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July 2nd, 2014 at 9:01 am
Public Ranks Obama Worst President in 70 Years
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Americans have apparently not taken total leave of their senses. A new poll released by Quinnipiac University shows that a plurality of voters — 33 percent — rank Barack Obama as America’s worst president since World War II. Now, a poll’s only as good as its respondents and there’s always a danger in asking people to compare current political figures with historical ones, because the contemporary personalities absorb such a disproportionate amount of their attention (it’s salient that George W. Bush came in second the poll). Still, I think these results just about get it right.

The only two presidents in the post-WWII era that could arguably compete with Obama are Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Nixon is really sui generis though because of Watergate. Without the scandal, it’s unlikely that he’d be held in such low esteem; Nixon was accused a lot of things, but incompetence was never one of them.

As for Carter, traditionally the measuring rod that those of us on the right have used for hapless chief executives, Obama actually makes him look good by comparison. Whereas virtually every instinct Obama has on domestic policy is wrong, at least Carter can be credited with starting some of the push towards deregulation that really flowered under the Reagan Administration. And while Carter is Obama’s closest analogue on foreign policy fecklessness, there is one key distinction — Carter eventually learned from his mistakes, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan convincing him that a more robust foreign policy was a practical necessity. Judged in a vacuum that’s pretty thin gruel — but it’s fairly impressive by comparison with Obama.

Two other interesting points from the results: a narrow plurality of voters now say that Obama is a worse president than George W. Bush, something that would have been unthinkable to liberals five years ago. Also, by a 45-38 margin, respondents said the country would be better off if Mitt Romney had defeated Obama in 2012. It’s a bit frustrating that it’s taken this long for eyes to open … but better late than never.

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July 1st, 2014 at 4:23 pm
Yesterday’s OTHER Supreme Court Ruling
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Lost in all of the media hyperventilation about the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision yesterday (where the left is truly embarrassing itself over an extremely narrowly tailored decision) is the equally good news that came out of the case of Harris v. Quinn, which challenged Illinois’ requirement that home care workers had to contribute dues to the SEIU even if they didn’t want to join (an arrangement that was set up through a back room deal with now-imprisoned former Governor Rod Blagojevich). From The Hill:

The Supreme Court on Monday chipped away at the power of organized labor by ruling that some state workers cannot be forced to pay union fees.

In a 5-4 decision, the justices struck down a requirement that home care workers in Illinois contribute to a branch of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), even if they choose not to join.

“A state may not force every person who benefits from this [union’s] efforts to make payments to the [union],” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority’s decision.

It’s always the same story with big labor: their supposed benevolence relies on coercion. If people don’t want to join the union, by what right should they still be forced to pay them? And if the unions think the lack of dues leaves them vulnerable to free riding, then why not limit the terms of collective bargaining only to those workers who are actual members? The answer, of course, is that labor negotiates deals far better than they could receive in a competitive market, leading them to attempt to lock out anyone who might be willing to work for a lesser rate.

Expect to see the same outcome in Illinois that you did in Wisconsin when workers there got out from the unions’ thumbs: dues payers rushing for the exits. If big labor wants a viable future, they’ll have to start standing on their own two feet. The days when they can live off of others are quickly coming to a close.

May 30th, 2014 at 5:30 pm
The Right Choice for VA Secretary
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I wrote here last week that I was ambivalent as to whether Eric Shinseki should lose his job as Secretary of Veterans Affairs over the scandal involving VA hospitals. My reluctance owed not to any doubts about the gravity of the scandal — it’s utterly horrible — but to a long-held belief that firings should be targeted at the person most directly responsible for error. My feeling was that only if Shinseki either (A) was that person or (B) had knowingly enabled that person, he wasn’t necessarily the right person to get the axe. And, as I noted last week, it seems clear to me that the real problem at the VA has a lot more to do with the structure of the institution and the policies it employs than the management (though it’s utterly plausible that Shinseki wasn’t the right guy to address those deeper issues).

It’s all moot now, of course, as Shinseki’s resignation was announced this morning. This was probably for the best. If anything, I came to lean more towards thinking his departure was the right thing over the last week — not because of the underlying scandal but because Shinseki’s reaction to this outrage seemed muted almost to the point of drowsiness.

It’s nice to see someone in the Obama Administration finally be held responsible for failures (no doubt Kathleen Sebelius’s management of the ObamaCare rollout had a lot to do with her departure, but she was still allowed to leave on her own terms). That said, however, no one should be sanguine about what lies ahead. Sacrificing Shinseki to the media gods may have bought the Obama Administration some time, but it doesn’t solve any of the underlying structural problems at the VA.

One of the reasons that the VA scandal has had so much traction is that it’s utterly non-partisan. Everyone believes government should be doing everything in its power to assist those who’ve worn the uniform of their country. With that in mind, this would be a good time for President Obama to do something truly presidential and look for the best man for the job regardless of political affiliations. What he needs is a proven fixer, someone who can turn around a major organization and root out inefficiencies and rot throughout the system; someone who will do the job as a service to the country rather than as a stepping stone to greater visibility; someone who’ll take the charge seriously even after the story has dropped off the front pages.

There’s a guy out there who’s a perfect fit for this job. Barack Obama ran against him in 2012.

May 22nd, 2014 at 6:29 pm
A Victory for Political Freedom
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From the USA Today:

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service said Thursday it would start over on its controversial rule limiting the political activity of certain tax-exempt groups, propose a new rule that would take into account a backlash of opposition.

The announcement made official what IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told USA TODAY last month — that the IRS would put out a new proposal and seek more public comments before overturning a 57-year-old precedent allowing certain tax-exempt groups to engage in limited amounts of political activity.

Great news, though, alas, it sounds like the IRS will come back for another bite at this apple. Still, this buys time for those who believe that this entire endeavor is a misbegotten exercise in letting government narrow the parameters of political engagement.

There are few threats to freedom as great as allowing those in power to control what those out of power — which may be liberals one year and conservatives the next —can do or say about politics. Any truly ‘liberal’ society gives the opposition room to flower. May the IRS never complete this exercise.

The announcement made official what IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told USA TODAY last month — that the IRS would put out a new proposal and seek more public comments before overturning a 57-year-old precedent allowing certain tax-exempt groups to engage in limited amounts of political activityWASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service said Thursday it would start over on its controversial rule limiting the political activity of certain tax-exempt groups, propose a new rule that would take into account a backlash of opposition.
The announcement made official what IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told USA TODAY last month — that the IRS would put out a new proposal and seek more public comments before overturning a 57-year-old precedent allowing certain tax-exempt groups to engage in limited amounts of political activity.
May 22nd, 2014 at 1:17 pm
Should Shinseki Go?
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In my column this week, I look at the controversy surrounding the VA scandal. As I note, it presents a problem for liberals, who can’t rationalize this failure on ideological grounds the same way that they did with Benghazi or the IRS. As the always astute Byron York notes today in the Washington Examiner, left-wing ideology may also play a role in whether or not VA Secretary Eric Shinseki loses his job over the debacle:

The retired general has for years been a particular hero to Obama’s supporters on the left for his conflict with the George W. Bush administration during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

In early 2003, as the U.S. was planning the invasion, Shinseki angered his superiors in the Pentagon and White House by saying he believed victory and post-war stabilization in Iraq would require far more U.S. troops than President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were planning to deploy. “Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required,” Shinseki told Congress in February 2003.

By [2007], Shinseki had become a legend to anti-war liberals, and all the more so by December 2008, when President-Elect Obama was choosing his cabinet. “By tapping Mr. Shinseki to run the VA, [Obama] has provided a sop to the left,” wrote the lefty blogger Steve Kornacki, now an MSNBC personality, when Shinseki’s appointment was announced. A poster at the leftist website DailyKos had a shorter reaction: “Hallelujah!” Even though Shinseki was not chosen for the military policy position some had hoped for him, the reaction to his appointment showed the enduring gratitude of many on the anti-war left.

This is, of course, an indefensible rationale for keeping someone in a position where they’re failing. Shinseki should be judged for present performance, not past positions.

That said, I’m ambivalent on the question of whether the VA Secretary should be given his walking papers. President Obama, like President Bush before him, is not inclined to reflexively fire people because of bad press. That can be a good instinct if it means you’re more concerned with actually solving problems than just creating the image of responsiveness for the press. But therein lies the problem.

Who serves as Secretary of Veterans Affairs is a lot less important than the makeup of the system they’re presiding over. Whether it’s Shinseki or someone else, they’ll still be responsible for managing a gargantuan single-payer health care bureaucracy. It’s a similar dynamic to the Department of Health and Human Services — don’t expect much to change because Kathleen Seblius is gone. The underlying policies and infrastructure remain the same. Whoever sits behind the desk is little more than a captive to the administrative behemoth.

Should Shinseki get the boot? I don’t know and I’m not sure it makes much of a difference. What would really help would be upending the entire process — for example, giving veterans vouchers for their health care, which would allow the federal government to still finance their treatment without actually providing it. John McCain recently suggested that step (as did Mitt Romney in 2012 — when he was pilloried for it). At the time, it was decried as inhumane. Anyone who wants to know what real inhumanity looks like ought to visit the VA in Phoenix.

May 8th, 2014 at 12:10 am
Democrats’ Pathetic Response to IRS and Benghazi Scandals
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From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to hold Lois Lerner, a former Internal Revenue Service official accused by Republicans of abusing power, in contempt, laying bare the bitter divide over which much of the midterm elections will be fought.

Separately, the House approved a resolution calling on Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate allegations that the I.R.S. targeted Tea Party groups.

Then there are the accusations of a cover-up. On Thursday the House is expected to approve a resolution to establish a select committee to investigate the fatal 2012 attack on American facilities in Benghazi, Libya. Republicans accuse the White House and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state, of repeatedly lying about what set off the killings and the United States’ response to them.

Democrats mocked their Republican colleagues. “It is a circus,” said Representative Jackie Speier of California. “Psychologists will tell you that when somebody says something is not, it clearly is.”

Before the vote on Ms. Lerner, Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, listed what the investigation has yielded so far: $14 million spent by the I.R.S. responding to a stream of requests from Congress, and hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. “After all of that, we have not found any evidence of White House involvement,” he said. “I will not walk a path that has been treaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy.”

Now, put aside whatever suspicions you have about the White House for a moment and just deal with the facts. At a bare minimum, this is what we know: First, the IRS — violating the essential trust invested in it to be a neutral arbiter of the law —  went out of its way to shut a segment of Americans out of the political process during an election year on the basis of their convictions. Second, four Americans, including an ambassador, were murdered by terrorists and senior Administration officials continued to push a false narrative about what happened well after any confusion regarding the intelligence had been cleared up — also, by the way, in an election year.

You don’t need a conspiracy in either one of these cases — the facts, on their face, are damning enough. These are failures of the core functions of government. The idea that any elected official would mock efforts to understand what happened — or clutch their pearls in faux-distress — is appalling. (Though Rep. Speier’s quote is unintentionally hilarious given that her second sentence nullifies her first).

It’s also rich of Rep. Cummings — who himself seems to have been a player in the IRS scandal — to object to the cost and difficulty of the investigation. Since when does Cummings — a reliable vote for every spending increase and bureaucratic make-work project known to man — have compunctions about the cost or burdens of government? Millions for subsidies, but not one cent for justice!

Principled Democrats could do themselves and their party a favor by taking these investigations seriously, even if they are less suspicious of the Administration than their conservative colleagues. Serious matters of state are at stake. Instead, members of the party increasingly seem to be closing ranks around the White House. Voters should remember this allegiance to the powerful over the people come November.

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March 28th, 2014 at 7:14 pm
The Party of Science Goes Full Luddite
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From The Hill:

The Food and Drug Administration isn’t ready to embrace mandatory labeling regulations for foods made with genetically engineered ingredients, despite an aggressive push from lawmakers and advocates who cite health concerns.

Testifying before a House panel, FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg told lawmakers this week that the agency remains comfortable with a 1992 policy decision concluding that food made with genetically modified organisms — or GMOs — is not materially different from other products.

“We have not seen evidence of safety risks associated with genetically modified foods,” Hamburg said during a House Appropriations Committee hearing to assess the FDA’s 2015 budget request.

She said the FDA is working on fresh guidance backing a voluntary system for GMO labeling, an approach critics regard as insufficient.

Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) criticized the FDA’s unwillingness to impose mandatory labeling requirements, saying the action is the least the government can do to give consumers more information about the food on their dinner table.

“It’s beyond me that we can’t have accurate labeling,” Lowey told Hamburg at the hearing. “The labeling can’t hurt anybody but it’s possible that the lack of adequate labeling could, of course.”

Actually, neither of those statements are true. The labels could hurt people and the lack of labeling won’t.

First let’s get some basics out of the way. What qualifies as a “genetically modified organism”? Have a purebred dog in your house? That’s one. A rose bush in your garden? Yep, that too. In essence, any living being that has been bred for certain traits is a genetically modified organism. What the critics are upset with are industrial processes by which companies can cultivate these traits in the lab instead of breeding for them over the course of generations.

So, is there a reason to be concerned? Over to the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Gregory Conko, writing in the Washington Examiner earlier this week:

The primary thing that makes genetic engineering unique is the power and precision it gives us to make those changes and then test for safety afterward. It has also given us food that is both safer for our families and better for the environment. Plants with a built-in resistance to chewing insects, for example, have allowed farmers to use millions of gallons less pesticide every year.

Dozens of the world’s most prestigious scientific bodies, including the National Academies of Science, the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization, have studied genetic engineering for more than 30 years and concluded that such foods are at least as safe as, and often safer than, conventionally bred ones.

The other thing that makes genetically modified plants different is they are subject to intense scrutiny by three different regulatory agencies in the U.S. alone. It takes an average of five to 10 years to develop and test a crop for consumer and environmental safety. This is followed by an additional two to four years of review by the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency. And because most American farmers will not plant genetically modified crops they cannot export to global markets in Europe, Asia and South America, the wait is even longer in order to secure approval overseas.

The regulatory costs alone for testing and getting approval for a genetically modified plant variety average more than $35 million. By the time a new crop makes it to market, its safety has been confirmed by regulators in dozens of countries.

In 30 years of testing and commercial use in more than two dozen countries, genetically modified foods have caused not a single sniffle, sneeze or bellyache. This outstanding safety record is why the FDA does not require blanket labeling of such foods. It does, however, require labeling any time a food differs from its conventional counterpart in a meaningful way – such as a reduction in nutrients, the introduction of an allergen, or even a change in taste or smell.

The science here is overwhelming — and has a decades-long track record. That’s part of what makes the labeling idea such a bad one. Proponents often brush the evidence aside and claim that, even if the produce is safe, consumers should know what’s in their food (though, in many cases, what’s in it is no different with GMOs than organics). But that’s not cost-free. There’s the price, of course, of actually producing the labeling, but the bigger potential cost is the loss of business that would occur if GMO labeling became pervasive.

The point of labeling as a tool of regulation is to increase consumer knowledge. In this area, however, it’s likely that labeling would only fuel ignorance. The public is already poorly informed about GMOs. Mandating they be labeled — which gives the appearance of a warning — would only fuel fears that have no basis in science.

Those who care the most about GMOs are those who are already eating organic foods — foods, it should be noted, that go out of their way to market themselves as an alternative to GMOs. In other words, the market has already solved their problem. There’s no compelling reason — as a matter of science or policy — for them to be allowed to brand the GMOs that feed hundreds of millions of Americans with a scarlet letter just because of their scientific illiteracy.

February 28th, 2014 at 2:37 pm
Michelle Obama: New Food Labels Will Help Counteract the Fact That America’s Moms are Morons
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As a veteran of a speechwriting shop or two, I’m amazed that no one in First Lady Michelle Obama’s office thought to reel in the remarks that she made yesterday about the new FDA nutritional labeling guidelines that I blogged about yesterday. Here’s how the First Lady described the hellish odyssey of a mother in the supermarket under the current regime:

So there you stood, alone in some aisle in a store, the clock ticking away at the precious little time remaining to complete your weekly grocery shopping, and all you could do was scratch your head, confused and bewildered, and wonder, is there too much sugar in this product? Is 50 percent of the daily allowance of riboflavin a good thing or a bad thing? And how on Earth could this teeny little package contain five whole servings?

This stream of questions and worries running through your head when all you really wanted to know was, should I be eating this or not? Is this good for my kids or not? And if it is healthy, how much of it should I be eating? But unless you had a thesaurus, a calculator, a microscope, or a degree in nutrition, you were out of luck. So you felt defeated, and you just gave up and went back to buying the same stuff you always buy.

I’m not sure who these mothers are who find themselves overmatched by the grocery store, but it seems to me they probably need more help than just better labels on food. For the rest of us — all of whom seem capable of acquiring foodstuffs without an epistemic shutdown — this remains a $2 billion exercise in irrelevancy.

February 27th, 2014 at 7:09 pm
Obama Administration Forcing Food Companies to Spend $2 Billion to Change Fonts
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Following on Ashton’s post below, there’s yet another Obama Administration initiative that will reach deep into the pockets of the food industry.

As Politico notes, the FDA is overhauling the labeling requirements for nutritional information on consumer products. The new labeling requirements will more conspicuously display calorie counts, change the definitions of serving sizes, and mandate the description of added sugars. Unsuprisingly, this push is being spearheaded by the First Lady’s office (which invites the question of who empowered Mrs. Obama to do anything in the lawmaking department).

There’s certainly some limited utility to this nutritional information, though I imagine it probably would have emerged (albeit perhaps in a slower fashion) from market demand as Americans became increasingly diet conscious. That said, these changes are incredibly minor. Here, courtesy of Politico, is what the current labels look like by comparison with the new ones:

Current Label

Current Label

Proposed Label

Proposed Label

Now, you may be thinking “What’s the harm?” And that’d be a reasonable response if this was a cost-free exercise. According to the FDA, however the cost to the food industry to make this change will run around $2 billion. That, by the way, is enough to finance about 150,000 lap band surgeries.

It says something remarkable about the Obama Administration’s failure to engage in even the most basic cost/benefit analysis that that would be a less crazy way to tackle this supposed problem.

February 13th, 2014 at 4:55 pm
A Second Amendment Victory in California
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And it comes from the most unlikely of places, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Just over the AP wires from San Francisco:

A divided federal appeals court on Thursday struck down California’s concealed weapons rules, saying they violate the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

By a 2-1 vote, the three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said California was wrong to require applicants to show good cause to receive a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

“The right to bear arms includes the right to carry an operable firearm outside the home for the lawful purpose of self-defense,” Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain wrote for the majority.

Judge Sidney Thomas dissented, writing that the good cause requirement limited the number of people carrying concealed handguns in public to those legitimately in need.

This represents a massive shift in California, long home to some of the nation’s most restrictive gun control laws.

The Ninth Circuit’s ruling conflicts with those from three other federal appellate courts, which means this issue could eventually make its way to the Supreme Court . For today, anyway, Second Amendment rights are stronger in the Golden State than they have been at any time in recent memory.

February 7th, 2014 at 4:55 pm
The Case for Expanding the House
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Here in Southern California, the biggest development in recent weeks has been the announcement that hyper-liberal congressman Henry Waxman — who’s held a House seat from the Los Angeles area for 40 years — is finally stepping down at the end of the current session.

Given how long Waxman has dominated the politics of the area, it’s no surprise that there’s a long list of candidates lining up to succeed him. There’s another reason, however, for the glut of competition: this is an enormous district of wildly divergent communities. In my weekly column for the Orange County Register, I argue that this stems from a mistake in how we’ve organized the lower chamber for the past 85 years:

The physical distance between the northwestern edge of Waxman’s 33rd District, in Malibu, and its southeastern terminus, in San Pedro, is more than 40 miles. The cultural difference can only be measured in light years. The South Bay, the Westside, the Conejo Valley, and the coastal refuges of Pacific Palisades and Malibu are all worlds unto themselves, populated by citizens who view themselves as distinct from one another. The idea that they should all be represented by one person in Congress makes a mockery of the notion that House districts represent discrete, coherent communities.

That sort of absurdity is inevitable, however, given the fact that the House was severed from its original purpose 85 years ago, when Congress passed the Reapportionment Act of 1929. That law fixed the number of seats in the House of Representatives at 435, dictating that the available seats would be redistributed among the states based on population changes in each census, instead of adding new ones, which had been the historical practice (the House had grown to 435 from its original number of only 65). As a result, the average House district now consists of over 700,000 people – a far cry from the original system, where there was one representative for approximately 33,000 souls.

Whoever inherits Waxman’s seat will represent more people than the U.S. senators from the states of Wyoming or Vermont. Were the ratios employed by the founders still in use today, California’s 33rd Congressional District would actually be split into 21 discrete House seats.

Returning to that standard may be overkill; it would swell the ranks of the House of Representatives to over 9,500 members. Some expansion, however, is surely justified to create House districts small enough to actually represent something like the will of a coherent community. Until such changes are made, the notion of the House as the “people’s chamber” will be little more than a touch of historical nostalgia.

I’ll also note that having an enlarged House would (A) make it harder for special interests to capture critical masses of legislators and (b) have the practical effect of making it cheaper to run for Congress and allowing more true citizen-legislators to emerge. In short, it would make it harder to consolidate power in Congress—which is precisely why most sitting lawmakers won’t support it…and why it’s the right thing to do.

February 6th, 2014 at 2:48 pm
An Idle Generation
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Following on Ashton’s post below (many of the themes of which appear in my column for this week), it’s crucial to note that the hazards presented by Obamacare’s incentives for lower-income Americans to stay out of the workforce are compounding a pre-existing problem. As noted by Mark Peters and David Wessel in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

More than one in six men ages 25 to 54, prime working years, don’t have jobs—a total of 10.4 million. Some are looking for jobs; many aren’t…

… The trend has been building for decades, according to government data. In the early 1970s, just 6% of American men ages 25 to 54 were without jobs. By late 2007, it was 13%. In 2009, during the worst of the recession, nearly 20% didn’t have jobs.

To the crisis amongst men, we can add the crisis amongst youth. As noted earlier in the week by Zara Kessler at Bloomberg:

According to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, 36 percent of the country’s 18- to 31-year-olds were living in their parents’ homes in 2012 — the highest proportion in at least 40 years. That number is inflated because college students residing in dorms were counted as living at home (in addition to those actually living at home while going to school). Still, 16 percent of 25- to 31-year-olds were crashing with mom and pop — up from about 14 percent in 2007 and 10 percent in 1968. In a Pew survey conducted in December 2011, 34 percent of adults aged 25 to 29 said that due to economic conditions they’d moved back home in recent years after having lived on their own.

Every trend line is pointing in the wrong direction. Yes, there are structural issues (technology, offshoring) that complicate the employment picture, but free markets generally resolve such issues given enough time. Markets can’t resolve, however, the pathologies imposed on the economy by government — whether Obamacare’s perverse incentives or the consistently anti-growth policies of the White House.

If nothing changes, the upshot will be the Europeanization of the American economy: fewer workers toiling to support a growing class of government beneficiaries.

Future generations may note the irony of Mitt Romney being so thoroughly pilloried during the 2012 election for his infamous 47 percent comment. While you can quibble with the statistics, the underlying theme is correct: we’re headed towards an economy with fewer makers and more takers. Changing that trajectory will be the responsibility of the next president — and it won’t be an easy one.

January 23rd, 2014 at 8:34 pm
Just a Coincidence, We’re Sure
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You’d think the Obama Administration would have been sufficiently chastened by the IRS scandal not to push their luck. You’d have thought wrong. From the New York Times:

LOS ANGELES — In a famously left-leaning Hollywood, where Democratic fund-raisers fill the social calendar, Friends of Abe stands out as a conservative group that bucks the prevailing political winds.

A collection of perhaps 1,500 right-leaning players in the entertainment industry, Friends of Abe keeps a low profile and fiercely protects its membership list, to avoid what it presumes would result in a sort of 21st-century blacklist, albeit on the other side of the partisan spectrum.

Now the Internal Revenue Service is reviewing the group’s activities in connection with its application for tax-exempt status. Last week, federal tax authorities presented the group with a 10-point request for detailed information about its meetings with politicians like Paul D. Ryan, Thaddeus McCotter and Herman Cain, among other matters, according to people briefed on the inquiry.

Here’s the Administration’s problem: One of the reasons they were able to get away with targeting Tea Party groups for so long was because most of the victimized organizations were grassroots affairs without megaphones. But go after Hollywood? The tinseltown conservatives may have spent the past decade content to keep their opinions to themselves—but politically-motivated audits have a way of upsetting that equilibrium (how do you think the story got to the Times, after all?).

The old saying is “never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” Ink may be going by the wayside these days, but it’s still ill-advised to throw a haymaker at people with this kind of clout. I suspect the White House will learn that sooner rather than later.

January 17th, 2014 at 7:06 pm
Bob Gates, with Panache
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I’ve watched with interest over the past few weeks as the media has feasted on excerpts from the new memoir, Duty, by former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates. This is a pretty well-worn Washington tradition: do advance publicity for an otherwise workmanlike book by leaking its few moments of genuine provocation, then sit back and watch the sharks circle.

Truth be told, I don’t regard most of the “revelations” as befitting the name. Is anyone surprised that President Obama’s heart didn’t seem to be in the Afghan War (for Obama, it was only “the good war” relative to Iraq, not in absolute terms). Is anyone shocked that Vice President Biden consistently displays a facile approach to foreign policy? Are we stunned that Hillary Clinton and President Obama admitted behind closed doors that their opposition to the surge in Iraq was based on cynical political calculations (I actually find this somewhat heartening—I’d rather think of them as skilled, amoral politicos than complete naifs).

Gates—like his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, and his successor, Leon Panetta—is a decent man who genuinely wanted what was best for the country and the military. He’s also, it turns out, a bit of a firecracker (it helps in that job). From Joel Gehrke, writing at the Washington Examiner:

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates didn’t hide his contempt for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., when asked to answer Reid’s claim that he “denigrated” colleagues “to make a buck” with his new memoir.

“It’s common practice on the Hill to vote on bills you haven’t read, and it’s perfectly clear that Sen. Reid has not read the book. He will find that I do denigrate him,” Gates cracked back at a Politico event promoting his new book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.

I like the cut of his jib.

January 16th, 2014 at 3:39 pm
The Utter Wastefulness of Farm Subsidies
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Farm subsidies are wrong on principle. It’s fundamentally unjust to take money from taxpayers and funnel it to other citizens just because of the industry in which they work. If farmers need that money to stay afloat, that’s a sign that their business model isn’t working and that they either need to adjust or leave the practice entirely. If they are self-sufficient, then they don’t need the money in the first place.

Even if you accept the case for farm support in the abstract, however, you have to be mortified at how it plays out in practice. As Susan Ferrechio notes in the Washington Examiner:

To illustrate just how far the subsidy program has strayed from its original purpose, [watchdog group] Open the Books calculated payments going to three major cities with few, if any, modern ties to farming: Washington, D.C., New York City and Chicago. Taxpayers sent $30 million to those residents over the past four years to compensate them for converting farmland to conservation areas and for growing soybeans, cotton, corn, rice and other crops.

The big-city farm subsidies show that savvy landowners are legally maximizing a return on their real estate investments at the expense of taxpayers, [Open the Books founder Adam] Andrzejewski said. They buy land, hire a farm manager and collect a check from the federal government, he said.

This would be a good time to remember Nancy Pelosi’s complaint during last fall’s budget negotiations: “The cupboard is bare. There’s [sic] no more cuts to make.” Perhaps the cupboard deserves another look.

January 10th, 2014 at 11:52 am
A Few Thoughts on the Christie Scandal
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Slowly returning from the holiday deep freeze, the political media has spent most of this week fixated on the scandal out of New Jersey, where the Port Authority closed two of the three lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge back in September, causing serious traffic jams for days.

That story turned into a firestorm after it started to become clear earlier this week that allies of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had engineered the traffic jams as political punishment for the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey (where the bottleneck occurred), who had failed to endorse Christie’s reelection. A few thoughts:

— What makes the made-to-order traffic jam so singularly offensive is its thoughtless victimization of ordinary citizens who had nothing to do with the political infighting. Politicians are always going to engage in this sort of petty one-upmanship. Treating the voters as little more than collateral damage in the process, however, is the height of irresponsibility and makes a mockery of the notion of “public service.”

— Even putting the propriety of the act aside, this whole affair wasn’t even a particularly shrewd exercise in brass knuckle politics. Christie was a Republican governor with a commanding lead in a Democratic state. Failing to get the endorsement of the Mayor of Fort Lee was hardly going to make or break his campaign. And, of course, any reasonable cost-benefit analysis would have factored in the potential damage to the governor of this story coming out (Imagine if Christie had been dealing with the fallout from this story just before the November election instead of just after the new year).

— Like a lot of conservatives, I’m wary of Christie on a handful of issues. That said, his “talk until there aren’t any more questions” press conference yesterday was a superb exercise in crisis management. He took responsibility, fired the people involved, apologized, and demonstrated the kind of accountability that we rarely see in the midst of scandal. He also vehemently denied that he had anything to do with the shutdown, which is probably true—his assertions were so forceful yesterday that his political career would likely be over if it was revealed that he was lying.

— The media (and, to some extent, the general public) need to be a little bit more realistic about executive accountability. As the head of New Jersey’s executive branch, Christie is, of course, ultimately responsible for what goes on underneath him. That’s not quite the same thing as being culpable, however.

In an era of big, complex government, it’s impossible for a chief executive to know every detail of what’s going on beneath him (though it’s important to maximize the flow of information). People are going to make mistakes, sometimes accidentally, sometimes—as in this case—through crass calculation. Governors or presidents shouldn’t be faulted for these things happening unless they’ve directly enabled it. Where they should be held accountable is in bringing this people to heel. By that measure, Christie has done his job very well this week.

December 27th, 2013 at 5:37 pm
Holiday Reading Recommendation: “Days of Fire”
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If you were fortunate enough to receive a gift card for a book-seller this Christmas (economists would remind us, after all, that gift cards are one of the few economically efficient Christmas gifts), allow me to make a recommendation: Peter Baker’s recent book, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House.

If you’re like me, you may have an appetite for behind-the-scenes D.C. storytelling, but always wind up reading such volumes with skepticism; who knows, after all, who’s interpretation of events to give credence to, or what personal or professional agendas drive the final text (Bob Woodward, for instance, is famous for tilting his narratives in favor of the people who proved to be his best sources)?

As our regular readers may know, I served in the Bush Administration, working as one of the president’s speechwriters in the second term. Given the knowledge that experience imparted, I can tell you that Days of Fire is far and away the most judicious and even-handed account of the Bush Administration I’m aware of (my friend, Matthew Hennessey at City Journal, gives a good summation of why here).

Days of Fire never succumbs to either of the twin pathologies of presidential chronicles: hagiography or axe-grinding. Instead, it gives you just the facts, albeit in an addictive, page-turning fashion (there are lots of little anecdotes that only enhance the readability). You get a good sense of the various ideological positions of the key players in the Bush Administration, as well as the personality traits that shaped them and the Administration.

Baker does an exquisite job of presenting the material and allowing you to make your own judgments. While I wasn’t around for many of the events in the book, the ones I was present for are represented with dispassionate accuracy. All those that preceded my time are also described in the same terms on which I was made to understand them during my White House tenure.

This is a necessary reading whether you’re a Bush fan or a Bush critic (ditto Cheney). This is one of the few books that portrays either man in three dimensions and it will give you a great sense of how truly complicated, taxing, inspiring, and frustrating a presidency can be. Highly recommended.

December 19th, 2013 at 1:28 pm
Baucus Beijing Appointment Shows White House Running Scared in 2014
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Word leaked out yesterday that the White House is planning on nominating veteran Montana Senator Max Baucus (a Democrat) to become the new U.S. Ambassador to China. This continues this Administration’s long pattern of using the ambassadorial post in Beijing to take care of domestic political concerns rather than to strengthen our hand in international affairs.

Recall that Obama’s first appointment to the post was Jon Huntsman, then the Republican Governor of Utah. The Administration’s political hacks crowed at the time that this was a bit of Machiavellian genius, having sent Obama’s foremost potential rival for the 2012 presidential election halfway around the world. There were only two problems with that theory: (1) The Republican primary electorate had no real interest in Huntsman (Team Obama should have realized that anyone they saw as an appealing Republican would be a non-starter in a GOP election) and (2) Huntsman proved this fact by resigning the post a few years in and returning stateside to run against the president anyway. He was then subsequently replaced by Secretary of Commerce (and former Washington Governor) Gary Locke, whose primary qualification seemed to be his Chinese ancestry.

My first reaction to the Baucus appointment was precisely the one that NBC’s First Read highlights this morning:

Ever since Baucus said he wasn’t running for re-election — and after former Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D) took a pass on running — Montana has become a clear pick-up opportunity for Republicans, giving them a do-able shot at netting the six seats needed to win back the Senate next year.

But yesterday’s news means that the state’s Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, gets to appoint a replacement for Baucus, and most observers believe the replacement pick will be Lt. Gov. John Walsh (D), who is already running for Baucus’ seat.

Putting someone like Walsh in the Senate would boost his name ID, give him the benefits of incumbency (staff, official duties), and potentially clear the Democratic primary (although it seems like fellow candidate John Bohlinger is someone who isn’t easily persuaded to get out of a race).

At a minimum, Walsh — as an appointed senator — basically moves this race from Lean Republican to Toss Up.

This is a time-honored tradition of political gamesmanship, but one that I’m not sure will be adequate next year. In a normal election cycle, such humble benefits may be a difference-maker. In this one — which Republicans would be wise to make a national referendum on ObamaCare —it may not be enough to get it done. True, Montana often elects Democrats (though it consistently votes Republican in presidential races), but it’s a fundamentally conservative state. If there’s any year they’re going to look at Democrats with a jaundiced eye, it will be 2014. Republicans, of course, still need a viable candidate, but this is going to be tough sledding for the left.

This appointment shows us two things: (1) The Obama Administration is far too careless in making its foreign policy appointments and (2) they’re already scared to death of what the 2014 midterm elections will look like. The first is regrettable. The second may represent some rare interaction between this administration and reality.

December 12th, 2013 at 4:18 pm
Reminder: The Pentagon Can be Big Government Too
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Those of us on the right tend to be more defensive about the Pentagon than most organs of the federal government, and with good reason: it’s unquestionably a legitimate function of the federal government to maintain a military and protect America’s security interests, both at home and abroad. Too often, however, we get caught in a false dichotomy about the Department of Defense, with hawks unwilling to entertain the notion of the military seeing its budget cut by even one red cent and a certain strain of libertarians wanting to cut the military to the bone.

In between those two poles is a more sensible position: the military should receive absolutely everything it needs to discharge its core mission of defending the country and our interests abroad … and should be brought to heel like any other government agency when it wastes that money. And believe me, there’s a lot of waste.

Reuters is currently in the midst of chronicling this dysfunction with a series of articles on the incredibly flawed accounting and procurement techniques used by the Pentagon. The most recent installment is jaw-droppingly detailed. It’s a very long read, but one worth your time. A sample:

In its investigation, Reuters has found that the Pentagon is largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies; thus it continues to spend money on new supplies it doesn’t need and on storing others long out of date. It has amassed a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known. And it repeatedly falls prey to fraud and theft that can go undiscovered for years, often eventually detected by external law enforcement agencies.

The consequences aren’t only financial; bad bookkeeping can affect the nation’s defense. In one example of many, the Army lost track of $5.8 billion of supplies between 2003 and 2011 as it shuffled equipment between reserve and regular units. Affected units “may experience equipment shortages that could hinder their ability to train soldiers and respond to emergencies,” the Pentagon inspector general said in a September 2012 report.

Because of its persistent inability to tally its accounts, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with a law that requires annual audits of all government departments. That means that the $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996, the first year it was supposed to be audited, has never been accounted for. That sum exceeds the value of China’s economic output last year.

You’ll be horrified by the waste and sheer administrative bloat. You’ll be even more disturbed, however, when you read how difficult efforts at reform have been. Read the whole thing here.

December 6th, 2013 at 4:26 pm
A Classless Act from President Obama
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The White House announced today that President Obama and the First Lady will be traveling to South Africa next week to pay their respects to the memory of Nelson Mandela. That’s as it should be. While the media’s rush to canonize Mandela is a bit overwrought (his ultimate legacy was unquestionably positive, but that shouldn’t be allowed to obscure his many faults, which are presented in an admirably balanced fashion in National Review’s editorial on his life), his was still a deeply significant life, worthy of presidential recognition.

Given that sentiment, you may be wondering what the “classless act” I’m referring to in the title is. It’s not paying homage to Mandela; it’s the contrast with the events of eight months ago, when this happened:

Friends and allies of Baroness Thatcher expressed ‘surprise and disappointment’ last night as it emerged President Obama is not planning to send any serving member of his administration to her funeral.

… a US embassy spokesman confirmed that no serving member of his administration would be present to pay their last respects, citing a busy week in US domestic politics.

Obviously, the President — with his signature policy initiative currently on life support — is no less pressed for time now than he was upon Lady Thatcher’s death. It doesn’t take too deep a dive into his intellectual biography to find the root cause of this double standard: Obama has been open about his identification with Mandela; Thatcher was clearly a figure he regarded as alien at best, an attitude he seems to apply to the British with some regularity.

Obama is perfectly within his rights as an individual to hold some world figures in higher esteem than others. As President, however, he ought to feel obligated to remember the importance of his ceremonial role — one in which he is a totem of the United States, even if it occasionally puts him in positions that make him squeamish. Nelson Mandela deserves his recognition; Margaret Thatcher did too. It’s a shame that he couldn’t rise above his own university campus provincialism to pay her that respect.