Libertarian Leanings

Marines Over Medicaid

Reprinted with permission of the National Review. 

To the great surprise of nobody, another blue-ribbon panel of Washington’s A-list nabobs has failed at its task: In this case, it is the so-called supercommittee charged with nudging the federal government away from the edge of the debt abyss. Investors despaired at the news, and there was talk of a second downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt.

The failure of the supercommittee is a testament to Democrats’ tax obsession. With the supercommittee having fizzled, the next step is the automatic sequestration process, which imposes 50 percent of the cuts on a program that accounts for only 20 percent of spending (national defense) while leaving the entitlements largely untouched. But the country needs the Marines more than it needs Medicaid.

The talks broke down because Democrats demanded $1 trillion in tax increases as the price of doing any deal that included entitlement savings — which is to say, as the price of doing any deal that begins to address the major drivers of spending going forward. Republicans have never quite owned up to being open to a tax increase, but that is what they are talking about when they talk about “pro-growth tax reform,” which includes broadening the tax base and eliminating some deductions and exemptions, producing a net tax increase even if tax rates stay the same or go down. But even that isn’t good enough for the Democrats, who insist that any tax increase be enacted through a relatively narrow range of options, mostly through raising tax rates on individuals with above-average incomes and on businesses that do not fall within the protective circle of Democrats’ political favoritism. (Don’t expect General Electric or the next Solyndra to start paying 35 percent, whatever else happens.) Because Republicans rightly declined to go along with this class-warfare program and insisted upon savings in entitlements, the supercommittee failed.

The sobering thing is that even the massive tax increases the Democrats wish to inflict upon the nation would not close the deficit that our entitlement programs will produce if left unreformed. A study by the International Monetary Fund estimates that, in order to keep entitlement spending at current levels while stabilizing the debt, every federal tax on the books — income tax, payroll taxes, excise taxes, etc. — would have to be raised by 88 percent. Democrats will be happy to run against entitlement reform, and they will wallpaper the airwaves with vulgar advertisements that show Paul Ryan running granny off a cliff in her wheelchair. But they are really running on an 88 percent tax hike — that or massive, unsustainable deficits.

Voters are beginning to understand as much, and that means that Republicans have a two-fold task ahead of them: The first is to overturn the automatic defense-spending cuts, locating savings elsewhere in the federal budget to offset them. Unlike most of what the federal government does, national defense is a real, pressing, national priority that is unquestionably a government responsibility. The range of threats facing the United States is broad and deep, and a single 9/11-scale attack could in financial terms alone cost the nation far more than we would save through defense cutbacks, to say nothing of the loss of life. Defense is one of the few federal functions in which budgetary concerns must perforce take a backseat to global political realities.

The same is not true of the entitlement programs, and so the second part of the Republicans’ task is to take that case to the voters in November. Most of the Republican presidential hopefuls have developed thoughtful, credible, long-term solutions to the financial imbalances of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The reforms they are proposing — means testing, gradually raising the retirement age, changing the indexing formulae — are far short of the radical changes that have been contemplated by some on the right. But properly executed they would bring the programs back into balance, a goal that is of critical importance as our population ages and the financial stress on the entitlements becomes more acute. Changing the terms of Social Security for a well-off 35-year-old decades away from collecting any benefits is not relegating granny to a cat-food diet, and Republicans should be willing to make that case. 

Meanwhile, another opportunity to control spending and rationalize the tax code has come and gone. Our supply of such opportunities is not unlimited.

DaTechGuy's First Anniversary

Peter Ingemi, blogger and Worcester radio personality known as DaTechGuy, is celebrating his first anniversary on the air.  His invitation:

Just under a year ago DaTechGuy on DaRadio premiered as a one hour program Saturday Night at 9 p.m with Stacy McCain as my first guest. It was a grand experiment too see if it could work.

We’ve now been on the air 51 weeks with 43 different bloggers as guests, from the biggest of names like Glenn Reynolds, to small bloggers with good ideas that just weren’t known by many people beyond a small core of faithful readers. We’ve given them 50,000 watts to spread their ideas. The show has grown from that single hour with Stacy McCain Saturday night to two hours Saturday Morning as an anchor of original conservative radio on WCRN, with our next show live from Denver at the Blogcon convention.

So lets have some fun, After our anniversary show I am going to be at the Border Grille 246 Mill street in Leominster Massachusetts, and I’m inviting interested readers and listeners to join me in the back room for an afternoon of good talk and conversation on the issues. Our last little salon had about a dozen people and we talked for hours about the issues and had a grand time. This will start at 1 p.m. and end when the last person goes.

I've had the pleasure of being a guest on Peter's show, and I want to say this is an event I don't plan to miss.  Everyone is welcome.  A map to the Border Grille is here.  I hope you can join us.

DaTechGuy can be heard on WCRN AM830 from 10:00 to noon every Saturday morning.

Absolving The Occupy Shooter

Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez has been arrested for firing his rifle in the direction of the White House, putting a hole in an exterior window and embedding the bullet in the interior ballastic glass.

In trying to determine why he traveled to the nation’s capital from the western part of the country, investigators also found no connection between him and the Occupy D.C. protest, according to three law enforcement officials familiar with the case.

One official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing, said Ortega-Hernandez’s alleged motive may have been anger. “He hates the president, he hates Washington, he hates society,” the official said.

Jonathan S. Tobin is quick to note how quickly the media rushed to establish that there is no connection between Otega-Hernandez and the Occupy DC protest, even though the shooter spent some time at the Occupy DC encampment.

But imagine just for a moment if a man who was described by police as being filled with anger at Washington and the president and who had a predilection for violence had, prior to losing a shot at the White House, lingered in the vicinity of a Tea Party demonstration, let alone an encampment of the group. Though they were routinely depicted as a threat to democracy, there was no Tea Party violence, just an occasional rude remark to members of Congress at town hall meetings. The notion of the Tea Party as a band of violent racists is a trope that was repeated endlessly by the same news outlets that are rightly endeavoring to make sure there is no guilt by association link established between the White House shooter and OWS.

Let’s also compare the rush to absolve OWS of any connection to Ortega-Hernandez with the stampede to tie Jared Loughner​, the mentally disturbed man who attempted to assassinate Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, to conservative critics of President Obama and the Democrats. Though that supposed connection was almost immediately proved to be utterly false, the fact that some Republican groups (including one led by Sarah Palin) sought to “target” Giffords (as in, attempt to defeat her re-election bid) is still spoken of in many quarters as being somehow responsible for the attack.

Unlike the Occupy Shooter, the Tea Party weapon of choice is the vote.  The Tea Party ambush is set for election day 2012, and I expect it will be devastating.  It was in 2010.

 

Not Their Fathers' Democratic Party

Daniel Henninger wonders, "Why should any blue-collar worker who isn't hooked for life to a public budget vote for Barack Obama next year?"

Within days of the Keystone decision, Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper, said his country would divert sales of the Keystone-intended oil to Asia. Translation: Those lost American blue-collar pipeline jobs are disappearing into the Asian sun. Incidentally, Mr. Harper has said he wants to turn Canada into an energy "superpower," exploiting its oil, gas and hydroelectric resources. Meanwhile, the American president shores up his environmental base in Hollywood and on campus. Perhaps our blue-collar work force should consider emigrating to Canada.

...

You would think someone in the private labor movement would wake up and smell the tar sands. Last week's Big Labor "victory" in Ohio was about spending tens of millions to support state and local government workers. Many union families attached to the state's withering auto plants no doubt voted with their public-sector brothers in solidarity. But why? Where the rubber hits the road—new jobs that will last a generation—what does this public-sector vote do for them?

The Students Demand

Earlier this month Harvard Economics 10 students demanded that Professor Gregory Mankiw refrain from teaching them economic theories with which they intend to disagree. 

Wednesday November 2, 2011

Dear Professor Mankiw—

Today, we are walking out of your class, Economics 10, in order to express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics course. We are deeply concerned about the way that this bias affects students, the University, and our greater society.

As Harvard undergraduates, we enrolled in Economics 10 hoping to gain a broad and introductory foundation of economic theory that would assist us in our various intellectual pursuits and diverse disciplines, which range from Economics, to Government, to Environmental Sciences and Public Policy, and beyond. Instead, we found a course that espouses a specific—and limited—view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.

The students complained that Adam Smith’s economic theories should not be presented as "more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory," apparently not realizing that Keynes is covered later on in the course.  The students continue:

Harvard graduates play major roles in the financial institutions and in shaping public policy around the world. If Harvard fails to equip its students with a broad and critical understanding of economics, their actions are likely to harm the global financial system. The last five years of economic turmoil have been proof enough of this.

We are walking out today to join a Boston-wide march protesting the corporatization of higher education as part of the global Occupy movement. Since the biased nature of Economics 10 contributes to and symbolizes the increasing economic inequality in America, we are walking out of your class today both to protest your inadequate discussion of basic economic theory and to lend our support to a movement that is changing American discourse on economic injustice.

Scary thought, that students like these might someday have a major impact on public policy, free from the encumbrances of unwanted and distasteful economic theory. 

Of Grass Roots And Acorns

Having been without power all week, I haven't had a lot of time for blogging or even keeping up with recent goings on.  So you can imagine my amusement at coming online again to find this wonderfully entertaining story about Occupy Wall Street.

Officials with the revamped ACORN office in New York -- operating as New York Communities for Change -- have fired staff, shredded reams of documents and told workers to blame disgruntled ex-employees for leaking information in an effort to explain away a FoxNews.com report last week on the group’s involvement in Occupy Wall Street protests, according to sources.

NYCC also is installing surveillance cameras and recording devices at its Brooklyn offices, removing or packing away supplies bearing the name ACORN and handing out photos of Fox News staff with a stern warning not to talk to the media, the sources said.

“They’re doing serious damage control right now,” said an NYCC source.

NYCC Executive Director Jon Kest has been calling a series of emergency meetings to discuss last week’s report—and taking extreme measures to identify the sources in their office and to prevent further damage, a source within NYCC told FoxNews.com.

Two staffers were fired after NYCC officials suspected them as the source of the leaks, a source told FoxNews.com. “One was fired the day the story came out, the other was fired on Friday. (NYCC senior staff) told everyone that they were fired because they talked to you,” a source said.

We always knew ACORN would reinvented itself, but as the KGB?  Who would ever have dreamed?

NYCC is also monitoring its staff’s behavior, cracking down on phone use and socialization. Officials have ordered all papers -- even scraps -- to be shredded every night, the source said.

“And all the supplies—everything around the office that said ‘ACORN’ -- is now all in storage until this blows over,” the source said. “People literally have to cover up the cameras on the back of their cellphones in the office.”

“Now there’s no texting in the office, no phone calls in the office. They tell us to take our phone calls out into the waiting room where there’s an intercom, and then they turn on the intercom to hear our conversations. They’re installing new cameras and speakers around the building so they can hear everything.

Gee, wasn't just a couple of weeks ago that Nancy Pelosi was bubbling over with praise for Occupy Wall Street, as if it were some powerful, spontaneous grass roots campaign.

“The message of the protesters is a message for the establishment in every place,” she told reporters in a Capitol press conference. “The message of the American people is that no longer will the recklessness of some on Wall Street cause massive joblessness on Main Street.

“God bless them for their spontaneity,” Pelosi added. “It’s independent people coming (together), it’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.”

"Grass roots" doesn't quite match reality, a fact which became hilariously evident when FoxNews.com reported that NYCC, formerly known as ACORN, was paying protesters to protest. 

A source said that immediately following publication of the FoxNews.com report staff were called into the Brooklyn office for meetings headed by NYCC’s organizing director, Jonathan Westin. Westin handed out copies of the article and went through it line-by-line, the source said.

Staffers were also given copies of photos of Senior Fox News Correspondent Eric Shawn and three other Fox News staff members, including this reporter [Jana Winter].

“They reminded us that we can get fired, sued, arrested for talking to the press,” the source said. “Then they went through the article point-by-point and said that the allegation that we pay people to protest isn’t true.”

“‘That’s the story that we’re sticking to,’” Westin said, according to the source.

The source said staffers at the meeting contested Westin’s denial:

“It was pretty funny. Jonathan told staff they don’t pay for protesters, but the people in the meeting  who work there objected and said, ‘Wait, you pay us to go to the protests every day?’ Then Jonathan said  ‘No, but that’s your job,’ and staffers were like, ‘Yeah, our job is to protest,’ and Westin said, ‘No your job is to fight for economic and social justice. We just send you to protest.’

“Staff said, ‘Yes, you pay us to carry signs.’ Then Jonathan says, ‘That’s your job.’ It went on like that back and forth for a while.”

"Progressive" and "grass roots" are mutually exclusive terms.  Progressive movements are top down affairs where the elites tell the lesser ones what to think, what to say, and when to say it.  Ideas come from the top.  Those at the bottom must be persuaded, coerced, or paid to take their enlightenment. 

Occupy Wall Street is a good metaphor for the "hope and change" that Barack Obama has been working to impose these last few years.  It's fitting that Obama, Pelosi, and the rest of the progressive leadership have embraced the Occupy Wall Street movement.  "Movement" is a good word, too.  Especially as it seems the movement is hitting the fan.