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Posts Tagged ‘reason’
February 15th, 2012 at 4:10 pm
Negative Campaigning … in Context
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When weeks at a time pass between primary contests, the media — long on time to fill and short on content with which to fill it — has a magnetic attraction to hand-wringing about the civility deficit in American politics. As this brilliant video from Reason shows, however, the caterwauling is ahistorical:

February 7th, 2012 at 5:21 pm
“The New Debate in the Republican Party Needs to be Between Conservatives and Libertarians”
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So says South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint in a wonderful new interview with Reason TV. And on that point he’s precisely right. While the farthest reaches of Ron Paul’s political philosophy (an isolationist foreign policy, drug legalization, etc.) are both ideologically imprudent and political non-starters, the Texas congressman has ignited an important discussion that has the potential to bring the GOP back to its first principles of limited government.

Unlike Paul, however, DeMint is not content to be a legislative voice in the wilderness. His work with the Senate Conservatives Fund has been essential in bringing Tea Party principles to Congress’s upper chamber. Have a look at the video and be thankful that we still have a few more years of service forthcoming from this principled conservative leader.

January 11th, 2011 at 12:34 am
Which Governors Can You Trust?
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That’s the question Reason’s Nick Gillespie puts to the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards, as they look at which governors have been the best friends of lower taxes and lower spending in the past two years:

December 16th, 2010 at 10:15 pm
Re: Trimming the Fat in the Federal Budget
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On Tuesday, we told you about the potent case for cutting federal spending being made by Nick Gillespie and Veronique De Rugy over at Reason. Because, as the new omnibus spending bill makes clear, Democrats are congenitally incapable of entertaining the idea of reigning in expenditures, the plan has become the target of criticism for The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait. His response is worth reading, as is Gillespie’s comprehensive rejoinder, but one of his central arguments stands out for its unseriousness:

Another way of putting this [the budget situation] is that, to maintain the current level of services in the federal budget, we would need to spend $5.5 trillion. Gillespie and de Rugy would propose instead to spend $4.2 trillion in 2020. That’s their prerogative. I’m sure they could find at least $1.3 trillion in spending that they don’t like. But the point is that you would have to eliminate a lot of functions of the federal government, and/or reduce a lot of social benefits.

The definition of modern liberalism may be to believe that it would be a hardship for the federal government to get by on over $4 trillion a year. And if budget cuts are a non-starter under this rationale, it’s hard to see when they would be palatable to liberals (how much do you want to bet that national defense is the exception?)

Are we to believe that Mr. Chait is convinced that such bracing austerity would rip the national safety net asunder? And that every activity currently undertaken by the federal government is too sacrosanct to be pruned? There’s a mathematical equation for such worship of the state … and its product is Nancy Pelosi’s approval rating.

December 14th, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Trimming the Fat in the Federal Budget
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The folks over at Reason TV never miss a chance to make complex public policy simultaneously comprehensible and funny (how else to explain their decision to augment Nick Gillespie’s Ian Malcolm look with a chef’s hat?). Take a look at their new video on how to balance the federal budget and then visit the link where they explain their plan in detail. As a comprehensive look at how Congress could get the deficit mess under control without raising taxes, it’s a logical compliment to CFIF’s One More Vote campaign.

 

 

September 3rd, 2010 at 7:53 pm
Higher Education Bubble Could be the Next to Pop

Conventional wisdom says that when the job market dries up, it’s time to head back to school for more education.  With today’s announcement that unemployment is above 9% nationally for the 16th month in a row, many out-of-work Americans will consider going back to school.

In two to three years, those who pay for more certificates or degrees may find that their employment – and financial – situation hasn’t improved.  The reason is the rising cost of higher education coupled with the loss in value of college degrees.  Per Reason Magazine:

Student borrowing has more than doubled since the end of the 20th century, according to the College Board, with $85 billion in loans in 2008, up from $41 billion in 1998. And as the rising rate of defaults indicates, borrowers in aggregate are not making the kind of money—i.e. twice as much as a decade ago—they would need to pay those loans back.

The government’s response to this bubble has been to get itself more deeply involved in the inflation. The administration has kicked in various types of assistance, such as a $100 million college prep program. And in March, President Barack Obama signed a bill eliminating the 45-year-old Federal Family Education Loan Program (which guaranteed student loans made by private lenders) and replacing it with a system of direct Treasury Department loans to students. The first part of these efforts is a straightforward waste of money. The second has the potential to be a marginal improvement on a system that shouldn’t exist.

So we have too much money going into an asset, not enough value coming out, a massive increase in leverage, and a large taxpayer liability for the difference.

Get ready for another bailout…

August 26th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
The Commerce Clause and the Erosion of American Liberty
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As a longtime fan of the video work done by our friends over at Reason, I have to admit astonishment at a video that surpasses even their usually high standards.

Check out the latest from the West Coast libertarians on how an expansive judicial interpretation of the Commerce Clause has become a blank check to Congress (skeptics take note: Erwin Chemerinsky, the UC-Irvine Law School dean featured here is not a liberal straw man dug up for the purposes of this video. He’s a highly regarded intellectual on the legal left — which ought to make his closing comments even more disturbing).

 

June 22nd, 2010 at 8:35 pm
One More Opponent of “Net Neutrality”
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While no one in the vast right-wing conspiracy is going to outdo CFIF’s own Timothy Lee for principled and prolonged resistance to the FCC’s attempt at a backdoor takeover of the Internet, we appreciate the assist from the folks at Reason. Here, Nick Gillespie lays out three reasons to oppose Washington’s proposed conquest of cyberspace:

October 6th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Light Bulbs vs. The Nanny State
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October 2nd, 2009 at 10:50 am
Video: Cracking the Education Monopoly
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This video on school choice is courtesy of ReasonTV.