Category: national politics & policies

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national politics & policies political challengers too much government

Fiscal Brinksmanship

“America,” President Obama insists, “is not a deadbeat nation.” Mounting evidence to the contrary.

He chastises Republicans for even contemplating a default on the debt. At a news conference this week, he called any attempt to use the debt limit authorization issue to negotiate federal spending down “absurd,” and akin to a hostage situation. Refusing to raise the ceiling, you see, would “crash the economy”:

He demanded that Republicans in charge of the House of Representatives approve a rise in the federal government’s authority to borrow money to pay existing obligations — without seeking policy concessions in return.

The BBC goes on to quote the president, who clarifies his stance. “While I’m willing to compromise and find common ground over how to reduce our deficits,” said the president, he insists that he will definitely not “have that negotiation with a gun at the head of the American people.”

It’s an interesting approach: accuse Republicans of dangerous brinksmanship, while continuing to overspend and increase debt to the very brink of insolvency.

What Obama won’t recognize is that fiscal conservatives, today, play the same role as a parents cutting up their college kid’s credit cards after the young spendthrift had racked up an extraordinary debt. Obama plays the role of the kid saying: I’ve already budgeted spending, you can’t cut up the credit card — that’d be irresponsible!

It was different in 2006, when Senator Obama opposed raising the debt ceiling and called the increasing debt levels a sign of “a failure of leadership.”

Now that he — and not a despicable Republican — has the leadership role, he’s changed his tune. He says his former cry of “irresponsibility!” was itself irresponsible.

The very best thing we can say about this? The president has been captured completely by the forces he once opposed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

P.S.Soon after the last period of the above squib was struck, I turned on Fox. And there was Sean Hannity, leading his nightly political opinion show with the president’s remonstrance of Republicans for daring to fix tight the debt ceiling. Hannity noticed what I noticed — indeed, what it turns out a lot of people noticed: Obama’s repudiation of a practice that he himself had engaged in in 2006.

But notice what Hannity is trying to prove: “how reckless, irresponsible and fundamentally dishonest a man [Obama] is.” Hannity sees Obama’s press conference performance as indicative of the president’s hypocrisy, demagoguery, and slipperiness-with-facts.

The case can be made, and Hannity has made it. The trouble is, the way Hannity makes it, to his audience, just skips over precisely this kind of behavior from Republicans. For, remember, Republicans repeatedly voted to increase the debt limit while their guy, Bush, was in charge. Another person to notice the differences between Junior Senator Obama and Second-Term President Obama, young Ms. Julie Borowski (“Token Libertarian Girl”), showed more savvy on Facebook than Hannity does on his primetime program:

Most Republicans are against raising the debt ceiling under Obama. But most were all for it during the George W. Bush administration.

Most Democrats are for raising the debt ceiling under Obama. But most were all against it during the George W. Bush administration.

Pssh, here’s a better idea. Dramatically cut spending. Stop manufacturing fake crises and raising the debt ceiling almost every year to finance drunken spending sprees. And why they are at it, members of Congress should pass a budget for the first time in over three years. It’s no wonder that a recent Public Policy Polling survey finds that cockroaches are more popular than Congress.

No doubt, since insecticide is cheaper and more effective than politics.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

The Great Evasion

From the earliest moments of the current, ongoing economic depression, our leaders signaled their fear by hastily concocting programs that postponed the reckoning that had to come.

Douglas French, writing about housing finance today, says a lot simply with his title: “Markets Stagnate Until They Clear.” Government policy has kept mortgages in a weird limbo, and market prices at unnatural highs. Our geniuses in power have even moved heaven and earth to reinflate the old housing boom.

Better to have let it crash and recover rather than keep it unworkably hobbling along.

But the clearing of markets scares politicians silly.

Right after the 2008 implosion, our leaders increased unemployment insurance and offered many new cushions for workers. Humanitarian? Or just another way to avoid new, lower wage rates to match the monetary collapse? I’m not sure about the latter, since the “wages” of not working proved so effective that many workers stayed unemployed voluntarily.

The cost? An extended, lengthy depression.

But that’s not all, of course. By putting more people onto the rolls of the federal government’s dependents list, the burden on taxpayers and on the debt system increases.

Meanwhile, politicians still cannot imagine a way to do what a few other countries, including Canada, have done: cut back on spending and balance budgets.

Our politicians will do anything to avoid that!

Some folks are calling the current period “The Great Recession.” I suggest a better term: “The Great Evasion.” And what’s being evaded is responsibility.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies too much government

A Symbolic Threat

“Medicare’s trustees estimate that the hospital insurance fund supported by the payroll tax will run out of cash by 2024,” informs a Washington Post editorial, “but this is mainly a symbolic threat: The government will draw on general revenues to keep Medicare going.”

So, what exactly does this “symbolic threat” symbolize?

It shows that Medicare — like Social Security — was set up and run in an unsustainable, even fraudulent, way. Politicians promised benefits without collecting the taxes to pay for those benefits. This left “today’s voters” getting unpaid for bennies and future voters being handed a hefty bill.

The only question is: how hefty? That depends on how quickly the imbalance gets addressed.

Already, Medicare represents 15 percent of total federal government spending, last year costing taxpayers $555 billion. Worse yet, the cost is expected to double in the next decade — in large part, because the number of seniors on the program is expected to explode, from 50 million today to 78 million by 2030.

“No structural solution is,” the editorial bemoans, “for the moment, politically possible.” Instead, the Post endorses a number of small cuts — all making seniors pay more and/or get less — that add up to slightly over $40 billion a year. That drop in the bucket would, in a decade, account for less than 4 percent of Medicare’s projected yearly cost.

Frankly, the unavoidable first step in any honest fix of Medicare’s big, structural problems, is for those in Congress and the White House to fully admit the rotten fraud they have perpetrated against us for their personal political gain.

Acknowledging their deception would be more than symbolic.

You can’t change your ways until you first repent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

We’re All Bond Fans Now

The latest James Bond film, Skyfall, is so well liked that there’s even Oscar buzz about it. But it’s not just moviegoers who feel like they’ve entered a new era.

In the new flick, M, played by Judi Dench, argues before a parliamentary board that, because “the enemy” can be just about anybody these days, now’s really the time for some good old-fashioned espionage, James Bond-style. You know, with casual murders committed by men given a “license to kill.”

But things have changed. The old Bond skirmished with Russkies while fighting rich criminals who dreamed of destroying or ruling the world. Today’s Bond fights an ex-agent who wants to hurt the higher-ups in the spy biz who had hurt him.

In reality, it’s the U.S. President — Felix Leiter’s boss — who has the license to kill, exercising it by overseeing multiple drone programs, the practice of rendition, and a developing program called a “disposition matrix,” which aims to target people who are up-and-comers in the America-hating (and thus) terrorist game.

Many critics have noted that the recent Bond films starring the brilliant Daniel Craig have become more personal and less gadgety. Maybe that’s the way real-life spying plays in Britain (I doubt it) but from the American perspective, the current reality of drone strikes overseas, unregulated-by-law rendition tribunals, and database management geared to determining terrorist psychology is positively science-fictional.

And I don’t mean that in a good way.

This is not a Brave New World or a 1984, I realize. But it still frightens.

Indeed, for people in the targeted regions it must be pure horror. America’s ruling classes have upped the game. And we can expect to reap a . . . skyfall.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency national politics & policies

The Latest Legislative Land Mine

The most prescient thing ever said about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, was articulated by then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

The medical reform package is quite the hodgepodge. Actually reading the whole thing makes taking on Middlemarch, War and Peace, and In Search of Lost Time a course of light entertainment.

The latest revelation from its thousands of pages? A passage prohibiting doctors from asking their patients questions about guns in the home.

The Washington Post reports that many gun control groups are incensed at the power of the NRA to limit their ability to “collect information”:

Physician groups and public health advocates say the cumulative effect of these restrictions undercuts the ability of the White House and lawmakers to make the case for new laws, such as an assault-weapons ban, in the face of opponents who argue that there’s no evidence such measures are effective. Advocates for regulating guns lament that reliable statistics are limited in part because physicians and health researchers who could track these patterns are being inhibited.

Considering the quality of previous doctor-led sociological studies into gun usage — and really, this is not a medical problem but a complex, society-wide issue far beyond the competence of medical training to comprehend — the prohibition might really best be described as a defense of scientific method.

But the big issue here is not the politics of “research.” It’s that a health care reform package passed nearly three years ago contains hot potatoes such as this, and we are only discovering them now.

Nancy, you were all too disastrously correct.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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links national politics & policies

Townhall: Hair on Fire

In case you didn’t notice, the world didn’t end on Friday. Oh, and Paul Jacob’s Sunday column on Townhall.com is up. Click on over, and come back here for more prophetic nourishment.

The bigger cliffs ahead include problems associated with

  • a structurally unsound and unstable Social Security
  • Medicare and Medicaid commitments that are also unsustainable
  • a continuing regime of “too big to fail” providing incentives to another round of risky investments
  • a looming dollar crisis
  • imperial overreach risking the life and liberty (not to mention pocketbooks) of American citizens
  • a general increase in the “gimme gimme” mentality, the political and moral hazard of everyone trying to live at the expense of everyone else.

Any one of these is very bad. Together they threaten the very existence of the union. Here at Common Sense, we’re always interested in these problems, and in finding solutions. So, if you haven’t already, click on the link, above right, and subscribe to the email version of this weekday commentary. Thanks!

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crime and punishment folly national politics & policies

Shooting from the Hip

Wearing his I’m-Not-Partisan-No-Not-Me hat, President Obama has again declared war on partisanship, telling congressional Republicans to “peel off the partisan war paint.”

To be partisan in a bad way is not merely to belong to a political party and more or less support its program. It is to cling to party at the expense of Doing the Right Thing.

Unless, that is, it’s about opposing the program of a president determined to be partisan at the expense of Doing the Right Thing.

I often disagree with both parties. But let’s say that a representative of one party is marginally more reluctant to destroy our wealth and freedom than a representative of another party. Then I prefer the slightly more responsible stance of the former — and wish it were tougher and more consistent — even when the latter engages in name-calling and abuse of the former.

Demanding “perspective,” President Obama declares that he and the Congress should “not put ourselves through some sort of self-inflicted crisis every six months.” And I wholeheartedly agree. These crises happen because their spending programs always go up and up and up, even when a few “cuts” get made.

But the president doesn’t stop there. He explains they must “allow ourselves time to focus on things like preventing the tragedy in Newtown from happening again, focus on issues like energy and immigration reform. . . .”

Um, sir, please do not suggest that an unimpeded path to fiscal ruin is the only way to prevent fiscal ruin, or can somehow enable policymakers to prevent crazy gunmen from killing people. Please.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Death by a Thousand Non-Cuts

As I write this, the United States of America is $16,275,179,205,442 in debt. By the time you read this, we’ll have piled up millions more.

Much debt is of recent vintage. When George W. Bush became president in 2000, the national red ink totaled $5.7 trillion. In eight years, Dubya nearly doubled it to $10.6 trillion. Since his 2008 election, President Obama has far outpaced Bush, sinking us another $5.3 trillion in debt in just half Bush’s time.

And, by continuing to run yearly deficits of over $1 trillion, we’re digging the hole deeper at top speed.

For all the hysteria over draconian cuts, forced at the so-called fiscal cliff, those somewhat slippery savings would at best amount to about 10 percent of our yearly deficit, leaving us spending 9/10ths of a trillion dollars we don’t have.

In the “other cuts” department, the Obama Administration had been supporting paltry reductions to federal Medicaid spending of $17.6 billion over ten years (that’s less than $2 billion a year), but just flipped its position. Why? State governors are deciding if they can afford to take part in Obamacare’s massive Medicaid expansion to cover those earning up to 133 percent of the poverty line.

Not content to spend recklessly alone, the Feds picks up the entire tab of new Medicare recipients’ first three years. After that, Washington pays 90 percent and the states pay 10.

States are wondering how they’ll come up with that additional 10 percent — seven governors have already declined to join in the spending program. No one in Washington has given a second thought to paying the 90 percent.

They figure they can always raise taxes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Paying for Agreement

How do you get a body of professionals to go along with your program?

Pay them.

It’s an old idea: He who pays the piper calls the tune.

The pipers are economists. The paymaster is not you, but the Federal Reserve. There’s a suprising amount of agreement amongst even disagreeing economists that the Federal Reserve is, on the whole, “a good thing,” a necessary thing, even an institution whose existence and rationale must not be questioned.

Shocking, but less so when you apply what is called “Public Choice” analysis to economists themselves. Assume that economists are self-interested. Assume that they like to get paid. Opinions turn out to be somewhat elastic, even given some very hard facts. The results?

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Nicely, a few economists bring this up, every now and then. Garett Jones on EconTalk did, reviving a letter monetary economist Milton Friedman wrote to researcher David M. Levy in the early 1990s. Friedman summarized the situation concisely, saying that the Fed

hires directly roughly half of all economists specializing in the field of money, and indirectly provides funds for a large fraction of the remainder. I have no doubt that is a major reason why the Federal Reserve, despite such a poor record of performance, has such a high public standing.

This also helps explain why there was a major shift away from laissez faire amongst economists. In the 20th century, the “worldly philosophers” developed a new labor market; they found that they could make a great deal of money working for government. And they don’t get paid for telling the government not to do what it wants to do, or to fire most economists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Our Youth

Adults have expressed disappointment in the behavior of young people since civilization began. You can read complaints about “the kids these days” on cuneiform tablets.

That being said, I have some sympathy for U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)., who has asked MTV to cancel its latest “reality TV” extravaganza, Buckwild, slated to debut in January. This West Virginia-based show show emulates Jersey Shore, a low-level satire on low-life New Jersey twentysomethings that I know too much about . . . without ever having watched.

“As a U.S. Senator, I am repulsed at this business venture,” Manchin asserts. He seems especially troubled by the fact that “some Americans are making money off of the poor decisions of our youth. I cannot imagine that anyone who loves this country would feel proud about profiting off of” the presumably horrid show.

First, as Ed Krayewski notes on Reason’s Hit and Run, were the senator really to take pride in business, he could mind his own: “The Senate . . . hasn’t passed a budget in more than 1,200 days. And, unlike MTV, it’s their job.”

Second, this is “Reality TV” here, folks. Not much to see. The truth is that Americans, for reasons ranging from Schadenfreude to mirth, like watching people make fools of themselves. And the youngsters hired on to play the foul-mouthed, inebriated, uncultured, promiscuous ninnies of Buckwild will be well paid for their efforts, and, as Americans chortle at them, they’ll chuckle all the way to the bank.

Third, they perform a useful service. Most folks watching fools don’t want to become fools themselves. They laugh. And, in so doing, begin to grow up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.