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Archive for July, 2013
July 31st, 2013 at 8:38 pm
Gallup: Fed Unemployment Formula Distorts Jobs Picture

Beware of financial bureaucrats posing as economists. That’s my main takeaway from some pre-analysis of Friday’s unemployment numbers by Gallup’s lead economist, Dennis Jacobe.

As is sometimes the case when using metrics to understand reality, it looks like the federal government isn’t counting the right economic event if it truly wants to understand the employment market.

According to Jacobe, “The current government job measures leave a lot to be desired in terms of face-validity. For example, [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben] Bernanke noted in his testimony to Congress that the Fed’s unemployment target may need to be adjusted, depending on the labor participation rate. A declining participation rate can artificially lower the unemployment rate as job seekers give up looking for work, while an increasing participation rate can do the reverse.”

The problem is particularly acute when one considers how the feds count part-time jobs.

“Similarly, the establishment survey can be distorted by a surge in part-time jobs – a factor that may need to be considered when one evaluates Friday’s report,” writes Jacobe. “Part-time jobs not only count as new jobs for this survey, but if an American having one part-time job adds an additional part-time job, it counts the same as the creation of a new full-time job.”

This kind of counting completely misrepresents the rise in multiple part-time jobs. By treating two-part time jobs as the equivalent of one full-time job, the metric leaves out the fact that unlike just about every full-time job, almost no part-time job provides health or retirement benefits. Thus, while the hours worked my be roughly the same, the overall compensation is not.

What makes this an especially pernicious way to describe today’s employment market is the well-documented impact ObamaCare is having on the decline of full-time employment. If the federal unemployment survey continues to equate workers with multiple part-time jobs and those with full-time employment, a huge net loss in millions of workers’ standard of living will be lost because the official formula simply doesn’t account for it.

That’s a point worth remembering if Friday’s unemployment numbers come back better than expected.

July 30th, 2013 at 7:20 pm
Wisconsin’s Walker Previews Potential 2016 Message

In a speech to a room full of government researchers, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker made some bold predictions: If Detroit had passed the same public union reforms as the Badger State did, it wouldn’t be bankrupt today. And if Chicago had done so, its public school system would be in much better shape.

Walker’s comments are sure to spark controversy from union-friendly Democrats who disdain his rollback of debt-creating privileges. But liberals should get used to the argument because the success of Walker’s program is quietly making him into a viable 2016 presidential contender.

Later this week Walker is hosting the National Governors Association in Milwaukee, and he plans to deliver a simple message: “Worry more about the next generation than the next election.”

Absent Walker’s track record, it would be an empty bromide. But with it, the phrase introduces a formula for success that Americans nationwide may be willing to try after eight years of economic futility under President Barack Obama.

Stay tuned…

July 30th, 2013 at 3:57 pm
Howard Dean: ‘Repeal IPAB’

IPAB – aka, the Independent Payment Advisory Board – is one of the chief cost-containing elements of ObamaCare. As designed, a presidentially appointed panel of medical experts will convene to decide how much the government will pay for certain kinds of care, and who gets which treatments.

That means that “The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body,” writes Howard Dean in the Wall Street Journal. “By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them.”

Dean, who is a licensed medical doctor and spent 11 years as the Democratic Governor of Vermont before running for president in 2004, knows from experience that IPAB is doomed to fail.

“There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting – the essential mechanism of the IPAB – has a 40-year track record of failure,” says Dean. “What ends up happening in these schemes (which many states including my home state of Vermont have implemented with virtually no long-term effect on costs) is that patients and physicians get aggravated because bureaucrats in either the private or public sector are making medical decisions without knowing the patients. Most important, once again, these kinds of schemes do not control costs. The medical system simply becomes more bureaucratic.”

Dean goes on to call for a bipartisan repeal of IPAB, which is great to read and should be acted on. But the logic of including IPAB with ObamaCare’s structure makes perfect sense. Government-controlled health care is centrally-controlled and -planned health care.

If Dr. Dean wants a more patient-centered health care system he should be calling for repeal of ObamaCare in its entirety and greater deregulation of the health care industry. Empowering a new generation of medical entrepreneurs that can leverage advances in technology into boutique health care outlets would drive down costs, increase business opportunities and improve the quality of individualized care.

Dean is right to shudder at the care-killing cost of bureaucracy. Maybe one day he’ll discover the possibilities of a freer health care market too.

July 30th, 2013 at 9:59 am
Ramirez Cartoon: The Holder Justice Department
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Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

July 29th, 2013 at 3:54 pm
Another New Study Shows Destructive Impact of LEED Standard on Jobs, Domestic Timber Industry
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All too often, cowed policymakers throughout the U.S. blindly accept the assertions and demands of environmental extremists as somehow representing mainstream opinion or scientific fact.  With the new LEED v4 standards approved earlier this month by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) providing the latest example, it’s time for those policymakers to finally apply scrutiny to LEED and how it continues to negatively affect our domestic timber industry.

As we’ve documented before, LEED standards institutionalize a destructive bias against the vast majority of American timber, which receives certification by alternative systems.

Unfortunately, too many members of the public also associate LEED with “green” without serious thought.  But as we noted, LEED has the effect of raising the prices of timber, reducing consumer choices, threatening jobs and growth and favoring overseas competitors at the expense of domestic businesses.  The market gets distorted without yielding any corresponding environmental benefits.

Even though it has been “rebranded,” the folly of LEED remains its preferences for timber certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).  Its “leadership extraction practices” credit is only eligible for those using “wood products [that] must be certified by the Forest Stewardship Council or USGBC-approved equivalent.”  Builders that use FSC timber are more likely to enter LEED building projects than others.

The problem for our domestic timber industry is that 90% of FSC timber comes from abroad.  Policies that enforce LEED therefore increase the chances of foreign wood entering American building markets than would normally be the case under a true free-market in which FSC-certified products compete on a level playing field with Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) and American Tree Farm System (ATFS)-certified materials.    The combined SFI and ATFS-certified forestland in the U.S. outnumbers that of FSC by millions of acres, so a pro-FSC framework automatically disadvantages a majority of Americans in the forest products industry in order to benefit a much smaller minority.

Moreover, the financial costs of this FSC-centric framework are considerable for American consumers, our broader economy, and the environment.  For example, FSC wood costs 15-20% more than other types of timber, according to numerous estimates.  The American Consumer Institute (ACI) estimated that making FSC-certification a binding requirement for American forests leads to $10 billion in annual consumer welfare losses for wood products.  Another recent study by EconoSTATS similarly determined that mandatory FSC standards would lead to 41,000 job losses in Oregon and Arkansas alone.  And in ecological terms, importing lumber from countries such as Brazil and Russia, where FSC is active, entails significant transportation costs.  FSC also enforces lower standards for certification in those countries, and many Asian and South American nations lack environmental safeguards that are taken for granted in the U.S.

In effect, the FSC framework displaces high-quality domestic lumber for foreign wood harvested under questionable circumstances.

While the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) ignored the input of hundreds of local, state and federal officials, conservationists, small and large businesses and academics who called for a revision to LEED’s treatment of domestic timber, a number of states are taking action on their own.  In the last few years, Maine, Georgia, Florida, Oregon, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee have taken steps to nullify or mitigate the negative effects of LEED.  Through legislation and executive orders, these states are opening up building markets to larger amounts of timber certified by credible standards like ATFS and SFI.

The more states that follow in their footsteps, the better.

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July 29th, 2013 at 2:44 pm
THIS WEEK’s RADIO SHOW LINEUP: CFIF’s Renee Giachino Hosts “Your Turn” on WEBY Radio 1330 AM
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Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.”  Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT:  Bob Dorigo Jones, Senior Fellow for the Center for America – Wacky Warning Labels;

4:30 CDT/5:30 EDT:  Richard Miniter, bestselling author and columnist – American Media Institute and Investigative Journalism;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT:  Avik Roy, Senior Fellow at Manhattan Institute – Unworkable ObamaCare; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT:  Timothy Lee, Senior Vice President at CFIF – Detroit vs. Houston.

Listen live on the Internet here.   Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

July 26th, 2013 at 4:23 pm
New Survey: Americans Overwhelmingly Support Intellectual Property Rights, Efforts to Fight Piracy
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I had the honor this week of participating in a panel on Capitol Hill hosted by The American Consumer Institute (ACI), whose speakers also included Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R – Tennessee), ACI’s Steve Pociask,Todd McCracken of the National Small Business Association, Sandra Aistars of the Copyright Alliance and Dr. Joseph Fuhr, Jr., Professor at Widener University and ACI Senior Fellow.  At that time, ACI unveiled its new public opinion survey showing overwhelming support for intellectual property (IP) rights and legal efforts to combat IP piracy.  Remarkably, in this era of political polarization, that support approaches 90%, so political leaders should pay attention.

Today, IP rights are under constant threat not only by way of theft and counterfeiting, but also by special interests here and abroad who seek to undermine IP protections.  For example, some of the nations with whom the U.S. is negotiating free trade agreements believe that IP should receive little, if any, legal protection.  Accordingly, for my part I emphasized that IP is precisely the basis on which the U.S. has evolved into the most prosperous, innovative nation in human history.  After all, many alternative legal systems exist providing less protection for IP.  Yet it is here in America, with its strong tradition of IP protection, where the overwhelming amount of innovation has occurred over the past two centuries.  That is not by accident, and it’s not coincidence.

Our IP system has delivered a higher standard of living and record of creation than any other system that the world has ever known.

But I also emphasized that IP protections aren’t just utilitarian in nature, as some seem to claim.  Rather, IP protections also reflect our view that the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor and efforts is a natural, unalienable one.  As stated by John Locke, “Our handiwork becomes our property because our hands – and the energy, consciousness, and control that fuel their labor – are our property.”  That right is at the core of American society itself.  The Constitution reads, “The Congress shall have the Power … [t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”  That reflects not only British common law, which is the basis for our own legal system, but also the Founding Fathers’ views.  In The Federalist No. 43, James Madison noted, “The copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged, in Great Britain, to be a right of common law.”

Today, American IP is valued at approximately $5 trillion, which is greater than the gross domestic product (GDP) of any other nation in the world.  It also accounts for over half of American exports, which is critical at a time of increasing international competition.  Unfortunately, piracy of U.S. IP constitutes a multi-billion dollar threat, which steals our wealth and deprives our innovators the fruits of their labor.

With ACI’s new study, lawmakers can recognize where the American public overwhelmingly stands.  That data can prove critical in the ongoing battle to protect IP rights and increase legal protections to fight piracy both domestically and abroad.

July 26th, 2013 at 1:49 pm
Killing … with Kindness
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We’ve all had the experience. You’re at a social gathering or a meeting with someone you don’t particularly care for and you offer up a totally insincere nicety just because it seems like the civil thing to do. But while that may be an isolated, awkward moment for you, what I’ve just described represents the lion’s share of the practice of diplomacy.

There’s blowing smoke, however, and then there’s actively distorting the truth. That latter category is where President Obama’s remarks while hosting Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang yesterday fall. In his brief comments to the press following the meeting, Obama felt the need to note that Ho Chi Minh, the country’s former communist dictator, “was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.”

Now, Ho did indeed invoke Jefferson and the rhetoric of the founding, but it shouldn’t exactly come as news to anybody that communist tyrants’ actions didn’t always match up with their rhetoric. How many “people’s republics,” after all, spent most of their time slaughtering the very ‘people’ they were supposedly organized to empower? As Chris Stirewalt notes for Fox News:

While Jefferson did get pretty fired up about “the blood of tyrants,” it’s hard to see how the Sage of Monticello inspired the murderous career of the Vietnamese dictator. Ho famously slaughtered his opponents, including the infamous butchery of peasant farmers who resisted his brutal taxation in the early days of Ho’s regime. Not particularly Jeffersonian.

Estimates run as high as half-a-million killed in Ho’s effort to consolidate power after his communist forces drove the French out of Indochina. The killing of landlords and bourgeois-class merchants was famous even in its day and since then has been documented in even more horrifying detail.

And those who carried his banner forward following his death in 1969 – he remains “Uncle Ho” even to this day – built upon his brutal regime. Following the final U.S. retreat from Vietnam untold thousands of Vietnamese, deemed collaborators by the regime, were put to death. He and his Leninist regime used V.I. Lenin’s tactics: murder, terror and “reeducation” to obtain, maintain and expand power.
OK, I get it. Sometimes being president requires you to find something nice to say in situations where there’s no real justification for it. But surely we can draw the line at anything that puts an even slightly positive gloss on a murderous regime that sent so many innocents to an early grave.
July 26th, 2013 at 12:59 pm
What If Spitzer Becomes NYC’s Comptroller?

Michael Warren of The Weekly Standard has some analysis of a big name running for a little known office that should gets lots of attention.

In the piece, Warren explains how Eliot Spitzer – disgraced former New York Governor and current candidate to become New York City’s Comptroller – would use the powers of the obscure financial office to foist a liberal political agenda onto corporations.

The key to the scheme is the $140 billion worth of public employee pension funds that Spitzer would be in charge of administering. If elected, Spitzer plans to use the money invested in private companies as leverage to demand corporate policy changes in-line with his political agenda.

Of course, that’s not what the job of the NYC Comptroller is designed to do.

“As Yale law professor Jonathan Macey says, the comptroller’s top duty is to get a good return on the city’s investment of its pension funds. ‘It’s a public trust,'” Macey tells Warren. “‘His fiduciary responsibility is to maximize the returns of the beneficiaries.'”

“But what Spitzer is proposing instead—in interviews, in articles, and in his new book, Protecting Capitalism Case by Case—is to use the power of public-employee pension funds to influence corporate policies. Ostensibly, he’d do that for the sake of the public good. What’s more likely to happen is that Spitzer will use the city’s power as shareholder to extract concessions from corporate America that further a populist liberal agenda.” (Emphasis added)

Along with Troy’s excellent column this week, this is yet another reason for New York voters to reject Eliot Spitzer’s political comeback bid.

July 26th, 2013 at 12:33 pm
This Week’s Liberty Update
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Center For Individual Freedom - Liberty Update

This week’s edition of the Liberty Update, CFIF’s weekly e-newsletter, is out. Below is a summary of its contents:

Senik:  Why Character Still Matters
Lee:  Detroit vs. Houston: Laboratories for Liberalism, Conservatism
Ellis:  ObamaCare’s “Data Hub” Should be Its Death Knell

Podcast:  The Growing Cost of Overregulation
Jester’s Courtroom:  Take Me Out of the Ballgame

Editorial Cartoons:  Latest Cartoons of Michael Ramirez
Quiz:  Question of the Week
Notable Quotes:  Quotes of the Week

If you are not already signed up to receive CFIF’s Liberty Update by e-mail, sign up here.

July 26th, 2013 at 9:25 am
Podcast: The Growing Cost of Overregulation
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In an interview with CFIF, Ryan Young, Fellow in Regulatory Studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, discusses the soaring cost of overregulation, CEI’s annual survey of the Federal regulatory state, “Ten Thousand Commandments,” and the government’s biggest offenders.

Listen to the interview here.

July 25th, 2013 at 5:02 pm
Holder Can’t Wait to Revive Stricken Piece of Voting Rights Act

Less than a month after the Supreme Court lifted an outdated “preclearance” formula off the backs of states like Texas, Eric Holder’s Justice Department is trying to reinstate the restrictions by inviting judicial activism.

The move comes in response to the Supreme Court’s invalidation of a coverage formula in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Previously, states with a history of racial discrimination had to seek Justice Department approval – preclearance – before enacting any changes to their election laws. The problem for states like Texas is that the formula for deciding which jurisdictions are required to submit to preclearance hasn’t been updated in decades, making it virtually impossible to get out from under the federal government’s thumb.

In striking down Section 5’s coverage formula, the Court said that Congress is free to create a new formula based on current data. But with the legislative branch divided, few think any action is imminent.

And so, in keeping with the Obama administration’s motto “We Can’t Wait,” Attorney General Holder announced today that his department won’t wait for Congress to update the law. Instead, lawyers at Justice are filing lawsuits against Texas and other jurisdictions seeking to reinstate preclearance on a case-by-case basis.

The cost to taxpayers will be huge, since both sides of the “v.” are government employees. Each federal judge hearing a case will act as a mini-Congress by making factual findings before crafting a rule of law to determine the outcome. Of course, these decisions will be litigated up the lengthy federal appellate chain; all the way to the Supreme Court, if possible.

What makes this an affront to the constitutional design of separation-of-powers is the deliberate intent of one arm of the executive branch to invite members of the judiciary to make laws that Congress will not pass.

Granted, for well-connected attorneys like Holder it’s cheaper to litigate the Left’s pet projects on the taxpayer’s dime rather than as a private lawyer working pro bono. But as Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry said in response, Holder’s actions really amount to “utter contempt for our country’s system of checks and balances.”

July 25th, 2013 at 2:29 pm
ObamaCare’s Data Hub Will Destroy Privacy

Seton Motley, President of Less Government, catalogues in blistering fashion why ObamaCare’s Federal Data Hub – a database designed to link all of the personal medical and financial information held by the states and federal government – may not be a good idea:

The government spies on reporters. And their parents.

The government collects phone call data on hundreds of millions of Americans. It allows thousands of National Security  Administration (NSA) analysts to listen to them at their individual discretion. These same analysts can also read our emails, texts and Instant Messages, and watch our video chats. The government is working with many of the largest Internet companies to take possession of much of the information they have on us.

The government uses our data to sic the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on opponents, inhibits select political organizations from forming or gaining approval, then releases damaging information on and audits anyone not with the big government program.

With this as its track record, how in the world can Americans trust the government to protect some of our most precious personal information and refrain from abusing it?

Better to pull the plug on the Hub and the law that mandates its existence.

H/T: The Daily Caller

July 24th, 2013 at 5:45 pm
If You’ve Lost Dana Milbank …
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The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank is usually a reliable source of center-left hackery, so it bears noting when even he can’t react to a new Obama Administration PR push with anything other than a 650-word eye roll. From his column in today’s Post, reacting to the president’s new agenda of economic speeches (the first of which was given earlier today in Illinois):

… [E]ven a reincarnated Steve Jobs would have trouble marketing this turkey: How can the president make news, and remake the agenda, by delivering the same message he gave in 2005? He’s even giving the speech from the same place, Galesburg, Ill.

White House officials say this will show Obama’s consistency. “We plead guilty to the charge that there is a thematic continuity that exists between the speech the president will give in Galesburg, at Knox College on Wednesday, and his speech in Osawatomie [Kansas, in 2011] and his speech back at Knox College in 2005,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said.

Yes, but this also risks sending the signal that, just six months into his second term, Obama is fresh out of ideas. There’s little hope of getting Congress to act on major initiatives and little appetite in the White House to fight for bold new legislation that is likely to fail. And so the president, it seems, is going into reruns.

I’m actually inclined to go a little easier on the president in terms of analysis while being more damning in the conclusion I draw.

‘Thematic consistency’ makes sense if you’ve got a persistent ideology. This president clearly does on economic issues: intemperate Keynesianism seasoned in rhetorical class resentment.

He’s had half a decade to put that theory into practice — in circumstances sufficiently dire that you can’t rationalize away failure — and it just … doesn’t … work. New ideas would require him to reevaluate first principles, unraveling his entire political philosophy. Is he out of ideas? No, just an ideologue who can’t come to grips with the fact that his worldview has failed the acid test of reality.

July 23rd, 2013 at 6:40 pm
Scott Walker: The Anti-Obama

In his column last week, Troy identified Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker as perhaps the best potential Republican presidential candidate to correct for Barack Obama’s deficiencies.

In an editorial by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, we have even more proof.

One of Walker’s first acts as governor was to sign into a law a series of big changes on how public employee unions operate. The three biggest were limits on collective bargaining, requiring unions to recertify each year and prohibiting automatic collection of union dues.

According to analysis by the paper, in the two years since the law passed the Milwaukee affiliate of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees “has gone from more than 9,000 members and income exceeding $7 million in 2010 to about 3,500 members and a deep deficit by the end of last year.”

So far Walker’s law has translated into savings of $110 for Milwaukee taxpayers, says a new report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Let’s see, budget-busting president or belt-tightening governor? Maybe, just maybe, America will get to make a sensible choice in 2016.

July 22nd, 2013 at 5:30 pm
Elizabeth Warren Errs Again with ‘Stand Your Ground’ Comment

If you wanted to know what a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts thinks about a Florida murder trial, the Huffington Post has you covered.

Speaking to the press in South Boston today, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said that while she thinks people should accept George Zimmerman’s acquittal in Trayvon Martin’s shooting death, it is reasonable to criticize ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws.

Except that it’s completely unreasonable in Zimmerman’s case. As I pointed out in my column last week, Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ law played absolutely no part in the trial for either the prosecution or the defense. Instead, Zimmerman argued that once Martin started beating him he was entitled to use deadly force to defend himself. Zimmerman relied on traditional self-defense, not ‘Stand Your Ground’ – a law which drops the requirement that a person reasonably fearing death or great bodily injury must first try to escape before engaging his attacker.

This isn’t the first time Senator Warren has played fast and loose with the facts. For decades she (at best) made misleading assertions about her alleged Native American ancestry, allowing her to get plumb academic jobs at Penn and Harvard Law ahead of other more qualified candidates. Earlier this year, Warren claimed that her brother lived solely on his Social Security checks – a claim she walked back after admitting that she and her millionaire husband give him assistance.

And so on with today’s politicization of Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ law.

Warren, like other liberal elites, is turning a tragedy into an activist agenda to repeal a law that played no part in Martin’s death. It would be comical if it didn’t betray a serious disregard for reality. Warren and friends need to stop directing anger at the wrong source, and start acting with the competence and prudence their high offices demand.

July 19th, 2013 at 7:16 pm
The Administrative State: Too Big to Scrutinize
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From Obamacare to the current Gang of Eight immigration bill, the only thing more threatening to consensual government than enormous pieces of legislation is the even larger corpus of rules and regulations that they inevitably breed. Consider this analysis of Dodd-Frank, as reported by The Hill:

Rules implementing the Dodd-Frank financial reform law could fill 28 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, according to a new analysis of the Wall Street overhaul [by the law firm Davis Polk]…

All told, regulators have written 13,789 pages and more than 15 million words to put the law in place, which is equal to 42 words of regulations for every single word of the already hefty law, spanning 848 pages itself.

And if that seems like a lot, keep in mind that by Davis Polk’s estimate, the work implementing the law is just 39 percent complete.

I don’t think you have to be a limited government conservative to realize that government of this scope just can’t work. We no longer have a meaningful legislative branch if members of Congress are only responsible for writing 2 percent of what eventually becomes the law (the easiest 2 percent, it should be noted — it’s in the rules and regs, not the statutes, that oxes really get gored). There will be no one capable of enforcing all of these provisions, nor anyone capable of complying with all of them (though you can bet that they’ll be an army of consultants offering compliance services for a pretty penny).

For the rule of law to mean anything, rules have to be few enough to be digestible and clear enough to be intelligible. That’s also, by the way, a good rule of thumb for creating a legal environment that leads to economic growth. Rulemaking orgies like Dodd-Frank? They take us in precisely the opposite direction.
July 19th, 2013 at 6:15 pm
Laborers Union Criticizing ObamaCare Too

Add the Laborers International Union of North America to the list of organized labor groups criticizing ObamaCare’s disastrous effects on the status quo.

In a letter to Democratic leaders, President Terry O’Sullivan called for a halt to the health law’s “destructive consequences” on the costs and provision of health care.

Unlike the Teamsters and other unions, Laborers International did not support ObamaCare when it was passed into law. Unfortunately, they are just as oppressed by the law’s cost increases and coverage interruptions as those that did.

With the employer mandate delayed for at least a year, maybe there’s enough angst brewing among the Democrats’ liberal base to pressure delaying the entire law for at least as long.

July 19th, 2013 at 5:49 pm
Senate Dem Using ‘Stand Your Ground’ Hearings to Target ALEC, NRA

In the days since a Florida jury acquitted George Zimmerman of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, liberal politicians and pundits have tried to argue that without the state’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ law providing a defense, Zimmerman would be guilty.

The problem with this argument is that Zimmerman’s lawyers never invoked ‘Stand Your Ground’ as a defense in the trial. ‘Stand Your Ground’ was irrelevant to the verdict.

But that hasn’t stopped liberals like Attorney General Eric Holder from using the mere existence of ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws as a pretext for unmerited lawsuits. In a speech to the NAACP this week, Holder encouraged members of the NAACP to agitate for the repeal of such laws in the 30+ states where they exist.

Now, Congress is upping the ante.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) is promising to hold congressional hearings about the effects of ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws, including such topics as “when racial profiling and ‘stand your ground’ laws mix,” according to a press release.

Amid all the racially charged theater, Durbin also announced what has to be his real motive behind the hearings – scrutinizing the roles that the NRA and ALEC played in promoting ‘Stand Your Ground’ legislation.

Durbin has no right to subject either organization to an investigative fishing expedition designed to criticize private groups for exercising their First Amendment rights. If Durbin follows through with his threat, someone in the Senate GOP needs to throw some brush-back pitches in Dick’s direction. After the politician-inspired IRS scandal, it’s time for liberals to be held accountable for their wild-eyed accusations.

July 19th, 2013 at 3:50 pm
Glaring Statistic Emphasizes Need to Reduce and Reform U.S. Corporate Taxes
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In today’s Wall Street Journal, former Japanese Diet member Mieko Nakabayashi and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury James Carter spell out in stark terms the need for reform and reduction of U.S. corporate taxes, which are now the highest in the industrialized world.  In particular, they highlight the alarming exodus of large corporations from America to more hospitable tax regimes with this statistic:

When the U.S. last cut its corporate tax rate in 1986, 218 of the world’s 500 largest corporations measured by revenue were in the U.S.  Today, that number is 137.  Similarly, the number of Japanese corporations in the Fortune Global 500 fell to 68 last year from 81 in 2005.  While there is no single explanation for the drop, Tax Foundation chief economist William McBride tells us:  ‘The common thread behind all of this is the U.S. corporate tax, which is the most punitive in the developed world.'”

We live in a period of unprecedented political polarization.  The need to reduce our corporate rate, however, has achieved bipartisan agreement, with Barack Obama himself proclaiming, “Our corporate tax rate is too high.”  Accordingly, the time is now to enact reduction and reform, lest America’s legacy of economic leadership deteriorate further.