Daily Archives: March 2, 2017

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has been ranked two points ahead of India in the Index of Economic Freedom 2017 published by Washingtons No 1 think tank, The Heritage Foundation, which measures the principles of economic freedom and progress.

Economic freedom is the fundamental right of every human to control his or her own labour and property. In an economically free society, individuals are free to work, produce, consume, and invest, and governments allow labor, capital, and goods to move freely, and refrain from coercion or constraint of liberty.

Pakistan is ranked at 141 out of a total 180 countries, while India is ranked at 143. However, both countries are ranked in the Mostly Unfree category.

The reports states that Pakistan has pursued reforms to improve its entrepreneurial environment and facilitate private-sector development. The financial sector has undergone modernisation and restructuring while progress in improving the entrepreneurial environment has been modest.

However, overall progress lags significantly behind other countries in the region. The tax system is complex and inefficient despite reforms to broaden the tax base and increase transparency, while unstable democracy and threat of terrorism have made the business operating environment more challenging in recent years.

Furthermore, it states the judicial system of Pakistan suffers from a serious backlog, and corruption continues to taint the civil service, while excessive state involvement in the economy and restrictions on foreign investment are serious drags on economic dynamism.

The index states that India is a significant force in world trade but corruption, underdeveloped infrastructure, and poor management of public finance continue to undermine overall development

In India growth is not deeply rooted in policies that preserve economic freedom while progress on market-oriented reforms has been uneven and a restrictive regulatory environment discourages entrepreneurship.

According to the according to the editors of the Index, the world economy is moderately free with another rise in economic liberty leading to a fifth annual global increase. Among the 180 countries ranked, scores improved for 103 countries and declined for 73 (16 of which recorded their lowest Index scores ever).

The world average score of 60.9 is the highest recorded in the 23-year history of the Index. Forty-nine countries, the majority of which are developing countries, achieved their highest-ever Index scores.

Hong Kong and Singapore were ranked first and second in the rankings, while five other frequent top 10 finishers New Zealand (3rd globally), Switzerland (4th), Australia (5th), Estonia (6th) and Canada also improved their scores.

A surprise newcomer to the top 10, the United Arab Emirates took the 8th spot. Ireland (9th) and Chile (10th) saw their scores dip but still managed to round out the global top 10 ranking.

The Index of Economic Freedom documents the positive relationship between economic freedom and a variety of positive social and economic goals. The ideals of economic freedom are strongly associated with healthier societies, cleaner environments, greater per capita wealth, human development, democracy, and poverty elimination.

Launched in 1995, the Index evaluates countries in four broad policy areas that affect economic freedom: rule of law, government size, regulatory efficiency and open markets.

There are twelve specific categories: property rights, judicial effectiveness, government integrity, tax burden, government spending, fiscal health, business freedom, labor freedom, monetary freedom, trade freedom, investment freedom, and financial freedom.

Each of the twelve economic freedoms within these categories is graded on a scale of 0 to 100. A countrys overall score is derived by averaging these twelve economic freedoms, with equal weight being given to each.

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Pakistan ranked above India in Economic Freedom Index report - Daily Times

Temporary budget consultant Shante Humble was introduced at a recent Sandwich City Council meeting.

Humble works at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, in the finance departments office of the budget, Mayor Rick Olson said. According to her contract with the city, Humble will work in Sandwich and off-sitethrough the citys budget year at the end of May.

Humble distributed new forms to city officials and heads of departments to help them prepare the citys fiscal 2018 budget, according to Olson. He explained her contract is for atotal of96hours with an hourly wage of about $33 an hour.

The citys prior finance director left the position in November.

In other business, the council had a lengthy discussion about 16 new streetlights that will be installed on West Center Street from Green Street through the Main Street intersection. Some aldermen thought theres not enough money in city coffers to pay for the streetlights and others stressed that the decorative streetlights should remain a part of the downtown beautification efforts.

Director of Public Works/City Engineer Tom Horak told the council there were three different prices, depending on the number of non-decorative street lights with arms on top and how many of the decorative street lights are erected. The prices ranged from $171,000 to $189,000 to $227,000. He said the poles would have electrical outlets and flag holders installed.

Horak announced a schedule for bidding the streetlight project, with bids opened March 22 and awarded April 6. If those dates remain in effect, he said work would start after the July 5 Freedom Days Parade and be completed by the Early Days Gas Engine Days parade of tractors the end of June.

The parking lot on the southeast corner of Main and Center streets will be closed for 31 days for construction equipment, he said.

Horak also is preparing plans for work on the Lisbon Street project, where the city plans to repave the street and to install new sidewalks, water main pipes and sanitary sewer pipes. Construction, which also will include improvements at the intersection of Main and Lisbon streets, is to begin in April, he said.

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Consultant to help Sandwich prepare budget for fiscal 2018 - Kendall County Now (subscription)

I am part Text ColorSwatch/NoneStrokeStyle/$ID/SolidText ColorSwatch/NoneStrokeStyle/$ID/Solid$ID/NothingText ColorText Color$ID/NothingText ColorText Colorof Text ColorSwatch/NoneStrokeStyle/$ID/SolidText ColorSwatch/NoneStrokeStyle/$ID/Solid$ID/NothingText ColorText Color$ID/NothingText ColorText Colora profession recently designated an Enemy of the People.

Its a chilling phrase, used by despots throughout history to justify the limitation of free speech, the imprisonment and even murder of those who speak anyway.

Id like to share this quote from David Remnick of The New Yorker (Feb. 18):

Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, makes the point that autocrats from Chvez to Erdogan, Sisi to Mugabe, all follow a general pattern. They attack and threaten the press with deliberate and ominous intensity; the press, in turn, adopts a more oppositional tone and role. And then that paves the way for the autocrats next move, Simon told me. Popular support for the media dwindles and the leader starts instituting restrictions. Its an old strategy.

However McCarthyism aside it is new to the land of the free, the home of the brave.

Does America have enemies? Sure. Within and without. But you cannot paint the entire media profession with one brush.

Its not all fake news. Its not fake news just because you dont like it. Think it through. Would you trust Breitbart over PBS? Occupy Democrats over the Associated Press?

With a nod to Mike Wilson, editor of the Dallas Morning News, who first wrote on this ...

An enemy of the people wrote a three-part feature on beloved restaurant Olpe Chicken House. An enemy of the people revealed a serious case of theft at a beloved, taxpayer-supported institution.

An enemy of the people spent a day with a law enforcement officer to give the community a better idea of what our protectors face.

An enemy of the people wrote about the need for food, clothes and a place to take a shower for students at Emporia High School.

An enemy of the people questioned the fiscal need for yet another community survey. An enemy of the people talked to hometown hero Clint Bowyer so you could keep up with his career.

Enemies of the people routinely contribute articles to The Gazette on fiscal health, physical health, spiritual health.

Am I your enemy? I hope not. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press is vital to our nation.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.

The Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1892-1984. 1937 1945 interred at Sachsenhausen and Dachau

Regina Murphy

Features Editor

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Who is the enemy? - Emporia Gazette

As someone who was intimately involved in supporting Tea Party activists in 2009, I feel like Ive entered Bizarro World.

A re-energized wave of liberal activists is crashing down across the nation. Democrats are celebrating disruptive protesters at congressional town hall forums, lauding them as living exemplars of the best traditions of American participatory democracyflesh-and-blood versions of Norman Rockwells Freedom of Speech painting. Everywhere, people are marching, protesting, tweeting, [and] speaking out, cheered Hillary Clinton in a new video released by the Democratic National Committee. Let resistance plus persistence equal progress.

Story Continued Below

For many Republicans, their new roles in this episode are equally upside down. Members of Congress are skipping out on public events, afraid of catching the wrath of angry voters. Several GOP elected officials have alleged that the protesters are not actual constituents, but outside agitators paid by wealthy liberalspeople to be ignored, not engaged with. President Donald Trump himself questioned the legitimacy of so-called angry crowds, tweeting that they are planned out by liberal activists. Marco Rubio, who first won election to the U.S. Senate in the Tea Party wave of 2010, has defended his own decision to avoid such town halls, arguing that attendees will heckle and scream at me in front of cameras.

What a difference eight years makes.

Back in 2009, it was impossible to find a single Democratic apparatchik willing to acknowledge the legitimacy of citizen participation in congressional town halls. Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas dismissed frustrated voters as a mob part of a coordinated, nationwide effort. Then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi described Tea Party protesters not as grass-roots Americans, but as artificial Astroturf. After a glut of protests at town hall events in August 2009, she even went so far as to co-author a USA Today op-ed in which she smeared the demonstrators tactics as un-American. Organizing for America, Barack Obamas campaign machine-turned-advocacy group, outrageously labeled Tea Party members right-wing domestic terrorists who are subverting the American democratic process.

Improbable as it seems, the hysterical reactions from the left about robust citizen participation in the democratic process in 2009 almost make Trumps tweets circa 2017 seem downright reasonable. As Jerry Seinfeld once described it: Up is down, and down is up.

In 2009, I served as the head of FreedomWorks, where I helped to support and organize Tea Party activists. I know something about town-hall protesters. And I have some tough news for both parties. The Tea Party was real, not astroturf, we were not a mob, and we were certainly not domestic terrorists.

Likewise, the Womens March in January and the current flood of town-hall protests are equally real, and should not be dismissed or diminished. Citizens exercising their poweras long as they dont hurt people or infringe on others rightsis always a positive thing. Indeed, its one of the primary tools Americans have to hold the government accountable.

If it looks like chaos, I call it beautiful chaos. We are in the middle of a political paradigm shift that is giving access to knowledge and power back to end users. Citizens have more say today, and social media and other technologies make it easier to educate others about the issues and organize.

Welcome to the new normal in American politics.

***

Todays progressive town-hall protesters follow in a tradition of disrupting the old top-down status quoone that stretches back across the political spectrum, ranging from Howard Dean to Ron Paul to the Tea Party, and yes, even Donald Trump.

That said, there are some important differences between Tea Party and todays activists, and I think these distinctions will ultimately undermine the ability of todays protests to evolve into a social movement with real electoral consequences.

First, this movement feels strictly partisan, and many of the groups supporting the protesters have strictly partisan goals. Indivisible, the group bootstrapping a training manual on town hall disruption based on Tea Party tactics, is helmed by Democratic operatives. Several of the authors are, in fact, former staffers of Doggett. Likewise, the Center for American Progress, the Service Employees International Union, and Organizing for Action (President Obamas community-organizing operation formerly known as Organizing for America) are all involved, often with paid community organizers on the ground.

At FreedomWorks, we provided much of the same type of support: training, organizing, and providing logistical backing. Although we were savaged at the time as Astroturf, these wereand arelegitimate functions. But there is an important difference between advancing partisan political goals and advocating an ideological agenda.

Though my friends on the left may not realize this, they ignore it at their own peril: The Tea Party wasnt a partisan movement, especially in 2009 and 2010. Critics of the Tea Party forget (or ignore) the origins of our frustrations. At the massive Taxpayer March on Washington on September 12, 2009, every single activist I spoke with cited President George W. Bushs Wall Street bailout as their primary motive for getting involved. They would recite back to me his infamous rationale: I abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system. Thats what got folks off the couch and organizing. We were ideologues in 2009, and our shared philosophy bound us as a movement.

We targeted Republicans and Democrats with equal zeal, because, as our battle cry made clear at the time, we had to beat the Republicans before we could beat the Democrats. By contrast, todays protesters seem to be strictly targeting Republican town halls instead of making Democratic members of Congress feel the heat, too.

Second, its hard to find a focused, unifying set of issues or principles that connect todays Democratic protesters. Most seem motivated solely by Donald Trumps victory in November. But being anti-Trump is not enough: Even if they wanted to, Republicans in Congress cant really do anything about this. Are the disruptions today about the electoral process? Russia? Immigration? Health care? LGBT rights? One of the myriad other issues that seem to be drawing activists out? I cant tell. They will need to find unified principles and a cause.

The Tea Party, almost to a person, was unified on the principles of individual freedom, fiscal responsibility, and constitutionally limited government. Our policy agenda flowed from that: opposition to bailouts, deficit spending and government control of health care.

Third, if protesters want their cause to reach independents and disaffected Republicans (there are likely plenty), they had better keep it civil and respectful. Tea Partyers certainly got rowdy at the 2009 town halls, but they also came prepared, many having read and shared the contents of the health-care legislation that Pelosi had posted online. Surprising as it may be to some on the left, at FreedomWorks gatherings of Tea Party organizers, we were assigning readings about Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, and other successful nonviolent social movements. Violence can kill your cause, and we did our best to police our own community. Fair or not, todays protesters will own the worst behavior associated with their efforts.

Just shouting down members of Congressor in the case of one recent town hall in Louisiana, booing both the Pledge of Allegiance and the chaplain offering an opening prayer wont play well with anyone you need to win over. Not all protesters are the same and most are real people with real frustrations, but all protesters will be tarred by the actions of the worst among the group. Try to show a little respect, and it will be more effective.

Republicans are making a big mistake if they dismiss or ignore this movement. Contra the political mythology, the Tea Party was far more independent than Republican, and that translated into a broader coalition when coupled with the existing GOP vote. Today, the same battle rages for the hearts and minds of independents and Republicans uneasy with Trumps rhetoric.

So, a little advice to Republican elected officials: Dont avoid town halls. In fact, schedule more of them, like Representative Justin Amash has done. Listen. Hear your constituents. Defend your positions. Dont abandon the promises you made to voters in the election. If needed, provide for security at the event so that all citizens feel safe. Set up a system where everyone gets a chance to speak and to hear your response. Answer democratic engagement with more democratic engagement.

I realize how difficult this all may be in practice, but I agree with former Democratic Representative Gabby Giffords: Have some courage. Face your constituents. Hold town halls. Democrats failed that test in 2009 and 2010. Republicans run the risk of making the same mistake in 2017.

Matt Kibbe is president and chief community organizer of Free the People, and a senior editor at CRTV. He is the author of Dont Hurt People and Dont Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto.

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Wake Up, Republicans: This Could Be the Democrats' Tea Party - POLITICO Magazine

Nothing President Donald Trump said in his first speech to Congress, and nothing visible on this years budget battle horizon, will change the grim realities of the long-range federal fiscal forecast.

Trump continues to sound like hes out to refashion the Republicans as populist protectors of elderly Americans and their expansive government safety net, and GOP leaders on the Hill newly sound like they arent going to do anything to stand in his way. That represents a fundamental retreat from three decades of party orthodoxy, which could revive the sort of ballooning annual deficits long derided by Republicans as the enemy of national economic stability.

This has nothing to do with the 10 percent increase in military spending Trump is advocating, which hed pay for by cutting an equivalent $54 billion from education, the environment and other domestic programs.

That headline-inducing trade-off already looks dead on arrival at the Capitol the boost rejected by defense hawks as too timid and the nonmilitary cuts spurned by lawmakers in both parties as impractically draconian. But at least the simplistic equation had the virtue of neutrality toward the budgetary bottom line.

Not so the all-but-formalized decision by the Trump administration to propose no changes whatsoever for Medicare, Social Security, veterans benefits and the other big entitlements. These are otherwise known as mandatory programs because the government is mandated to cover whatever the beneficiaries are entitled based on formulas and eligibility rules that Congress is under no obligation to revisit each year.

Just as he never mentioned North Korea or Russia, two of the nations most nettlesome overseas adversaries, in his address Tuesday night, neither did he say a word about entitlements, which are a comparably vexing and enormous challenge domestically.

Thats because they already combine to account for three-fifths of the budget, and that is twice as much as the $1.2 trillion being spent this year on discretionary programs, from the Pentagon to the arts agencies, which are subject to annual appropriations decisions. (The rest is interest on the national debt.)

Thanks mainly to the aging baby-boom population, annual entitlements will grow by almost $500 billion, or 18 percent, just during this presidential term unless Congress and Trump come up with a plan to curtail the outlays. Just 10 years from now, entitlements will have mushroomed 73 percent more than currently, cresting $4.3 trillion. That will be almost two-thirds of the entire federal budget, and also almost triple what the appropriators have to allocate assuming a continuation in the very slow pace of recent growth in discretionary spending.

And unless taxes are increased along the way which both Trump and the GOP Congress remain unalterably resistant to the cost of doing nothing about entitlements will quickly grow stark. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected last month the annual deficit will rise from $560 billion this year to $1 trillion in six years and $1.4 trillion in 2027, which would equal 5 percent of the economy. And the cumulative effect of those steadily widening budget imbalances would mean adding $10 trillion to the national debt in the next decade, the CBO estimates.

Such dramatic trend lines are nothing new, but they do get slightly more alarming each time another year passes without any legislation to slow or shallow the trajectories which would happen, perhaps dramatically, depending on how deeply entitlement benefits got curbed or how much eligibility was limited.

By remaining silent on that score, Trump is absolutely staying true to his campaign promise to keep Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid just as they are.

The much more newsworthy silence comes from Speaker Paul D. Ryan, whose rapid rise from young Wisconsin backbencher to the principal policy playmaker in the House was fueled by a passionate advocacy for entitlement curbs, which he views as the central ingredient for balancing the budget, and creating a new era of national fiscal health.

This is a once-in-a-generation moment, Ryan said Tuesday of the legislative year ahead, because the first entirely Republican power structure in Washington in a decade creates the opportunity to finally tackle big problems that have held us back for so long.

But the roster of a half-dozen topics he then enumerated made no mention of corralling the growth of entitlements. Asked if that meant the issue had been dropped for the year, the speaker quipped I never give up a dream and took no more questions at his news conference.

He told some other reporters during the day that he believes Trump might still be someday persuaded to limiting Medicare and Social Security for people who retire in the future because if you dont start bending the curve in the out years, we are hosed. But that night, Ryan nonetheless labeled Trumps speech a home run, and to be sure, the president did come close to endorsing Ryans plan for taxing imports and embraced the House GOP leaderships framework for replacing the 2010 health care law.

Still, Ryans apparent willingness to back away from the central crusade of his congressional career is further evidence of his awkward position in the capital power structure of 2017.

Having criticized Trumps temperament and ideology repeatedly during the campaign, without ever flatly repudiating him, while at the same time enduring regular putdowns from the GOP nominee for having focused on fiscal austerity and then losing as the vice presidential candidate of 2012, Ryan is not in the best position to wage a war for the Republican Partys philosophical soul. The president is the de facto head of his political party, no matter how improbable his victory or how low his initial approval ratings.

So if Trump sticks with his unusual recipe of nationalism and economic populism as a replacement for fiscal discipline and a smaller social safety net as the pillars of GOP orthodoxy, for now Ryan and the rest of the party hierarchy in Congress have little choice except to get with the program or get castigated by the partys base forundermining their top commander.

Many Republicans on the Hill had been counting on two of their own now in the Cabinet White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, previously a House Freedom Caucus stalwart from South Carolina, and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, a Georgian who was previously the House Budget Committee chairman to successfully sell Trump on the notion that pushing entitlement restraint in the name of long-term government solvency would be an important way to cement an economic legacy.

Although the first written outline of Trumps initial budget wont be delivered to the Capitol for two weeks, his opening preview and his first congressional address have made clear that argument did not get very far.

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How a Tenet of GOP Orthodoxy Slipped Away - Roll Call