Video: The Wisdom of Justice Obama
CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses how President Obama’s rhetoric regarding ObamaCare and the challenge currently before the Supreme Court to the law’s subsidies is both unseemly and not presidential.
CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses how President Obama’s rhetoric regarding ObamaCare and the challenge currently before the Supreme Court to the law’s subsidies is both unseemly and not presidential.
Normally I’m proud to reference Nashville — my second home of sorts — as an instructive contrast to the political and social pathologies of my native Southern California. Normally.
From my old colleagues at the Beacon Center of Tennessee (which was the Tennessee Center for Policy Research when I was there):
Nashville officials worry that the city, which people worldwide refer to as “The Music Capital of the World,” has a sudden shortage of creative talent, whether in music, art or literature — so government must intervene.
In other words, even though it is Nashville, too few of the city’s residents are members of the performing arts.
Members of one taxpayer-financed agency are taking action and offering affordable housing to people who fall below a certain income — provided that (1) they are artists and (2) their art meets a certain progressive standard.
…
Not every artist, however, will qualify.
Only seven members of a specially selected Artist Committee, in addition to the building’s property manager, can decide who may live there and who may not. Potential tenants who wish to live at the Ryman Lofts must satisfy Committee members’ standards on whether their art is “unique” and “progressive.”
I’m not sure that I can pinpoint the exact line beyond which government has become too large. I am confident, however, that taxing hard-working citizens to subsidize housing for people who spend their days rendering acrylic representations of Gaia is well beyond that line.
This Friday, the 2012 Summer Olympics kick off in London (with an opening ceremony that shows Britain will respond to Beijing’s 2008 triumphalism with cultural self-loathing). Will it be a triumph for national pride, sheer athleticism, and the indomitable human spirit? We can certainly hope so. For the city of London itself? Not so much. Matthew Stevenson gets it right over at New Geography:
Why does anyone persist with the Greek mythology that the Olympics are an engine of economic development, sportsmanship, or peace on earth? London is spending $15 billion on the hope that it can sell enough tickets to synchronized swimming, and earn enough from television ads, to cover the costs of the 30,000 rent-a-cops and military personnel being deployed in the spirit of Olympic harmony.
Even though the Games break few economic records, except those for non-performing sovereign debts, governments around the world scramble madly every four years for the right to act as host, as if influence peddling were an Olympic sport.
The original cost estimate, sold to the British public to convince them to get behind the bid for the 2012 Games, was about $4 billion. Those budget forecasts imagined that, after the event, Olympic sites would be recycled for use as schools, homes for the aged, and handicapped parking, even though earlier Olympic cities have found little use for their table tennis stadiums and aquatic centers…
… At the end of three weeks of the London Games, even if the British army has had to shoot off a few of its surface-to-air missiles, TV commentators will pronounce the Games an immortal success, a triumph of Spartan proportions, and an epic not seen since Jason came back with the golden fleece.
Then, in three years, if not sooner, London will get the $15 billion invoice for its fun summer, and all it will have to show for it will be a few used diving boards and, with luck, some new light-rail. In the words of George Best, the great Northern Irish footballer: “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.”
The record of Olympic Games failing to deliver on grandiose economic promises is simply too consistent to be ignored. Much like stateside subsidies of facilities for professional sports teams, the inevitable outcome is a massive redistribution of resources rather than a surge of economic growth.
We wish the London Olympics well. But we also wish the people of London weren’t footing the bill for the rest of the world’s party.
In my commentary last week — focusing on the economic weaknesses of the Republican presidential candidates — I spent some time looking at Newt Gingrich’s enthusiasm for various energy subsidies, a pathology that he’s shared with much of the bipartisan establishment of the last decade or so. I noted in conclusion:
The Speaker is smart enough to know that the virtues of a free market apply to the energy industry just as much as any other. Fuel markets work best when consumers are making decisions based on price and quality, not when politicians are hand-picking energy sources to please favored constituencies.
This is just as true of conventional fuel sources like coal and oil as it is of boutique alternatives like hydrogen, wind, or solar. And it’s just as true whether it’s Democrats or Republicans giving the handouts. That’s why it’s so refreshing to see a group of Tea Party conservatives on Capitol Hill attempting to strip the crony capitalism from the energy industry. As Timothy P. Carney reports in the Washington Examiner:
Freshmen Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas has proposed the loftily titled “Energy Freedom and Economic Prosperity Act,” while the Senate’s Tea Party heroes, Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Mike Lee (Utah), have introduced the companion bill in the upper chamber.
The bill, which Pompeo hopes to insert into legislation extending the payroll-tax credit, would take a huge bite out of energy subsidies by eliminating tax credits for everything from solar panels and wind turbines to oil drilling and nuclear power generation. At the same time, the measure would cut tax rates.
…”This is the model,” Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist told me Friday. It gets rid of the hodgepodge of distorting credits that steer money away from productive energy investments and toward politically favored activities, and it also lowers everyone’s rates. Neutral, low taxes, conservatives have long argued, are the formula for prosperity and economic growth, not to mention fairness.
On this, Norquist is precisely right. By taking the federal government’s hand off the scales, this bill would allow energy providers to flourish or falter on the merits, rather than according to the size of their lobbying budgets. And by lowering tax rates, it would ensure that providing Americans with the energy they rely on to do everything from heating their homes to driving their cars would be both more profitable for producers and more affordable for consumers.
Pompeo is to be saluted for his courage. Now it falls to the American people to push for this bill’s passage. A wide array of energy industry lobbyists will be hell-bent on killing it. That’s just one more testimony in its favor.
Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.
View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.
Newt versus The Wall Street Journal editorial board – the unofficial 2012 Republican campaign is off to a very lively start.
On January 22, the Journal ran a commentary entitled “Amber Waves of Ethanol” in which it criticized federal ethanol subsidies. It noted that, “Four of every 10 rows of corn now go to produce fuel for American cars or trucks, not food or feed,” which does nothing to improve the environment or our reliance on foreign oil, but wastes billions in taxpayer dollars and drives food price inflation. Likely 2012 candidate Newt Gingrich responded in Iowa last Tuesday, repeatedly referring to himself “as an historian” and accusing the Journal as part of a sinister cabal, saying, “Obviously big urban newspapers want to kill it because it’s working, and you wonder, ‘What are their values?'”
This morning, the Journal responds in its lead commentary entitled “Professor Cornpone.” This dispute, it says, symbolizes the larger fight “between the House Republicans now trying to rationalize the federal fisc and the kind of corporate welfare that President Obama advanced in his State of the Union”:
Given that Mr. Gingrich aspires to be President, his ethanol lobbying raises larger questions about his convictions and judgment. The Georgian has been campaigning in the Tea Party age as a fierce critic of spending and government, but his record on that score is, well, mixed… Now Republicans have another chance to reform government, and a limited window of opportunity in which to do it… So along comes Mr. Gingrich to offer his support for Mr. Obama’s brand of green-energy welfare, undermining House Republicans in the process.”
Regardless of one’s views toward Mr. Gingrich as a potential candidate, the fact that the race is already lively with substantive policy debate is a healthy sign.
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