In another fascinating article from Reason Magazine, three policy experts explain how governments in Canada, New Zealand and post-WWII America slashed government spending and spurred economic growth. Each expert highlights the strategies used to achieve the respective financial miracles, but one from Canada deserves special mention:
In assembling these cuts, (Canadian Finance Minister) Paul Martin didn’t follow the usual pattern of consulting interest groups one by one. Instead, he held four televised regional consultations in which various lobbyists, experts, and ordinary citizens contended with one another. Martin also spoke directly to the public about what was needed to turn Canada’s budget around. In October 1994, his Department of Finance published a report, A New Framework for Economic Policy, showing that in order to keep the ratio of debt to GDP from rising, government had to run a substantial surplus on its program budget—that is, have revenues significantly exceeding state expenditures.
Public debates used to be a spectator sport in the civilized world. (Remember reading about the Lincoln-Douglas debates?) If Republicans win back control of at least one house of Congress, it would behoove their leadership to find ways to nationalize spending issues with public debates. And, if members of Congress are too afraid to step forward and defend principles, they should consider sponsoring debates featuring lobbyists, policy wonks and activists.
We all know who votes for whom. Let’s get them in the same room, on camera and hear their pitch.
The 60-year-old justice, an appointee of President George W. Bush, acknowledged with a smile that his colleagues “who are more disciplined refrain from manifesting any emotion or opinion whatsoever.”
Alito, answering questions following a speech Wednesday at the conservative Manhattan Institute in New York, also said, “Presidents will fake you out.” The institute provided an online video link to Alito’s talk and question-and-answer session.
The president will begin a sentence with an invocation of the country’s greatness, Alito said. If justices don’t jump up and applaud, “you look very unpatriotic,” he said.
But, Alito continued, then the president may finish the thought by adding “because we’re conducting a surge in Iraq or because we’re enacting health care reform.” Justices aren’t supposed to react to statements about policy or politics.
The better course, Alito said, is to follow the example of more experienced justices like Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and the recently retired John Paul Stevens. None has attended in several years.
“So I doubt that I will be there in January,” Alito said.
For anyone wondering how large organizations can put pieces of time-sensitive information into a coherent, real-time picture, author Steven Johnson provides an answer. In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Johnson explains ‘the adjacent possible;’ i.e. alternative paths. In the short video below, Johnson discusses the missed opportunity pre-9/11 to match up the FBI’s ‘Phoenix Memo‘ with the arrest of a would-be terrorist who said during flight school that he didn’t need to know how to land.
If our nation’s intelligence community is ever going to function efficiently, it’s going to need a way to match information in a fast, coherent way. Maybe Johnson’s book could help.
This brand of social activism also happens to perfectly dovetail with the brand of conservative feminism that was being promoted at the (Smart Girl Summit): You can maintain your duties as a wife and mother but also become involved in the movement through making phone calls, handing out flyers, running for school board if national office seems too disruptive to your family. ( “Start small, build big” was another theme—school board leads to county leads to state, etc.) You can organize an entire conference and run a highly trafficked Web site but, since those activities are not professionalized, still call yourself a stay-at-home mom. And those “maternal” skills—organization, communication—are just as good, if not better than, a high-powered professional résumé in a movement that’s asking for foot soldiers. (But high-powered résumés are OK, too—cf Liz Cheney.)
Though Malcolm Gladwell makes some excellent points about the limitations of social networks as vehicles for social change, the increasing use and adaptability of social networking technology is allowing a whole new breed of conservative activists (homeschooling mothers) to dramatically impact the national political scene; at least when it comes to news coverage and GOP primaries.
Check out this Fox Business interview with Eric Singer, the founder of Congressional Effect Management, an investment firm that only gets into the stock market when Congress is out of session. The key to Singer’s strategy is avoiding ‘political risk’ – the damage to wealth creation that Congress causes through taxes and regulation (real or threatened).
The Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald has an eye-popping expose on the insane delusion about the ‘root causes’ of homelessness among what passes for San Francisco’s intelligencia. Though the entire article is worth reading, one passage deserves special mention for the way it shows how disconnected are the captains of ‘Homelessness, Inc.’ from the actual motivations of the people they claim to serve:
An unintentionally hilarious letter to the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2010 revealed just why the homelessness-industrial complex is so desperate to claim the Haight infestation for itself: government contracts. “The majority of the youth on the streets and in the park are in the Haight seeking support to address the issues that have led them there,” wrote the executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services in criticizing the sit-lie proposal. “Funding to help these youths through outreach, case management, education and employment has been severely cut over the past two years. . . . Rather than rallying in anger, a better use of our time is to focus on helping youths exit the streets so they can find work and housing and become contributing members of the community.” Translation: Homelessness, Inc. wants more money.
Larkin Street’s analysis of why people hang out in the Haight is as wildly inaccurate as the Coalition’s fingering of unaffordable rent. Few, if any, of these vagrants are “in the Haight seeking support to address the issues that have led them there,” unless “support” means money for booze and drugs. To the contrary, the “youth” are there to party, en route to their next way station. As a platinum blonde boozily announces in The Haight Street Kids: “I love this city, love your fucking life.” A tall youth draped around her adds: “It’s awesome for traveling kids to stop in when they need a break.”
Predictably, the offer of services and housing—which San Francisco’s round-the-clock outreach workers constantly put before the Haight Street vagrants—is usually turned down. As for becoming “contributing members of the community,” that’s definitely not on the agenda, either. Asked what he saw for himself in the future, a “traveler” in the Stanford documentary rolls his eyes, smiles nervously, and shakes his head for nearly a minute before replying: “A hot dog, there’s definitely a hot dog in my future.”
The number of Americans who pay taxes continues to shrink—and the United States is close to the point at which half of the population will not pay taxes for government benefits they receive. In 2009, 64.3 million Americans depended on the government (read: their fellow citizens) for their daily housing, food, and health care. Starting in 2015, the Social Security program will not receive enough taxes to pay all the promised benefits—which will be hard for all job-holders, but devastating for roughly half the American workforce that has no other retirement program. Add in last year’s preposterously named American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, spiraling academic grants, flat-out farm socialism, the swelling ranks of Americans who believe themselves entitled to “free” government benefits—and now the government takeover of the nation’s health care system—and the very nature of this country’s republican form of government is called into question. Like they have been doing since 2002, Heritage Foundation policy experts lay out the increasingly gloomy facts. Can Americans pull back from the brink of complete dependence on government?
A great companion piece to Heritage’s ‘Dependence Index’ is the Legatum Institute’s ‘Prosperity Index,’ an equally in-depth look at policies that grow individual wealth instead of destroy it.
Recently, the committee conferring the Nobel Peace Prize decided to give the award to someone who actually deserves it: jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Excerpts of his writings can be found in Q & A form here. In the snippet below, Xiaobo explains the importance of continuing to pressure the Chinese regime to free its people from dictatorship:
Does your struggle for democracy in China have any significance for the rest of the world?
To eliminate the negative effects of the sudden rise of dictatorial communist China on world civilization, we must help the world’s largest dictatorship transform into a free and democratic country as soon as possible. In the great cause of global democratization, China is a key link: if China is in the game, then the game is on for everyone.
Therefore, whether to let the CPC dictatorship, which has taken more than one billion people hostage, continue to degrade human civilization, or to rescue the world’s largest hostage population from enslavement, is not only a matter of vital importance for the Chinese people themselves, but also a matter of vital importance for all free nations.
Were China to become a free country, its value to human civilization would be incalculable. It would inevitably follow in the wake of the global collapse of the Soviet Eastern European totalitarian empire to bring about another global avalanche among the remaining dictatorial systems. It would be difficult for dictatorial regimes such as North Korea, Myanmar, Cuba, and Vietnam to continue, and those Middle Eastern countries with firmly entrenched dictatorial systems would also suffer a great blow. ~ The Negative Effects of the Rise of Dictatorship on World Democratization, 2006
For all the ink spilled trying to divine the cause of the present financial crisis the most stirring theory is that culture – not capitalism – failed America. It’s a theory that lies at the heart of the Citizens United documentary “Generation Zero” and is discussed in eye-popping detail by William Cohan in today’s New York Times.
Asserting the commonsensical notion that people do what they are rewarded to do, Cohan (a former denizen of Wall Street) claims that when firms morphed from partnerships to corporations they simultaneously shifted the risk of loss from executives to stockholders. That simple change in legal form privatized profits while socializing losses.
Here’s Cohan’s solution:
To my mind, its central feature should be that each of the top 100 executives at Wall Street’s remaining “systemically important” firms be personally liable for the risks they take. Not just their unexercised stock options or restricted stock, but every asset they have in their possession: from their cars to their fancy homes to their bulging bank accounts.
…
Pretty harsh, right? Maybe, but Wall Street deserves no sympathy. Had this security, or something like it, been in place at every Wall Street firm five years ago, there would have been no mortgage bubble, no financial crisis, no deep and unsettling economic recession with nearly 10 percent unemployment, no need for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and no need for Dodd-Frank or Basel III.
Why? Because human beings do what they are rewarded to do — especially on Wall Street — and if they are rewarded for taking prudent and sensible risks, that’s exactly what they will do.
Along with Reps. John Dingell (D-MI) and Barney Frank (D-MA), another incumbent Democrat congressman is looking at the very real possibility of losing his seat on November 2nd. And because of his stunts, it couldn’t happen to a better poster child for partisan politics than Florida’s Alan Grayson. Byron York provides a nice summary of Grayson’s offenses:
Grayson has been involved in so many dust-ups, scrapes and other indignities that it’s surprising to realize he has only been in office 20 months. From describing the Republican health plan as hoping the sick will “die quickly” to calling a top official at the Federal Reserve a “K Street whore” to saying of former Vice President Dick Cheney that “blood … drips from his teeth while he’s talking” to “Taliban Dan” — well, a lot of people in Florida and Washington won’t be sad to see him go.
A poll taken by Sunshine State News at the time of the ad controversy showed Webster with a 7-point lead, 43 percent to 36 percent. Barring any unforeseen events, that’s likely to hold. The 8th District was Republican for almost 30 years, until the Obama-Grayson victories of 2008. Now it appears to be moving back to the GOP.
The fusion of the Tea Party and Republican Party is underway, according to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal. Of particular interest is the headway being made in Virginia where Tea Party activists are keeping Republican politicians’ feet to the fire.
Virginia’s statewide tea-party alliance is perhaps the most advanced of any in the country, both in organization and in its own interactions with the GOP.
Its convention this weekend is expected to draw the cream of the state Republican Party and at least 3,000 participants. The state’s top three Republicans—Gov. Bob McDonnell, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling and Attorney Gen. Ken Cuccinelli—all agreed to attend and field questions, but as mere panelists, not keynote speakers.
“The party is trying to mollify the tea-party folks, if only as a protective measure,” says Mr. Cuccinelli, who rose to office last year with the support of thousands of tea-party activists.
Messrs. McDonnell and Bolling see it differently. “I am going because I am driven, and the tea-party members are driven, by the same ideas,” says Mr. McDonnell. Mr. Bolling says his message to the convention will be “that we stand with them and we appreciate their involvement in the political process.”
Several events have helped to push Virginia to the vanguard of a national tea-party movement. A huge sales-tax increase in 2004, passed with the help of Republican votes, stirred a rebellion among the party’s base and helped propel a new crop of conservatives to power last November, including Messrs. McDonnell, Bolling and Cuccinelli.
Accountability is coming to the political process. Double-dealing politicos beware.
As the nation watches in horror as its debt begins to grow beyond the point of no return, the Congressional Budget Office continues statically scoring all legislation.
It assumes that if tax rates are raised, taxes received by the Treasury will go up proportionately. It disregards the impact of the extra 10 billion hours it now takes to figure out our taxes.
It ignores the fact that in the face of 1,400 new regulations from health care and financial overhauls (Sarbanes-Oxley had only 16), virtually all businesses will slow down and hoard cash as they try to understand what the new rules might be.
Static scoring assumes that the uncertainty created by the presence of new laws and new regulations does not affect behavior or taxes collected. Static scoring assumes some sucker will always be available to buy our debt no matter how much we waste. Worst of all, it assumes no one will change behavior to reduce taxes.
Every assumption of the static scoring model is demonstrably false. Higher tax rates usually result in lower revenues as people change their actions to reduce their tax burden. This will certainly happen if some or all of the Bush tax cuts expire and the economy continues to sag as a result. The time, cost and restraints of new regulations can choke businesses.
The kind of rampant uncertainty caused by the explosion in federal regulations will continue to slow America’s economic recovery. Riffing on Singer, maybe after passing CFIF’s ‘One More Vote’ initiative, the country can pass a constitutional amendment to limit the amount of congressional work days.
In a revealing analysis the researchers at Rasmussen Reports found that although voter anger at the political class is at record highs, campaign contributions from individuals are drying up. Why would people fed up with the political system not be pouring money into contested races? Probably because the memory of Republican free-spending is still so fresh in the public’s mind.
The Rasmussen telephone survey found that while most of the respondents thought campaign contributions are important to winning, they think a candidate’s political positions is the ultimate deciding factor.
So there you have it. For candidates running this year it sounds like voters are expecting ideological purity to trump fundraising prowess. Hopefully, they’re right.
First, a disclosure: I am very partial to interesting (and inconsequential) number combinations, such as 12:34 on a digital clock. Silly? Yes. Unusual? Well…
The Tenth Amendment Center (TAC) launched a multi-city tour called “Nullify Now!” that encourages state governments to ignore federal laws they deem unconstitutional. The second stop on the tour occurs on October 10, 2010, or as TAC enthusiasts prefer, 10-10-10.
Speaking at the event will be a number of national and local personalities. Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico who many think will be running for president as a republican in 2012, will be joined by New York Times best-selling author Thomas E. Woods Jr., who received his master’s from Harvard and Ph.D. from Columbia, as keynote speakers for the event. Also speaking will be Jim Babka, president of DownsizeDC, Tampa-based author and activist Tom Mullen, and Trevor Lyman, best-known as the architect of the 2007 “Ron Paul money bombs” which resulted in the largest single-day fundraising efforts in election history.
Launched in September, 2010, the Nullify Now! tour is currently scheduled to visit six cities around the country (Ft. Worth, Orlando, Chattanooga, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Minneapolis), with ten more locations being planned for 2011, said event organizers. The tour focuses efforts on educating people that whatever their political persuasion is, they can affect far more change on a state, rather than a federal, level.
For those interested in the history and use of nullification, tour speaker Thomas Woods’ Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century is one of the best arguments for using the controversial idea first conceived by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. (Spoiler Alert: Abolitionists in antebellum America found it particularly useful when refusing to enforce the ‘runaway slave’ laws.)
Who says Congressional Democrats don’t have a death wish for their party’s future? Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) is openly stating his intent to pass an amnesty bill during the lame duck session between the November 2010 midterm elections and swearing in the new Congress in January.
And get this for his rationale:
“A lot of senators are retiring and might be willing to look at the issue,” Menendez said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We need something to jump off from if we’re going to go into it in the early part of the next Congress.”
What Menendez should have said is that a lot of senators will be nursing grudges during their four eight weeks notice of being fired, and might be willing to stick it to voters on a controversial issue.
If the liberals running the Democrat Party go through with threats like this to ram through unpopular agenda items during a lame duck session they will ensure minority status for their party for several election cycles to come.
It’s the first Monday in October which means that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is back in session. Uber-liberal constitutional law expert Erwin Chemerinsky is not celebrating the occasion. Instead, he bemoans the conservative ‘take-over’ of the court and sites as evidence the fact that Republican presidents from Nixon to Bush II made a total of 12 appointments to SCOTUS while only two Democrat nominees made it onto the bench. (Bill Clinton appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, while Jimmy Carter was faced with no vacancies during his term.)
Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Irvine’s law school, singles out 4 of the 12 appointments (John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito) as proof of the conservative ascendency. But for conservatives a success rate of 33% is hardly a victory; especially when considering that both of President Barack Obama’s SCOTUS appointments replaced Republican nominees, yet didn’t alter the conservative-liberal voting patterns. Gerald Ford appointed John Paul Stevens, a man who ended his tenure as the leader o the court’s liberal bloc. Bush I appointed David Souter, a justice who voted in lock-step with Stevens and the court’s other liberals.
True, Bush I gave us Thomas, and Reagan hit a home run with Scalia, but Reagan also put soul-crushing moderates like Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy on the bench; two people who repeatedly frustrated conservatives on issues across the political spectrum. Ironically, at least to some, is the SCOTUS legacy of Bush II who made solid conservative appointments with Roberts and Alito. That these two often team with Thomas and Scalia (and manage to cajole Kennedy to heed his better angels) is more the result of a historical accident than a carefully executed strategy.
Imagine the kind of country we could be enjoying had Republican presidents from Nixon to Bush I had a conservative justice success rate of 66% rather than 33%. As it is, since at least the Eisenhower Administration (Earl Warren, William Brennan) liberals like Chemerinsky have benefited handsomely from liberal appointments by supposedly conservative GOP presidents.
It’s often said that if private business owners kept their books like the government does, there would be lots of CEOs in prison. With the Bell scandal showing that fraud is criminal no matter who does it, the people who’ve grown rich at the public’s expense should start looking over their shoulders.
The Prometheus Institute, an Irvine, CA-based think tank, is at the leading edge of using new media to make government more transparent, while spreading the good news about free markets. Currently, the group’s signature initiative is the ‘Do-It-Yourself Democracy’ App.
The fruit of hundreds of hours of research, the DIY Democracy App allows users to instantly find the contact information for state and local officials, official forms for filing complaints, propose local initiatives, and research individual rights like freedom of speech and association.
Here’s an interview with the Institute’s founders from Reason.tv:
Prometheus is also gearing up to use the digital capabilities of the Apple I-Pad to promote free market classics like F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom to a new generation of readers. Not bad for a couple of guys trying to “pioneer innovative technology to advance liberty.”
Remember when then-candidate Scott Brown made reminded David Gergen that the U.S. Senate seat he was contesting didn’t belong to the Kennedy family or the Democrat Party, but the people of Massachusetts?
Well, here we go again. This time it’s Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) complaining that the Vietnamese-Americans supporting Republican Van Tran’s candidacy are really trying to deny the Hispanic community its rightful claim to congressional representation. Only in the Democrat Party can identity politics be used as a justification to elevate one ethnicity over another. After all, the logical implication of Sanchez’s statement is that the Vietnamese in the district are not entitled to having one of their own in Congress.
Time will tell if Sanchez’s district in Orange County, CA – once a bastion of conservatism – can rid the people’s house of this kind of ethnic superiority complex; allowing America can get back to debating real issues, not cosmetic ones.
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