Freedom Line Blog

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.

If you want to understand how comprehensively the Obama Administration has failed the nation, you need only begin with this point: as the president approaches the end of his first term, we’re still unearthing lurid details about his first major policy initiative, undertaken in his earliest days in office.

That plan, of course, was the $787 billion stimulus package that was supposed to kickstart economic growth (it didn’t) and keep unemployment under 8 percent (it’s never been that low in the nearly three years since the package was enacted).

Last week, I wrote about the case of a Maryland PR firm that got paid nearly a million dollars in stimulus money by the National Institutes of Health to promote how well the National Institutes of Health was spending stimulus money.

This week’s second verse of the same song is orders of magnitude worse; the dollar amount is in the billions and the outcome wasn’t just wasteful — it was non-existent. According to the Daily Caller:

As of the third quarter of 2011, no projects from the federal government’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) — a technology stimulus program funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) — have been completed…

The funds awarded for BTOP totaled over $4 billion, and the average award was $6,217,509, according to Recovery.gov.

Three years. Over $4 Billion. Zero results. This project may not have stimulated any growth in the broadband sector, but it’s certainly going to keep some Republican opposition researchers employed.

Huzzah to the 241 members of the House of Representatives who, in a thinly bipartisan vote today (4 Democrats voted in favor), passed H.R. 10, better known as the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act.  As the acronym indicates, the bill wants to limit President Barack Obama’s ability to impose job-killing regulations on the economy.

How does the REINS Act purport to do its job?  If passed by the Senate and signed by the President then every new federal agency regulation inflicting at least $100 million in economic costs would be subject to an up-or-down vote by both houses of Congress.  ($100 million is the threshold for “major” regulations these days.)  When those bills fails – which they almost certainly will unless they are inextricably intertwined with a national security issue – the bureaucrats who dream up these obstacles to economic growth will have to go back to the drawing board and divine a less expensive way to grow the federal government.

Characteristically, the Democrats running the Senate and the one occupying the White House have promised to do nothing to help pass this bill.  (The President even threatened to veto it should enough Senate Dems have the temerity to save their states’ small business owners from the paperwork onslaught thanks to 219 new regulations poised to add thousands of dollars per worker in compliance costs.)

Today, fiscal conservatives can cheer passage of a real “job creation” bill thanks to the conservative plurality in the House of Representatives.  Next year, it will critically important to elect more of these to the Senate – and hopefully the presidency – so that America can get back to work.

Ashton and Quin posit some ideas below for why former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum (a man I admire) hasn’t become a significant candidate in the Republican presidential field. Let me tackle a few of these suppositions and then explain why I think Santorum’s campaign is in the basement — and why it will stay there.

Ashton wonders if the media has an aversion to Santorum because of his stances on social issues. I doubt it. Mike Huckabee was the social conservative candidate du jour in 2008 and he got plenty of press coverage. The fact that the media mandarins are often unsympathetic to people of faith doesn’t keep them from covering religious candidates– it usually just means they’ll cover them with scorn. It’s been 25 years since Pat Robertson ran for president and the press is still taking their shots at him

Quin is correct to note that Santorum consistently shows a very strong grasp of the issues in debates. He’s also correct to note that the former senator gets very little camera time at these forums. That latter fact, however, doesn’t explain Santorum’s failure to catch on. The time a candidate gets in a debate is a lagging indicator of his relevancy, not a leading one. Herman Cain didn’t get much attention in early debates either, but he maximized what time he had and his performances led to his rise in the polls. The same was true of Newt Gingrich early on. Ditto Huckabee in 2008. If a second-tier candidate wants to get into the first tier, he has to know how to exploit the few openings that come his way. Santorum doesn’t.

Like Quin, I don’t put much stock in the argument about Santorum as a loser because of his performance in the 2006 Pennsylvania senate race. Those are calculations that are primarily made by beltway types for beltway types.

Of all the diagnoses, I think Quin’s point about Santorum’s failure to win style points in the debates is closest to the mark, though I would take it much farther. Santorum actively hurts himself in these forums. He has a seemingly unshakable tendency to come off petulant, complaining about how much time he gets and boasting about his congressional record in a manner so ostentatiously self-regarding as to be off-putting.

It’s also important to remember that “style points” matter (just ask Rick Perry). Style, particularly in the way you communicate, is one of the major levers of presidential power, though it’s not always sufficient (just ask Barack Obama). Santorum conveys no personal warmth, humor, or sense of personality whatsoever. He seems just as bland as Tim Pawlenty once did behind the podium.

That may seem like a superficial standard by which to judge a possible president, but it’s one of the standards we use (it’s a lot less operative at other levels, including the senate, which is why Santorum hasn’t had this problem before). Americans have an emotional attachment to the presidency and they’re always implicitly asking themselves “Is this the person I want in my living room for four years? Is this the person I want to rally behind in a time of crisis?” Unless and until Santorum can figure out how to convince voters to answer those questions in the affirmative, he’ll remain mired in the single digits.

Here’s my contribution to the debate on how to cut the federal deficit: Congress should cut the criminally mismanaged loan program administered by the Department of Energy.  Under Secretary Steven Chu’s watch, the department has doled out $535 million to the now-bankrupt Solyndra, with a separate $400 million sweetheart deal to Abound Solar.  Both firms are financially backed by top-dollar campaign bundlers for President Barack Obama’s presidential runs.

Had this program not been in place nearly $1 billion of taxpayer money would not have been parceled out to crony capitalists.  (Add the $548 million steered to Siga Technologies Inc. for a smallpox drug America doesn’t need, and you’re at nearly $1.5 billion to pay for products the private market doesn’t want.)  Is there a Democrat in Congress willing to defend this massive waste of taxpayer money, money that could have been spent to pay down the debt, shore-up Social Security, or extend the payroll tax holiday?

The best reason to get a Republican nominee quickly is so that the broader American electorate can be educated on the enormous amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse inflicted on the nation’s fisc by the Occupiers in the White House.

Everything you need to know about the Obama political team’s total ignorance of Republican politics can be summed up with one fact: when Obama chose then-Utah Governor Jon Huntsman to serve as his Ambassador to China in 2009, he did so thinking that he was removing a formidable opponent for the presidency. Huntsman’s tepid performance as a 2012 candidate — and his total inability to connect with the conservative base — have comprehensively given the lie to that notion, an outcome that the president’s political team could have envisioned if they had actually talked to any Republicans.

Now, the best minds in the Democratic Party are at it again. With Newt Gingrich leading in the polls in Iowa and South Carolina — and closing the gap in New Hampshire — they’re issuing a new television ad targeting … Mitt Romney?

Reports indicate that the White House is convinced Romney will be the nominee and wants to soften him up early. That’s silly for a couple of reasons. First, it shows (as did the Huntsman calculation) that these strategists don’t realize that being the Democrats’ favorite Republican doesn’t automatically launch you to the front of the field. Second, Romney’s continued inability to get above about 25 percent in the polls (his favorability has actually been dropping of late) and Gingrich’s surge make it extremely premature to assume a nominee. And third, even if the White House’s hunch is right, what difference is a general election ad airing a month before the primaries going to make?

The alternative, more Machiavellian interpretation is that the White House wants to weaken Romney in order to bolster Gingrich, who they view as the more beatable candidate. If that’s true, watch this video and ask yourself if this is a man you’d be spoiling for a fight with:

If this is how Team Obama plays offense, they better hope they have a hell of a defense in 2012.

We’re way overdue for a Chris Christie video here on Freedom Line. Thankfully, the New Jersey governor is back in the saddle and he’s seemingly competing with Newt Gingrich to see who can blister the sitting Commander-in-Chief more thoroughly. This is a thing of beauty:

I’ve been shouting from the rooftops for as long as anyone would listen that the Congressional Supercommittee was (a) a bad idea (b) doomed to failure and (c) destined to put the funding of America’s military forces in danger because of triggered cuts that could add up to more than a trillion dollars.

Now that’s all coming true and the lines are beginning to get drawn in the sand. From today’s coverage in Politico:

Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) vowed to eliminate the automatic cuts, which would take effect in 2013, citing dire warnings from his panel’s analysts and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta about the impact of an additional $500 billion reduction on the nation’s security.

“I will not be the armed services chairman who presides over crippling our military,” he said just before the supercommittee admitted defeat Monday afternoon…

President Barack Obama later said he would veto any attempt to undo the spending cuts. “There will be no easy offramps on this one. We need to keep the pressure up to compromise, not turn off the pressure,” he said.

The president’s callousness is stunning. Fully funding the men and women of the United States military is not an “easy offramp” — it’s a strategic and moral necessity. An easy offramp would be proposing an increase in the debt ceiling without offering any spending cuts during a time of record national debt. An easy offramp would be allowing Congress to grope its way through the supercommittee process without any leadership from the White House. In short, an easy offramp would be everything President Obama has done to avoid any responsibility for reducing the national debt.

It’s time for the Congress to make a stand — and not just the Republicans. Many Democrats will understand that it’s both good policy and good election-year politics to keep the Pentagon from being gutted. And let’s hope they’re not just limited to Capitol Hill. Nothing would put the issue in starker terms than Defense Secretary Leon Panetta — a good man and one who has consistently opposed this reckless policy — standing in solidarity with a bipartisan congressional majority against the president. If he’s worthy of his job, that’s exactly what he’ll do.

Begin the countdown. November 23 — one week from today — is the deadline for the bipartisan, bicameral congressional “supercommittee” to deliver its plan to cut $1.2 trillion from the federal deficit. Only problem? No one expects it to happen. From today’s Washington Post:

White House officials are quietly bracing for “supercommittee” failure, with advisers privately saying they are pessimistic that the 12-member Congressional panel will find a way to cut $1.2 trillion from the deficit as required…

Obama has stopped short of issuing a blanket veto threat if the committee tries to undo the severe cuts that would take effect in 2013 if an agreement is not reached. Obama has simply said that Congress “must not shirk its responsibilities” and, in a news conference from Hawaii, said he would not comment on the potential for a veto.

Oh, so now it’s Congress that’s shirking its responsibilities? Where was President Obama’s veto pen when more than $4.2 trillion was being added to the federal debt under his watch (more than the total federal debt from George Washington to George H.W. Bush)? And if the role of Congress is so important, why leave the task of debt reduction to a dozen congressmen out of a body of 535? And why keep members from being able to so much as amend the proposal, making the compromise that will be necessary for such a grand bargain that much harder to ascertain?

The answer, of course, is that this process has been intended all along to grease the skids for tax increases. And by threatening the welfare of the men and women of the U.S. military (failing to pass a plan would result in automatic cuts to the Pentagon’s budget that could add up to over $1 trillion), liberals are hoping they can force conservatives’ hand.

The supecommittee process deserves to end in failure. The automatic spending cuts deserve to be overridden by Congress, as does any veto that President Obama may subsequently issue. And every member of the legislative branch who helped midwife the president’s record-breaking debt deserves a one-way ticket home.

A few weeks ago, Ashton gave us a column’s worth of examples of President Obama’s rhetorical stupidity, much of which involved running down the nation he governs. Well, the Schoolmarm-in-Chief is at it again. From coverage of the APEC summit going on in Hawaii:

Note the palm trees in the background if you want to fully understand the moral force of the president’s example. Effort may be the issue, but we’re not sure the private sector is the culprit.

Four years ago at this time, we were all being told about the unrivaled intelligence of both candidate Barack Obama and his presidential campaign. Now, as the One prepares to launch his reelection campaign in earnest, we see how far the mighty have fallen. From Fox News:

The Obama administration has imposed a 15-cent tax on Christmas trees in order to pay for a new board tasked with promoting the Christmas tree industry.

There are still about eight weeks left in the year, but the odds are pretty good that this is the single dumbest sentence you will read about American politics this year. Even John Maynard Keynes deep into the eggnog would have a hard time working out the economic rationale of taxing an industry in order to finance a campaign promoting that same industry. And is there an epidemic lack of public awareness about Christmas trees in America? (Side note: are the PC police okay with calling them “Christmas trees” as long as we’re taxing them?)

More than anything else, this is just incredibly amateurish politics. With the flood of public workers who have come to D.C. during the Obama years, you’d think there’d be at least one political apointee with the savvy necessary to point out that a president presiding over a prolonged economic downturn (including 9 percent unemployment) may not want to make his contribution to the holidays a tax on the foundational symbol of the season. I suspect the principle may not sink in until next Christmas, when the president’s stocking is stuffed with a first-class ticket back to Chicago.

UPDATE: ABC News is now reporting that the administration is “going to delay implementation and revisit this action” in light of the uproar. It’s hard to know whether to be thankful that media scrutiny could cause such a swift retreat or depressed that it had to get this far down the road before the White House realized there was a problem.

Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal summarizes the winners and losers in the fight between the environmental left and blue collar union workers:

The EPA has labored over an ozone rule (estimated job losses: 7.3 million), power plant rules (1.4 million), a boiler rule (789,000), a coal-ash rule (316,00), a cement rule (23,000), and greenhouse gas rules (even Joe Biden can’t count that high). The administration blew up Louisiana’s offshore deepwater drilling industry, insisted Detroit make cars nobody wants to buy and, just to stay consistent, is moving to clamp down on the country’s one booming industry: natural gas.

Those going the way of the dodo are utility workers, pipefitters, construction guys, coal miners, factory workers, truck drivers, electrical workers and machinists. Many of these are union Democrats who don’t care if their union bosses are publicly sticking with the president. They are pessimistic about the future and increasingly angry over the president’s attack on their work.

The 2012 electorate is ripe for another GOP presidential candidate able to pick-up thousands of ‘Reagan Democrats’ in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.  The fact that all three states elected Republican governors in 2010 sets the table for a nominee able to wrap free market principles in a populist appeal.  The question is, will someone craft a message in time to take advantage of Obama’s foolishness?

Previously, I’ve written about the need to pass the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act by Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY).  If passed, the bill would require all new bureaucratic rules costing $100 million or more to have an up-or-down, standalone vote in Congress, plus the President’s signature before going into effect.

The main purpose of the REINS Act is to give Congress a check on the administrative state so that job-killing regulations get a chance to be eliminated before going into effect.

This is yet another example giving the lie to President Obama’s charge of a do-nothing Congress, the House majority continues to move bills that will help the economy.  The House Judiciary Committee reported the bill favorably yesterday.  Here’s hoping it gets fast-tracked for a full House vote soon.

Quin’s point is well taken.  Obama-era regulations and rhetoric are scaring away the kind of investment growth the country needs to get Americans back to work.  On the regulatory side, increased capital holding requirements stack dollar bills in bank vaults while small business loans dry up.  Cost-of-employment drivers like Obamacare and the EPA’s threatened regulation of carbon make any rational employer look for ways to enhance productivity and efficiency instead of staffing up.  Simply put, under President Obama it’s cheaper to do more with less to keep what you have rather than risk the money and regulatory gauntlet trying to increase market share.

On the rhetoric side, my recent column on the five most recent dumb statements by the president contains just a sample of his daily assaults on the ambition and energy of America’s job creators.  What the president fails to see is that a sustainable government depends on a vastly more prosperous private economy.  Until he learns the importance of that relationship, we’re likely doomed to being (and producing) much less than we otherwise would.

Btw, Quin: I’m sure you’ve got business contacts in the Mobile-D.C. corridor.  Are any of them looking at the current and future regulatory scene and thinking, “Gee, what a great time to expand”?

Regular readers of the blog know that there is a small gallery of Washington pundits that I simply cannot abide; not because I disagree with their views, but because I despise the predictability of their positions, the ballast of their prose, and the intellectual laziness of their work.

That’s a group that includes Tom Friedman, Joe Klein, and E.J. Dionne, amongst others. But there’s a special place in pundit hell for the professional joiner: the columnist who always has to march in lockstep with Beltway fashion. That’s why it’s so delightful to see the once-respectable Fareed Zakaria get noted in the New Republic’s list of over-rated DC thinkers. The précis is priceless:

Fareed Zakaria is enormously important to an understanding of many things, because he provides a one-stop example of conventional thinking about them all. He is a barometer in a good suit, a creature of establishment consensus, an exemplary spokesman for the always-evolving middle. He was for the Iraq war when almost everybody was for it, criticized it when almost everybody criticized it, and now is an active member of the ubiquitous “declining American power” chorus. When Obama wanted to trust the Iranians, Zakaria agreed (“They May Not Want the Bomb,” was a story he did for Newsweek); and, when Obama learned different, Zakaria thought differently. There’s something suspicious about a thinker always so perfectly in tune with the moment.

Indeed. Fareed Zakaria is a man who writes Gallup polls in paragraph form. Nice to see the media take notice.

Once upon a time, candidate Obama promised to participate in the federal campaign finance program in a sop to free speech restrictionists.  Of course, he reneged as soon as he could, claiming that since the system is “broken” it was his right to collect as much money as he could  from willing donors.

Fast-forward to today, and it looks like President Obama has long forgotten his former aversion to privately financed campaigns:

[The President] can also raise large contributions for the Democratic National Committee — topping out at $30,800 per donor rather than the $5,000 limit on contributions to candidates — that are helping finance the party’s broader efforts to help Democrats up and down the ballot. During the last three months, the committee has already transferred funds totaling more than $1.3 million to Democratic organizations in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to the party’s filings.

I don’t begrudge any candidate for choosing a free(r) market approach to campaign finance.  What’s galling in Obama’s case, though, is that once again we have an example of how brazenly opportunistic he is when it comes to basic principles.  Whether it’s promising people they can keep their health insurance after Obamacare or campaigning as a post-partisan then saying Republicans want folks to drink dirty water, the man seems incapable of keeping his word. 

The joke on some politicians is a truth applied to the president: you know he’s lying when his lips are moving.

Aside from being unconstitutional, Obamacare is also financially unsustainable.  Of course, everyone except the White House and their drones at HHS acknowledged this when the law passed.  Now, fiscal reality has forced the Obama Administration to scrap a program that was supposed to provide half of the fallacious budget savings from passing Obamacare.  Per Phillip Klein of the DC Examiner:

As Obamacare’s critics noted at the time, Democrats’ deficit reduction claims were based on a series of accounting gimmicks. One of the most obvious was the inclusion of the Community Living Assistance and Support Services Act, a program that was slated to collect five years of premiums before paying out any benefits. Though it was unsustainable over time, on paper it produced surpluses during the Congressional Budget Office’s 10-year budget window.

At the time of final passage, the CBO found that the health care law would reduce deficits by $143 billion, and $70 billion of that was attributable to the CLASS program.

Earlier, I noted a new HHS report recomending against implementing the program. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has now sent a letter to Congress conceding that there’s no path forward.

Republicans are still rightly moving to formally repeal the CLASS Act from federal law.  Let’s hope they keep pressing for a complete elimination.

I’ve written at length here at CFIF about the doomsday scenario that will ensue should the congressional supercommittee fail to pass at least $1.2 trillion in debt reduction by its November 23 deadline. Because of an outrageous provision in last summer’s debt ceiling agreement, a fail to act would produce defense cuts that could end up cutting as much as $1 trillion from American’s national security budget.

While the supercommittee’s broad goal of debt reduction is laudable, congressional Democrats are digging in their heels and asserting that the real problem is that Americans are being taxed too lightly, not that Washington is spending too much. From the Associated Press:

The supercommittee is struggling. After weeks of secret meetings, the 12-member deficit-cutting panel established under last summer’s budget and debt deal appears no closer to a breakthrough than when talks began last month…

Democrats won’t go for an agreement that doesn’t include new tax revenue; Republicans are just as ardently antitax. The impasse over revenues means that Democrats won’t agree to cuts to popular entitlement programs like Medicare…

 “There’s been no movement on (new) revenues, and I’m not sure the Democrats will agree to anything without revenues,” said a Democratic lobbyist who required anonymity to speak candidly.

Let’s be clear here: either scenario — either massive cuts to the Pentagon’s budget or higher taxes — would imperil America’s ability to maintain its global leadership position. The former would gut our defense resources now, while the latter would hollow out our ability to generate the economic growth that will be necessary to fund our military in the future.

On yesterday’s Meet the Press, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) demonstrated how to reframe quickly just about any debate on taxes or the economy into one that favors free markets and opportunities for everyone:

“I don’t worry about people who are already rich. I worry about getting people to become successful,” Ryan said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Removing those barriers so that people who have never seen success before can actually become successful. … This redistribution idea of pinning people against each other does not work. It’s divisive, and it hardly gives us the kind of attitude we want for businesses to take risks so we can succeed in the future.”

Conservatives need more of this kind of rhetoric from leading politicians.  Let’s hope the eventual GOP nominee lifts Ryan’s lines to give an inspirational lift to what will surely be a withering attack on the failed Obama economy.

With the unwashed masses “occupying” Wall Street and other financial centers throughout the country, Community-Organizer-in-Chief Barack Obama is trying to convince the protesters of crony capitalism that their grievance is really his.  From today’s Wall Street Journal:

Asked about the demonstrations that have spread to cities across the U.S., Mr. Obama empathized with protesters’ frustrations without embracing the movement: “The American people understand that not everybody has been following the rules; that Wall Street is an example of that.”

Haven’t been following the rules? How’s this for a list of people not following the rules:

• Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner fails to pay federal income taxes while working at the taxpayer-supported International Monetary Fund

• Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius grants over 1,000 ObamaCare waivers – many of them to unions

• Energy Secretary Steven Chu rubber stamps another taxpayer subsidy to Solyndra after the company defaulted on a $535 million loan (the company couldn’t get sufficient venture capital funding but did grease the skids to get taxpayer money thanks to an Obama fundraiser – who was also an investor – pulling strings)

• Attorney General Eric Holder lies to Congress about allowing a criminally stupid ‘gun-walking’ program at ATF to continue that sends 2,000 guns to Mexican drug cartels, killing a Border Patrol Agent

• Education Secretary Arne Duncan violates the No Child Left Behind law by unilaterally issuing waivers that require recipients to accept White House dictated regulations that cannot get through Congress – an unheard of abuse of the waiver process

I could go on, but I think the point is made.  The American people are viscerally aware of a politically connected elite waging war on the rule of law.  But it’s the Tea Party, not those squatting outside America’s nodes of commerce, that has identified the biggest threat to prosperity.  It’s time to occupy the White House and the Cabinet with people who not only respect the law, but also know how to grow the economy in a real, free market fashion.