Archive for November, 2007
How Much Defense Spending Is Enough?
Over at the National Interest, my boss Ted Carpenter has been slugging it out with former senator Jim Talent over (originally) Fred Thompson’s proposal to spend 4.5% of GDP on defense.
Ted notes correctly that we already spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined, but Sen. Talent is nonplused. To the contrary, he protests that
the Navy must buy new DDG-1000 destroyers, ramp up procurement of Virginia-class submarines, and buy large numbers of littoral combat ships and the next-generation cruiser. The Air Force must buy its new superiority fighter, the F-22, as well as Joint Strike Fighters or equivalent aircraft and additionally fund its strategic-airlift requirement, design and build a new tanker and develop an interdiction bomber to replace the B-52. The Army must modernize and replace almost its entire capital stock of fighting vehicles.
How does Ted oppose doing the things Sen. Talent says we “must” do? Because, according to Talent, he
ignores the risks created by: the collapse of democracy in Russia, the rapid growth of Chinese power and the reemergence of Chinese national ambitions, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to rogue states and unstable governments, the rise of Islamic fanaticism empowered by the tools of asymmetrical warfare, and the intense ethnic and religious rivalries that have led to genocide on a vast scale in Europe, Africa and Asia in the last twenty years.
This is an interesting exercise in bait-and-switch. So the justifications for buying new battleships, the Joint Strike Fighter, and a new bomber are supposed to include all of these things? How is the Joint Strike Fighter going to deal with the collapse of democracy in Russia? How would new battleships help us deal with nuclear proliferation? And how would a new bomber help us deal with “the rise of Islamic fanaticism empowered by the tools of asymmetric warfare” or “the intense ethnic and religious rivalries that have led to genocide on a vast scale in Europe, Africa and Asia in the last twenty years”?
The Right Way to Engage China
The United States and China reached an agreement yesterday on a dispute over alleged Chinese export subsidies. In exchange for the U.S. government dropping a case it was pursuing through the World Trade Organization, China agreed to end subsidies that the U.S. claimed were promoting exports and hindering imports of steel, wood, IT products, and other manufactured goods.
Details of the case aside, the announcement shows how trade disputes with China can be resolved without resort to threats of retaliatory tariffs. This is not the first time China has changed its trade laws in response to pressure from the United States through the WTO. In 2004, China dropped a discriminatory tax refund on domestically produced semiconductors after the U.S. government filed a complaint.
Today’s announcement is another vindication of resolving trade disputes with China through a rules-based system rather than through threats of unilateral retaliation. China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 not only committed China to lowering trade barriers on a broad range of goods and services; it also brought China into the generally effective WTO dispute settlement mechanism.
In two weeks, Treasury Secretary Paulson, U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab and other cabinet members will meet with their Chinese counterparts in Beijing as part of the ongoing Strategic Economic Dialogue. As today’s announcement verifies, the SED represents the right approach to encouraging China to continue its evolution toward a more free and open economy.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Trade and Immigration
NCLB: Putting Swine before PIRLS?
At least among education wonk-ish types, it’s well known that on national and international assessments American students perform best in 4th grade, decline by 8th grade, and do dismally in high school. Well yesterday a report was released—the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS)—which hinted that even our vaunted 4th graders might be losing ground. And this despite the fact that since 2002 the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has “demanded” good results starting in the 3rd grade.
There is, it should be noted, a bit of good news in PIRLS: Our kids scored above the PIRLS average—set at a “scale score” of 500—in both 2001 and 2006. But then, one would expect our kids to perform above average since we are the world’s leading economic power and, according to the PIRLS report, our gross national income (GNI) per-capita, after adjusting for purchasing power, was surpassed by only Norway and Luxembourg among PIRLS participants.
And then there’s the bad news. It starts with our average score dropping a tad between 2001 and 2006, going from 542 to 540. Worse, several countries and territories we’d beaten in 2001, including Russia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, surpassed us in 2006. And we can’t blame poverty for our problems: None of the places that moved ahead of us, at least as measured by GNI, are as well off as we are economically.
Importantly, the analytical limitations of average scores, and the generally small changes seen between 2001 and 2006, make PIRLS far from a final word on either NCLB or the general progress (or lack thereof) of American education. However, when coupled with other recent testing results, PIRLS adds to an increasingly clear conclusion about NCLB: the law is at best having no positive impact on American education, and is very likely having a negative one.
Judicial Restraint and the Second Amendment
Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, has a column on HuffingtonPost and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution arguing that the Supreme Court should uphold the D.C. gun ban and reject the idea that when the Constitution says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” it means that people have the right to keep and bear arms. His basic argument, summed up in the title, is that “The will of the people must not be overruled.” He pounds away at that theme:
Last March, the District of Columbia saw judicial activism replace the will of the people….
More than 30 years ago, the elected representatives on the D.C. City Council decided to enact a system of strict gun laws to help protect public safety. The people in D.C. strongly support these laws….
[The Court of Appeals] imposed their own policy preferences on the people of D.C.
It was a textbook example of judicial activism at its worst….
If the justices reject judicial activism and refrain from substituting their own policy preferences for the people’s elected representatives, then the District of Columbia will prevail. And so will the American people.
As a lawyer and a lifelong Republican, I have deep respect for judicial precedent, for American history and for a close reading of all the words in the Constitution. As one who served as mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind., for 12 years, I also believe in the importance of local communities being able to pass the laws they believe will help keep them safe.
It’s a powerful argument, and it may well resonate with the conservative justices who think that judges often overreach and “substitute their own policy preferences” for those of the people’s elected legislators. But I wonder if Helmke really believes that judges should respect the will of legislators and not strike down laws. Does he believe that the Warren Court should not have struck down school segregation, which was clearly the will of the people’s elected representatives–and no doubt the people–in Kansas, as well as in South Carolina and Virginia, whose similar cases were combined with Brown? Does he believe that the Supreme Court was wrong to strike down Virginia’s law against interracial marriage in 1967? The Texas law outlawing sodomy in 2003? The Communications Decency Act in 1997? Does he indeed think the John Marshall Court was wrong to invalidate a section of the Judiciary Act of 1789 in Marbury v. Madison? That’s the implication of his ringing words in defense of legislative absolutism.
I don’t think he believes this for a minute. I am sure he agrees with Cato’s constitutional scholars that the Supreme Court has an obligation to strike down laws that exceed the powers granted to Congress or that violate the rights protected in the Bill of Rights. He just doesn’t want the Court to apply that rule to the right to keep and bear arms. But in fact there’s an increasingly broad consensus among scholars that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. And thus the Court should do its duty and find that an absolute ban on gun ownership by law-abiding citizens clearly exceeds any power of reasonable regulation that might be permitted under a properly understood Second Amendment.
Hyde Will Be Missed
Former Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois, who died this 
morning in Chicago at the age of 83, was a friend of the Cato Institute who worked closely with us in our efforts to put a spotlight on the abuses flowing from America’s civil asset forfeiture law. A staunch defender of the war on drugs, Rep. Hyde saw nonetheless that not every tactic the government used in that war could be justified. In particular, the government’s seizure for itself of private property that merely “facilitated” a crime, often from completely innocent people, drove him to do whatever he could to end such abuses. He called hearings, at which Cato scholars were invited to testify. Then in 1995 Cato published his book, Forfeiting Our Property Rights: Is Your Property Safe from Seizure? The tone of the book was captured in its opening words:
Much of what you may have learned in school or college about your rights and liberties no longer applies. Increased government and police powers, rising criminal activity and violence, popular anxiety about drug use–all have become justifications for curtailing the application of the Bill of Rights and the individual security it once guaranteed.
The book was a ringing indictment of the government’s war on private property through the awful practice of civil asset forfeiture. More hearings followed its publication, culminating in a reform bill, which Hyde unveiled as the keynote speaker at a 1999 Cato conference. Hyde was tireless in shepherding the bill through both houses of Congress, fighting the Justice Department all the way, and in obtaining President Clinton’s signature. We will miss him.
Henry Hyde, RIP
Rep. Henry Hyde died this morning. He was one of the “elder statesmen” in the GOP and, as this article says, was known around the capital for his courtly manners. Hyde and Cato found common ground in the mid-1990s as the government was seizing property left and right under the guise of civil forfeiture laws. Cato published his book, Forfeiting Our Property Rights: Is Your Property Safe from Seizure?
Here’s a brief excerpt from that book:
I think it evident that an individual’s free nature indicates clearly that we are self-providers, that we naturally want to support ourselves and our families. But when an individual is robbed of his or her property, of the right to ownership of material goods, that individual then becomes subject to the will, caprice, and power of others in a way that degrades the dignity and independence of his or her human nature. And when this power is concentrated in the hands of government, it becomes an even greater threat to life and liberty. … My personal belief, which prompted my writing this book, is that there is an immediate need for restoration of the constitutional principles that are debased by the current application of asset forfeiture laws.
Hyde shepherded reform legislation through the Congress following the publication of his book. Although Hyde and Cato had disagreements–especially with respect to term limits–he had kind things like this to say: “The Cato Institute has consistently provided a much-needed and very certain trumpet among the unreasoning cacophony that is everyday Washington.”
Greenwald on the GOP and Limited Government
While I’m on the subject of Glenn Greenwald, I should point out his great response to David Brooks’s latest column on the alleged death of small government conservatism. Greenwald cites a Cato study by Gene Healy and Tim Lynch on the Bush administration’s terrible civil liberties record to make the broader point that the Bush administration has abandoned the limited government ideals that animated the Republican party in under the leadership of Goldwater and Reagan:
But neoconservatism — which is really what the right-wing pro-Bush movement has become — doesn’t believe in any of that, and Brooks’ column demonstrates that they are admitting that more and more explicitly. Instead, it touts a radical and authoritarian nanny-statism that seeks, at its core, to provide feelings of protection, safety, and moralistic clarity — “security leads to freedom” — all delivered by political leaders using ever-increasing federal government power and limitless militarism. Whether one believes in that radical and warped vision of the American federal government is, more than any other factor, what now determines one’s political orientation.
I have argued several times before that the radicalism of the Bush presidency and the neoconservatism on which it is based has resulted in a fundamental political re-alignment. As Brooks points out, the issues that shape our political spectrum and determine one’s political orientation have changed fundamentally — Brooks contrasts today’s predominant issues with those of the 1970s in order to demonstrate this shift, but the shift is just as drastic even when one compares today’s predominant political issues to those that drove the key political dispustes as recently as the 1990s.
There is one principal reason for this shift — the Bush presidency and the political movement that supports it is not driven by any of the abstract political principles traditionally associated with “liberalism” or “conservatism.” Whatever else one wants to say about the Bush presidency, it has nothing to do with limiting the size, scope and reach of the federal government. The exact opposite is true.
On every front, the Bush administration has ushered in vast expansions of federal power — often in the form of radical and new executive powers, unprecedented surveillance of American citizens, and increased intervention in every aspect of Americans’ private lives. To say that the Bush movement is hostile to the limited-government ends traditionally associated (accurately or not) with the storied Goldwater/Reagan ideology is a gross understatement.
Of course, our own Ed Crane saw this coming almost a decade ago, observing in 1999 that the future President Bush had absolutely no interest in carrying on the Goldwater/Reagan tradition of limited government.
America’s Hall Monitor
Odd as it may seem, there are libertarians who are Giuliani enthusiasts–and some who even find “America’s Mayor” “electrifying.” David Boaz and David Weigel each provide some very good reasons to doubt that a Rudy presidency would be good for American liberty, among them his 1980s prosecutorial “reign of terror” against Wall Street, his unhinged approach to foreign policy, and an authoritarian streak that ought to disturb civil libertarians. But for a shorter indictment, it’s hard to beat this anecdote from Newsweek’s recent feature “Growing Up Giuliani”, in which the ambitious, officious young Rudy sounds like a cross between Douglas C. Neidermeyer and Tracy Flick:
Giuliani managed a friend’s campaign that year, hiring a U-Haul with a loudspeaker to cruise outside the school, but his highest office was hall monitor. He seemed to enjoy wearing a badge and disciplining students for minor infractions, such as talking during a fire drill. “He had a stern look,” says Jack J. Rengstl, another former Loughlin student. In the yearbook, in the usual “Most likely to …” categories, he was voted “Class Politician.”
Stenographers to the Powerful
There’s a mini-scandal brewing over a Time magazine column by Joe Klein that attacked House Democrats for playing politics with the domestic wiretapping issue. Klein wrote that the House Democratic proposal would, among other things, “require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court” and “give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans.” In an accompanying blog post he accuses Democrats of standing in the way of sensible legislation “because of blind, stupid partisan politics.”
Now, as Ryan Singel ably demonstrates virtually every word of the FISA discussion in Klein’s article is false. The Dems’ proposal doesn’t require court approval to intercept communications overseas, nor does it “give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans.” The bill isn’t that long or complicated; had Klein bothered to actually read it, it would have been obvious that these characterizations were false. Klein even seems confused about which legislation the House has been considering. Klein issued a weasely follow-up post on his blog on Saturday conceding that he “may have made a mistake” in discussing the details of the bill but sticking by his “larger point” that House Democrats were to blame for holding up sensible legislation.
Today, Time issued its own correction to the online version of the column, and will apparently print that correction in the magazine as well. It reads, in its entirety:
In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.
As Glenn Greenwald points out, it’s hard to find a pithier summation of all that’s wrong with our nation’s media elites. The editors of the nation’s most popular newsweekly apparently don’t believe it’s their job to evaluate the two sides’ competing claims and decide which is more credible. They seem to believe that “balance” simply requires faithfully transcribing each side’s claims. Even when one side’s claims is clearly true and the other side’s claim is clearly false, it’s not the reporter’s job to say so, or even to quote an independent expert saying so.
And that, of course, leaves Time’s four million readers with the erroneous impression that the Democrats want to give overseas terrorists the same legal protection as American citizens. Most readers aren’t going to take the time to read the bill and disentangle the competing claims. Most don’t read Glenn Greenwald’s blog, Ryan Singel’s blogs, or Cato@Liberty.
It’s worth mentioning the broader context here. The House Democrats’ bill, known as the Restore Act, is far from perfect. It allows the executive branch to intercept foreign-to-domestic calls on American soil without a warrant in certain circumstances, which I think runs afoul of the spirit of the Fourth Amendment. But the legislation is much better than the Protect America Act Congress passed in August, and better than the companion legislation being discussed in the Senate. And the House Democrats have resisted intense lobbying from the telecommunications industry to give them retroactive blanket immunity for illegally sharing their customers’ private information with the government. They deserve more credit than anyone else in Congress or the White House for putting principle above political expediency.
Klein has rewarded them for their courage by repeating inaccurate Republican talking points and thereby smearing them as soft on terrorism. By refusing to print a meaningful correction—one that points out that the Democrats proposal does not, in fact, “give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans”—they are perpetuating the false impression that thousands of ordinary Time readers got from Klein’s column. And they are also starkly revealing the sad state of elite journalism.
Constitutional Reform in Latin America?
Yesterday I went over to the Organization of American States (OAS) for a roundtable on “Constitutional Reform in the Americas.” The event featured opening remarks by the OAS Secretary General, followed by country-specific presentations by experts on Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Venezuela.
I won’t bore you with the details, but three themes emerged:
1) The ever-expanding constitutions of many Latin American countries, both to strengthen strongmen (Chavez) and to add to the copious list of positive rights (Brazil). This is not good for either constitutionalism or rule of law because on the one hand you have the country’s founding document being changed at the whim of a single man and on the other a constitution bloated with such things as the fundamental right to, e.g., four weeks’ paid annual vacation decreases in legitimacy. To paraphrase an old Argentine lawyer who advised that country’s last significant amendment process in 1993-94, “constitutional inflation leads to rule of law devaluation.” Alternatively, the Latin American counterpart to the old saw about French constitutions being filed in libraries’ periodicals section is that Latin ones are filed as encyclopedias.
2) The desire to constitutionalize (or rebalance constitutional structures relating to) the “special rights” of indigenous peoples. There is nothing wrong per se with wanting to recognize that certain native peoples preceded the arrival of European colonists/conquerors (British-American in the U.S., Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America) and that these people should not be exploited as a result of their having been vulnerable to colonization. But to enact wholesale nationalizations and special privileges on the basis of race, or caste, or tribe — let alone raise these perversities to the constitutional level as is being proposed in Bolivia — is a political and legal travesty.
3) The battle over political reform is no longer, if it ever was, between left and right or socialism and neoliberalism (the common Latin American term for pro-market policies and the Washington Consensus), but rather between democracy and authoritarianism. This may not represent that much of a change from the past — the populist governments that plagued the region in the 20th century could be alternately left or right wing — but it does confirm that the “consolidating democracy” project of the ’80s and ’90s has stalled if not taken a reverse. That is, the narrative that those of us studying Latin America in college and grad school in the late ’90s to early 2000s learned — the Third Wave of democratization, Latin America finally being on the right path but just needing time to grow economically – underestimated some nasty undercurrents of resistance.
In short, the roundtable was equal parts fascinating and frustrating. You can watch it (in Spanish) here.
Filed under: International Economics and Development; Law and Civil Liberties
Lind on Libertarianism
Michael Lind is at it again, proclaiming the death of libertarianism on the op-ed pages of the Financial Times. “The two great trends now,” he writes, “are the collapse of libertarianism as a political force and the rise of economic populism.”
In the piece Lind provides a potted history of America’s evolving political economy. In the opening act of 1932-1968, New Deal welfare-state liberalism occupied the political center, flanked on the left by economic populism and on the right by Eisenhower-style “dime store New Deal” conservatism. Then came the shift to the right during 1968-2004, when welfare-state liberalism was shunted to the left, a newly assertive libertarianism occupied the right, and moderate conservatism commanded the center. Now, according to Lind, anxieties over globalization have led to the rout of the libertarians and the rebirth of populism. So we’re back to where we began, with welfare-state liberalism in the center (where, according to Lind, it rightfully belongs).
I’ll concede that we’ve seen a cyclical shift in recent years somewhat along the lines Lind describes. The political terrain has become more difficult for supporters of free markets and limited government, and more inviting for Lou Dobbsian populism.
But we need to be careful to distinguish between cyclical and secular change. Lind focuses on the back-and-forth of the pendulum and misses the fact that the whole clock has been moving. And it’s been moving in a generally libertarian direction.
Lind merrily proclaims that welfare-state liberalism has reclaimed the center that it occupied during 1932-1968. But he ignores the fact that welfare-state liberals today are dramatically more libertarian on economic issues than their predecessors in their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Nobody these days seriously supports a return to a 70% top income-tax rate, or Keynesian fine-tuning, or interest-rate controls for banks, or the phone monopoly, or regulated trucking; nobody touts nationalization or wage-and-price controls as cures for what ails.
The economy today is dramatically more competitive and entrepreneurial today, and markets are dramatically less regulated, than was the case a few decades ago. And notwithstanding Lind’s fond hopes for a return of the New Deal liberal ascendancy, there is little reason to believe that this huge secular shift is going to be reversed in the foreseeable future.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Political Philosophy
Edwards vs. Edwards on Hunger
My prior post on hunger in the United States attracted some comments in the blogosphere regarding what presidential candidate John Edwards has been saying about the issue.
Candidate Edwards has been claiming that 35 million Americans are going hungry. For example, in recent Thanksgiving comments he said: “More than 35 million Americans went hungry last year.”
That is not true. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is the official source for such statistics. Here is what the agency says:
“USDA does not have a measure of hunger or the number of hungry people. Prior to 2006, USDA described households with very low food security as ‘food insecure with hunger,’ and characterized them as households in which one or more people were hungry at times during the year because they could not afford enough food . . . In 2006, USDA introduced the new description “very low food security” to replace “food insecurity with hunger.”
O.K., well how big is the group called “very low food security?” If you look at the chart here, you see it is at most about 3% of the population (about 9 million people), or those with an episode of “very low food security” even a single time during a year.
In sum, this appears to be a good topic for a Washington Post’s Pinocchio analysis.
Is Rudy Running for Editor of the Weekly Standard, or President of the United States?
Lest one worry that Rudy Giuliani’s campaign consists of little more than repeating “9/11″ over and over again, it’s worth having a look at his appearance yesterday at the “Politics and Eggs” event in New Hampshire to see what he’s up to. It appears he’s most focused on currying favor with the couple dozen or so die-hard neoconservatives who buzz around Washington complaining that President Bush isn’t hawkish enough.
First, Giuliani assembled a world class cadre of extremists to staff his foreign policy team, including David “End to Evil” Frum, Norman “I Hope and Pray that President Bush Will Bomb Iran” Podhoretz, Michael “The Case for Assassinating Foreign Leaders” Rubin, and a host of others.
But then, at yesterday’s Politics and Eggs breakfast, Giuliani played some dog-whistle politics, blasting away at the State Department for having undermined the Bush administration’s foreign policy. “We have to do a better job of explaining ourselves,” Giuliani observed. “The core of diplomacy is being able to explain the United States in various parts of the world, in cultures that might be very different, and it’s our job to understand them better.”
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics
The Biological Process that Dare not Speak its Name
A century and a half after Darwin penned On the Origin of Species, the Florida state board of education is considering adding the word evolution to its official curriculum. Until now, it has been referred to only obliquely as “biological changes over time.”
At least one school district (of which Florida has only a handful) is already balking at the proposed change.
Most of my fellow evolutionists seem to think that government-mandated instruction in evolution, in state run schools, is the ideal path to biological enlightnment. Personally, I think 150 years of foot-dragging before seriously considering the use of the word evolution bodes ill for the quality of instruction that will follow.
Two Tax Rates Catching On
A few years ago, I proposed a major overhaul of federal taxation with a plan I called the dual-rate income tax. (See here and here). The plan would get rid of virtually all credits and deductions, be favorable to savings and investment, and compress the current six-rate system down to two lower rates.
I proposed the idea to the president’s tax reform panel in 2005, but the panel didn’t bite. Panel co-chair, former Senator John Breaux, said: “Chris, I looked at your plan; I don’t like it.”
But this year, the two-rate idea is catching on. House Republicans led by Paul Ryan have proposed a two-rate plan called a Simplified Tax. (Please join us to hear Mr. Ryan speak about his plan on December 6). And yesterday, presidential candidate Fred Thompson included a two-rate plan in his platform.
In the long-run, Americans should follow the lead of more than 20 countries that have enacted flat taxes. Meanwhile, the two-rate plan would represent a huge step toward that ultimate goal.
Which Secretary Chertoff Do You Believe?
In February, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the following about the REAL ID Act: “If we don’t get it done now, someone is going to be sitting around in three or four years explaining to the next 9/11 Commission why we didn’t do it.”
Alice Lipowicz of Washington Technology reported on REAL ID yesterday:
[Chertoff] and other DHS officials have said that older drivers present a lower terrorism risk and, therefore, might be allowed more time to switch to Real ID licenses. According to the Washington Post, DHS might extend the deadline to 2018 for drivers older than 40 or 50. Moreover, states will have more time to implement the act, Chertoff said.
DHS had previously extended the statutory May 2008 deadline for beginning implementation to December 2009 and recently set 2013 as the deadline for full implementation.
2013 is more than 5 years from now – 2018 is more than eleven. For all Chertoff’s urgency at the beginning of the year, has the Department abandoned its mission to secure the country?
Of course not. But Chertoff and the DHS were clearly trying to buffalo the Congress and the American people on REAL ID earlier this year. They haven’t succeeded.
Happily, this national ID system doesn’t add to our country’s security as its proponents have imagined. We are not unsafe for lacking a national ID. I explored all these issues in my book Identity Crisis.
If REAL ID were a sound security tool, pushing back the deadline for compliance would be a security risk, of course, as would reducing the quality of the cardstock used to make REAL ID-compliant cards – another measure DHS is considering.
Forget security, though. DHS is straining to get the program implemented just so it can claim success and save some face.
“[T]hose who are singing a funeral dirge, I think they’re singing the wrong tune,” Chertoff said November 6th. Alas, as before, Secretary Chertoff is the one more likely to sing a different song.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Privatize Marriage
Stephanie Coontz, a historian, suggests in the New York Times that government get out of the marriage business. Why, she asks, “do people — gay or straight — need the state’s permission to marry?”
For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.
For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.
So, she says, “Let churches decide which marriages they deem ‘licit.’ But let couples — gay or straight — decide if they want the legal protections and obligations of a committed relationship.”
It’s a great idea. Indeed, it’s such a good idea that I proposed it in Slate back in 1997:
So why not privatize marriage? Make it a private contract between two individuals. If they wanted to contract for a traditional breadwinner/homemaker setup, with specified rules for property and alimony in the event of divorce, they could do so. Less traditional couples could keep their assets separate and agree to share specified expenses. Those with assets to protect could sign prenuptial agreements that courts would respect. Marriage contracts could be as individually tailored as other contracts are in our diverse capitalist world. For those who wanted a standard one-size-fits-all contract, that would still be easy to obtain. Wal-Mart could sell books of marriage forms next to the standard rental forms. Couples would then be spared the surprise discovery that outsiders had changed their contract without warning. Individual churches, synagogues, and temples could make their own rules about which marriages they would bless.
One of the problems with this whole idea is that, as usual, the state has entangled itself in our lives. There are 1049 federal laws that mention marital status, most of them dealing with taxes or transfer payments. If marriage becomes a matter of private contract, the federal government will still have to decide whether to recognize all such contracts for the purpose of handing out marital benefits. And that doesn’t even get into custody, inheritance, property, next-of-kin, hospital visitation and other sorts of laws usually handled at the state level. Just another example of how the intrusion of the state into every corner of society makes it difficult to privatize any aspect of life. But it’s good to see the idea getting some discussion.
This Week at the Supreme Court
Notwithstanding last week’s agreement to hear the D.C. guns case — the announcement of which managed to be both later than originally expected and earlier than expected after the decision’s postponement – the Court has gone back to putting itself out of business by reducing its workload to nothingness. (How’s that for judicial restraint?)
The Court has granted review to 51 cases this term, putting it about at the same pace as last year, when only 68 cases were decided after argument. This is down from the 70-low-80s of the previous 15 years (except 92 in 1997-98), which itself is down from the 100-110 pace before that (and, for example, 129 in 1973).
But forgetting the numbers game, this week the Court is hearing four arguments, in cases involving: 1) private causes of action under ERISA (Larue v. DeWolff); 2) the deductibility of financial advisers’ fees from trust/estate taxes (Knight v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue); 3) whether New Jersey may construct a natural gas facility on the Delaware River over Delaware’s objection (New Jersey v. Delaware); and 4) the federal preemption of a (Maine) state law that blocks the delivery of Internet-bought tobacco to teenagers (Rowe v. New Hampshire Motor Transport Assn.). Not too exciting, other than that case 3 comes in under the Court’s rare original jurisdiction (meaning no state or lower federal court first ruled on the matter).
On Friday, the justices are scheduled to hold a private conference to discuss more pending cert petitions, with orders on those expected next Monday. The safe bet is that they’ll deny them all — though there is one interesting case (McDermott v. Boehner) where one sitting congressman is suing another over the latter’s disclosure to reporters of an illegally taped (and embarrassing) phone conversation. Stay tuned.
Are 35 Million Americans Going Hungry?
A news story and op-ed in the Washington Post recently noted that about 35 million Americans, or more than 10% of the population, are “food insecure.” It sounds like there is a massive underclass of people in the nation who are so poor that they can’t get enough to eat and are going hungry. No doubt that is the idea that many articles want to put across on the reader.
But is the hunger problem really that big? Let’s go to the official definitions and data at the Department of Agriculture:
Definitions: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FoodSecurity/measurement.htm
Data: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FoodSecurity/howoften.htm
It seems to me that it’s only the “very food insecure” folks who might be sometimes going hungry. Less than 3% of the population is very food insecure at any time during a given month, and that drops to less than 1% on any given day.
Douglas Besharov has argued that the main food-related health problem today is obesity, not hunger. Poor Americans are generally suffering not from too little food, but from too much of the wrong kinds of food.
According to federal data, about two-thirds of American adults are “overweight” and about half of those are “obese.” Those rates are actually higher for adults below the poverty level. Similarly, children below the poverty line are more likely to be overweight than other children.
Despite these modern realities, food subsidy programs continue to support an out-of-date model of increasing the caloric intake of low-income Americans. It’s time to cut them. See further discussion here.
Filed under: General; Tax and Budget Policy; Trade and Immigration
More on Bulgaria Flat Tax
Adding to Dan’s note, here is today’s story from Tax Notes International (no link):
The Bulgarian parliament passed a new flat tax on income on November 16, making Bulgaria the seventh EU member state to adopt a flat tax regime . . .
The new flat tax will replace Bulgaria’s progressive, three-bracket income tax, with a flat 10 percent tax on income starting in 2008. Bulgaria had already slashed the corporate tax from 15 percent to 10 percent in 2006 . . .
Bulgaria is the latest in a number of Central and Eastern European countries that have replaced progressive systems with flat tax regimes. The flat tax revolution was pioneered by Estonia in 1994, and since then about 20 countries in Central and Eastern Europe have followed suit.
In this country, many pundits and presidential candidates would reverse President Bush’s modest reduction in the top income tax rate from 40% to 35%. Those rates are more than three times higher than the new flat tax rate in Bulgaria, a former communist country.
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