Freedom Line Blog

As we profiled in last week’s Freedom Minute video, they’re currently doing a bit of housekeeping in the Obama White House, with key departures coming throughout the ranks of the senior staff. Thus far, the biggest change has been on the economic team, with the departures of Peter Orszag, Chrisina Romer, and Larry Summers. Last week’s announcement that General Jim Jones would step down as National Security Adviser, however, shows that the bloodletting is now spreading to the president’s foreign policy team.

Unfortunately, the upshot of this transitional period seems to be replacing plaques rather than policies. The new economic advisers promise more of the same. And on national security, we may actually be trading down.

While General Jones was known for keeping banker’s hours and not being a particularly influential member of Obama’s inner circle, his military credentials insulated him from being viewed as too dovish on foreign policy. Not so his replacement, Thomas Donilon, whose past successes include being in-house counsel at Fannie Mae (you can’t make this stuff up).

Writing in today’s New York Post, AEI’s Arthur Herman lays out the case for pessimism at Obama’s choice for the nation’s most powerful national security position:

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.

Larry Summers, Director of President Obama’s National Economic Council, has been a loyal ally to the administration and proponent of current health care reform proposals floating around Congress.

Summers has backed ObamaCare despite the many troubling provisions contained in House and Senate legislation, namely the individual health care mandate and the government-run public option.

Apparently, the economic views of Dr. Summers have changed in the current partisan environment.  When he was an academic and cared more about economic externalities than political favoritism, he penned this paper critiquing individual mandates and government-run plans.

Here is an excerpt:

Note that a payroll tax on employers directed at financing health insurance benefits publicly would have the same employment displacement effects [translation: people lose their jobs] as a mandated health insurance program….  If policymakers fail to recognize the costs of mandated benefits because they do not appear in the government budget, then mandated benefit programs could lead to excessive spending on social programs.  There is no sense in which benefits become “free” just because the government mandates that employers offer them to workers.  As with value-added taxes, it can plausibly be argued that mandated benefits fuel the growth of government.”