred to people who did not earn it, sits idly and unused? The taxpayers who earned the money would have put it in their mattress? They would not have purchased anything with the money? They would not have invested it? But through the magic of government transfer, the money in the hands of the food stamp recipients creates “economic development?” So the government transfer itself creates growth? Is that it? I don’t understand because it makes no economic sense.

The next time Emily Wilkins wants to write anything on economics, she ought to ask at least one of the many economically literate people in the Springs. Her story offered no alternative perspective, just the pro-government transfer, economically devoid perspective. She could have asked her colleague Seth Richardson. Or the always venerable Sean Paige. Or even better, she could have consulted Colorado Springs’ resident economist Paul Prentice. Not only is Paul a senior fellow with us at Independence, he’s part of the faculty at the Mises Institute and co-founder of the Pikes Peak Economics Club. Perhaps those credentials were too lofty for such an article. Maybe next time she’ll contact someone with 5 less economics degrees than Paul Prentice. Like me.

The Supreme Court recently granted certiorari in Millender v. Los Angeles. Here are the background facts: Bowen shoots at his ex-girlfriend with a sawed-off shotgun. The police obtain a search warrant for the home of Bowen’s 73-year-old former foster mother. The warrant application does not disclose that Bowen last lived with his foster mother 15 years ago. (The girlfriend suggested to the police that Bowen might be hiding there.) The warrant authorizes the seizure of all firearms on the premises, not merely the particular gun which had been used in the crime against the girlfriend.

The police executed a 5 a.m. dynamic entry, and in the course of their search, seize a firearm which is lawfully owned by the 73-year-old woman, Augusta Millender. She sues, and the 9th Circuit en banc rules that the warrant was objectively unconstitutional. The officer who procured the warrant (and Los Angeles, by respondeat superior) are not entitled to qualified immunity, because the warrant to seize all firearms was so clearly unconstitutional, based on settled law.

In the certiorari grant, the Questions Presented are:

This Court has held that police officers who procure and execute warrants later determined invalid are entitled to qualified immunity, and evidence obtained should not be suppressed, so long as the warrant is not “so lacking in indicia of probable cause as to render official belief in its existence entirely unreasonable.” United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 920, 923 (1984); Malley v. Briggs, 475 U.S. 335,341,344–45 (1986). The Questions Presented are: 1. Under these standards, are officers entitled to qualified immunity where they obtained a facially valid warrant to search for firearms, firearm-related materials, and gang-related items in the residence of a gang member and felon who had threatened to kill his girlfriend and fired a sawed-off shotgun at her, and a district attorney approved the application, no factually on point case law prohibited the search, and the alleged overbreadth in the warrant did not expand the scope of the search? 2. Should the Malley/Leon standards be reconsidered or clarified in light of lower courts’ inability to apply them in accordance with their purpose of deterring police misconduct, resulting in imposition of liability on officers for good faith conduct and improper exclusion of evidence in criminal cases?

The phrasing of the Questions Presented further suggest that attorneys for Respondents have an uphill battle. The Supreme Court docket page is here; the full history of the case in the district court and the Ninth Circuit, with full text of many of the relevant documents, is available at the website of California attorney Chuck Michel. Michel is, in my opinion, one of the top two firearms law lawyers in California, the other being Don Kilmer.

In conjunction with Stephen Halbrook, Michel filed an amicus brief in Millender, on behalf of the National Rifle Association and the California Rifle and Pistol Association Foundation. The brief explains how the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on general warrants is closely entwined with the right to arms; for example, the 1662 gun ban of the wicked Stuart king Charles II was enforced by general warrants.

The Questions Presented seem to presume the unconstitutionality of the general warrant, with the only issue before the Court being qualified immunity. The Halbrook/Michel argument on qualified immunity points out that

Detective Messerschmidt knew that the only firearm involved in the crime was a black, pistol-gripped, short barreled shotgun.  He nonetheless drafted a general warrant authorizing search and seizure of all firearms and firearm parts from the home of an elderly woman, her daughter, and her grandson, knowing that the suspect (Bowen) did not even live in that home.  Messerschmidt cannot now rely on the defense that he persuaded others up the chain to approve his general warrant.

...

It bears repeating that the affidavit failed to disclose that the residence was that of an elderly lady and her relatives, not that of the suspect.

Although Los Angeles argues that the unconstitutionality of the warrant was not clearly established at the time the warrant was executed, Halbrook and Michel point to:

Groh v. Ramirez, 540 U.S. 551 (2004), aff’g Ramirez v. Butte-Silver Bow County, 298 F.3d 1022 (9 th Cir. 2002), involved a general warrant obtained to search for unregistered firearms, but the warrant contained no list of firearms to seize.  Id. at 554.  A list of firearms was included in the affidavit, but not attached to the warrant.  Id.  Only lawful firearms were found.  Id. at 555.  The homeowners later filed a civil rights action for damages.  Id.  The Supreme Court upheld the Ninth Circuit’s conclusion in Groh that the search was unlawful and that the agent who secured the warrant and led the search could not rely on the defense of qualified immunity.  Id. at 563–566.

Moreover,

In Groh, the law was clearly established in the very text of the Fourth Amendment.  Case law condemning general warrants in England dates back to at least 1765 in Entick, and in the United States, to 1886 in Boyd.  The general warrant here–to search for all firearms and related items, when only a black, pistol-gripped, short-barreled shotgun was at issue, and it had little or no connection to the house to be searched–clearly violated the Fourth Amendment, would be known to do so by any competent officer, and was not sanctified by being rubber stamped by higher ups.

Michel has announced that NRA and CRPAF will file an amicus brief in the Supreme Court, in part to explain to the Court the problem of law enforcement officers seizing large numbers of lawfully-possessed firearms in order to boost gun seizure statistics.

I hope that at some point Orin Kerr will be able to provide his insights on Millender.

On this week’s Devils Advocate, widely read and widely regarded columnist Jay Ambrose joins me to talk about what states have great public policy (Texas) and what states get their policies dead wrong (New York). Then in the second half of the show, American Furniture Warehouse CEO Jake Jabs talks good business practices and not succumbing to the allure of corporate welfare and government protections.