Freedom Line Blog

For every crisis, there is an opportunity:

As part of the June budget agreement, the state will transfer to the 58 counties responsibilities for managing low-level offenders, as well as providing mental health, substance abuse and child protective services. It’s a Reaganesque approach – the idea that we can deliver better service at less cost by moving government decision-making closer to the people. Or, as Gov. Jerry Brown described Thursday, “It’s a bold vision of a new relationship between the state and local governments.”

It’s also a bow to fiscal reality.  Here’s to more (forced) bold thinking that gives local officials the power to best serve their neighbors.

The Heritage Foundation has a masterful indictment of Senator Harry Reid’s (D-NV) ham-handed attempt to use a FEMA budget bill to score political points.  Last week, Reid deliberately killed a House-passed continuing resolution funding FEMA for $3.5 billion while cutting $200 million in subsidies similar to the Solyndra loan fiasco.  Angry at the cuts, Reid sidelined the House bill and introduced his own with no cuts and more spending.

Yet when the Senate sensibly defeated Reid’s proposal, he chastised the chamber in a bizarre floor speech that tried to pin blame on Republicans for leaving disaster victims out in the cold.

Besides refusing responsibility for holding victims hostage so more green jobs could be subsidized, Reid’s implication was that without billions in taxpayer money, citizens would be left to fend for themselves.

As Heritage shows, Reid’s argument is simply not so.  With just a bit of calling around, the think tank found that disaster victims in Pennsylvania were being assisted by the Wyoming County United Way, the Seven Loaves Soup Kitchen and the Weinberg Regional Food Bank.  Each of these private voluntary groups reported record numbers of donations and applications to assist.

As with any disaster, everyday Americans don’t wait for the government to mobilize.  Instead, they roll up their sleeves, stuff sand bags, serve hot food and help the devastated rebuild their lives and communities.  For statists like Harry Reid, people die without the government.  For those living in the real world, it’s people – not bureaucracies – that make recovery possible.

Bloomberg News reports the latest ultimatum from House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to President Barack Obama:

“We await the president’s submission of the three trade agreements sitting on his desk so the House can consider them in tandem” with the aid and preference programs, Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said in a statement yesterday. “If the president submits these agreements promptly, I’m confident that all four bills can be signed into law by mid-October.”

Apart from Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget resolution and the president’s deficit reduction proposal, there may be no better example of how different is each party’s idea of sound economic policy.

Boehner wants Obama to release three trade treaties negotiated by the Bush Administration so that Americans and their counterparts in Columbia, South Korea and Panama can start enjoying the benefits of free trade.

For his part, Obama wants to force Republicans into funding another round of unemployment benefits, this time for workers displaced by the yet-to-be-ratified agreements.  That’s right: the president wants to spend money on people who may never be fired.

First of all, it’s fallacious to assume that businesses operating at historically low worker levels will fire employees; especially since increased trade opportunities are more likely to lead to hiring increases.  Moreover, Obama fails to recognize the cost of not enacting the three free trade agreements.  For instance, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that failure to ratify the agreements will cost 380,000 jobs due to missed business opportunities.

At the heart of this dispute is the focus of each party.  Boehner and the Republicans want to spur economic growth.  Obama and the Democrats want to lock-in the growth of the entitlement state.

Boehner is right to demand action on both free trade and worker aid at the same time.  If Obama cries foul, it’s only because his childish attempt to spend more and get less was called out.

The Canadian Press reports that its government will hire consultants from Deloitte Inc. to devise ways to reduce annual spending by $4 billion by next March.  Cost of the contract: $19.8 million.

Here’s the Conservative government’s response to those badgering it for spending $90,000 a day to reduce spending:

A spokeswoman for Clement defended the contract, saying Ottawa needs the best advice available for reducing costs.

“Engaging private sector advisers who have been successful with cost-saving operational reviews will better enable ministers and deputy heads not only to compile their individual cost-savings proposals but also to provide practical advice on what to look for and how to execute their plans,” press secretary Heather Hume said in an email.

“As always, our government is committed to maintaining an open, fair and transparent procurement process while obtaining the best possible value for Canadians.”

If President Barack Obama and Congress are so willing to set aside the normal constitutional processes for writing budgets and tax policies (as evidenced by the creation of the congressional ‘supercommittee’ charged with finding $1.5 trillion in savings by Thanksgiving), why not go all the way and let experts in the private sector scrub the books and find the savings?

Hat tip to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and his staff at the House Committee on Government Oversight for sharing this “Myth v. Fact” explanation via email of the USPS’s alleged overpayment into the federal retirement system.

Myth: The Postal Service has overpaid by $50-$75 billion into the Civil Service Retirement System and Congress owes this money back.

Fact: There is no Postal Service overpayment.

The United States Postal Service was created in 1971 from the old Post Office Department in order to provide better mail delivery and let it act more like a business. In 1974, the Postal Service agreed to a formula to share the retiree costs of individuals who worked for both the Post Office Department and the Postal Service, calling it “proper, as a matter of principle.” Now, with revenues declining, the Postal Service argues that that formula is unfair. The Postal Service argues that if a formula it considers to be fair had been used instead, then it would be owed $50-$75 billion by the US Treasury.  This is an attempt to rewrite history. The original formula was instituted as part of a broader set of decisions concerning the creation of USPS.  For instance, those decisions included not charging any fee to USPS in return for the postal monopoly it was granted.  Another reason why it makes little sense to speak of an overpayment due to USPS is that the Postal Service had a clear requirement from 1971 until 2006 to raise postage rates to cover all costs, including its cost of retirement funding.  If a different formula had been used all these years that had resulted in lower annual payments by USPS for its federal employee retirement costs, those savings would have been used to lower the cost of postage rates.

Issa’s postal reform bill is up for consideration in a congressional subcommittee today.  You can get more information on his version of postal reform at this website.

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.

Whatever shred of credibility Fareed Zakaria retained as a conservative pundit from his celebrated book The Future of Freedom has now been officially lost thanks to follow-ups like The Post-American World and today’s essay “Does America Need a Prime Minister?”

In the essay, Zakaria uses the recent S&P downgrade of American sovereign debt to note that “no country with a presidential system has a triple-A rating from all three major ratings agencies.”  He then uses this to support his thesis that the United States would be better served by chucking separation-of-powers and moving to a British-style parliamentary system where the executive and legislative branches are the same.  After all, Britain still has a triune triple-A rating!

How wonderfully anti-American of the Harvard PhD.  Throughout the essay one realizes that Zakaria has wandered so far from the insights of the Founding generation that he now endorses the very system – and possibility for tyranny – that the American Revolution fought to end.  So too did another PhD-turned-constitutional-scold: Woodrow Wilson, the godfather of America’s progressive movement.

Wilson believed that government needed to be professionalized and removed from popular control so that it could act quickly and decisively to cure whatever ailed the populace.  He favored the parliamentary system because it gave enormous power to one man: the Prime Minister.

To appreciate how far Zakaria has wandered from core American principles about the proper way to construct a government, consider this passage from today’s essay:

In the American presidential system, in contrast, you have the presidency and the legislature, both of which claim to speak for the people. As a result, you always have a contest over basic legitimacy. Who is actually speaking for and representing the people?

In America today, we take this struggle to an extreme. We have one party in one house of the legislature claiming to speak for the people because theirs was the most recent electoral victory.  And you have the president who claims a broader mandate as the only person elected by all the people.  These irresolvable claims invite struggle.

There are, of course, advantages to the American system – the checks and balances have been very useful on occasion. But we’re living in a world where you need governments that are able to respond decisively and quickly.  In a fast-moving world, paralysis is dangerous. Other countries are catching up – if not overtaking – America.

Who are these other countries?  Members of the European Union with a currency and debt crisis several times worse than our own?  China with its unsustainable population demographics and monetary policy?  Arab dictatorships that are being toppled by the month?  Latin American oligarchies that nationalize industries to buy off the masses with the wealth of entrepreneurs?

The problem we are experiencing in Washington, D.C. is not America’s constitutional design of checks-and-balances and separation-of-powers.  If anything, the ability of the House GOP to slow down the liberal agenda to tax-and-spend the nation into bankruptcy is due solely to the very “paralysis” intended by our constitutional framework.

If Zakaria wants to end the paralysis in D.C., he should vote for pro-growth fiscal conservatives in 2012 and urge all of his readers to do the same.

I just about spewed my cookies when I saw this post regarding Eric Cantor. Cantor, very wisely, advises fellow Republicans to “avoid unnecessary conflict.” Well, yes. I frequently get blasted by conservative ideologues for insisting that there are occasions when it makes no sense to push issues to an all-or-nothing, edge-of-cliff face-off. As a general matter of strategy and tactics, conservatives recently have, quite arguably, tended to err a little too much in that direction for our own long-term good.

But then Cantor got specific, and he is as wrong as wrong can be (I’m quoting NRO’s Andrew Stiles here):

He [Cantor] simply suggests that House Republicans stick to the spending levels called for in the recent debt-ceiling deal, as opposed to trying to push for deeper cuts.“While all of us would like to have seen a lower discretionary appropriations ceiling for the upcoming fiscal year, the debt limit agreement did set a level of spending that is a real cut from the current year level,” Cantor writes. “I believe it is in our interest to enact into law full-year appropriations bills at this new lower level.”

This is nonsense. It’s sickening. The recent agreement’s limits were just that: limits, not mandates. They are part and parcel of the same agreement that calls for another $1.5 trillion in savings. There is no reason, not on God’s green Earth, that some of that $1.5 trillion can’t come from domestic discretionary appropriations, even in advance of any deal reached by the “supercommittee.” Any additional savings achieved through the appropriations process this fall will only make the supercommittee’s job easier. And, of course, there remains so much incredible, unfathomable, indefensible waste in domestic discretionary spending that it makes no sense to put further savings from that area out of bounds. As a matter of fact, I have long argued that it is on individual Approps bills, where individual extravagances can be focused on and highlighted, that the best, least politically dangerous, most politically advantageous case can be made for cutting spending. The fight over the omnibus bill in the spring, halfway through the year, was not the best time to fight. Nor was the debt ceiling the best place to draw a line in the sand, although (thanks to John Boehner, whose achieved far more than conservatives give him credit for) that fight worked out better than I had feared.

But if Congress actually does its job and passes Approps bills one by one, in plenty of time, rather than throwing everything into a massive omnibus bill, then it becomes far easier to make the case for individual cuts.

Cantor’s advice here is the advice of a capitulator. It is disgusting. I am not advocating another “to-the-cliff” battle, but rather a series of carefully chosen skirmishes, all on behalf of the taxpayer.

Shame on Cantor.

From Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post:

* Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is getting involved in the presidential race — sort of. He’s emailing supporters asking for money to run ads in Iowa defending his budget and urging 2012 candidates to support it. The Democratic National Committee has been painting Ryan’s budget as “extreme” in Iowa ads, Ryan wrote that he wants to launch a “counter-attack.” It’s an unusual move for a non-candidate.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) earned his position today by naming three conservative workhorses to represent the Senate GOP in the new “Super Congress” charged with eliminating more than $1 trillion in federal spending.

Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) is getting the lion’s share of attention because of his former leadership of the conservative Club for Growth, and his opposition to the debt deal that created the committee he’ll serve on.  But McConnell deserves some serious thanks from the Tea Party for also naming Senators Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Rob Portman (R-OH).

Both Kyl and Portman own reputations as serious policy wonks who know how to get substantial conservative victories in government negotiations.  (Kyl is an expert on foreign affairs, defense, and tax issues, while Portman served as President George W. Bush’s OMB Director and Free Trade Representative.)

For his part, Toomey is no slouch when it comes to putting skins on the wall.  (Under Toomey, Club for Growth helped illuminate the economic records of several Republican candidates, helping to identify which were in line with less government.)

All told, the Tea Party should be very pleased that Leader McConnell has named a terrific trio to grow the federal government down in a smart and lasting way.

Byron York eviscerates the common liberal meme that former President George W. Bush was worse on spending and taxes than President Barack Obama.  After showing that Bush’s tax cuts increased federal revenues and shrank deficits while Obama has increased the national debt at twice Bush’s pace, York ends with a resounding rebuke of the common “eight years of Republican rule” canard.

None of this is to say that George W. Bush had a good record on spending. He didn’t, and he’s fair game for criticism. But is it honest to condemn reckless spending in “eight years of Republican rule” when Democrats controlled the Senate for four of those years and the House for two? Is it honest to talk about the “cost” of the Bush tax cuts when federal revenues increased significantly while they were in effect? And is it honest to refer to Bush’s ballooning deficits when deficits actually trended down for much of his presidency — at least before Democrats won control of Congress?

Of course Obama partisans would like to pin the president’s troubles on Bush. But they should get their facts straight first.

Dan Walters, the dean of California political journalists, is sounding the alarm over a series of moves by the state’s Democratic machine to restrict conservative access to statewide ballot initiatives.

As California Democrats see it, conservatives are poised to unleash a torrent of ballot measures to rein in government spending and regulations, as the state continues to suffer double-digit unemployment and annual budget deficits.  With Democrats controlling all levers of government, there’s only one area where their tax-and-spend liberalism could be challenged: at the ballot box.

To eliminate that threat, Democrats in and outside government are pushing to criminalize paying signature gatherers per name collected, and issuing radio ads linking petition-signing with identity theft.  Last week, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown vetoed the criminalization measure, but others are waiting the wings.

The motivation behind the Democrats’ ploy is protecting the public employee union members who live off legislative largesse, be it sweetheart pension deals, deferred compensation, or over-generous overtime pay.

With Californians waking up to the fact that economic growth isn’t possible without serious reforms, it’s becoming clearer by the day that the liberal Democrats running the state are not governing in the taxpayer’s best interest.  So to the statist’s mind, it’s far better to cut off debate than face reality.

There are few things more annoying than trying to compete against someone who won’t play the game.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) expresses the frustration of many conservatives who want a real debate about the purposes of government and our ability as a nation to fund them.  Ryan rightly chides President Obama for failing to engage in specifics about how to focus policymakers’ attention on the debt, not just its ceiling.

It is mystifying to me that the president continues to shut out Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” proposal as a middle ground between bankrupting Medicare and Medicaid and eliminating them altogether.

One would think The One could see a Clintonian moment when presented.  But rather than see Ryan’s willingness to preserve the social safety net for what it is – a path to a long-term bipartisan solution – the president can’t see past his own partisan nose.

Yet instead of laying out his own vision, President Obama continues to offer speeches instead of specifics.  Lots of us want a debate about the ends of government, and how we structure our economy to pay for it.  If the leader of the Democratic Party won’t engage in a serious debate about it, maybe the Democrats should get someone who will.

As House and Senate negotiators scramble to fashion a deal that can garner 60 votes in the Senate, 216 or 217 votes in the House, and President Alinsky’s signature (I still smell a last-minute torpedo job from The One), three keys should guide the Republican leaders. First, defense spending should be significantly protected. Second, absolutely no tax hikes should be part of the “trigger” mechanism for the second round of savings, and the Senators and House members appointed by GOP leaders to the commission should also be known anti-taxers who have signed the ATR pledge. Third, and this is of utmost importance: In order to reassure conservatives, the domestic discretionary spending cuts should be even more front-loaded than the Boehner plan was. The revised Boehner plan cut $22 billion in the first year; the new one OUGHT to cut at least $25 billion, and it should accordingly cut more in the second year than Boehner’s revised plan did.

Frankly, we should not care much what the caps are in years nine and ten; but history shows that spending caps actually tend to work in the first two or three years at least — and that if savings are achieved for more than one year, the “baseline” for future spending tends to drop and stay dropped for another two or three years — so the first two or three years are crucial.

Frankly, as long as these three conditions are met, I think Reaganite conservatives will have won, on behalf of the public, a reasonably decent victory.

Some hard-liners in the House are refusing to support John Boehner’s latest plan. They seem to believe it’s doesn’t achieve enough savings.

Not to be too blunt about it, but they need to get a clue.

James Capretta, who trashed the Gang of Six plan, says Boehner’s plan is okay. So does Grover Norquist.

Here’s what they understand: $1.2 trillion of savings from domestic discretionary programs, with real, enforceable budget caps, over ten years, is a huge accomplishment. And it still leaves on the table some of the low-hanging entitlement fruit (a “chained” Consumer Price Index adjustment) and some of the mid-hanging entitlement fruit (hiking the Medicare eligibility age merely to coincide with that of Social Security). So that means that part of the other $1.6 trillion in savings, to come from the later commission, is actually likely to be fairly easy to achieve as well.

The history is this: Never before has Congress used the debt ceiling hike to force serious budget savings. Any successful use of this debate toward that end should be counted as a significant accomplishment. Sure, some on the hard right — and I have ALWAYS been hard-right on cutting spending — may complain that Boehner’s plan isn’t as good as the original “Cut, Cap, and Balance.” So the bleep what. Anybody who ever expected CC&B to become law in its original form wasn’t living in the real world. James Madison and Roger Sherman didn’t design our system to allow one House to steamroll both the other congressional chamber and the president (although they did indeed give more power to the House of Reps. vis-a-vis the president, on domestic issues, than it has historically made use of).  The U.S. government is designed to force compromise.

Frankly, the Boehner plan isn’t a 50-50 compromise; it’s a win for conservatives, for fiscal responsibility, and for the nation. It effectively changes the trajectory of spending for the first time since Washington started bingeing again (after three good years) in the fall of 1998. It’s a remarkable achievement when working against the most leftist president in history. Conservatives should not torpedo it.

The Heritage Foundation has a helpful list of the Obama Administration’s many anniversaries this month:

The Obama Administration has seen its fair share of milestones this month. Yesterday marked the first anniversary of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Protection Act, Obamacare is just over one year old, it has been more than 800 days since the Democrat-controlled Senate passed a budget, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau opened its doors on Thursday–the first new federal agency in nearly a decade. You’ll notice that no one is celebrating any of them.

Liberals are aghast that regulating the economic activity of millions of people is going so slow, while business owners and the unemployed are living in constant fear of growth-killing rules.

Happy Anniversaries, Mr. President!  Your laws are destroying America.

Over at The American Spectator, I explain why conservatives should accept a scaled-down version of the Gang of Six plan on the budget. Let me make it even more clear. Herewith, the Hillyer Plan, which has legislative elements simple enough that they should be able, on a fast track, to be passed by Aug. 2 — and if not, by about mid-August (which means a delayed August “recess”), which would require a temporary extension of the debt limit which all sides should accept. But let’s be up front about this: Sometimes, Washington gets WAY too tied up with official accounting “scores” of budget proposals, when in truth almost all out-year projections are nonsense, with huge shifts in numbers dependent on unpredictable effects of economic growth, inflation, and other factors. The Hillyer Plan would specifically NOT be “scored” in advance, because the point isn’t to figure how many economic assumptions can dance on the bead of an abacus. Instead, the guiding principle should be good policy combined with overall debt reduction, without worrying about whether the reduction officially hits a specific numerical target. As Jack Kemp and the Gingrich Congress showed, economic growth can and will balance a budget that is reasonably restrained.

Okay, here’s the plan:

1) Permanent (non-sunseted), three-tiered rates for both individual and corporate income taxes, at 12%, 24%, and 30%.

2) Capital gains taxes at the same levels — except that the calculation of the base price would be indexed for inflation for the first time, and no individual capital gain under $5,000 would be taxed.

3) Complete elimination of taxes on ordinary stock dividends. Dividend taxes require far too much accounting for far too little bang for the buck.

4) A cap on the deduction for mortgage interest at $3,000 per month (adjusted upward for inflation every five years). Owners of McMansions will be getting a big enough break via cutting the top rate from 35% to 30% that this trade-off will be more than worth it. A cap, too, on the deduction for state and local income taxes, set at perhaps $10,000. (This would have the effect of at least subtly pressuring high-income-tax states to reduce their own tax rates, while of course gaining at least a little money for the feds.)

5) Complete and permanent elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax.

6) Elimination of Barack Obama’s hated tax break for private jets.

7) Elimination of all tax breaks for corn ethanol, combined with elimination of the import tariffs on cellulosic ethanol.

8) From the Gang of Six plan: Shift to the chained-CPI (a more accurate measure of inflation) government-wide starting in 2012, along with the following specifications for Social Security: (1) exempt SSI from the shift for five years, and then phase in the shift over the next five years; and (2) provide a minimum benefit equal to 125% of the poverty line for five years. (According to CBO, the shift to chained-CPI would result in the annual adjustment growing, on average, about 0.25 percentage points per year slower than the current CPI.)

9) From the Gang of Six plan: Repeal the CLASS Act.

10) Allow the Dems to pick any business tax “loopholes” of their choice for elimination, of up to $150 billion over ten years, of which the GOP would be obliged to accept $100 billion of them. (Note: The selection of options, first by the Dems and then by the GOP, could easily be done within two weeks.)

11) Require the administration by law, within a year, to approve permits to open enough federal-government-owned lands to energy development to produce, via royalties and taxes, at least $100 billion in federal revenue over the next ten years. This idea stems from a column by Gary Palmer of the Alabama, not yet available online. Palmer explains: “According to the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Bureau  of Land Management, there are 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from oil shale in the Green River Formation. This is three times more than the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. The Green River Formation covers about 11 million acres in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, with about 80 percent of the recoverable oil in a 1,225 sq. mile area of western Colorado. The federal government owns or manages 73 percent of the lands that contain significant oil shale deposits in the West and 80 percent of the recoverable oil in the Green River Formation.”

12) Immediately remove authority to spend at least $75 billion in whatever “unobligated” funds still remain (some were withdrawn a few months ago in the 2011 Continuing Resolution).
13) Pass a shell budget resolution that sets overall non-defense Appropriations limits for 2012 of $25 billion less than the combined budget authority approved for 2011 (in actual dollars, without an inflation adjustment).

14) Before final passage of this whole package, pass “Sense of the House” and “Sense of the Senate” resolutions (there’s no time for actual legislation before Aug. 2 to implement the specifics)  supporting the following items in the Gang of Six spending outline:

• Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions would find $70 billion.
• Homeland Security and Government Affairs would find $65 billion.
• Agriculture would find $11 billion while protecting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
• Commerce would find $11 billion.
• Energy would find $6 billion and may propose additional policies to generate savings that would be applied to the infrastructure deficit or to reduce the deficit.
• Judiciary would find an unspecified amount through medical malpractice reform.

• Impose spending caps and security/nonsecurity firewalls.
• Sequester accounts at the end of the year to recoup any excessive spending by Congress.
• Restrict the use of emergency designations that circumvent the spending caps.
• Prevent Congress from exceeding the caps by requiring a stand-alone resolution subject to a 67-vote threshold, in order to isolate that vote to increase the deficit from any other policy items.

• Achieve program integrity savings of $26 billion in entitlement programs to curb fraud, abuse, and other wasteful spending government-wide.
• Create a working group to provide updated budget concepts for CBO and OMB.

There. I hate to have a “14-point” plan because it has the cringe-inducing whiff of Woodrow Wilson, but that’s just how the numbering came out. Anyway, I believe every one of the first 13 points could actually be enacted in law by Aug. 2 or certainly by August 15, and while the resolutions in Point 14 obviously do not have the force of law until subsequent legislation enacts them, it would have enough moral force, with enough public attention, to effectively force compliance as soon as the complicated legislative wheels could operate.

The bipartisan “Gang of Six” has been in bad odor with conservatives for months now because it always has been seen as a sell-out and a way to force tax hikes into law with bipartisan cover. But the deal outlined today actually claims to represent a net tax cut of $1.5 trillion over ten years. It would actually lower marginal tax rates on both individuals —

* Simplify the tax code by reducing the number of tax expenditures and reducing individual tax rates, by establishing three tax brackets with rates of 8–12 percent, 14–22 percent, and 23–29 percent.

* Permanently repeal the $1.7 trillion Alternative Minimum Tax.

— and businesses:

Establish a single corporate tax rate between 23 percent and 29 percent, raise as much revenue as the current corporate tax system, and move to a competitive territorial tax system.

I haven’t had much time to study all the details, but it looks like this deal would achieve $500 in real savings in the short term and then set up about as good a budget “cap” system as I’ve ever seen, without triggering tax hikes. I reserve final judgment, but, frankly, I don’t see anything in here for conservatives to seriously object to.

Fred Barnes’ story at the Weekly Standard about our supercilious, self-important, rude, overbearing, blowhard of a president is absolute must reading. It explains why these budget talks have been unproductive: because Barack Hussein The One The Redeemer Obama has absolutely no regard for anybody else’s opinion, no patience with dissent of any kind — and no manners. In short, he’s a boor — a boor with authoritarian inclinations:

The president has been less genial away from the prying eyes of the press and the public. In the private talks, he’s dominated the discussion with the eight most senior members of Congress in an overbearing way not likely to lead to compromise. He’s been argumentative. He’s come across as President Blowhard.

After Sperling briefed the group on the deficit cap proposal, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi addressed another subject. When a Republican participant criticized the deficit cap, Obama interrupted with a monologue. When the Republican tried to speak a second time, the president quickly cut him off and delivered another sermon on why the criticism was wrong.

I have argued all along that Obama doesn’t really even want a deal. He wants  a crisis. His behavior — pretending to be the adult and compromiser in public while actually torpedoing progress in private — is exactly that of somebody who is trying to foment a crisis from which he can benefit.

That’s why Charles Krauthammer makes sense:

[D]are the president to put the country in default on the basis of ‘I won’t accept anything short. I only want something that will serve me on Election Day.’

All of this talk about a Balanced Budget Amendment is fine and dandy, but it has NOTHING to do with the debt ceiling fight. It is literally impossible to get a BBA in time for the debt limit deadline. The best thing to do is to stop talking and actually pass spending cuts attached to a short-term lifting of the debt limit. Even better, doing a shorter-term debt limit hike also means the spending cuts, while substantial, are less likely to include things against which Obama can demagogue. In other words, the cuts, while not as big in total dollars, can be more carefully chosen for PR purposes — and they will accompany a more restrained debt-limit hike, which itself sends a message that conservatives refuse to give carte blanche to debt as high as Obama wants the new limit to be.

Yes, call Obama’s bluff. The way to do that is to pass a politically palatable bill with real savings — and leave extraneous things out of it.

Charles Krauthammer suggests (more a command, really) calling President Barack Obama’s bluff about a “long-term deal or nothing” on a debt default deal: a short-term deal that extends the negotiating clock instead.

The Republican House should immediately pass a short-term debt-ceiling hike of $500 billion containing $500 billion in budget cuts. That would give us about five months to work on something larger.

Why not?  Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s plan to give the president authority to raise the debt ceiling on his own just stokes an already imperial presidency.  What’s more, McConnell’s reservation of oversight to Congress by a 2/3 vote to block the president from raising the debt ceiling is constitutionally suspect because it sounds suspiciously like an impermissible legislative veto.  Since the Supreme Court has said that Congress can’t overrule Executive decisions once Congress delegates its authority, don’t be surprised if McConnell’s clever power switch gives unilateral discretion to a big-spending liberal president without any means of checking him.

Far better to go with Krauthammer’s suggestion since it keeps the focus on spending and the economy and relieves the pressure of a debt default while the parties get serious about specifics.