Larry Summers, the economist whose resume includes helping create the kind of mortgage default swaps that crashed the financial system, being fired as President of Harvard for sexist remarks about female scientists, and resigning in disgrace as his infrastructure-heavy stimulus package failed, is back with a plan only a Soviet central planner could love.
Writing for Newsweek (itself an entity that’s seen better days), Summers tells his former boss, “Mr. President, We Need a 10 Year Plan.” Give Summers credit for brashness; in Soviet Russia the Communist Party considered it a success if it could make good on any of its 5 year plans. (It never did.)
I’ll use Summers’ piece as an excuse to do something otherwise thought impossible: praise President Barack Obama for firing at least one bad economist.
It’s not about central planning, Larry; it’s about incentives. Reform the tax code and streamline regulations with incentives for hiring and producing, and the economy will grow.
Byron York breaks down a CNN poll showing that Republican voters 65 and older (i.e. eligible to receive Social Security) favor Texas Governor Rick Perry for president more than any other GOP candidate.
This flies in the face of the current criticism of Perry’s widely discussed comment at last week’s debate that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme.” As far as I can tell, no one has yet shown that Perry is incorrect since in both Social Security and a Ponzi scheme the money from later investors (or taxpayers) goes to benefit earlier investors (or taxpayers).
If anything, Perry should be applauded for speaking the kind of tax-and-spend truths necessary to get a handle on the nation’s fiscal problems so we can begin to fix them.
Admittedly, there is one noticeable difference between the programs that Cato’s Michael Tanner explains perfectly:
Of course, Social Security and Ponzi schemes are not perfectly analogous. Ponzi, after all, had to rely on what people were willing to voluntarily invest with him. Once he couldn’t convince enough new investors to join his scheme, it collapsed. Social Security, on the other hand, can rely on the power of the government to tax. As the shrinking number of workers paying into the system makes it harder to continue to sustain benefits, the government can just force young people to pay even more into the system.
In fact, Social Security taxes have been raised some 40 times since the program began. The initial Social Security tax was 2 percent (split between the employer and employee), capped at $3,000 of earnings. That made for a maximum tax of $60. Today, the tax is 12.4 percent, capped at $106,800, for a maximum tax of $13,234. Even adjusting for inflation, that represents more than an 800 percent increase.
In addition, at least until the final collapse of his scheme, Ponzi was more or less obligated to pay his early investors what he promised them. With Social Security, on the other hand, Congress is always able to change or cut those benefits in order to keep the scheme going.
It’s a little something called “false consciousness.” An essential aspect of Marxist thinking (though it was actually propagated by his partner, Friedrich Engels), false consciousness is a term that one uses to tell an ideological adversary, in essence, “You disagree with me not because of your reasoned conclusion, but because your ability to understand reality is so polluted as to prevent you from even discovering truth without the enlightened guidance of your betters.”
That seems to be the tact that former Vice President Gore is taking on — what else? — climate change skepticism. And his need for proselytization is now taking on a particularly bizarre form. According to Reuters:
“24 Hours of Reality” will broadcast a presentation by Al Gore every hour for 24 hours across 24 different time zones from Wednesday to Thursday, with the aim of convincing climate change deniers and driving action against global warming among households, schools and businesses.
The campaign also asks people to hand over control of their social networking accounts on Facebook and Twitter to it for 24 hours to deliver Gore’s message.
That last paragraph is particularly cultish. Tell the former VP to get his own damn Twitter account.
Gore and his ilk are accustomed to referring to their critics as “anti-science”. Yet they’re the ones engaged in something that sounds a lot more like televangelism than a climatology symposium.
Here’s an idea: if Gore really wants to be seen as a paragon of sweet reason — and really intends to convert the skeptics — why not have that hour of programming feature a debate between himself and one of the leading critics of his theories? Someone, perhaps, like Christopher Monckton of the British House of Lords, the former Thatcher advisor who has been challenging Gore to a scrimmage on global warming for years.
Of course, this format would put Gore on the spot. But when the science is ‘undeniable’ that should be an easy fight to win, no?
Methinks what Pawlenty is really saying is: “Please, please, please Mr. Romney, if you get the nomination, choose me for vice president! I promise I’m your man. Oh pleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease! I really didn’t mean that bit about Obamneycare. It wasn’t even an intentional slight, and I wasn’t trying to be funny. I just had a slip of the tongue. That’s why I didn’t repeat it in that debate: I really didn’t mean it in the first place. PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASE!!!! I promise I’ll be good.”
On the 10th anniversary of September 11, this week’s Freedom Minute honors those who lost their lives and the families they left behind. We shall never forget.
The web of possible criminality in the ATF “gun-walking” case i still stretching with a Fox News story confirming the existence a second and third ATF gun at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.
Congressional investigators have been looking for evidence of the third weapon for months. Now, it looks like it disappeared at the behest of the FBI for fear that an informant working for it and ATF would be exposed.
This revelation follows on the news that ATF and the FBI coordinated efforts on other dubious programs that allowed guns to reach known criminals.
There seems to be no end to the incompetent corruption at Eric Holder’s Justice Department. Can the same indefinite tenure be true of the Attorney General?
New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas did today what precious few liberal commentators would: give Sarah Palin a fair hearing. “Confessing” a knee-jerk reaction to Palin that writes-off the former Alaska governor before she speaks, Giridharadas nonetheless noted Palin’s striking analysis of the current political scene from a recent speech in Iowa:
She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).
This is the kind of anti-establishment populism that Palin articulated to victory against incumbent Republicans in Alaska (first, fellow members of the state’s Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, then the sitting governor). Indeed, one of the main reasons John “Maverick” McCain chose Palin as his vice presidential running mate was because of her willingness to buck the system in favor of her principles.
As just what might those principles be as president? Giridharadas says:
Ms. Palin may be hinting at a new political alignment that would pit a vigorous localism against a kind of national-global institutionalism.
On one side would be those Americans who believe in the power of vast, well-developed institutions like Goldman Sachs, the Teamsters Union, General Electric, Google and the U.S. Department of Education to make the world better. On the other side would be people who believe that power, whether public or private, becomes corrupt and unresponsive the more remote and more anonymous it becomes; they would press to live in self-contained, self-governing enclaves that bear the burden of their own prosperity.
No one knows yet whether Ms. Palin will actually run for president. But she did just get more interesting.
Rich Lowry and Charles Krauthammer both hit home runs. Four years ago, I had a column (containing within it my 9/11 immediate-react editorial from the day itself) that I’d also like to share with y’all. For what it’s worth.
Tim had a great post explaining why the 4th Circuit’s dismissal of the two Obamacare lawsuits is not all that big a deal. He’s absolutely right, in terms of ultimate effects. At the American Spectator (in the first of my three unrelated, half-formed thoughts), I explain why on legal grounds the rulings are an absolute outrage anyway, even though, as Tim said, they don’t really harm the overall argument against the individual mandate as the issue moves inexorably toward the Supreme Court.
As I explained:
The grounds on which the judges made the decision are so ludicrous as to be intellectually bankrupt.
Against all reasonable evidence and against the rulings of every other court, both liberal- and conservative-dominated, that has considered the issue, this Fourth Circuit panel concluded that the mandate actually operates as a “tax.” Congress has broader powers to tax than it does merely to regulate; thus, legal challenges to a tax face a higher bar. Because these obstreperous judges say it is a tax that hasn’t actually been imposed yet (it has been passed by Congress but not yet implemented), they say the university has suffered no harm yet and thus can’t sue. The absurdity is that the mandate is in no way a tax. By both definition and implementation, it imposed no tax but instead a penalty for non-compliance. President Obama himself repeatedly argued in public that it wasn’t a tax. Congress didn’t call it a tax. And every other court — at least four district courts and two appeals courts — that has analyzed this claim has made mincemeat of the administration’s contention that it is a tax. Most of those courts haven’t just rejected the claim; they have eviscerated it.
As I said on my radio show last night (in the introductory 15 minutes, before I interviewed Rick Santorum), this is why the fights over judges are so important. Bad judges are an affront to constitutional republicanism. And this ruling by three bad, liberal judges is an abomination.
In an interview with CFIF’s Quin Hillyer, Eric Eversole, executive director of the Military Voter Protection Project, discusses the continuing low percentage of overseas military personnel who actually cast and have their ballots counted.
Our friends at Americans for Tax Reform compiled this helpful list of the 21 new or higher taxes President Barack Obama has signed into law since being sworn into office. Of these, 20 come from ObamaCare.
There’s been quite a bit of media buzz surrounding the recently announced bankruptcy of Solyndra, the California solar panel company that couldn’t turn a profit even after a $535 million loan from the federal government.
But what started out as Exhibit A in the case against subsidizing green jobs into existence has morphed into the latest scandal engulfing the Obama Administration. At issue is a suspicious connection between a Solyndra investor’s work as a bundler for the Obama campaign and the sweetheart loan given to the company.
Today, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against challenges of ObamaCare by Virginia and Liberty University.
For several reasons, however, today’s ruling should be taken with a Jimmy Buffet-sized shaker of salt. First, the ruling itself did not address the substantive merits or the primary Constitutional claim that ObamaCare exceeds the authority permitted by the interstate commerce clause. Instead, the judges ruled that neither Virginia nor Liberty possessed procedural “standing,” the ability to demonstrate harm that has occurred or may imminently occur. That is very different than a ruling that ObamaCare itself passes Constitutional muster, and at any rate is subject to change down the road as ObamaCare’s provisions are more fully implemented. Second, two of the judges who ruled today were appointed by Barack Obama himself, and the other by Bill Clinton. In the Fourth Circuit as a whole, however, there is an even split with seven judges appointed by Republican presidents and seven appointed by Democrats. So the ideological makeup at an en banc hearing will be very different. Third, the question of standing is not one within the unique expertise or authority of these three particular judges. Quite the contrary, standing is an issue within the authority of every court in every case, because it is a requisite to move forward with any lawsuit in the first instance. Accordingly, today’s particular ruling is at odds with not only the lower court’s standing determination, but that of the Eleventh Circuit in its recent ruling overturning ObamaCare. Fourth, this particular panel’s decision wasn’t a surprise, as its line of questioning in May focused on the issue of standing, rather than the merits of ObamaCare.
In other words, the immediate overarching theme is that today’s ruling is not a game-changer, and certainly not a significant “W” for ObamaCare as it continues its inevitable course toward the United States Supreme Court. Whether through the Supreme Court or through the next Congress, ObamaCare will be defeated.
No, not Joe McCarthy. Andrew McCarthy. In an absolute tour de force at the New Criterion magazine, McCarthy — the prosecutor who put the parking lot bombers of the World Trade Center (1993) in jail — outlines the manifold abuses of law of Barack Obama and his Justice Department consiglieres, especially Attorney General Eric Holder. In doing so, he broadens and deepens and updates a piece I did last fall for The American Spectator — but with an extra dose of authoritativeness I could not match.
Writes McCarthy:
In flagrant violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, the Department of Justice now practices racial discrimination in enforcing, and in choosing not to enforce, the federal civil rights statutes. These laws, enacted to safeguard our basic liberties, are not invoked when the victims are white and the lawbreakers are black. The most brazen example of this noxious policy—but far from the only one—is the Department of Justice’s astounding decision to drop a voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party even though Justice had already won the case.
As McCarthy explains, for Obama and his Alinskyite allies,
Lawfulness and lawlessness, thuggishness and regular politics—we’re not to divine any moral or ethical differences. They are just different “approaches” to empowerment. They only “seem” to be “divergent.” It may be important to maintain the veneer of respect for legal processes, but it is just as legitimate to stretch or break the rules whenever necessary to achieve the desired outcome—social justice being a higher form of legitimacy than society’s rule of law. Separatism, menacing, and civil disobedience: none of these is beyond the pale; they are simply choices on the hard power menu Obama “bridges” with soft power (i.e., the system’s mundane legal and political processes).
Again, read the whole thing. Great stuff. Scary, but oh-so-important for us to understand what we’re facing in the Oval Office.
I’ve taken my share of shots at GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney for all the usual conservative misgivings about his candidacy. And while this post is in no way an endorsement of him or his campaign, I do think it worth sharing a link from the Boston Globe to Romney’s newly unveiled economic plan.
Thankfully, it’s all about how to achieve economic growth. Quin mentioned previously that Rick Santorum, one of Romney’s rivals for the nomination, also has some good ideas. As conservatives get down to the business of eyeballing the candidates, we’d better get as informed as we can be. Republican or Democrat, we can’t make another presidential level mistake.
David Codrea, the blogger who originally broke the “Gunrunner” scandal at ATF, reports that another guns-to-criminals scheme is sprouting up in Indiana.
There, a gun seller defended himself recently against an FBI demand for information about guns sold to American crime gangs with all-too-familiar response: I was just following ATF’s guidelines.
That’s right, according to Codrea’s extensive documentation there is now another instance of ATF deliberately violating gun control laws to let weapons fall into criminal hands in the hopes of catching bigger criminal fish. And how’s this for oversight: when the FBI was told the Indiana gun dealer was working with ATF, the FBI promised to remove the seller from any further investigation.
Last week the Acting ATF director was reassigned and the Arizona U.S. Attorney abruptly resigned. With a third front opening up, how much longer can U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder – the man charged with oversight of ATF – keep his job?
Yes, I have a weekly radio show, and it can be listened to nationally. I’ll have the first in a series of presidential candidates as guests this Thursday night, with Rick Santorum being welcomed to Hillyer Time. Details here.
At the American Spectator, I provide a small, informed-third-party view of Dick Cheney’s persona, while clearly taking his side vs. Colin Powell. What I didn’t write there, because I handed it in before last night, was that all of the remembrances of 9/11 are bringing into stark relief just how fortunate we were to have Cheney around on that day. I watched a Smithsonian TV special on 9/11 last night, featuring extensive interviews with Cheney (among dozens of others, of course), and it was striking just how essential it was to have Cheney’s good judgment and steady hand in the White House while President Bush was airborne for so many hours. A good man and a true statesman, Dick Cheney served his country well. I’m glad his book is receiving so much attention.
In an interview with CFIF’s Quin Hillyer, Eric Eversole, executive director of the Military Voter Protection Project, discusses the continuing low percentage of overseas military personnel who actually cast and have their ballots counted.
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