Freedom Line Blog

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.

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):  Shannon Goessling, Executive Director of the Southeastern Legal Foundation:  Global Warming — Lawsuits and Science;

4:30 (CDT)/5:30 pm (EDT):  Todd Young, President & CEO of the Center for America:  Jobs, Hope and Brighter Future;

5:00 (CDT)/6:00 pm (EDT):  Angela Logomasini, Senior Fellow, Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI):  Chemical Laws and Plastic Bans;  and

5:30 (CDT)/6:30 pm (EDT):  Lyss Stern, Founder and CEO of Diva Moms:  Bullying  (http://Divamoms.com).

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

The debate over unemployment benefits isn’t an easy one. While the left completely ignores the rudimentary economics (and the empirical evidence) showing that prolonged benefits tend to keep unemployment artificially high, the fact remains that many workers use the system in good faith, relying on it as a bridge during uncertain times. We can all probably agree, however, that this doesn’t make any sense. From MarketWatch’s report on rising unemployment claims:

Weekly jobless claims jumped by 13,000 to a seasonally adjusted 380,000 in the week ended April 7, the highest level since late January, the U.S. Labor Department said Thursday.

Much of the increase was related to spring break, when many school bus drivers and cafeteria workers are allowed to file for temporary unemployment benefits.

Hey, if this is the direction we’re going, why not allow them to file for unemployment over the weekend? Or perhaps for those oppressive hours of 5 PM-9 AM every weekday when they’re not gainfully employed?

This is an offense both to people who really require unemployment benefits and to the taxpayers who are underwriting school workers’ spring breaks. And with MarketWatch attributing”much of the increase” to these workers, are we to understand that it’s become common practice for school workers to exploit this outrageous provision?

Some aspects of the unemployment debate are difficult trade-offs between economics and empathy. This one, however, is a no-brainer.

I blog about this at the American Spectator today: Conrad Black has a great essay against out-of-control federal prosecutors, in which he highlights a case I wrote about a few weeks ago.  (Sorry for the internal links, but they are well worth following. Please do check out my post and the Black column.)

What I want to note here is that these stories are a continuing manifestation of a problem of overcriminalization and rogue prosecution that I have written about here at CFIF several times. See here and here.  This is an important issue. It’s especially important when lawless people, like those now in charge, run the top ranks of the Justice Department.

Just months ago, T-Mobile became another unjustified casualty of the arbitrary and capricious Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  It was bad enough that the FCC curiously opposed T-Mobile’s proposed merger with AT&T, which would have upgraded wireless service for tens of millions of American consumers and created thousands of new jobs.  Compounding that injustice, however, the FCC committed the unprecedented transgression of releasing a confidential staff report that inaccurately maligned the proposed merger’s justifications.

Sadly, T-Mobile now seeks to employ that same FCC as a bureaucratic bludgeon to cripple a market competitor, by asking it to block a private spectrum purchase by Verizon Wireless.   Whereas T-Mobile announced a few months ago that, “The U.S. wireless industry will remain fiercely competitive”  by allowing acquisition of 50 MHz of T-Mobile’s spectrum as part of the AT&T deal, it now claims that Verizon’s proposed acquisition of 20 MHz of unused spectrum will somehow “unduly tip the scales” in Verizon’s favor.  Moreover, T-Mobile itself seeks to acquire 20 MHz of spectrum, which it claims is in the public interest and “seeks only to assign spectrum licenses and no other assets.”

CFIF supported T-Mobile’s right to enter into a bargained-for exchange between private parties during its proposed merger with AT&T, which the FCC and Obama Justice Department improperly blocked.  But by the same token, it should not turn around and attempt to interfere with other parties’ market transactions.  T-Mobile is a subsidiary of Deutsche Telecom, the world’s fourth-largest telecommunications company, which itself is partly owned by the German government.  So it’s not exactly David fighting Goliath, unable to contend in the marketplace without exploiting the FCC as some sort of protective big brother.

Verizon Wireless merely seeks to purchase unused spectrum, which will bring desperately-needed wireless service improvements for U.S. consumers.  That’s none of T-Mobile’s business, and the FCC is not some sort of instrument to be used as a competitive weapon.

Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee is the dean of California political writers and today he’s got a gem.  Walters criticizes including yet another entry on the state’s list of population groups required to be taught in a positive light in history classes.

The latest effort is Senate Bill 993 by Sen. Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, which would require social science instruction on the “braceros,” a long-expired federal program that brought workers into the country, mostly from Mexico, during and after World War II to offset farm labor shortages.

Lest Walters be accused of insensitivity, he rightly directs attention to the real crisis facing California’s schools:

In a state as diverse as California, there’s literally a bottomless well of ethnic and cultural groups that could seek inclusion not only on the instruction list but in the liturgy of those that must be portrayed only in the most positive terms.

We don’t need to brainwash our kids. We need to give them well-rounded, accurate instruction that prepares them for life beyond childhood – and our poor academic test scores indicate that we’re neglecting that important task while filling their minds with feel-good pap.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have an alternative to such a broken system by applying your tax dollars to tuition at a private or charter school of your choice?  If you think so, check out Troy’s column on Bobby Jindal’s school reform breakthrough in Louisiana.

And if you’re a pap-hating Californian with school-age kids, consider moving.

The Daily Caller profiles a new book, Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics, that explains why aging and shrinking populations in China, Japan, and Europe will dramatically alter American foreign policy.

Some of the book’s findings are startling:

• By the end of this decade India will surpass China as the most populous nation.

• Japan will lose 1 million people a year by 2060, contracting from 127 million to less than 87 million.

• Europe’s expensive social welfare model and aging populations will increasingly spur governments to scale back military spending in order to fund burgeoning entitlement program.

• Even though America’s current rate of replacing itself gives it a demographic advantage, unless serious reforms are instituted to entitlement spending, it too will continue to cut military expenditures to pay for rapidly expanding benefits for the elderly.

India surpassing China means that democracy – not a communist-controlled autocracy – will be the government adopted by the most populous country on Earth.  It may also encourage the United States and India to forge a closer strategic partnership around shared values to check China’s ambitions.

And of course, we’ve already seen how the European model of heavy on services, light on defense is making the region – though not a few individual countries – increasingly irrelevant when it comes to making the world safe.

In his budgets, President Barack Obama has chosen to increase spending on entitlements and gut defense, arguing like a European that multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and NATO can accomplish more than any one nation.

Paul Ryan highlighted this danger in his latest budget proposal, “The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal.”  In it, he faults President Obama for cutting $500 billion from the Defense Department instead of making the changes needed to entitlements so that Americans can be protected both at home and abroad.

Americans need not accept decline through badly prioritized budgets.  Instead, using innovative entitlement reforms like the ones in Ryan’s Path to Prosperity, we can have sustainable entitlement programs and a robust defense.

We’ve got the people.  Now we need to implement the right policies.

With President Obama now into his fourth year in the oval office, CFIF’s Renee Giachino looks back and compares Obama’s promises and rhetoric to his results.

California, as has become universally known in recent years, has become a fiscal and political basket case. Take a look at the state as it stands in the spring of 2012: it has a $9.2 billion budget deficit, approximately half a trillion dollars in unfunded public pension liabilities, and a business environment ranked worst in the nation by Chief Executive magazine (in 2010, the periodical referred to the state as “the Venezuela of North America”).

Part of the problem, of course, is the liberal-labor union coalition that dominates Golden State politics, in which the most nefarious force is the California Teachers Association, the hulking union that overwhelmingly outspends any other special interest in the state. Now, in the midst of this economic crisis, the CTA is getting behind Governor Jerry Brown’s proposal to increase state sales and income taxes, a move that would only hasten the state’s decline.

I tackle the issue in my new column for City Journal California. From the coda:

CTA officials contend that Brown’s proposal—an extra quarter of a cent added to the sales tax and up to three extra percentage points on the state income tax, depending on income levels—represents only a modest increase, a cost that the Golden State’s economy can easily absorb. But the margin of the increases is less significant than the final rates they will produce. If Brown’s package passes, California would have both the highest state sales tax in the nation and the highest top income-tax rate. That will only continue to drive economic activity out of the state, a trend that recent IRS data shows cost California $27 billion in tax revenue from 1999 to 2009.

The lesson should be clear: the kind of punitive taxation that Brown’s initiative promotes is precisely what depletes the tax base necessary to finance California’s public schools and pay the salaries of CTA members. Raise rates and you only dim the prospects for public education further.

In a 2009 piece for National Affairs, I noted that, “from 2004 to 2007 more people left California for Texas and Oklahoma than came west from those states to escape the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.” Yet in the intervening years California’s political class has done nothing to improve conditions for those who might be tempted to leave the beauty and cultural dynamism of the Golden State behind for more economically palatable environs. One wonders exactly what natural disaster they’ll have to approximate before the lesson sinks in.

In an interview with CFIF, Lance Izumi, senior fellow and director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute, discusses his Encounter Broadside, “Obama’s Education Takeover,” and how President Obama is leading a massive federal power grab that is disempowering local communities and parents by centralizing education policy in Washington.

Listen to the interview 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.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the reasons French tire company Michelin is expanding its operations in South Carolina while reducing its employment footprint in the Midwest:

Pete Selleck, Michelin’s North America president, said the state has strong technical education resources and ready infrastructure. “South Carolina has a long history with technical colleges dating back to the 1960s,” he said. The state “is also one of the least unionized states in the country, which gives us the flexibility to focus on the customer.”

“There is no significant difference between nonunion and unionized plants other than a rule book in our unionized plants that tell us what we can and can’t do,” Mr. Selleck added.

The emphasis is mine, and it tells you all you need to know about where the growth opportunities are for companies, customers, and employees.

In another part of the article Michelin is credited with paying a starting wage of $20 per hour, about a third more than the $15 per hour required under the average union contract.

Better pay and no union dues?  Maybe the iconic bumper sticker saying “Work Union, Live Better” should be changed to read, “Work Union, Earn Less.”

Last month, I posted here on the blog about the U.N. Human Rights Commission’s risible-if-it-wasn’t-so-deplorable failure to deal with the enormous human rights violations occurring in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. But be not worried — if those fearless defenders of human rights can’t bring justice to Damascus, they’ll be happy to settle for the Orlando suburbs. From Breitbart:

UN Human Rights chief Navi Pillay has called for an “immediate investigation” into the death of Trayvon Martin.

Leaving aside the matter of the despicable record of the UN on human rights, what kind of record does Pillay herself have on human rights, and does she have any moral leg to stand on when interfering in the domestic affaris of the United States?  According to Freedom House, between September 2008, when she became the Human Rights Chief, and June 2010, Pillay made no comment whatsoever on the victims in 34 countries rated “Not Free.”  Some of the countries not criticized were: Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Vietnam.

Your United Nations, ladies and gentleman. Cost to American taxpayers: approximately $3 billion a year.

The Trayvon Martin case remains an ambiguous tragedy. Certainly someone was in the wrong, but the available facts give us no clarity as to who. At the moment, only one thing is certain: justice will be less likely with the UN involved.

So ubiquitous is coverage of presidential candidates in this 24-hour news cycle era — and so pervasive is the numbness that results — that it’s easy to lose sight of some truly bizarre developments in this year’s election cycle; developments that have seen their novelty rusted away by saturation coverage.

Among them: the signature achievement in the political career of Mitt Romney, the almost certain Republican nominee for president (especially with Rick Santorum leaving the race today), is so deeply unpalatable to conservatives that it even divides his advisers. Consider this, from Politico:

Two of the five members of [Mitt] Romney’s recently announced Health Care Policy Advisory Group have a record of opposition to his Massachusetts health care reform plan.

Paul Howard, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a new addition to Romney’s advisory team, wrote in late 2010 that Romney’s plan has resulted in a dramatic increase in insurance costs for small businesses.

He also said it’s “no secret” that the state plan was the “template” for President Barack Obama’s federal health care law.

Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and another new Romney health adviser, was sharply critical of Romney’s health plans in 2007 while Atlas was supporting New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign.

“Mitt Romney’s legacy is the creation of a multibillion dollar government health bureaucracy that punishes employers and insists middle income individuals either purchase health insurance or pay for their own health care,” Atlas told reporters. “The former is a mandate, the latter is a tax and neither one is free market.”

Lest the point be oversold, we should note that past Republican nominees have accessorized their necks with similar albatrosses. John McCain, for instance, was the co-author of a federal campaign finance law loathed by conservatives because it is inimical to political free speech. But there’s still a slight difference: Romney’s policy liability deals with one of the defining issues of the election he’ll be running in — and it also happened to be the intellectual predicate for his opponent’s crowning legislative achievement.

Virtually all the energy that has animated the conservative movement over the last three years — energy best exemplified by the Tea Party — has come in reaction to Obamacare and the government overreach it represents. Now the Republican Party will march into electoral battle behind the progenitor of that intrusion. We live in strange times.

Today at The American Spectator I blogged at length about how Eric Holder’s Justice Department uses flagrant racial double-standards in enforcing the law.

The same habit infects the news media, and apparently some police departments as well: If the perpetrators are black, it is A) not news, and B) sometimes not investigated, much less prosecuted. J. Christian Adams has a new example here. In this case, a motorist was targeted by a black biker gang. Result: Nada. Adams writes:

Boyd tells me he contacted the crime beat reporter at the Birmingham News and told her about his story. “Not newsworthy,” was her response. Boyd also tells me that law enforcement officials told Boyd they “don’t mess with the Outcasts of Alabama.”  Comforting.

Had the attackers been the Confederate Hammerskins, and the victim been different, we all know (at a minimum) the Birmingham News would have covered the story. DOJ lawyers would be checking on the contract air carrier from Washington to Birmingham. I’ll wager even Soledad O’Brien would have spent at least one show on the attack.

It is precarious when the law, and attention from the media, are so out of balance. When state law enforcement officials flinch from prosecutions of the black Outcasts of Alabama, and national media organizations ignore some violence while elevating other incidents to month-long stories, the rule of law suffers.

Shame on the Birmingham News. Shame on any police who don’t follow up on such cases. Shame on all of us for letting race affect how we deal with important issues and events, in any direction.

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.

Attorney General Eric Holder, dismissing the idea that voter fraud is a serious problem in an interview with NBC News last month:

I think there is a misperception that there is a vast amount of vote fraud out there. You do not see huge amounts of vote fraud and the type of vote fraud that we see is not typically the kind that is in-person vote fraud at the polls which voter ID laws are designed to impact.

Now witness the latest from James O’Keefe’s team at Project Veritas, wherein a young white man walks into a Washington D.C. polling place and the poll workers are only too happy to hand him Holder’s ballot:

It’s been said by some supporters of President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus spending spree that we can’t really know if it failed because we can’t ‘re-run’ the last three years to see if something else might have worked.

But according to economist John Lott, we don’t have to.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Daily Caller about his new book, , Lott compares the different approaches by the liberals in Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We can Do Now to Regain Our Future the Obama White House and the conservatives running Canada’s government.  The results aren’t pretty.

How do we know the stimulus package made the economic situation worse?

Compare the U.S. and Canada. Their unemployment rates increased in lock step from August 2008 until six months later, in February 2009, when the stimulus was passed in the United States. During those six months, the U.S. unemployment rate rose by 2.1 percentage points, from 6.1 percent to 8.2 percent, and the Canadian rate grew by 1.9 percentage points, from 5.1 percent to 7 percent (using the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] measure to make the Canadian measure of unemployment comparable to the U.S. rate). The graph that we have showing this is actually stunning.

Canada adopted a much smaller and quite different “stimulus” program that emphasized cutting tax rates and regulations and that produced dramatically smaller deficits. On a per-capita basis, Canada’s stimulus was about a third that of America’s, costing $979 per person compared to our $2,730. The conservative Canadian government chose not to introduce any big programs.

Obama, meanwhile, adopted big-ticket Keynesian programs, believing that government spending for its own sake creates wealth. But Democratic emphasis on “green” energy, government-approved investments and technology and higher salaries for public-school teachers merely moved money away from where Americans and companies would have otherwise spent it.

Obama’s stimulus also raised the effective marginal tax rates that some individuals face, discouraging work; Canada, by contrast, cut some marginal rates. Obama kept the corporate tax rate stuck at 35 percent, while Canadians cut their corresponding rate from 21 percent in 2007 to 16.5 percent this year — with a further cut to 15 percent planned for next year. By last year, Canada had the lowest overall tax rate on business investment of any major industrialized country.

Canada also didn’t run the huge stimulative deficits that we ran here in the U.S. They didn’t saddle their kids with a huge debt that they were going to have to pay off.

But if Obama’s program — including a massive 21 percent hike in spending from 2008 to 2011 and corresponding massive deficits — worked so well, why has our unemployment rate risen more since those policies were adopted than have the rates of the European Union, South America, Japan, Australia or New Zealand?

Along with reformist former state official Bradley Byrne, I explained yesterday at the Mobile Press-Register how Medicaid is taking over the entire Alabama General Fund budget, and how ObamaCare makes it worse. This might have some bearing, tangentially, to the Supreme Court case on ObamaCare (the part argued last, about states being commandeered into ObamaCare Medicaid expansions).

Federal and state governments share Medicaid costs, but Obamacare by design will add millions nationwide to state Medicaid rolls while picking up the added costs only in the short term….

Before the $81 million error was discovered and before Gov. Bentley was forced to prorate the state’s budget (making across-the-board cuts due to revenue shortfalls), and even without full implementation of Obamacare, the state General Fund’s budget for Medicaid had doubled in just two years. To put this into perspective: During this two-year period, our court system was cut by a third, our criminal prosecutors’ offices by 14 percent, our Forestry Commission by 17 percent and our economic development by 5 percent. Medicaid went from consuming 20 percent of our General Fund budget two years ago to 36.5 percent this year. It is on track to consume the entire General Fund by decade’s end.

This is a big deal. And Alabama is hardly unique. It adds practical weight to the states’ arguments that they are being coerced into something they can’t afford.