Category: Politics 2011

Apparently there are still newspapermen who talk like this.

The major controversy right now in the GOP presidential primaries is over Rick Perry’s contention that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that can’t deliver on its promises under its current structure. Mitt Romney doesn’t exactly dispute this – in fact, Romney himself said the same thing in his book, but then Romney always did like to attack other Republicans for things he himself has said or done – but Romney’s argument is that you can’t say these things out loud and win elections.
Well, President Obama last night handed Perry a huge gift, by providing a vivid illustration of how Perry is right about Social Security.
Here is what the President said:

[The American Jobs Act] will provide a tax break for companies who hire new workers, and it will cut payroll taxes in half for every working American and every small business. It will provide a jolt to an economy that has stalled, and give companies confidence that if they invest and hire, there will be customers for their products and services…
Pass this jobs bill, and starting tomorrow, small businesses will get a tax cut if they hire new workers or raise workers’ wages. Pass this jobs bill, and all small business owners will also see their payroll taxes cut in half next year. If you have 50 employees making an average salary, that’s an $80,000 tax cut. And all businesses will be able to continue writing off the investments they make in 2012.

This proposal is an extension of a prior temporary payroll tax cut that was part of the extension of the Bush tax cuts passed by the lame-duck session of the last Congress at the end of 2010:

The cut affects the 46 percent of all Americans who pay payroll taxes but do not qualify to pay federal income taxes. In the bipartisan deal last December to keep the Bush-era tax cuts in place for another two years, lawmakers signed off on a proposal to reduce the percentage of taxes that workers pay towards Social Security from 6.2 to 4.2 percent. That rate is set to go back up to previous levels on Jan. 1, unless Congress acts.

Now, as an initial matter, the problem with temporary cuts in the payroll tax is that they don’t provide much incentive to hire new permanent workers. This is a recurring issue with Obama’s proposals, like how he tried to use temporary stimulus payments to induce states to take on more permanent obligations under Medicaid, a deal a number of Governors rejected. If I’m a business owner, this sort of payroll tax cut may persuade me to hire more temporary or seasonal workers, but I’d be leery of creating new permanent positions knowing that the tax will pop back up as soon as we’re past the 2012 election. There’s certainly a good case to be made for slashing the payroll tax in the long haul – which would require fundamentally reworking how Social Security is funded – but as an economic matter a temporary payroll tax holiday is mostly a gimmick that will offer only a very limited bang for its buck.
Which brings us to the fiscal impact. If you take at face value the defenders of the Social Security status quo, their theory is that Social Security is not supposed to be a welfare program but a pension plan: workers pay into the system, which places their wages in a “trust fund” and later pays them back a defined benefit. As Perry – and Romney, in his book – notes, the system doesn’t actually run that way. The only “assets” in the trust fund are “I owe me” bonds reflecting that the taxpayers will be asked to come up with revenues in the future, the same kinds of “my own debts are my assets” accounting that got Enron in trouble; meanwhile, the government spends the money as soon as it comes in, and hopes that it will continue getting enough future payroll tax revenue to pay future benefits. This is the textbook definition of how a Ponzi scheme operates and precisely why such schemes – as we saw with Bernie Madoff – inevitably go bust when they can’t keep expanding.
Social Security already has that problem, as the most recent Trustees Report makes clear:

Social Security expenditures exceeded the program’s non-interest income in 2010 for the first time since 1983. The $49 billion deficit last year (excluding interest income) and $46 billion projected deficit in 2011 are in large part due to the weakened economy and to downward income adjustments that correct for excess payroll tax revenue credited to the trust funds in earlier years.

With retirees living longer and benefits having been expanded in various ways over the years, the number of current workers supporting each current retiree has plunged dramatically since the program was established, a problem that will only get worse with declining birthrates and the Baby Boom generation entering retirement age. In other words, the conditions for ever-widening Social Security deficits are upon us already and will, by design of the current system, only get worse. The bill for the longstanding pattern of both parties on Capitol Hill raiding the program’s surplus income to spend on other things has come due.
And with this crisis upon us and only designed to grow, what does President Obama propose? An even bigger bite out of the income of a program already in deficit:

Obama plans to cut revenues by $245 billion, or 36%, of the entire annual revenue (projected at $687 billion) of the so-called trust fund. Being that he will ostensibly slash half of payroll taxes, that number is surely too low…

This is the point in the storyline where a guy like Madoff gets led out in handcuffs. Let Obama make the argument that extending the temporary payroll tax cut is an economic necessity; we can have the argument about whether this is the best way to cut tax burdens on businesses and workers. But what he can’t do is pretend is that Social Security is sacrosanct when just last night he went before the nation and proposed gutting its only source of funding just as it’s plunged into the red. The next time Governor Perry lays out his case against the flim-flam accounting behind Social Security and its manifest inability to pay for its own promises, he will have fresh ammunition direct from the man he hopes to face in the general election.

I confess: on some level, I like Jerry Brown. He’s one of those guys – like Pat Moynihan, Paul Tsongas or Bill Bradley – who really, truly and honestly believes in the goals of liberalism, yet is periodically honest enough to be blunt about its failures in the real world. He even studied to be a priest, way back when. One can argue, as Steven Hayward has of Moynihan, that it’s a species of moral cowardice to cling to an ideology you know doesn’t really work, but even as many times as Brown and his comrades disappoint me, their candor, even unintentional candor, is still refreshing and amusing.
I thought of this when reading an interview CNN’s Candy Crowley did with Gov.-again Brown earlier this month, and how it dovetails with the latest reports from the CBO on the economy.
Brown’s interview is revealing on a number of levels, given that he’s one of the few elected Democrats left who has some historical perspective on how we’re re-living the Carter years (Brown was California Governor from 1975-83 and ran for President in 1976, 1980 and 1992). First, he basically advises President Obama to raise taxes, but frankly admits that Obama needs to lie about doing so to avoid Walter Mondale in 1984:

CROWLEY: So you think the president needs to run saying, folks, we need to raise taxes?
BROWN: Well, I wouldn’t quite put it in those terms, because that, we know from Mr. Mondale, is a big fat loser.
CROWLEY: Well, exactly, but you’re talking about stark contrasts.
BROWN: Well, the contrast is what the choice is. If you don’t want to pay the taxes, you’ve got to cut Social Security, the military, research, highways, hospitals, schools, universities. You have to retrench from being a great superpower. And I think there is a bill at the end of that that people might be willing to pay. If they don’t pay then America will never be the same.
So there is the tax reform. There is the deductions, the loopholes. There are a lot of ways that the president can present it. But it may be that because of the propaganda or the state of indulgence where we are, maybe the truth cannot be spoken in a way that makes it a successful campaign. If that’s true, then we are really in for it.

Yet when dealing with the state of the economy, Brown seems befuddled by the Return of Malaise, and certainly lacking in the swagger of his staffers:

CROWLEY: Do you see unemployment in California, absent any help from the federal government in the near term, –(CROSSTALK)
BROWN: In the near term — (CROSSTALK)
CROWLEY: — staying where it is?
BROWN: Well, when I was governor the last time it got up to, I think, 11 percent. So this happens.

Not exactly the tune Brown was singing during the 2010 campaign. Perhaps Brown could consider what else 2011 has in common with those years – specifically, a hapless liberal Democrat in the White House and Jerry Brown as Governor.
Brown isn’t the only one recalling the days of the Misery Index. Conn Carroll notices the CBO finding consumer confidence down to levels reminiscent of the Carter years:

[C]onsumer spending has been lower in the past year than the levels that would normally occur given consumers’ income and wealth – suggesting that other factors, such as pessimism about the prospects for income growth, may be restraining spending. As an example, for much of 2011 so far, only about 10 percent of consumers have expected to see real gains in their income in the year ahead, matching a level of pessimism last seen in 1980.

Yes, the business cycle produces recessions, as surely as the weather produces storms. Both Carter and Obama inherited messes, just as did Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and John F. Kennedy. But the economy’s protracted lifelessness under Carter and Obama is not simply the arbitrary hand of fate. It doesn’t have to stay 1980 forever.

This anonymously-sourced report from The Hill, which clearly derives in good part from Republican sources, is pretty damning about President Obama’s leadership, if it turns out to be accurate:

GOP aides and lawmakers, speaking on background, portrayed Boehner as the calm negotiator who repeatedly exasperated President Obama.
Boehner last month asked the networks to televise his response to Obama’s address to the nation, a request which infuriated the White House, Republican sources said.
On July 23, they claim, the White House called Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), telling her not to participate on a call with Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Pelosi informed Reid, who declined to participate, and the call was canceled, the Republican sources said. (A Pelosi spokesman could not be reached for comment.)
Later that day, the four leaders met with Obama at the White House. At one point, GOP officials said, the Democratic and Republican leaders asked Obama and his aides to leave the room to let them negotiate.
A tentative deal was subsequently struck, but Obama privately threatened to veto it, the sources said.
Reid has repeatedly denied that he ever signed off on such an agreement.
The following day, staffers for Boehner, Cantor, Reid and McConnell continued to work on an agreement, according to Republicans.
After more twists and turns – and involvement from Vice President Biden – a bipartisan deal was reached a week later.

The article’s worth reading in its entirety for a good deal more color on how Boehner overcame the dissension within his own caucus on passing the second House bill (the first being the Cut, Cap and Balance plan, not counting the vote on the Ryan roadmap). If that’s how it went down, it seems pretty clear that Obama was simply an obstacle to getting a deal done – not the only adult in the room, as he portrayed himself, but the one guy who had nothing to contribute to the process and was actually in the way.
Which brings us to the next point. A big part of why the whole political spin war was so acrimonious throughout these negotiations was the asymmetry in transparency among the participants. The House GOP side of the argument was played out in public: the House passed two plans before the Senate even held a vote on a plan backed by Senate leadership. Everybody knew what the House would do if it controlled the process, and what its negotiating posture was. (The House Democrats, of course, were marginalized, as the House minority always is). The Senate Democrats and Senate GOP leadership each floated plans that were less concrete (until the point late in the game where Reid held a vote on his own alternative), but at least could in some general way be evaluated by the voters and the media.
But throughout the entire process, President Obama never put a plan where the voters could see it. No proposal was circulated by the White House, and the President and his spokesmen refused to go into any specifics beyond a few public statements about small-bore issues like depreciation rates for corporate jets. That posture has its advantages – on an issue of less intense public attention, closed-door back-room dealing can be the way to get rhetoric set aside and the parties moved ahead on reaching their bottom lines. It also gave Obama political advantages, since he could take potshots at the GOP plan while offering no target to be criticized without complete deniability for the White House.
But the downsides manifested themselves in other ways that helped poison the process and ultimately cripple the President. Denied competing plans to pore over, the media coverage ended up focusing on he-said she-said disputes about things that had happened behind closed doors (like Obama’s blowup with Eric Cantor) and competing spin over what Obama had or had not offered. Energized Tea Party activists were given a choice between a no-compromise conservative bill they could see, and a closed-door backroom deal with Obama they couldn’t evaluate beyond their willingness to trust the DC establishment that created this mess in the first place. Even liberal activists were offered very little to work with. Obama ended up sending out mass emails like this one last Friday:

Imagine you got to be a fly on the wall in a closed meeting of the House Republicans yesterday.
Would you hear sober talk of the solemn responsibility our representatives have? Or empathy for those having a tough time in this economy?
No. You’d hear one freshman Republican tell his colleagues to “put on your helmet, buckle your chinstrap, and knock the sh** out of ’em.”
This group thinks holding our economy captive is a game.
But right now Congress is running out of time to reach a resolution to this debt crisis before Tuesday’s deadline — or put our economy and American jobs at risk. President Obama has called on both sides to compromise and get this thing done — and he’s asked all Americans to contact their representatives and tell them to do their jobs.
“If you want to see a bipartisan compromise — a bill that can pass both houses of Congress and that I can sign — let your members of Congress know,” the President said this morning. “Make a phone call. Send an email. Tweet. Keep the pressure on Washington, and we can get past this.”
So let’s do this. Our records show:
You’re represented in the Senate by [Senator, phone number]
and [Senator, phone number]
In the House of Representatives, you’re represented by [Representative, phone number]
Call them now and say this isn’t about politics — it’s about doing the right thing for the country. Then click here to let us know who you called and how it went, so we can keep track of who we’re reaching.
House Speaker John Boehner, who’s responsible for bringing people in his party to the negotiating table, needs to hear from you, too. You can call his office at (202) 225-0600.
If Congress fails to act, millions of seniors may have to go without the Social Security checks they rely on. Veterans may not be able to get their benefits. We could lose our AAA credit rating.
President Obama has made it clear from the beginning that he will work with Republicans and Democrats to find a balanced, responsible approach to dealing with the nation’s debt.
What’s not clear is whether the fringe ideological faction on the other side refuses to come to the table because they’re genuinely unwilling to give an inch, or just because they think they can benefit politically from appearing that way. Either way, they need to be reminded that Americans know the stakes and want them to compromise and get the job done.
It takes just a few minutes to make a call. If you can’t get through, keep trying. Then help us track our progress by reporting your calls and letting us know how they go:
https://my.barackobama.com/Debt-Deal-Calls

First of all, in all my years receiving direct mail and emails from Republicans, I do not believe I’ve ever gotten anything so abjectly begging for a deal, any deal. Obama was hectoring his supporters to get behind absolutely anything that would pass, without even the slenderest nod to what might be in it (this is how he ended up with a progressive Congressman describing the final result as a “Satan sandwich”). Second, the barrage of Tweets from Obama then targeting each and every state’s delegation made him sound like a 13-year-old girl trying to start a trending topic about Justin Bieber, rather than the Leader of the Free World directing events. Remember when liberals sneered that Sarah Palin was “president of Facebook”? Well, that was Obama last week – President of Twitter. Except as the actual President of the United States, he should have had better ways of influencing Congress than Twitter. Third, Obama’s expectation that the voters and swing-district Congressmen and Senators would rally behind a backroom deal without any public defense of its specifics was a disastrous misreading of the public mood in general and the mood of newly-elected, Tea Party-backed Republicans in particular.
And finally, Obama’s backroom strategy destroyed his leverage. As John Podhoretz noted in the Post column I linked to earlier today, Obama’s inability to either work out a deal in private or rally public support behind any particular plan resulted in a deal that left out the one thing he had demanded, any tax hikes. And indeed, whether or not the Hill’s account is accurate, it is telling that Obama insisted that his entire role be performed offstage where the public couldn’t verify what he was doing or where he stood except by taking the word of him and his spokesmen. That amounted to a total surrender of the ‘bully pulpit,’ despite Obama’s frequent appearances to repeat his vague appeals for a “balanced” approach – Republicans could see that he wasn’t willing to take any stand for which he’d be held accountable, and so they inferred, correctly, that he’d never stand ground he’d taken in private if he feared to take it in public. His silence on the specifics rendered him weak and vulnerable, and ultimately impotent. He became the man who’d take any deal, so of course he got none of what he asked for.
That part, no amount of spin about the blow-by-blow of the closed-door negotiatons can conceal.

Following up on my post below, contrast this view of President Reagan’s breaking of PATCO with this take on President Obama’s ineffectual efforts to get tax hikes into the debt ceiling deal for a sense of how presidential negotiating tactics can have further-reaching consequences.
More here and here from streiff, one of my RedState colleagues, assessing the House GOP’s negotiating posture in retrospect and going forward.

So, a member of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors – Jeff Stone, a Republican – has proposed splitting the state of California, with San Diego and the largely rural, Republican-leaning south east of the state becoming “South California,” and LA remaining with the liberal coast and northern part of the state. You can follow the link to the LA Times for the map of what his proposal would look like. Secession proposals of this nature are a hardy perennial on the Left and Right alike, and are almost always bad ideas, although there is at least a fair argument that California as currently constituted is (1) too large any longer to serve the role of responding to local needs unmet from Washington that is a major part of why we have a federal system in the first place (as the LAT notes, “[t]he proposed 51st state would be the fifth largest by population, more populous than Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania”), (2) essentially dysfunctional, and (3) particularly unresponsive to the needs of the 13 million residents of the 13 counties in question.
But what’s really interesting here isn’t a proposal by one member of the board of one county, but rather the response by a spokesman for Governor Jerry Brown:

“If you want to live in a Republican state with very conservative right-wing laws, then there’s a place called Arizona,” Brown spokesman Gil Duran said.

Now, I don’t know about you, but saying that millions of residents should just leave the state if they don’t like California’s liberal laws, dysfunctional finances and horrendous business climate doesn’t really disprove the point that the Sacramento elite really and truly do not care about the Republican-leaning parts of the state or the people in them. California’s unemployment rate is 11.7% compared to 9.1% for the nation as a whole (given California’s size, I’d guess without doing the math that means the rest of the country may be as much as a full three points below CA). Even the NY Times says California’s budget crisis may be the worst in the nation, with a $26.6 billion budget deficit comprising nearly a third of the state’s budget. California owes $2,362 in debt per resident of the state, and pays a 20% premium to borrow money compared to better-run states; its A- credit rating from Standard & Poor’s is the worst in the nation. A recent budget deal only barely convinced S&P to avoid an immediate further downgrade, and S&P is still concerned that the deal doesn’t solve the state’s long-term “backlog of budget obligations accumulated during the past decade.”
Gov. Brown’s office may think that’s a record to get cocky about, but maybe it’s time California showed a little humility about the failures of its political culture and business climate, and learned a few things from its more conservative neighbors – and maybe even from some of its own citizens.

You too can ask President Obama a question on Twitter, using the hashtag #askobama. Of course, the tiny fraction of those tweets to be answered will doubtless be carefully screened, and the answers vetted before posting them. I’d say Saturday Night Live should satirize this, but it already did, the last time something like this was tried as if it was a totally brand-new idea, in March 1977:

This graph is pretty compelling as far as looking at who contributes the most to political candidates and campaigns. This is the status quo that the critics of independent expenditures are so desperate to protect.

Expecting consistency from left-wing political activists is folly, but rarely does one get such a glaring example as the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen on presidential “signing statements.” Watch, and your head will spin.
During the Bush years, liberal commentators suddenly discovered that they didn’t like the longstanding practice of “signing statements” by which the President offered his own interpretation of legislation he was signing, in some cases declaring his intention to ignore unconstitutional provisions. Now, in a better world, presidents would just veto laws containing unconstitutional things – this was, in fact, perhaps the most frequent basis on which presidents used the veto power in the 19th Century – but the use of signing statements to set forth a public defense of Executive Branch prerogatives has a long and bipartisan history, and there is a quite respectable argument that such statements preserve the President’s role as head of a co-equal branch of government with as much right to his interpretation of the Constitution as Congress or the Supreme Court.
Anyway, Steve Benen was one of the liberal bloggers who pushed the anti-signing-statements hysteria without consideration that there was any argument for defending the practice whatsoever:

Continue reading Where Do I Sign?

So often, the problem with the New York Times op-ed page is not just the left-leaning politics, but the poor quality of the contributors, despite the fact that they occupy some of the highest-paid and most-visible perches in the punditocracy. And the hallmark of poor quality punditry is the failure to think through the implications of one’s arguments. So it is with today’s column from Times columnist Nick Kristof.
Kristof’s thesis is that the US military is actually a “socialist” institution that should be a model for our society:

[I]f we seek another model, one that emphasizes universal health care and educational opportunity, one that seeks to curb income inequality, we don’t have to turn to Sweden. Rather, look to the United States military.

Now, it’s reasonable as far as it goes to point out that the military, being wholly-owned and operated by the government, does not behave like a private for-profit enterprise. But does Kristof really think the military isn’t too bureaucratic and inefficient to be a model for the private sector? Hint: it is, because it’s a government bureaucracy, but we tolerate that because it performs an essential and irreplaceable function. Even leaving that aside, however, let’s look at the essential characteristics of the military as a workplace, few of which Kristof seems to have thought through and many of which, I’d guess, he would find objectionable as applied to the private sector:

Continue reading Militarizing America: The Nick Kristof Plan

The president jokes – and not for the first time – about “shovel-ready” projects in the stimulus not being actually shovel-ready. It’s staggering how little attention you have to have paid to American government before 2009 to be surprised by this.
Obama’s inexperience has proven to be awfully expensive. Next time, let’s not elect a guy whose first order of business is to spend nearly a trillion dollars on something with no idea how it works. That would be a good start.

In the past three years, there have been three special elections in upstate New York in districts the GOP could or should have won.
Each time, the GOP bigwigs nominated a member of the hated and dysfunctional state legislature.
Each time, the grassroots was dissatisfied with the nominee, who lost.
In 2010, Republicans picked up five House seats in New York – more than any other state – and not one of those newly-elected Members of Congress was a state legislator.
Coincidence? I don’t think so. More here. And for Democrats spinning this as a national-referendum or indicator of a coming wave like Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts in early 2010, a reminder here of a key feature of Brown’s win: it was a statewide race with presidential-election level turnout, something we haven’t seen in any of the special House races the past three years.

Excellent Paul Ryan video that neatly captures the two sides’ differing approaches to controlling the explosive growth of the costs of Medicare:

I told you last month that Herb Kohl, Wisconsin’s Democratic senior Senator, hadn’t raised even a penny in the first quarter of 2011, leading to questions about whether he would run for re-election in 2012. Kohl was best known for being not known – he kept an extremely low profile in the Senate, and the best you can say of his Senate career is that, to quote Animal House, Kohl has a long tradition of existence in the Senate. Today he makes it official: he’s not running for re-election in 2012.
Kohl’s retirement sets off a scramble to identify the candidates for what will doubtless be a very high-profile race, given the recent political controversies in Wisconsin and its status as a potentially crucial 2012 swing state. The A-list Democratic candidate is recently deposed Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, who commands loyalty from the base and top-flight fundraising capability; given that Feingold was beaten in 2010 by relative unknown Ron Johnson (52%-47%) without the assistance of a scandal or other major controversy, running him sets up a pure test of whether the state’s rightward shift will endure in 2012 with the elevated turnout of a national election.
The GOP “dream” candidate is Paul Ryan, who of course is also being courted in some circles to be a presidential or vice presidential contender, but Ryan has a safe lock on an otherwise Democratic-leaning district, a powerful perch in the House and young kids, so he may pass on this race. The other main candidate who’s already jumped in is former two-term Congressman Mark Neumann, who lost a moderately close race to Feingold in 1998 (50.55%-48.40%) and finished a distant second to Scott Walker in the 2010 Gubernatorial primary.
Then again: it’s a job opening in Wisconsin, and guess who’s out of work!
Stay tuned.

With the recent debate over federal taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood bringing the abortion debate back to the surface, it is sometimes useful to look at the numbers to get a little perspective on why this issue is such a large one. (All of these are estimates, and sources vary, but there’s no serious debate as to the scale of the numbers).
Number killed or missing in action in all wars in U.S. history: 1,343,812. Adding the wounded: 2,489,335.
Number killed or missing in action in U.S. wars since 1973: 12,387. Adding the wounded: 96,680.
Number of executions in U.S. history dating back to 1608: 15,269.
Number of executions in U.S. history dating back to 1930: 3,859.
Number of executions in U.S. history dating back to 1977 (after the Supreme Court lifted a decade-long moratorium): 1,099 through 2008.
Number killed in the September 11 attacks: 2,977.
Number of detainees waterboarded by the CIA under President Bush: 3.
Number of abortions in the U.S. since 1973: 53,310,843 through 2010.
Number of abortions per year in the U.S. since 1973: 1,402,917.
Number of abortions per month in the U.S. since 1973: 116,910.
Number of abortions per week in the U.S. since 1973: 26,979.
Number of abortions per day in the U.S. since 1973: 3,841.
Number of abortions by Planned Parenthood in the U.S. in 2009: 332,278, more than 900 per day, or 27.6% of all abortions in the U.S.
You know, there are a lot of issues I care about, as a conservative Republican. I don’t especially like having to draw lines in the sand over abortion, and if you’re reading this, even if you’re pro-life, chances are you don’t either. But it is useful at times to prick our consciences with the sheer scale of this atrocity, happening daily under our noses. Liberal activists and lawyers devote massive efforts every year to battling the death penalty – yet all the executions of the post-Roe era don’t even add up to a third of a day’s worth of the number of abortions. We agonize, and rightly so, over the cost in life of our wars – but the toll of abortion is equal to fighting the Battle of Antietam, or two Battles of Okinawa, every single week, or two entire Vietnam Wars every month. Our commentariat was racked with paroxysms of moral reproach over three prisoners being waterboarded, yet considers it gauche to even mention well over three thousand abortions daily, each of which destroys a biologically unique human being. (Your religion may override your regard for the science, but there’s no way around the fact that an unborn child has his or her own unique genetic code, the definitive scientific hallmark of an individual).
Numbers alone can’t make the moral judgments that constitute public policy for us. But they can certainly inform our sense of perspective. And looking at the number of abortions is a reminder that maybe, sometimes, we go too far in trying to make this just another issue.

The biggest political story of 2011 is at the state level, where new Republican governors like Scott Walker and Rick Snyder have followed in the footsteps of Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie by seeking not only to cut short-term spending to address their states’ immediate budget crises while resisting tax hikes, but to attack the #1 source of their states’ long-term fiscal problems: excessive long-term commitments to pay and benefits for (mostly unionized) state and local public employees. Local Democrats in many states have responded with apoplexy, reflecting their political and financial dependence on those same unions. In other states, where the Democrats still hold the statehouses, they’ve had to swallow some spending cuts, but are nonetheless in denial – Jerry Brown in California has tried to close his budget gap with a 50/50 mix of spending cuts and tax hikes, Mark Dayton in Minnesota has pandered to the DailyKos crowd by proposing to double the state’s top income tax bracket, Connecticut’s Dan Malloy – elected by the slimmest of margins – blasted Walker’s collective bargaining reforms as “Un-American” and proposed a battery of tax hikes, and Maryland’s Martin O’Malley even went to the Corzine-esque extreme of giving the keynote speech at a union protest against his own budget, swearing to avoid “Midwestern oppression.”
But oddly, at least one newly-elected Democratic governor seems to have come to grips thus far with reality, and it’s maybe the unlikeliest of all: New York’s Andrew Cuomo. The son of liberal icon Mario Cuomo, the Clinton-era HUD Secretary, the successor to Eliot Spitzer as the state’s crusading Attorney General; nothing in Cuomo’s history before the 2010 election suggests he’s anything but a standard-issue liberal. Nor did he take office under any urgent need to court swing voters; while New York’s usually liberal electorate gave the state Senate back to the GOP and swung more House seats from D to R than any other state in the Union, Cuomo himself cruised to victory by almost 30 points over his clownish self-funded challenger, Carl Paladino, and the state GOP boasts a depressingly shallow bench of prospective challengers.
Nonetheless, Governor Cuomo’s agenda sounds like it could come straight out of the Christie-Walker playbook. The NY Daily News’ Bill Hammond has an overview of Cuomo’s promises and the obstacles he’s faced, mainly from his own party. Some highlights:
-Negotiating for concessions on existing contracts from the public employee unions.
-Cutting health care, Medicaid and education spending. (see here; a quarter of the state’s residents are on Medicaid).
-Capping property taxes to “limit the growth of these levies to 2% a year or the inflation rate, whichever is less,” similar to the cap passed by Christie in New Jersey. (see here on how the cap would work to restrain school spending; the cap easily passed the GOP-controlled State Senate but faces stiff resistance from the Democrat-controlled Assembly and has provoked outrage from the teachers’ union).
-Opposing all new tax hikes, especially a “millionaire’s tax” on incomes above $200,000 promoted by the Assembly Democrats and supported by $1.5 million in ads run by the teachers’ union (see here).
-Touting reform of the LIFO (last in, first out) rules that require teacher layoffs to be done by seniority rather than performance. (see here; Cuomo has backed down on doing anything about the LIFO rules but claims to be willing to replace them if a new system is installed for evaluating public school teachers).
As Hammond notes, Cuomo’s progress – and even the sincerity of his commitment, as on the LIFO issue – has been uneven; he’s yet to get real concessions from the Assembly or the unions (other than getting buy-in from hospitals and health-care unions on his health care cuts) and still faces a battle with Senate Republicans over ethics and gerrymandering bills. But if Cuomo has made some of the right enemies, he’s made some strange bedfellows, too. His approval/disapproval ratings among Republicans are the same as among Democrats, and Rudy Giuliani has noticed that Cuomo is facing New York’s fiscal realities by working from the GOP playbook:

Giuliani said in an interview Wednesday that the Democratic governor “has gotten off to a very good start.”
“I don’t know how Democrats feel about him but he’s doing everything that a Republican governor would be doing in a similar situation,” said the former mayor and one-time presidential candidate.

And while Cuomo has to navigate public-sector union opposition, he’s actually getting backing for his budget and tax proposals from what may be as much as $10 million in outside ads by the Committee to Save New York, a post-Citizens United alliance of business and real estate interests with private sector construction unions and the public support of Democratic former comptroller and onetime bitter Cuomo foe Carl McCall. Here is a taste of the Committee’s ads:

The question is why Governor Cuomo is trying to govern like a Republican, at least on fiscal issues. Certainly, after a life in liberal-Democratic circles, he’s hardly had a road-to-Damascus conversion of principle, and he faces no real threat from the state GOP. The obvious reason is simple realism: even David Paterson tried to get a property tax cap passed. The state’s finances are such a garish illustration of the failure of big-government liberalism that only a complete fool could deny the need for a change of course. A second reason is that Cuomo is, whatever his other faults, a guy who believes in doing things. He doesn’t want to end up as the same impotent failure, hog-tied by dysfunctional Albany, as his three predecessors (George Pataki, like many moderate Republicans, had a good first year in office but followed it by not really accomplishing squat for the next 11 years; Spitzer was flailing even before “Client #9,” and the functionally illiterate Paterson never had a prayer). The money’s just not there for more liberal experiments; unless the state changes its ways, Cuomo will leave office with nothing accomplished, and he knows it. A third may be that Cuomo’s investigations of the corruption in state pension funds – including targeting former Democrat comptroller Alan Hevesi and Obama Administration ‘car czar’ Steve Rattner – opened his eyes to the depth of corruption in business-as-usual Albany. And national ambition may be another driver – if Barack Obama wins a second term solely by virtue of a weak GOP field in 2012, four more years of Obama will almost certainly leave the Democrats looking for a new national leader unencumbered by Obama’s fiscal profligacy if they hope to survive. Cuomo may be hoping to craft an image as some sort of fiscal centrist with an eye on 2016.
New York conservatives, often scorned and abandoned by the state GOP, don’t and shouldn’t trust Andrew Cuomo any further than we can throw him. But we can certainly get behind enough of his agenda to send the message far and wide that even blue-state liberal Democrats recognize the need for Daniels/Christie/Walker-style reforms to how our states do business. If even Andrew Cuomo can wake up and smell the tea, why can’t your state?

Greg Sargent, the Washington Post’s in-house left-wing activist, has a hilarious post up analyzing the latest WaPo poll. (The post was originally entitled, “The pubic agrees with Dems, but they don’t know it,” although eventually someone caught on and fixed the typo.)
Everybody has typos; what’s more enduringly amusing is Sargent’s effort at spin:

A big majority, 64 percent, thinks the best way to reduce the federal budget deficit is through a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes, while only 31 percent think the best way is through only spending cuts. The former position is the one held by most Dems, while the latter is the one held by many Republicans.
…Democrats can plausibly conclude that the public agrees with them at least as much as with Republicans on how to handle our fiscal matters. Yet Dems are not proceeding as if this is the case.

(Italics in original; bold added). If you are keeping score at home, you just heard a left-wing activist admit that 95% of the public believes spending cuts are the best way to reduce the deficit, whether or not that plan also includes tax hikes. Going to the poll itself, only 3% believe the best way to cut the deficit is simply raising taxes. And what’s more, that’s the public – not likely voters or even registered voters, but all adults. Which is one reason why the entire poll is garbage (“all adults” don’t vote for issues; voters vote for candidates). Another, of course, is that Sargent is, as usual, mouthing talking points here in claiming that the Democrats want serious spending cuts (this narrative doesn’t even last the whole piece, as later on he cites support for “the Democratic argument that budget cuts will cause job loss,” which is more like what Democrats usually argue when these issues come to a head. But notice that the Post didn’t ask whether tax hikes would cost jobs, the answer to that one being painfully obvious). And as noted, even with all the poll’s flaws, there’s only 3% public support for closing the budget gap by soaking the taxpayer.
As I’ve explained previously, the real argument worth having isn’t about the deficit at all, it’s about what the ratio of public spending should be to private sector income, with the deficit being only a symptom of the problem of public spending crowding out the private sector. Sargent is trying to frame the debate as one about closing the deficit in a way that reduces the focus on spending cuts, and using an essentially worthless poll to do so. But when even that poll shows respondents by a 95-3 margin saying you have to cut spending to cut the deficit, the Democrats should think long and hard about choosing that hill to die on.

Michael Barone on the Taylorite origins of modern labor-union ideology and how unsuited that ideology is to unions of public employees who do not work on assembly-line jobs.
This is a slight tangent, but having read only glancingly about him over the years, I hadn’t known that Taylor was a fraud. It’s amazing how many of the most famous early celebrity “scientists” and pseudo-scientists this is true of – Alfred Kinsey and Margaret Mead, to pick a few obvious examples (Rachel Carson’s work stops short of outright fabrication of studies, but doesn’t stand up much better to retrospective scrutiny). One of the lessons we should have learned years ago is that really groundbreaking research needs to be double-checked – sometimes it’s completely bogus, and even when it’s diligently done, further evaluation usually turns up more qualifiers. And yet, the widely-publicized theories of these “pioneers” ended up lingering long in public consciousness.

In case you missed it, Iowahawk had some fun at the expense of a fairly typical example of Paul Krugman’s work. He responds further here.

Vodkapundit sums up the difference between Tea Party protests and the protests in Madison Wisconsin.

As anyone who has spent any time reading them knows, left-wing bloggers and activists tend to live in a world of their own, in which the most outrageous sorts of allegations against conservatives and Republicans are not required to be supported by any evidence. This is especially true when it comes to accusing conservatives and Republicans of bigotry and other improper motivations; left-wingers feel free to lecture us on how they know better than we do what motivates us and how we think, and leave conservatives and Republicans stuck attempting to disprove a negative.
In theory, the Washington Post is supposed to be a reputable newspaper and above this sort of thing. But Greg Sargent, the former Talking Points Memo blogger and the Post’s current in-house left-wing activist, doesn’t see himself as bound by such mundane considerations as having evidence before slandering an entire movement. Consider this Tweet today from Sargent:

Hah! RT @Redshift4 TP leader compares Tea Party to abolitionism, civil rights, & women’s suffrage. // 3 things they want to reverse

I saved a screenshot here in case he takes it down:

Now, if you’re familiar with Twitter, this Tweet is sort of odd, as he appears to be Retweeting a user named @Redshift4 and adding his own comment after the slashes, but @Redshift4 appears to have only Tweeted once and this wasn’t in that Tweet. So, it’s not clear at all how much of this Tweet is Sargent’s “original” thought or, for that matter, what Tea Party “leader” (there are almost as many as there are Tea Partiers, which if you know anything about the movement is kind of the point) he’s quoting. But it is nonetheless clear that Sargent is at least endorsing the notion that “they” – presumably all Tea Partiers – want to “reverse” the work of the abolitionists, the civil rights movement and women’s suffrage and restore slavery, Jim Crow and the male-only vote.
This is outrageous. I realize that slandering grassroots opponents of the Obama Administration is considered necessary by the left-wing blogs, that left-wing bloggers are often so unfamiliar with ordinary Americans as to find their motivations inscrutable, and that Twitter lends itself to off-the-cuff oversimplifications. And I realize that grassroots movements, by their nature, include a broad enough array of opinion and attract enough cranks that you can find somebody in a movement of millions to support just about any old fool thing. But we are talking here about bedrock elements of our Constitutional structure – the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments – and legal and social changes that are by now deeply embedded in our society, none of which has anything to do with the stated purposes by which the Tea Party movement has attracted such a wide following. Sargent cites no evidence, and I expect him to cite none, that any significant sliver of the Tea Party movement, let alone the dreaded “they” that appears to refer to the entire movement, has designs on reinstituting slavery and segregation and denying women the vote. Even the 9/11 Truthers had more to work with than this.
The Washington Post should consider whether it stands by Sargent’s characterization of the motives of the entire Tea Party.

A little history can be a dangerous thing, and in advance of Tuesday’s State of the Union Address by President Obama, political commentary will be focusing on Obama’s ability to replay 1995-96, when President Clinton rebounded from a similar rout in the midterm elections to more or less coast to re-election (while Clinton finished below 50% of the popular vote, it was only a “coming home” of Republicans in the campaign’s closing weeks that averted a more lopsided result; the outcome was not seriously in doubt).
Undoubtedly, Obama will have the opportunity to take advantage of many of the same dynamics that favored Clinton’s re-election, and he may succeed for those and other reasons. But history never repeats itself precisely. It is worthwhile to reflect on the many things that worked to Clinton’s benefit that Obama can’t count on:

Continue reading Why 2012 Is Not 1996

Patterico notes a meme being rapidly spread by left-wing bloggers: that Glenn Beck told his viewers to shoot Democratic Members of Congress in the head. This is, sadly, the kind of thing the left-blogs try to put over on their readers, hoping it will stick quickly before the facts can come out. But I would not advise doing that while the likes of Patterico are on the case.
Here’s the actual transcript that Patterico links to, and as you can see, you’d need to be illiterate to fall for the spin being put on this. After a lengthy diatribe about the growing danger to Democrats posed by hard-core radicals and Communists in their own coalition, Beck concludes:

Continue reading Suckers

I’ve been tied up a bit and was too late to the party to really add anything new to the blogospheric reaction to the Arizona shootings, but looking over the comments to this thread, I am reminded that many of the left-wingers still trying to score political points on this one are seriously beyond parody.
Everything we know about the Arizona shootings points to the same conclusions: Jared Lee Loughner was not any sort of political conservative or Republican, paid no attention to political conservatives or Republicans, didn’t even vote in 2010, was your basic unhinged lunatic and recognized as such by the people around him, and had been obsessed with Congresswoman Giffords since 2007. Thus, any effort to use the shootings as an excuse to attack Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Jan Brewer, the Tea Party movement, etc. in any connection with the shootings is dishonest political opportunism, plain and simple. And yet the ecstasy of folks on the left in their immediate reactions to the shootings was palpable from the instant the story hit Twitter, and nearly none of those folks have allowed their initial reactions to be affected even slightly by the facts.
I know why this is being done, but I don’t know why anybody should be expected to believe it. We all saw coming clearly the pre-existing desire of the Left to replicate how Bill Clinton benefitted from Oklahoma City. We also saw the the instant efforts to blame all the same people for the Discovery Channel shootings, the Holocaust Museum shootings, the suicide of a government worker in Kentucky, the Times Square bombing, the DC Sniper, etc., none of which held up at all after the facts came out. But the lesson of Hurricane Katrina remains embedded for the Left: the first out of the chute to build a narrative can set it in stone before the facts are available. So we see the same people using the same “frame” over and over again until they can get it to stick. This week’s Word Of The Week was “eliminationist,” which got recycled endlessly by Kos, Paul Krugman, Peter Daou and other usual suspects (samples here). Which is ironic, of course, as it is the Left that has conducted the noisiest campaign over the past several years to delegitimize the Tea Party and the Republicans it supports through a barrage that has little or nothing to do with discussion of political ideas and everything to do with trying to make citizen activists sound crazy, dangerous, racist, etc.
The merits of the argument that people on the Right were using “dangerous” rhetoric that could have hypothetically contributed to the shootings – even in the complete absence of any sign that they did – are also lame, best symbolized by this rather pathetic effort to explain why it’s dangerous to use a crosshairs on a map of political election targets, but perfectly OK to use a bullseye. These angels-on-heads-of-pins distinctions are, unsurprisingly, not that effective in persuading the public, but effective in giving the media a deniable rationalization to keep running stories drawing a connnection that’s not there.
What’s left is a sort of passive-agressive rabbit-punching strategy: attack Sarah Palin in particular in an effort to politically destroy her over the shootings, then complain that she’s politicizing the issue when she fights back (one day we had Chris Matthews saying Palin was “on the lam” for not addressing the attacks, the next she was being faulted for responding; heads I win, tails you lose). This is emblematic of people who cannot bear to take a fraction of what they dish out, and are uncomfortable with robust debate rather than a one-sided media narrative in which all media voices proceed from the same premises.
And you know who really has no standing to complain about extremists? Supporters of Barack Obama, that’s who, as we can recall from the extensive evidence of Obama’s long, sorded background with hate-spewing and in some cases violent extremists. Sarah Palin condemned Jared Lee Loughner after the fact; that may seem like a ridiculously low bar to set for public discourse until you consider that our current president directed large sums of grant money to Bill Ayers, an unrepentant member of the terrorist group the Weather Underground, to direct a distinctly politicized school curriculum after Ayers’ crimes.* Of course, typical of the rabbit-punching strategy, the same people who concoct incredibly baroque theories trying to tie Sarah Palin to violent extremists argue that it is illegitimate and racist to discuss Obama’s direct association with an actual terrorist.
None of the criticisms leveled at Palin or the Right in general here have been made in good faith. None at all.

Continue reading Opportunism

Yesterday’s swearing in of the new House and Senate, including the transition of power to Speaker Boehner and the new Republican majority in the House, inaugurates a new political season, in which “the deficit” promises to be front and center. President Obama is already sending up trial balloons about various proposals made by the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission. But Republicans should resist efforts to frame the debate as being about “the deficit,” because that term itself focuses on the wrong measurement.
Democrats like to talk about the federal government’s operating budget deficit as if it is a matter of balancing income against spending. It’s not. The money taken in by the federal government is taxes, but taxes are not income; they are simply a subset of the income of the private sector, in the same way that the money you withdraw from your bank account is only a subset of your bank balance. If you want to know whether you can afford to buy something, you look to the size of that bank balance (and the sources of real income that go into your deposits), not simply into whether you withdrew enough money to pay the latest credit card bill.
The mistake made in talking about “the deficit,” then, is in assuming that fiscal responsibility comes from matching public spending with the government revenues used to pay for that spending in the short term, rather than with the actual income produced by the private sector. It is the money thrown off by the private sector that is the ultimate source of all public spending, and therefore any sane measurement of real fiscal responsibility will measure the outflows (public spending) as a fraction of real income (private sector income) rather than the intermediate step of taxing real income. The larger that fraction is, the less the private sector has to work with to continue producing growth and a high standard of living; in short, the more of our private sector income we are spending today on government, the less we will have to leave to our children, regardless of how high or low we set our tax rates. Put another way, the problem isn’t that the government is spending more than the government takes in, but that the government is spending too much of what we create. (Keynsian economics, which is based on trying to create short-term growth with public spending, is fatally flawed because it ignores all but the shortest term effects of public spending – a predictable failing in the work of a childless economist and a director of the British Eugenics Society). Anybody who tells you that the federal budget operating deficit is a better measure of fiscal responsibility than comparing public spending to private sector income is simply trying to mislead you and isn’t serious about long-term fiscal responsibility.
Moreover, the broader question isn’t just federal spending, but all public spending, federal, state and local, although a good start to keeping a restraining hand on state and local spending is to refuse to use the federal government’s fiscal printing presses to bail out imprudent state and local governments, and in the long run stop using Washington as a tax collector for state and local governments, as happens in the myriad ways that revenues are raised nationally and then laundered back to the states.
As I have explained before, the federal budget deficit is only a symptom, and an imprecise one at that. Public spending of privately created resources, depleting the source of future growth, is the disease. If we restore the proper balance of robust private sector growth to a limited public sector, we’ll have no problem in the long run handling any operating deficits; if we don’t, the size of the operating deficit will be the least of our concerns. If the GOP is serious about setting our fiscal house in order, the new Republican majority must resist at every turn the urge to treat the symptom rather than the disease.