Freedom Line Blog

There’s no question that the forthcoming federal spending cuts under the sequester aren’t ideal, particularly given the indiscriminate way in which they’ll be applied. Republicans in Congress, however, have rightly determined that indelicate cuts are a better option than a compromise that does little or nothing to arrest the trajectory of our debt crisis (even if they haven’t quite worked out the messaging yet).

Standing firm on that principle means accepting some pretty large cuts to defense, but as Byron York notes in a must-read column for the Washington Examiner, the Pentagon is going out of its way to make the situation seem much worse than it really is:

… Over many decades of defense budget battles, the Pentagon has often used a tactic known as a “gold watch.” It means to answer a budget cut proposal by selecting for elimination a program so important and valued — a gold watch — that Pentagon chiefs know political leaders will restore funding rather than go through with the cut.

So now, with sequestration approaching, the Pentagon has announced that the possibility of budget cuts has forced the Navy to delay deployment of the carrier USS Harry S. Truman to the Persian Gulf. With tensions with Iran as high as they’ve ever been, that would leave the U.S. with just one carrier, instead of the preferred two, in that deeply troubled region.

“Already, the threat of these cuts has forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf,” Obama said at a White House appearance on Tuesday, in case anyone missed the news.

Some military analysts were immediately suspicious. “A total gold watch,” said one retired general officer who asked not to be named. Military commentator and retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters called the Navy’s move “ostentatious,” comparing it to “Donald Trump claiming he can’t afford a cab.”

… Meanwhile, with a budget higher than it was even at the peak of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Pentagon is resisting attempts to force it to audit its own finances. Congress passed a law back in 1990 requiring such an audit, to no avail. Last year, Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., introduced the Audit the Pentagon Act, which would try again to force a look inside the maze of Pentagon spending.

Now, with the Defense Department sounding the alarm about sequestration, some budget hawks on Capitol Hill are doubtful. “It’s difficult to take these doomsday scenarios seriously when the Pentagon can’t even audit its own books,” says a spokesman for Coburn. “We would argue that the Defense Department has the authority to reprioritize funding toward vital needs and away from less vital spending. As Sen. Coburn has detailed, the department spends nearly $70 billion each year on ‘nondefense’ defense spending that has nothing to do with our national security.”

Yes, the Pentagon does represent some of the most vital spending that takes place in Washington. But conservatives especially should remember that it remains, on many levels, a conventional bureaucracy, prone to defend well-established power centers and jealous of every dollar that comes its way.

The goals of cutting spending and preserving national security are not mutually exclusive.

From Fox News:

By law, each April and October, federal agencies are required to release an accounting of proposed regulations that will have an economically significant impact. That didn’t happen in 2012.

Instead, the Obama administration didn’t release its 2012 regulatory agenda until on the Friday before Christmas.

“The fact that this snuck in after the election, during the holiday season when people were otherwise occupied with their families, is not surprising,” said John Malcolm, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.

Since the Dec. 21 release, legal experts and analysts have been pouring through the tens of thousands of pages in order to determine their impact. According to an initial estimate by the American Action Forum, which notes that some entries are missing key fiscal data, the cost of implementing the agenda would top $123 billion. Completing the paperwork could require more than 13 million man-hours.

“It’s massive,” former Deputy Attorney General Tom Dupree said. “There’s no way any human being can sit down and read this whole thing from front to back.”

In a society that prizes both limited government and the rule of law, it’s reasonable to expect regulation to be simple, transparent, and cost-conscious. This new wave of dictates fails on all three counts. And what’s most singularly galling about the whole thing is that there is no one to hold directly accountable. No one who crafted any of these rules ever stood for office or received a single vote.

As ever, when it comes to the administrative state, the delegation of power is the abdication of liberty.

My new piece out today looks at the Obama Administration’s culpability in allowing Mohamed Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood to drive Egypt to the brink of a new dictatorship — one far less liberal than its predecessor.

Those of us observing foreign policy from the outside have a tendency to think of it in abstract terms — conflicting ideas, interests, and values. But, as anyone who has ever observed diplomacy up close will tell you, the human factor is also vitally important. And sometimes it actually obscures those far more important considerations. Writing at Politico, Rich Lowry nails this one:

Morsi staged his latest power grab on Thanksgiving Day in the immediate aftermath of working with Obama to get a cease-fire in hostilities between Hamas (a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot) and Israel. In a New York Times piece that ought to be preserved in amber as a record of 21st-century liberal naiveté, the paper reported that in his talks with Morsi, “Mr. Obama felt they were making a connection.” How sweet.

“He was impressed with the Egyptian leader’s pragmatic confidence.” And who can resist the lure of pragmatic confidence?

“He sensed,” the paper continued, in a gushing tone, “an engineer’s precision with surprisingly little ideology.”

This is the most embarrassing man-crush misjudgment of a noxious foreign leader since George W. Bush claimed to have peered into Vladimir Putin’s soul.

Ashton correctly notes below that the Democratic Party is incapable of discovering “diversity” anywhere other than in the melanin count or chromosomal pairings of its members, beyond which measures the party is remarkably homogeneous. I want to add one note to that, which plays into my longstanding irritation with the raw deal that African-Americans get from the Democratic Party.

While Debbie Wasserman-Schultz crows about the greater diversity in Democratic ranks, what goes unspoken is that the process by which minorities get elected to the House of Representatives actually thwarts their ability to move into higher office. Consider: in the outgoing Congress (the 112th), there are 44 black members, or just over 10 percent of the body. Blacks are 12.6 percent of the nation’s population, but there’s no iron-clad law by which we should expect them to achieve elected office in perfect proportion to their share of the population. Still, this is pretty close.

Now, how many black senators are there? 0

How many black governors? 1, Massachusetts’ Deval Patrick

When you consider that the House often acts as a feeder to both of these higher offices, the discontinuity only gets stranger. So what’s the cause?

Of the 44 black House members, 26 (59 percent) come from congressional districts where the majority of the population is black (as a bit of a trivia on the side, it’s worth noting that there’s one district — the Tennessee 9th, located in Memphis — where a majority black population is represented by a white member, liberal Steve Cohen). An additional four come from districts where the black population is over 40 percent. And the representatives who come from districts with smaller black populations include some of the most left-wing members of the House, including Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Keith Ellison.

The problem is that Democrats have long agitated for lawmakers to gerrymander these minority-majority districts as a means to ensuring electoral success for black candidates. That’s worked so far as it goes, but it’s also generated a generation of black politicians who have no experience appealing to anyone other than their fellow urban blacks. Since that group represents a small population in statewide races (even in Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of African-American residents, blacks make up only a little over 1/3 of residents), these House members end up being precisely the wrong kind of figures to obtain higher office. Indeed, it’s notable that Governor Patrick and President Obama, the two most prominent black public-sector executives in the nation, never served in the House (Obama lost a bid for the Democratic nomination in the First District of Illinois in 2000).

The vast majority of Americans agree that we should be striving for a color-blind nation. We’ve made remarkably brisk progress towards that goal in civil society for the past several decades. But, if anything, we’re lagging behind on the political front. Segregating black politicians from non-black voters is not the solution.

Kudos to Adam J. White at The Weekly Standard for hoisting Warren Buffett on his own petard. Buffett is out with a new New York Times op-ed agitating for — what else — higher taxes. His condescending opening reads as follows:

Suppose that an investor you admire and trust comes to you with an investment idea. “This is a good one,” he says enthusiastically. “I’m in it, and I think you should be, too.”

Would your reply possibly be this? “Well, it all depends on what my tax rate will be on the gain you’re saying we’re going to make. If the taxes are too high, I would rather leave the money in my savings account, earning a quarter of 1 percent.” Only in Grover Norquist’s imagination does such a response exist.

An addendum: only in Grover Norquist’s imagination and Warren Buffett’s biography. White catches him thusly:

Early in his career, Buffett invested heavily—almost one third of his early fund’s capital—in Sanborn Map, a company that mapped utility lines and such. But he soon grew frustrated with the company’s leadership, which “operated more like a club than a business,” and which refused to return greater dividends to investors. So Buffett amassed more and more stock, and with control of the company finally in hand he pressed the board of directors to split the company in two (one for the mapping business, and one to hold the company’s other outsized investments).

Finally, the board capitulated. But with victory finally at hand, Buffett nearly scuttled the deal because of … taxes. As [Buffett biographer Alice] Schroeder recounts, quoting Buffett, one director proposed that the company just cleanly break the company, despite the tax consequences—”let’s just swallow the tax,” he suggested.

To which Buffett replied (as he recounted to Schroeder):

And I said, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s — “Let’s” is a contraction. It means “let us.” But who is this us?  If everyone around the table wants to do it per capita, that’s fine, but if you want to do it in a ratio of shares owned, and you get ten shares’ worth of tax and I get twenty-four thousand shares’ worth, forget it.’

Buffett was willing to walk away from a deal because the taxes would have taken too much of a bite out of it. Fortunately for him, the board gave in and allowed him to structure the deal that he liked, saving him from his own Norquistian response.

So is Warren Buffett an irrational businessman or an irrational policy analyst? All the evidence points in one direction.

From the Daily Caller:

White House officials remained silent during the extended Thanksgiving weekend, as Egypt’s pro-democracy groups called on President Barack Obama to condemn Thursday’s power grab by their country’s Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi.

Morsi decreed Nov. 22 that his pronouncements and edicts were beyond the reach of judicial review. The announcement was met by resistance from the nation’s top judges, who said they would fight Morsi’s unusual self-elevation to near-dictator status.

Not to kick our Egyptian friends when they’re down, but point to any random spot on a map and chances are that you’ll be within hailing distance of a nation that has been disappointed waiting for the Obama Administration to do the right thing. Whether it’s supporting dissidents in Iran, protecting constitutional government in Honduras, or providing missile defense for Poland and the Czech Republic, the president has a real gift for making himself scarce when the stakes get high.

If the devolution of Egypt continues apace, the implications for Obama’s legacy are decidedly negative. This president, after all, promised a new start for the Islamic world in 2009. And he did so in Cairo.

As regular readers know, I’m something of a collector of asinine punditry. In the past, Tom Friedman, Joe Klein, and Gail Collins have all secured their place in my pantheon. But look out for the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky, who has been breaking land speed records for inanity of late. Here’s an excerpt from his latest, defending U.N. Ambassador (and likely Secretary of State nominee) Susan Rice:

… Are [Republicans] really considering filibustering the president’s choice to be the nation’s leading diplomat? That would constitute, among other things, an interesting form of minority outreach from the party that now says it’s so serious about winning over people of color. That party’s only two targets right now are Rice and Attorney General Eric Holder. Gee, what might they have in common, d’you think?

A couple points:

• Ignoring professional incompetence on the basis of race is not a form of ‘minority outreach.’ It’s a form of moral cowardice.

• These rabid right-wing bigots are masters of disguise. Tea Party enthusiasm for the likes of Allen West, Mia Love, and Herman Cain was obviously an elaborate misdirect. And we should probably add Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Susana Martinez to that list, since the hatred must extend to brown people as well.

The rest of Tomasky’s analysis has to be read to be believed.

He defends the choice of Rice to be the Administration’s public face on Benghazi (despite the president’s concession that she had nothing to do with the issue) by noting that “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should have been the one to do those shows, and she was asked first, but she said no.” Oh, well, that explains that. Of course, why wouldn’t the Secretary of State be indisposed to respond to a security disaster involving American diplomats?

Defending Rice’s complete misrepresentation of what happened in Benghazi, Tomasky trots out the Administration’s excuse de jure: “David Petraus has confirmed that while he knew or sensed from the start that it was a terrorist attack, America’s 16 intelligence agencies weren’t ready to say that publicly, mostly for fear of tipping off the bad guys. So Rice said what she was told to say.”

It doesn’t matter if it came from Petraeus or not — this is an incredibly stupid excuse. You worry about tipping off terrorists when you have intel before an attack and think that keeping it quiet could thwart the plot and/or bring the terrorists to justice. You don’t do it after an attack, when said terrorist group is telling you they did it. Acting like you don’t know who’s responsible at that point doesn’t make you calculating; it makes you an idiot. And if the Administration wants to claim that it knew what was going on all along, then it behooves them to explain why they chose an affirmative lie rather than a policy of relative silence.

The upshot for Tomasky: ‘Benghazi … was a terribly sad tragedy, but the kind of thing that, in a dangerous world, happens.” A man who responds to avoidable homicide with fatalistic detachment. That about says it all.

There is a certain logic to this. Why have laws, after all, that exist purely for the purpose of being broken? That being said, it’s telling that the Treasury Secretary (he of “We don’t have a plan, but we don’t like yours.”) seems more interested in eroding even the weakest checks on the national debt than in doing something to arrest — or, heaven forfend, even reverse — it’s growth.

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham preempted President Obama’s East Room press conference this morning by announcing that they would attempt to block — through use of the filibuster, if necessary — the potential nomination of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

Their rationale: Rice was directly responsible for propogating the Administration’s now completely-disproved contention that the Benghazi terrorist attacks were the product of an angry mob that spontaneously turned to violence. Whether Rice is guilty of incompetence or deception (there’s really no other plausible alternative), McCain and Graham argued, no one who was party to the Benghazi debacle should be expecting a promotion.

That stance led to the president attempting to go all alpha male in his remarks at the White House:

“When they go after the U.N. ambassador, apparently because they think she’s an easy target, then they’ve got a problem with me,” Obama said. “And should I choose, if I think that she would be the best person to serve America in the capacity at the State Department, then I will nominate her.”

“Then they’ve got a problem with me?” Obama might as well have gone with “Nobody puts baby in a corner.”

No one is actually afraid of this president. Which is why Graham’s response was so perfect:

Mr. President, don’t think for one minute I don’t hold you ultimately responsible for Benghazi.  I think you failed as Commander in Chief before, during, and after the attack.

Just so. The White House is going to need more than bluster to dodge accountability for what happened in Libya.

It was just a few weeks ago that President Obama was on the debate stage telling that nation that Mitt Romney had unfairly tarred his administration as anti-energy development:

We have increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years … Now, I want to build on that. And that means, yes, we still continue to open up new areas for drilling.

As I noted at the time, Obama’s defense of his record was essentially dishonest. Increased oil production was due almost entirely to a combination of private-sector development and federal efforts initiated by the Bush Administration. As for his pledge to open up new drilling sites? Well, judge for yourself. From The Hill:

The Interior Department on Friday issued a final plan to close 1.6 million acres of federal land in the West originally slated for oil shale development.

The proposed plan would fence off a majority of the initial blueprint laid out in the final days of the George W. Bush administration. It faces a 30-day protest period and a 60-day process to ensure it is consistent with local and state policies. After that, the department would render a decision for implementation.

…

Interior’s Bureau of Land Management cited environmental concerns for the proposed changes. Among other things, it excised lands with “wilderness characteristics” and areas that conflicted with sage grouse habitats.

The sage grouse, it should be noted, is not endangered, though it is on the waiting list to earn that classification. In 2010, the Fish and Wildlife Service described the bird’s status as, “numerous relatively small populations existing in a patchy mosaic of increasingly fragmented habitat.” Count me skeptical that  a population in such shape requires 1.6 million acres (2,500 square miles) to survive.

Oh, irony of ironies. What little hope there is on the economic front (which was at least sufficient to reelect the president) may have stemmed from policies antithetical to his worldview. From the National Institute for Labor Relations Research:

Right to Work states (excluding Indiana [which didn't implement its right-to-work law until earlier this year]) were responsible for 72% of all net household job growth across the U.S. from June 2009 through September 2012.  If these states’ job increase had been no better than the 0.85% experienced by forced-unionism states as a group, the nationwide job increase would have been less than half as great.  And the President wouldn’t have been able even to pretend the economy was in recovery.

You know, things got so busy in those last few days before the election — the hurricane, the swing state stops, the basketball game — that the President may have forgotten to tell you a thing or two. Like:

Two Iranian Su-25 fighter jets fired on an unarmed U.S. Air Force Predator drone in the Persian Gulf last week, CNN has learned.

The incident raises fresh concerns within the Obama administration about Iranian military aggression in crucial Gulf oil shipping lanes.

The drone was in international airspace east of Kuwait, U.S. officials said, adding it was engaged in routine maritime surveillance.

Although the drone was not hit, the Pentagon is concerned.

Four years and counting. Surely that unclenched fist is just around the corner.

From Fox News:

A member of the New Black Panther Party who was charged with voter intimidation in the 2008 election for standing outside a Philadelphia polling site was back Tuesday morning – in an official capacity.

Jerry Jackson, who was charged in the 2008 case along with Minister King Samir Shabazz, but later saw charges dropped by the Department of Justice, was seen early Tuesday outside a North Philadelphia voting site wearing the group’s trademark black beret, combat-style uniform and heavy boots. Fox News confirmed he is a designated poll watcher.

“No comment,” Jackson said when approached by a reporter at 1221 Fairmount Ave., in the city’s 14th Ward, where he lurked on Election Day in 2008.

There’s a certain strain of thinking on the right that scoffs at the notion of “efficient government.” The skepticism of what seems to be an unobjectionable goal has a few sources.

First, many pundits point out that the nation’s constitutional design is predicated on checks and balances that make government anything but efficient — the explicit goal, after all, is to slow the lawmaking process in an attempt to ensure some measure of deliberation. They’re right about that, of course, but that’s an observation on the lawmaking process, not on implementing or enforcing the law.

Second, conservatives note (also rightly) that government by its very nature (i.e., the lack of market incentives present in the private sector) has a built-in bias towards sclerosis and waste. That’s true as far as it goes, but arguing that government can’t be administered perfectly is not the same as arguing that it can’t be done better.

For a good example of the potential of reformist public administration, one need look no further than the example that Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels set with that most hated of bureaucracies, the DMV (though in Indiana it’s the BMV — The Bureau of Motor Vehicles). Consider this excerpt from Andrew Ferguson’s fabulous profile of Daniels in a 2010 issue of the Weekly Standard:

The state Bureau of Motor Vehicles, another patronage sump that was routinely ranked one of the worst in the country, was drastically reorganized. “[Daniels] likes metrics,” [Director of the Indiana OMB Ryan] Kitchell said. “He likes to measure outcomes.” Every line item in the state budget has at least one objective formula attached to it to indicate how well each service is being delivered. Regulatory agencies track the speed with which permits and variances are granted. The economic development agency has to compare the hourly wage of each new job brought to the state with the average hourly wage of existing jobs. In the case of the BMV, the two most important metrics were wait times and customer satisfaction. Now each receipt is stamped with the time the customer arrives and the time his transaction is completed. Wait times have dropped from over 40 minutes to under 10 minutes. Surveys put customer satisfaction at 97 percent.

So it can be done. And by the way, it’s also a cracker jack method for keeping government outlays under control. From Walter Russell Mead, writing at his Via Meadia blog:

… By 2025, fully 34 percent of US GDP will be eaten up by the cost of providing public services. Throw in little items [like] interest on the burgeoning national debt and pension and other liabilities, and we are looking at basic governance costs and obligations close to 40 percent of GDP—and heading inexorably higher…

There are two basic drivers behind these numbers: the first is the well known demographic problem that comes from the combination of increased longevity and falling birth rates. Programs like Medicare cost more as people live longer, and reduced population growth means that the workforce grows more slowly than the number of old people drawing on government services and transfer programs.

But the second driving force, which [an] Accenture [study] highlights very usefully, is less well understood: the catastrophically slow growth of productivity in the government workforce. Think of this as “bureaucracy drag;” while productivity in the workforce as a whole is rising by 1.7 percent per year, and in private sector service industries it is rising by 1.5 percent each year, in government productivity is rising by a miserable 0.3 percent per year.

Bureaucrats aren’t getting the job done. And the rest of us are paying the price. It’s time for public sector executives around the country to take a page out of Mitch Daniels’ playbook.

Normally I’m proud to reference Nashville — my second home of sorts — as an instructive contrast to the political and social pathologies of my native Southern California. Normally.

From my old colleagues at the Beacon Center of Tennessee (which was the Tennessee Center for Policy Research when I was there):

Nashville officials worry that the city, which people worldwide refer to as “The Music Capital of the World,” has a sudden shortage of creative talent, whether in music, art or literature — so government must intervene.

In other words, even though it is Nashville, too few of the city’s residents are members of the performing arts.

Members of one taxpayer-financed agency are taking action and offering affordable housing to people who fall below a certain income — provided that (1) they are artists and (2) their art meets a certain progressive standard.

…

Not every artist, however, will qualify.

Only seven members of a specially selected Artist Committee, in addition to the building’s property manager, can decide who may live there and who may not. Potential tenants who wish to live at the Ryman Lofts must satisfy Committee members’ standards on whether their art is “unique” and “progressive.”

I’m not sure that I can pinpoint the exact line beyond which government has become too large. I am confident, however, that taxing hard-working citizens to subsidize housing for people who spend their days rendering acrylic representations of Gaia is well beyond that line.

Mark my words: if Barack Obama is reelected, he will be thrust into scandal perhaps before he even takes the oath of office for a second time. Though the media — with Fox as virtually the only exception — is studiously avoiding the scandal of Americans being abandoned during the terrorist attack in Benghazi, the implications are far too sweeping to be suppressed for long (particularly if, as Newt Gingrich has suggested, there is a damning paper trail floating around out there). The most concise reading of this development — and, in my judgment, the most accurate — is this one from John McCain:

This president is either engaged in a massive cover-up deceiving the American people or he is so grossly incompetent that he is not qualified to be the commander in chief of our armed forces. It’s either one of them.

Just so.

GDP grew by two percent in the third quarter of this year. That’s not a particularly impressive number, but in this economy — with its now-ubiquitous diminished expectations — it falls under the category of “We’ll take what we can get.” The Mercatus Institute’s Veronique De Rugy and Keith Hall have scratched beneath the surface of those numbers, however, and what they’ve found is even more disheartening than the rate itself:

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the economy grew by a modest 2 percent in the third quarter of 2012. While this was stronger growth than the preceding quarter, all of the increase in GDP growth came from the biggest increase in federal government spending in over two years.  Federal government spending rose 9.6% at an annual rate in the third quarter…Growth in the private sector fell by 0.1 percent to 1.3 percent in the third quarter—down from 1.4 percent in the second quarter.

But the private sector, we remind you, “is doing just fine.”

Just in time for Election Day, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has released a report entitled “The Imperial Presidency,” which serves as an exhaustive chronicle of all the ways in which President Obama has undermined — or outright ignored — the rule of law. It covers everything from regulatory overreach to ignoring the traditional “advise and consent” process to abusing the waiver process, and it’s well worth a read.

As we approach November 6, it’s important to remember that these offenses aren’t just abstract violations of the constitutional order — they’re also ingredients for economic decline. As Conn Carroll notes today in the Washington Examiner:

Conservatives are not the only ones who have documented Obama’s assault on the rule of law and its impact on the U.S. economy. Every year, the World Economic Forum issues a Global Competitiveness Report, ranking more than 100 countries on a number of key economic indicators. When Obama was sworn into office, the United States was ranked as the best country in the world to do business. After just four years under Obama, the U.S. has dropped to seventh. The report specifically cites the collapse in the rule of law in explaining this decline.

Before Obama was president, the U.S. ranked 40th in “favoritism in decisions of government officials.” Today, the U.S. ranks 59th, a fall of 19 places. Before Obama was president, the U.S. ranked 50th for lowest “burden of government regulation.” Today, the U.S. ranks 76th, a fall of 26 places. Before Obama was president, the U.S. ranked 28th in “transparency of government policy making.” Today, the U.S. ranks 56th, a fall of 28 places.

Care to venture a guess as to where those rankings would be after another four years of Obama?

The American Enterprise Institute’s Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur have an important (and devastating) piece in today’s Wall Street Journal breaking down the misleading facets of the left’s argument that the U.S. is currently suffering through a crisis of economic inequality. Here’s a particularly eye-opening excerpt:

In the first place, studies that measure income inequality largely focus on pretax incomes while ignoring the transfer payments and spending from unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicaid and other safety-net programs. Politicians who rest their demands for more redistribution on studies of income inequality but leave out the existing safety net are putting their thumb on the scale.

Second and more important, it is well known that people’s earnings in general rise over their working lifetime. And so, for example, a person who decides to invest more in education may experience a lengthy period of low income while studying, followed by significantly higher income later on. Snapshot measures of income inequality can be misleading.

Thomas Sowell frequently makes a point complimentary to Hassett and Mathur’s second observation above: that measuring income inequality over time tends to be deeply misleading because membership in any given income bracket is highly fluid, with people’s income often shifting dramatically over time. Thus, someone who’s in the bottom quintile of income in today’s measurements may be in the second quintile from the top in 15 years’ time. But we tend to analyze these groups as if their composition is static.

Hassett and Mathur’s first point, however, is the one that always bowls me over. If the point of a safety net is to remove people from the perils of indigence, yet the government refuses to factor those provisions into measurements of income, we end up with a perpetually imperiled underclass that only exists on paper. As Mark Twain said (supposedly quoting Disraeli), there are three kinds of lies: “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

No, I’m not talking about the abortion dustup in Indiana’s U.S. Senate race , where I’m not sure the Republican candidate is as embattled as the media thinks (reason #1: members of the coastal media and members of the Indiana electorate might as well be from different species).

Rather, I’m referring to the U.S. Senate contest in Arizona, where Democrat Richard Carmona — a former Surgeon General in the administration of George W. Bush — has managed to run surprisingly close against Congressman Jeff Flake, a laudable champion of limited government. There’s been some mud thrown by both sides in recent weeks, but the newest development is a self-inflicted wound from Carmona. From a blog entry by Daniel Halper at The Weekly Standard:

“Obesity is the terror within,” Carmona told a University of South Carolina audience in early 2006, according to a wire report from then. “Unless we do something about it, the magnitude of the dilemma will dwarf 9-11 or any other terrorist attempt.”

Will Arizona — the state that gave us Barry Goldwater — really send a man to the U.S. Senate who regards the ice cream freezer of your local grocery store as more menacing than an Al Qaeda training camp? Count me skeptical.