Vin Suprynowicz

One major factor crippling the economic recovery is the tax-and-regulatory straightjacket confronting any American businessman who contemplates adding new jobs.

The mechanism by which these regulations and extractions come into being is part of the problem. For long decades, Congress has fallen into the habit of passing laws full of noble sentiments, but with lots of blank pages. These blank tablets are then sent on to the huddling hordes of unelected bureaucrats with the instruction, “We don’t have time to fiddle with the details; write up a few thousand pages of nice regulations to make all this happen.”

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The Associated Press represents itself as an unbiased purveyor of objective news. So I reserve the right to be disappointed — if not truly shocked or even surprised — when I see the time-honored news service embracing some of the ridiculous but currently fashionable presumptions of the ignorant but politically correct.

This past week, the SHOT show returned to Las Vegas.

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A reader who refers to himself as “a common sense liberal” writes in:

“In view of the agonized calls for increased restrictions on firearm ownership resurrected by the recent shooting in Arizona, could you write a column with meaningful statistics on death and injury nationwide prevented by the civilian ownership of firearms?

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I wouldn’t have nominated Jim Gibbons for “Mr. Charisma,” myself. He never seemed to take much joy in being governor of Nevada.

Nor do I adhere to the doctrine that we should speak no ill of the politically departed. Not only were Lincoln and FDR tyrants, they didn’t even offer any attractive short-term inducements in exchange for their yokes of tyranny.

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During a holiday week when the step could be expected to draw little attention, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Dec. 23 announced his agency would review about 220 million acres of land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management to see if it should be designated under a new class of “public lands protection” called “wild lands.”

In essence, the move allows Mr. Salazar’s bureaucrats to fence off from productive human use millions of additional undeveloped acres in the West, sidestepping the legal requirements that actual new “wilderness” designations be OK’d by Congress.

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In modern public relations, half the battle is won if you can get the public — and the media — to embrace your choice of wording.

Few want to be dubbed “pro-abortion”; it’s much preferable to champion the cause of “choice.”

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We keep getting letters explaining that of course the government schools can’t be expected to turn out as good a product as the private schools — even private schools that spend less per student per year — since the private schools get to pick and choose their students, while the government youth propaganda camps have to “take every which one.”

In a speech he gave after being named New York City’s Teacher of the Year (yes, “public school”) in 1989, John Taylor Gatto famously said:

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Surely ObamaCare is the modern Pandora’s box.

Did you realize it actually carries provisions that will more energetically tax, track and regulate your ability to buy gold coins worth $600 or more? (http://miniurl.com/73393.)

What does that have to do with “health care” — unless we’re talking about “the health of the IRS”?

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Let us turn to the mailbag:

“No, our money is just fine, Vin,” writes in one correspondent, answering my column of Nov. 21. “In spite of what the gold bugs would have you believe; the value of the dollar is still, historically and relatively speaking, at the place it was a century ago.”

It’s hard to believe anyone who’s allowed unsupervised use of a computer can think the dollar is worth as much as it was a century ago — or even 50 years ago, for that matter. You don’t have to be a degreed historian or a doddering geezer to know that gasoline cost about 25 cents a gallon in 1960, that a new Ford Mustang cost $2,500 to $4,500 when introduced in 1965. A Coca-Cola cost a nickel in 1910, but today it’s a dollar in a far less expensive disposable plastic bottle. (Yes, today’s “single” bottles hold more — though not that much more. Besides, shouldn’t the price have dropped after Uncle Sam made them take out the coca, which was the main point?)

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The House of Representatives on Dec. 8 honored lame-duck, one-term Nevada Congresswoman and permanent, lifetime UNLV politics professor (gubbimint jobs are like that) Dina Titus by enacting on a voice vote her bill to provide federal funding to schools and food banks to supply weekend meals to “low-income” children.

Previously budgeted at $10 million per year, the final House version doesn’t specify any dollar limit. Quick Senate passage is uncertain, thankfully.

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