Freedom Line Blog

They aren’t lotto numbers; they are the number of times Paul Ryan’s name and budget ideas have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard & National Review, and on Fox News, respectively, since the presidential election of 2008.

According to Politico, the unequaled access to conservative opinion leaders came as a direct result of Ryan’s deliberate strategy to cultivate conservative pundits and think tank-types so that they in turn would promote Ryan’s ideas to the American public, and ultimately, back onto Ryan’s colleagues in Congress.

To say the strategy worked is an understatement.  To read how Ryan did it would be time well spent.

Businessweek provides a snapshot of California state government’s fiscal insanity:

California Governor Jerry Brown is seeking a 38,000 percent spending increase for a proposed high- speed rail system, even as he plans to raise taxes, cut state worker pay and reduce social programs to narrow a $15.7 billion deficit.

The “38,000 percent” translates into a requested budget increase from $15.9 million to $6.1 billion for construction costs of California’s fantastical high-speed rail project.  The kicker: all that money builds only the first 130 miles of an estimated 800 mile route from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

A lot of internet ink has been spilt rightly decrying this total waste of taxpayer money.  What I want to emphasize in this post is that Governor Brown’s budget request should anger liberals even more than conservatives.

Can it really be true that with California’s budget deficit recently surging from $9.2 billion to more than $15.7 billion that welfare and salaries must be cut and taxes raised so that someone’s bullet train dream can come true?

This is insane.  If Californians – the unions included – can’t rouse themselves to kill high-speed rail for the sake of preserving food stamps and health care for the poor, the rest of the nation should wash its hands of the state and let it implode.

Ending any and all spending related to the L.A.-S.F. bullet train should be done today.  It’s a no-brainer.  Unfortunately, that’s also true of the folks in charge of the public fisc.

You read that right.

After the House voted down President Barack Obama’s budget proposal 414 – 0 in March, today the Senate defeated it 99 – 0.  There are 51 Democrats in the Senate (and two Independents that caucus with them).  Not one voted for their president’s budget.  There are 190 Democrats in the House.  Not one voted for their president’s budget.

There are only 535 members in Congress.  As of today, 513 are on record opposing Barack Obama’s 2012 budget.  No one is on record supporting it.

By contrast, Paul Ryan’s budget passed the House on March 29^th with 228 Republican votes, and only 10 party members against.  Today, 41 of 47 Republicans voted for Ryan’s budget; short of the 51 needed for passage.

Only one party is trying to govern.  The other is refusing to.  The American people should take notice and vote accordingly.

Meditate on this excerpt from an op-ed by former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

“An inclusive party would welcome the party’s most conservative activists right alongside its most liberal activists,” the actor-turned-politician said. “There is room for those whose views, I think, make them sound like cavemen. And there is also room for us in the center, with views the traditionalists probably think make us sound like progressive softies.”

As usual, Schwarzenegger is being too soft on himself.  After promising to “blow up the boxes” in Sacramento and get tough on a legislature full of “girly men,” Schwarzenegger passed seven laughably unbalanced budgets that everyone acknowledged were premised on accounting gimmicks that are illegal in the private sector.  He signed into law AB 32, the global warming regulatory scheme that burdens California’s economy without making a single degree of difference in the global temperature.  He supported a multi-billion dollar bond initiative to fund embryonic stem cell research despite the industry’s pivot toward adult stem cells as an ethically better, more scientifically promising avenue for treatment.

Ignoring the laws of fiscal gravity?  Cursing the sun while your neighbors grow their economies?  Defying science to serve a political ideology?  Who’s the real caveman in all this Mr. Schwarzenegger?

H/T: Catalina Camia at USA Today

The Heritage Foundation breaks down the numbers of what ObamaCare was promised to save, and what it actually costs:

Combine this spending monstrosity with the $787 billion stimulus bill and you’ve got nearly $1.5 trillion added to the federal deficit before any other Obama Era policy has been discussed.  Lard on the costs of EPA regulations, the uncertainty of Dodd-Frank’s implementation, and the specter of all the Bush tax cuts vanishing next January and it’s no wonder the American economy is stagnant.  The liberals in Washington, D.C. are spending and regulating us into oblivion.

Joe Mathews blogs at NBC Bay Area on the people and institutions most at fault for California’s budget fiasco.

The system makes the decisions, not lawmakers. And that system — the formulas and court decisions and constitutional spending mandates and tax restrictions — does not exist in any particular place that can be protested.

That’s the strange genius of this system, which is really a set of complex formulas. You can’t picket a formula’s house.

Indeed, protesting at the Capitol may be counterproductive — because it advances a false public narrative that the legislature is the problem here. The problem is the people of California, especially voters of the present and of the past.

…

Two years ago, in this piece for Fox & Hounds Daily, I suggested five alternative locations for protests: highways, gas stations, the prison guards’ union, retirement communities, and unsold homes.

Since then, I have one additional idea: California cemeteries.

Many of the spending mandates and tax restrictions that are strangling the budget, and higher education in particular, were put in place long ago by voters.

So long ago that many of those voters are dead. What better way to represent this problem of the dead governing the living than by taking the protest to those voters?

And what better way to show the crisis of California’s politics than to act as if politically-imposed spending formulas can’t be politically reformed?

Remember when Nancy Pelosi said of ObamaCare that Congress would need to “pass the bill so [the public] can see what is in it”?  Two years ago, Pelosi & Co. refused to make the contents of ObamaCare public until just before voting was allowed on the bill.

Well, it looks like Pelosi’s fellow liberals in California state government are doing her one better.  From the Los Angeles Times:

In an annual quirk of California government, lawmakers approved 78 budget bills on Thursday — and they were all blank.

The bills function as shells. As negotiations continue and tax revenues are tallied, they will be amended with actual budget details, then quickly passed by the Legislature and signed by the governor.

Calling this practice a quirk obscures the fact that California’s big-spending liberals are deliberately perverting the legislative process to hide their intentions.  Just like ObamaCare, California’s majority Democrats negotiate with themselves behind closed doors and demand an up-or-down vote on budget bills within hours of making them public.

This kind of process-destroying behavior cannot be allowed to continue.  The public needs accurate information to judge policies and politicians, not shell games that cost billions.

Philip K. Howard, author of Life Without Lawyers, has a thought-provoking essay in the Atlantic about how to repeal old laws in order to make room for new policies that will unleash American ingenuity and discretion:

Fixing what ails America is impossible, indeed illegal, without a legal spring cleaning. The goal is not mainly to “deregulate” but to restate programs in light of current needs and priorities.

As a practical matter, this requires Congress to authorize special commissions to make proposals, area by area. Using the base closing commission model, these proposals would be submitted to Congress for an up or down vote.

Going forward, Congress should incorporate sunset provisions in all laws with budgetary impact. The goal is not to end good programs but to impose a discipline that is essential for a functioning democracy that must constantly make tough tradeoffs.

Howard’s point about including sunset clauses into all new laws with budgetary impact would be a HUGE step in the right direction.  In Texas government, where I once worked as a legislative staff member, every state agency is subject to elimination pending the outcome of a once-a-decade review.

Each session the legislature is given the option to continue, modify, or eliminate state agencies falling within a policy area (e.g. all agencies having jurisdiction over education).  In practice, very few agencies are eliminated completely, but the many are consolidated and streamlined.  In every case, legislators get a chance to think through issues like whether the agency is meeting its mission; if not, why not; and if so, is there a better way?

There’s a case to be made that reforms that do little more than add to the existing body of law are, in practice, de-forms of public policy.  We don’t need more laws; we need less of the ones we have, and better versions of those.

Fred Barnes has a terrific column in today’s Wall Street Journal explaining the origin, structure and philosophy of Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform proposal.  The most intriguing paragraph explains how Ryan’s reform ideas went from minority alternative to majority consensus in just two years.

But House passage alone was a milestone. When Mr. Ryan first proposed premium support in 2008, 14 House Republicans signed on as co-sponsors. But when his budget cleared the House in 2011—with Medicare reform its most controversial provision—only four of the 241 Republicans voted against it. Of the 87 GOP freshmen, only one voted no. In the Senate, all but five of the 47 Republicans declined to back Mr. Ryan’s plan.

After weathering some resistance in the beginning:

Premium support is now Republican orthodoxy. But absent a GOP landslide this fall, that’s not sufficient to win congressional approval. Besides, entitlements are best enacted on a bipartisan basis. Otherwise, they may wind up like ObamaCare—unpopular, under legal challenge, and the target of endless partisan attacks.

Barnes is right that entitlement reform is best enacted on a bipartisan basis, but there’s every indication that a conservative victory this year that keeps the House and wins the Senate, supplemented with smart liberal support from the likes of Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and others, would certainly be considered bipartisan.

According to Barnes, a handful of Democrats in the Senate and House have told Ryan they are willing to go public with their support for Medicare reform after the 2012 elections.  Momentum is building for real reform of the largest deficit driver in the federal budget.  This should be a motivator for every fiscal conservative to make this election the year Ryan’s reforms become law so America can get its finances in order.

From John Stossel’s blog:

What would happen if you planned your family’s budget the way the politicians plan theirs? I showed people this chart:

Everyone agreed that this would be a ridiculous household budget.

But that’s the federal budget, if you just add 8 zeroes!

It’s been a bad week for Office of Management and Budget Director Jeff Zients, the man tasked with defending President Barack Obama’s 2013 budget proposal.

In testimony before the House Budget Committee Zients told Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) that the penalty for not complying with ObamaCare’s mandate to buy health insurance is not a tax increase.  (Subscription wall.)  In response, Rep. Garrett said, “Okay.  I just want to be clear on that because that’s not the argument the Administration is making before the Supreme Court.”

Before the Senate Budget Committee Zients was even more out-of-touch.  Under questioning from Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Zients claimed that Obama’s 2013 budget contained spending cuts – a distortion Sessions would not tolerate:

Mr. Zients, there are no spending cuts in this budget. This budget increases spending. Surely you know that. It increases taxes. So to say you cut $2.50 in spending for every dollar in tax increase is beyond the pale.

So too is the entire shell game about ‘deficit reduction’ when what liberals like Obama really mean is tax increases to pay for spending increases.  If the President won’t admit it at least his budget director will be made to.

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.

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.

In an interview with CFIF, Congressman Paul Broun, M.D. (R-GA) discusses legislation he recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives — H.R. 3883, the Budget or Bust Act — that would help force Congress to pass an annual budget by withholding Members’ salaries hostage in an escrow account until a budget is passed.

Listen to the interview here.

In a letter (pdf) to California legislators, State Controller John Chiang summarizes the Golden State’s fiscal problems with deft understatement:

As of December 31, 2011, total receipts are coming in $2.6 billion less than forecasted, and expenditures are $2.6 billion more than assumed.  Together, both of these components translate into a $5.2 billion reduction in cash resources.

At least someone in California can still do math.  Will it matter?

Quin makes some excellent points about the PR disaster that is the payroll tax cut extension debacle.  In addition, the spin on the debate is missing two important angles: (1) the Senate GOP’s apparent backstabbing of House Speaker Boehner, and (2) the fact that a trivial 60 day pay raise (the most any taxpayer will save is $40 per paycheck) won’t make a difference in anybody’s bottom line.  If the payroll tax “holiday” is extended, however, it will take another misguided step toward eliminating the tax permanently.  Recently, former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer explained why that’s bad (requires WSJ subscription):

Make no mistake, if the payroll-tax cut is extended, it will become permanent. Social Security will become another welfare program as the tie between what someone pays and what they receive gets broken. To a large degree, the tie has already been broken. Social Security’s trust fund has been raided for years by both parties and Medicare is already significantly financed through general revenues instead of through its dedicated trust fund.

Instead of squabbling over how to extend the payroll tax break, the GOP should concentrate on revising the tax code so it promotes growth and jobs, while reforming our entitlements.

Quin’s right.  Republicans need to use the payroll tax cut debate to educate the American public.  Phony nickel-and-dime policies like a 60 day, $40 tax cut are not solutions to Washington’s deficit addiction.  Neither, frankly, is a year-long tax holiday that moves Social Security from an under-funded to an unfunded mandate.

Since the Senate went home and President Barack Obama is in Hawaii on vacation, it looks like a great opportunity for Boehner to call a primetime press conference to explain why good policy is good politics.

Jennifer Rubin’s interview with House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) gives more reason to surmise that a pairing of him and GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney as the 2012 Republican ticket.  Rubin says that Ryan’s response to Romney’s entitlement reform plan was “effusive” and a clear statement of support from the leading elected conservative intellectual.

With Romney mired in an electoral no-man’s land – leading all other challengers but only garnering 25% support – adding Ryan to his team sometime next year would probably be enough to get disaffected Tea Party and conservative support otherwise underwhelmed with Romney’s checkered history.

More bad news from the Tarnished State:  A memo circulated by Democratic Assembly leaders pegs California’s budget deficit for next year at $8 billion, more than double the $3.1 billion Governor Jerry Brown and legislative Democrats projected just a few months ago.  In (un?)-related news, Brown’s office shut down a transparency website from the Schwarzenegger-era that made far-flung government documents easily available.  Now, visitors are redirected to some of the relevant primary sources, but many others are not listed.

In both cases, the price of reliable information seems to be too little, too late.

Last week I wrote here about Sen. Ron Johnson’s proposals to save $1.4 trillion over ten years. Today, for the University of Mobile, I add that to proposals by Jeff Sessions, Tom Coburn, Paul Ryan and others to show that significant savings shouldn’t be all that hard.

In our commentary this week entitled “While Federal Spending Hit New Record in 2011, Washington, D.C. Became America’s Wealthiest City”, we highlight the interrelation between federal spending reaching a new record high in 2011 and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area becoming the nation’s wealthiest.   Among other facts, we pointed out that wages of federal employees themselves are over 1/5 higher than comparable private-sector employees, and that federal benefits stand 20%-40% higher than those of private counterparts.

Today, Senators Jeff Sessions and Olympia Snowe sustain our point in their commentary within The Wall Street Journal entitled “An End to Budgetary Trickery.”  Advocating the Honest Budget Act they’ve introduced to end “the most blatant and dishonest” overspending gimmicks, they highlight “Fake Federal Pay Freezes”:

In November 2010, the president promised to institute a ‘two-year pay freeze for all civilian federal workers.’  He explained that ‘getting this deficit under control is going to require broad sacrifice.’  But 70% of civilian federal workers have continued to receive 2%-3% automatic ‘step’ increases just for showing up – costing taxpayers an extra billion dollars every year.  The Honest Budget Act, in keeping with the president’s pledge, would simply make the federal pay freeze real by legislative mandate.”

Senators Sessions and Snowe also seek to end false “emergency” spending, phony “rescissions” and timing shifts in their legislation.  As they summarize, “No more gimmicks, tricks or shell games.”  We agree, and urge you to take a quick moment to contact your two Senators in support of the Honest Budget Act.   Let’s get this done.