Archive for October, 2006
Criminal Negligence in Iraq
OK, keeping up with energy and enviro related insanity is so difficult that sometimes, it’s easy to fall behind on the newspapers. So over the weekend, I tried mightily to catch up on unread issues from the past week of The New York Times. That explains why I’m so late to catch this amazing review of PBS’s Frontline “The Lost Years in Iraq,” which was published last Tuesday.
Unfortunately, I missed the show, which likewise aired on Tuesday. But here’s a quote from the New York Times review:
Certainly some of the [Iraq Reconstruction Group] staff members seemed a bit underqualified. Colonel Hammes recalls that the person given the job of planning for [Iraqi] prisons and police was 25 and that this was his first job after college. He didn’t worry about having a staff of only four, the young appointee said, because they were all his fraternity brothers.
This is jaw dropping stuff. If I were a Congressman and this information had crossed my desk back in 2003, I would have submitted articles of impeachment of President Bush right then and there. This is criminal negligence and incompetence so amazing that words can’t do the matter justice.
Gotta go back and catch that show.
I Hear Voices
I don’t want to tempt fate by declaring that the tide is turning against the costly and interventionist federal agriculture programs, but there have been several critical (in both senses of the word) editorials and investigative series this year on farm subsidies. The voices protesting about farm programs seem to be getting louder.
For a recent example, bravo to the Washington Post, for its editorial on Saturday denouncing the crop insurance boondoggle — yet another agricultural policy fleecing consumers and taxpayers in order to make farming a risk-free enterprise. The editorial follows a series earlier this year from the Post, entitled ’Harvesting Cash’ (you can view that series here).
The insurance program works thus: the government pays 60 percent of the premiums for crop insurance ($2.3 billion last year), and also pays a fee to insurance companies for administering the program (over $800 million). All this for crop failure losses of $752 million (yes, that’s right, the losses cost less than the administrative fees). The insurance does not, however, remove the “need” for disaster payments — over $6 billion worth since 2000, according to the Roanoke Times.
Taxpayers can sleep well at night, however, knowing they are funding “something good, the rural life”, in the words of a farmer quoted by the Post. (I wonder how much money would flow to farmers if the charity was voluntary?)
Kudos also to the Boston Herald, for their Sunday editorial on the subject (view here) and the Roanoke Times (here) for their own version. The latter editorial could be especially influential since Bob Goodlatte is the representative for Roanoke County and Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.
It is encouraging to note the number and breadth of newspapers covering this subject. The LA Times, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Des Moines Register, the Denver Post, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel have all run editorials on farm programs this year. Let’s hope that the voices are heard, and that voters and their representatives start to demand change.
Energy Markets for Thee, but Not for Me
OPEC’s announcement last Thursday to cut crude oil production by 1.2 million barrels prompted this gem from Energy Secretary Sam Bodman: ”We continue to believe that it is best for oil producers and consumers alike to allow free markets to determine issues of supply, demand and price.” Hearing frank talk about the virtues of free markets in the energy sector is indeed refreshing. Too bad Bodman doesn’t take his own rhetoric seriously. Why should oil supply, demand, and price be left to market actors but not ethanol supply, demand, and price? Or wind energy supply, demand, and price? Or ad infinitum?
Simply put, this administration believes that politicians should dictate energy choices, not markets. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have “Freedom Car” initiatives, clean-coal technology programs, massive new subsidies for nuclear power plant construction, or any of the political madness surrounding ethanol.
OPEC should tell Bodman they’ll embrace markets as soon as Bush does likewise.
Althouse on Judicial Activism
Ann Althouse has an insightful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, which argues that judicial activism is inevitable in a system, like ours, in which the Constitution forces courts to define and protect individual rights. The tough question for Courts isn’t whether to be active or inactive, but how best to define and protect the constitutional rights that courts are institutionally obligated to defend:
There was a time — not all that long ago — when we openly praised the activist judge and scoffed at the stingy jurist who invoked notions of judicial restraint. That restraint was a smokescreen for some nasty hostility toward individual rights, we’d say. Now we all seem to love to wrap ourselves in the mantle of the new fashion [of judicial restraint]. But that fashion comes at the price of candor.
Hat tip: Jonathan Adler.
A Democratic Congress, Scary? Compared to What?
The office of House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) has produced a document titled “Pelosi’s House.” It is a list of
out-of-the-mainstream bills introduced by Democratic Members [that] deserve particular attention because the principle [sic] advocates are the very individuals who would be in a position to schedule committee markups and move the legislation through the Congress should the Democrats take control.
The list includes bills that would nationalize health care, create an adult diaper benefit under Medicare, reduce mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine, etc.
The list is less scary than its authors seem to think. Reducing jail time for selling crack cocaine is actually a good idea. And most of the bills have little support even among Democrats. A bill that would nationalize health care has only 19 cosponsors, which is less than 10 percent of Democratic House members and less than 5 percent of the full House.
I mean really. If the Democrats were to take control of the House, probably the worst they could do is add an expensive new prescription drug entitlement to Medicare.
Oh, wait. The Republicans already did that. So the Democrats would have to shoot for something else, like a new adult diaper entitlement. At least the GOP would go back to opposing such things. Right?
Libertarian Voters Hit the Headlines
Suddenly, a week after David Kirby and I published our study “The Libertarian Vote,” journalists and politicos are taking note of libertarian voters, along with disgruntled economic conservatives and social conservatives. In a story on our study, The Economist writes:
AMERICA may be the land of the free, but Americans who favour both economic and social freedom have no political home. The Republican Party espouses economic freedom — ie, low taxes and minimal regulation — but is less keen on sexual liberation. The Democratic Party champions the right of homosexuals to do their thing without government interference, but not businesspeople. Libertarian voters have an unhappy choice. Assuming they opt for one of the two main parties, they can vote to kick the state out of the bedroom, or the boardroom, but not both.
And that, of course, is why our study found that the 15 percent of American voters who are libertarian swung sharply toward the Democrats in 2004. Although they usually vote Republican, they’re not committed to the GOP. And they realized that the Bush Republicans have not been delivering fiscal responsibility, federalism, or any of the other policies that libertarians and other voters expect from Republicans.
If you think I have a starry-eyed view of some halcyon past when the Republican Party actually believed in small government, check out this Washington Post article that says that gays ”hold a tenuous, complicated spot within the ranks of the GOP, whose earlier libertarian, live-and-let-live values have been ground down by the wedge issue of opposition to gay rights.”
O’Reilly Interviews Bush
Bill O’Reilly got an exclusive interview with President Bush recently. The second and third segments were the most interesting to me.
In the second segment, O’Reilly asks some pretty good questions about torture, such as: How can anyone make a judgment about your policy when it’s all kept secret? Bush repeats his point that the terrorists can’t be told. O’Reilly could have followed up with: “But it’s out there already, isn’t it?”
During the same segment, Bush says when his agents pick up people from the battlefield, he wants to know what they know. O’Reilly should have followed up with: “But to be clear, sir, when you say “battlefield,” you mean any person picked up anywhere, right? So if an American citizen is arrested in Chicago, you are saying that you can employ “tough tactics” against him just on your own say-so, right?
The third segment of the interview is about Iraq. Here Bush restates his case, as you would expect. Still interesting. He seems to believe that having a clearly stated goal is the key to victory. He has established the objective and he believes the finest military in the world can find a way to achieve it. But later Bush says something like ”ultimately, it is up the Iraqi people.” O’Reilly could have followed that up by saying something like: ”Yeah, but that means the Iraqi people might opt for an endless civil war instead of a peaceful political process, right? If they go that route, we get out, right?”
The Search for a Libertarian Democrat
In his writings about “libertarian Democrats,” Markos “Kos” Moulitsas always cites Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer as Exhibit A. In the current Cato Unbound symposium, he writes:
Mountain West Democrats are leading the charge. At the vanguard is Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, who won his governorship the same day George Bush was winning Montana 58 to 38 percent. While the theme of Republican corruption played a big role in Schweitzer’s victory, he also ran on a decidedly libertarian Democrat message.
Hope springs eternal. But alas, in Cato’s “Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors,” released Thursday, Schweitzer gets an F for his taxing and spending policies. Author Stephen Slivinski writes, “Spending in his first proposed budget exploded.” Plus he reinstated an expiring tax.
We’re still waiting for a libertarian Democrat. Really. We’d love to find one.
The Sun Is Shining Bright in St. Louis
Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Gotham — mighty Beltran has struck out.
Hat tip: Ernest Lawrence Thayer.
Grading the Governors
Today, the Cato Institute released the eighth biennial report card on the nation’s governors. It provides an index of fiscal restraint for each governor based on multiple objective measures of fiscal performance. This year there are 23 variables on which the governors are graded – more than the 15 variables of the 2004 report card. The methodology has been improved this time, too. You can find a copy of the report here.
The formula for success in the report card is simple: If a governor cuts taxes and spending the most, he will get a high grade. Raise taxes and spending the most, he’ll get a low grade.
Cutting taxes is important, at least, because doing so makes a state more economically competitive. As I report in the study, between 1990 and 2005 the rates of growth in employment and personal income in the top 10 tax-raising states were lower than the national average. The tax-cutting states, on the other hand, saw economic growth faster than the national average.
Cutting taxes is also important because it reduces the amount of private-sector resources that the government can stake a claim to. Yet that’s only part of the story. While this sounds elementary, it’s a key point. The report card tries to capture how fond a governor is of big government. There are many governors who cut merely cut taxes and think it’s enough to get them a good grade. But if they increase spending, they really haven’t cut the size of government. Thus, the top grades will always go to the governors who keep taxes and spending under control simultaneously. It’s something you rarely find among most governors, Republican or Democrat. That’s why there are always so few “A” and “B” grades in the report card.
GOP Crime Record
This is the glistening new headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms:
IMHO, this is a fitting symbol of the GOP’s administration of the federal government. When the Republicans took control of the Congress in 1995, there was talk of abolishing the ATF for its appalling role in the Waco incident. (For background, read this and/or watch this). But the GOP “grew in office” as they say, and steadily expanded the budget of the ATF and then approved the construction of a fancy new headquarters. There is still oversight, mind you. The ATF director wanted a $65,000 conference table and the Bush administration put a stop to that. Bush’s people cracked down and said “You guys have to make do with a $33,000 table!”
For an article about how ATF continues to run amok, go here.
For an article about the GOP’s criminal justice record over the past 10 years, go here.
Taxing Times
Washington Post headlines Thursday read “Poll Shows Support for Tax Increase” (front page) and “In N.Va., Open to More Taxes” (jump page). And on the website ”Poll Shows Support for Tax Increase.” Well . . . sort of.
It’s true that voters in Northern Virginia (the Washington suburbs), though not the rest of Virginia, want to spend more money on roads. And they support allowing voters to approve local tax increases for roads. But if you read down to the 19th paragraph, on the second jump page, you’ll find that they don’t actually like the idea of raising taxes. Even in Northern Virginia, only 21 percent of respondents said that raising taxes was a good way to pay for increased transportation spending. Twenty-nine percent preferred tolls, and 22 percent said other spending should be reduced. In the rest of Virginia, tolls were more popular and tax increases even less popular.
Sometimes it just seems that journalists like taxes. Which is their right as Americans. But they should be careful about how they present voters’ opinions. In this case, even though voters would like to spend more on transportation, they believe either that users should pay through tolls or that less-essential spending could be found somewhere in the state’s $37 billion annual budget. Seventeen percent statewide seems like fairly minimal “Support for Tax Increase.”
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