Archive for January, 2011
Warning Without Color
Jim Harper noted yesterday that the Department of Homeland Security (after lengthy review) has decided to scrap its color-coded alert system. The change is long overdue–the alerts implied, absurdly, that danger was equally distributed across the nation. The fact that the Department never used the blue and green threat levels (general and low risk), which most accurately describe the true danger most Americans face from terrorism, showed the systems’ inherent threat inflation. Eventually, everyone started ignoring the threat level, officials stopped changing it, and system became a charade.
Jim argues that, in place of the colors, the Department should inform “the public fully about threats and risks known to the U.S. government,” treating us like adults with a shared responsibility for protecting ourselves. According to a report from the National Journal‘s Chris Storm, DHS agrees, sort of. Storm links to a DHS document on the new warning policy, which states:
- DHS will implement a new system that is built on a clear and simple premise: When a threat develops that could impact the public, we will tell you. We will provide whatever information we can so you know how to protect yourselves, your families, and your communities.
- The new system reflects the reality that we must always be on alert and be ready. When we have information about a specific, credible threat, we will issue a formal alert providing as much information as we can.
- Depending on the nature of the threat, the alert may be limited to a particular audience, like law enforcement, or a segment of the private sector, like shopping malls or hotels.
- Or, the alert may be issued more broadly to the American people, distributed — through a statement from DHS — by the news media and social media channels.
- The alerts will be specific to the threat. They may ask you to take certain actions, or to look for specific suspicious behavior. And they will have an end date.
- This new system is built on the common-sense belief that we are all in this together — that we all have a role to play — and it was developed in that same collaborative spirit.
Jeff McKay: A Limp Rag Masquerading as a Terror Warrior
This afternoon I briefly attended a meeting of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority board to comment on the question whether there should be random bag searches in the D.C. area’s subway system. A variety of other liberty loving D.C.-area residents spoke up against bag searches, noting the weakness of the practice in terms of security, the privacy consequences, and the insult to Metro riders in treating all as suspects. The chairman of the Riders Advisory Council asked that the program be suspended.
Along with restating the security weakness of random bag searches—it simply transfers risk from one station to another, from the subway to busses, or from the Metro system to other infrastructure—I emphasized the strategic consequences of the policy:
Terrorists try to instill fear and drive victim states to over-reaction. They try to knock us off our game. The appropriate response is not to give in to fear-based impulses. Obviously, we can and do secure what can cost-effectively be secured. And where infrastructure can’t be secured specifically, many other layers of security are protecting the society as a whole—aware people, ordinary law enforcement, targeted lawful investigation of terror suspects, and international intelligence and diplomatic efforts.
WMATA can play a part in our security, but in a very different way than by making a great show of desperately searching passengers. Refusing the bag search policy can signal to D.C. area residents and the nation that we are relatively secure, because we are. Al Qaeda is on the run, and the franchises it inspired are generally incompetent.
When America’s capital city abandons bag searching, it will be a small but important signal that terrorism doesn’t knock us off our game. Consistency in this message over time will weaken terrorism and ultimately reduce terror attacks from their already low numbers.
There will never be perfect security, but security measures that cost more than they benefit our security make us worse off, not better off. They make us victims of terrorism’s strategic logic.
Fairfax County Supervisor Jeff McKay disagrees. An alternate member of the WMATA board, he is the picture of the politician in thrall to terrorism. During the discussion of the Riders Advisory Council report, he stated—as a moral obligation, no less—that he should assume the existence of substantial threats to the Metro system because some authorities claim secret knowledge to that effect.
Whether there are threats or not, this does not respond at all to the point that random bag searches would not address them. Again, they transfer risk from one Metro station to another, from Metro stations to Metro busses, or from the Metro system to other infrastructure in the D.C. area.
We often joke about politicians who say “something must be done; this is something; this must be done,” but when you see it live and in person, it’s really stupid.
McKay seemed to take righteous pride in abdicating his responsibility to understand basic security principles as they pertain to the Metro system. He did note the bind that the board is in. They’re damned if they do bag searches because of the complaints from the community, and they’re damned if they don’t because something bad might happen.
McKay’s choice is to spend the money of District-area governments and undercut the civil liberties of Metro riders so that, in the unlikely event a terror attack occurs, his political career is protected. He can say “I tried to stop it with bag searches.” Never mind that it was an ineffective measure.
McKay thinks he’s doing the right thing, but that doesn’t excuse his being a patsy to the terrorism strategy. He’s a limp rag, abdicating his security responsibility while pretending that he fights terrorism.
New CBO Numbers Re-Confirm that Balancing the Budget Is Simple with Modest Fiscal Restraint
Many of the politicians in Washington, including President Obama during his State of the Union address, piously tell us that there is no way to balance the budget without tax increases. Trying to get rid of red ink without higher taxes, they tell us, would require “savage” and “draconian” budget cuts.
I would like to slash the budget and free up resources for private-sector growth, so that sounds good to me. But what’s the truth?
The Congressional Budget Office has just released its 10-year projections for the budget, so I crunched the numbers to determine what it would take to balance the budget without tax hikes. Much to nobody’s surprise, the politicians are not telling the truth.
The chart below shows that revenues are expected to grow (because of factors such as inflation, more population, and economic expansion) by more than 7 percent each year. Balancing the budget is simple so long as politicians increase spending at a slower rate. If they freeze the budget, we almost balance the budget by 2017. If federal spending is capped so it grows 1 percent each year, the budget is balanced in 2019. And if the crowd in Washington can limit spending growth to about 2 percent each year, red ink almost disappears in just 10 years.
These numbers, incidentally, assume that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are made permanent (they are now scheduled to expire in two years). They also assume that the AMT is adjusted for inflation, so the chart shows that we can balance the budget without any increase in the tax burden.
I did these calculations last year, and found the same results. And I also examined how we balanced the budget in the 1990s and found that spending restraint was the key. The combination of a GOP Congress and Bill Clinton in the White House led to a four-year period of government spending growing by an average of just 2.9 percent each year.
We also have international evidence showing that spending restraint – not higher taxes – is the key to balancing the budget. New Zealand got rid of a big budget deficit in the 1990s with a five-year spending freeze. Canada also got rid of red ink that decade with a five-year period where spending grew by an average of only 1 percent per year. And Ireland slashed its deficit in the late 1980s by 10 percentage points of GDP with a four-year spending freeze.
No wonder international bureaucracies such as the International Monetary fund and European Central Bank are producing research showing that spending discipline is the right approach.
This video provides all the details.
The Real Scandal of Farm Subsidies
When the Washington Post published a story in 2007 about how dead farmers had received farm subsidies to the tune of over $1bn, most people were horrified (even “farm subsidy moderate” Rand Paul thought they should go!). Although the article made clear that “most estates are allowed to collect farm payments for up to two years after an owner’s death,” and that the payments weren’t necessarily fraudulent, outrage ensued.
But a follow-up investigation by the USDA has found that all but about $1 million of the payments were completely above board. From the Associated Press:
A 2007 report that the federal government had paid $1.1 billion in subsidies to dead farmers sparked an outcry and has been frequently cited by critics who considered the payments a blatant example of wasteful spending. But a follow-up that found no fraud and determined nearly all the subsidies paid on behalf of dead farmers in recent years were proper has received little attention.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency, just a little over $1 million out of the billions of dollars paid in subsidies in 2009 went to estates or business entities that weren’t entitled to them.
“Very little money is going to individuals who have not earned that money. Very little is being paid in error because a farmer has passed away,” FSA Administrator Jonathan Coppess told The Associated Press. [emphasis mine]
Don’t you just love how Mr Coppess uses the word “earned” there?
That’s the real scandal of farm subsidies, readers. Not that they are fraudulent (although that is of course an outrage), but that they are, for the most part, perfectly legal.
As If Gov’t Spending Had Nothing to Do with It
This is how a front-page story in this morning’s Washington Post portrayed the cause of this year’s $1.5 trillion deficit:
Record U.S. Deficit Projected This Year
CBO forecasts tax cuts will push budget gap to $1.5 trillionThe still-fragile economy and fresh tax cuts approved by Congress last month will drive the federal deficit to nearly $1.5 trillion this year, the biggest budget gap in U.S. history, congressional budget analysts said Wednesday.
Federal spending and federal tax revenue play equally important roles in creating the federal budget deficit. Yet the Post blames the deficit only on inadequate tax revenue. Federal spending isn’t too high, the Post implies, tax revenue is too low.
This may not be an example of media bias. But it is an example of why supporters of limited government believe that major news organizations like the Washington Post are biased toward bigger government. At a minimum, the Post has some explaining to do.
And Good Riddance…
The Department of Homeland Security is scrapping the color-coded terror alert system. The color-code system meant to serve as a way of keeping the public informed, but because it signaled some ambiguous sense of “threat” without providing a scintilla of information the public could use, it merely kept Americans ignorant and addled.
Scrapping the color-coded threat system is only the beginning. The next step is to begin informing the public fully about threats and risks known to the U.S. government. We’re adults. We can handle it. In fact, we can help.
Nondefense Discretionary Spending Freezes
When it comes to reining in federal spending, House Republicans and the president have one idea in common: freezing nondefense discretionary spending. That category accounts for about 18 percent of total spending, so let’s see how such a freeze would affect the overall budget.
Today the Congressional Budget Office released updated budget figures and baseline projections of federal spending through fiscal 2021. Projecting the budgetary future is obviously an inexact science, and the CBO’s baseline reflects unrealistic assumptions. However, it does allow us to get an idea of the impact of a nondefense discretionary freeze on total federal spending.
Three proposals have been put forward:
- In his State of the Union address, President Obama proposed freezing nondefense discretionary spending for five years, beginning in fiscal 2012, at fiscal 2010 levels.
- The conservative House Republican Study Committee and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) recently proposed freezing nondefense discretionary spending for ten years, beginning in fiscal 2012, at fiscal 2006 levels.
- Ever since the release of its “Pledge to America,” the House Republican leadership has been talking about returning spending to fiscal 2008 levels. They apparently have non-security discretionary spending in mind, which is an even smaller category than nondefense discretionary. It’s not clear if they intend to freeze it at the new lower level.
Using the CBO’s latest figures, I calculated baseline spending from fiscal 2012-2021 under ten year freezes in nondefense discretionary spending at fiscal 2006, 2008, and 2010 levels:
Note: To make an apples-to-apples comparison, I extended the proposed Obama freeze at fiscal 2010 levels from five years to ten years, and I assumed a ten year freeze at fiscal 2008 levels for the House Republicans. Also, projected annual interest payments on the debt are excluded. Therefore, the chart refers to “baseline program spending,” which is the sum of nondefense discretionary, defense, and entitlement spending.
The chart makes it excruciatingly clear that freezing nondefense discretionary spending at the levels specified or implied by Republicans and Democrats is only a start toward needed reforms in the federal budget. Congress also needs to cut defense spending, and spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs.
A Teaching Moment on Sputnik
President Obama shows greater nostalgia for Sputnik than MST3K fans do for “The Satellite of Love.” But his narrative of how increased federal education spending and intervention spurred advances in student learning has a problem: it’s wrong.
Achievement went DOWN after passage of the National Defense Education Act—Congress’ response to Sputnik. I laid out the evidence here.
It is embarrassing that the president’s advisors have been telling him to repeat a patently false narrative for years. What are they being paid for?
Judges Should Judge
I am pleased to pass on word from our friends at the Institute for Justice that they have established a new Center for Judicial Engagement. The center is dedicated to reinvigorating the judicial branch to stand up and perform its constitutional role instead of showing the deference so many courts now give to the political branches of state and federal government.
As much lip service that has been paid to the bogeyman of “judicial activism,” the reality is that the courts have been all-too-reluctant to sacrifice constitutional questions to acquiesce to the supposed wisdom of political actors. Veteran IJ lawyer and friend of Cato Clark Neily will be heading the center, and had this to say about its mission:
We need judges to judge. What we see too often now is judges who ignore evidence, invent facts, and accept implausible explanations for government regulations. That amounts to judicial abdication. Judges should engage the facts of every case, including constitutional cases, and require the government to justify its actions with real reasons backed by real evidence.
As outlined by IJ in a press release, the basic principles of judicial engagement include:
1. The Constitution limits both the means and ends of government action.
The Framers wrote the Constitution to constrain government power. The Constitution explicitly defines a limited set of powers belonging to the federal government; government actions outside the scope of those powers are illegitimate and unconstitutional. The Constitution also demands that even legitimate powers of government be exercised fairly and without discrimination.
2. The Constitution guarantees a broad array of individual rights.
While the powers granted to government by the Constitution are few and limited, the rights guaranteed to individuals are many and broad. Some of those rights are specifically listed in the Constitution, and some are not. But all rights are entitled to meaningful judicial protection, regardless of their source. There are no “second-class” constitutional rights.
3. The job of judges is to enforce the Constitution.
Judicial review has been a vital part of our system of government for more than 200 years, and it remains a key bulwark against government tyranny and abuse of power. It is the duty of judges to strike down government actions that assume powers not granted by the Constitution or that violate individual rights. It is not “judicial activism” to strike down unconstitutional laws or government actions; it is judicial engagement—taking the Constitution seriously and applying it consistently in all cases. Refusing to strike down unconstitutional acts is not admirable “judicial restraint,” it is judicial abdication—judges literally failing to do their jobs.
4. The government should not have a leg up on citizens challenging government actions.
Laws are not entitled to judicial “deference” simply because they result from a democratic political process. To the contrary, the Framers were deeply concerned about interest-group politics and majority tyranny, and they designed the Constitution to protect individual rights from those dangers. Enforcing a presumption of government power over individual liberty, as courts typically do today, gets this design exactly backwards.
5. Facts matter.
It is impossible to determine the constitutionality of any regulation without determining the government’s actual objectives in enforcing it. But courts often ignore that question altogether, and will accept even the most ridiculous explanations at face value or, when necessary, simply invent justifications of their own in order to uphold government action against constitutional challenge. This is profoundly mistaken. Judges must carefully weigh the facts of each constitutional case, just as they would in any other case, and meaningfully evaluate the government’s action. Ignoring evidence, inventing justifications and rubber-stamping the exercise of government power—which have come to be the norm in the vast majority of constitutional cases—represents abdication, not judgment.
We fully agree — and applaud IJ for adding innovative programming such as this new center to its continuing litigation against the government Leviathan. Please check out the new center’s homepage here and its inaugural declaration here.
Ghailani Gets Life without Parole
In November, a New York jury found Al Qaeda bomber Ahmed Ghailani guilty on only one of 285 charges for his role in the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings. I called it “a good outcome” for a number of reasons, largely agreeing with Ben Wittes.
I’ve disagreed with Wittes on lawfare issues before, but he and Chesney are right on this case: (1) the defendant will serve a minimum of twenty years in jail, possibly life; (2) it’s not certain that the military commissions would have allowed evidence obtained by coercion (Charlie Savage also made this point in his article for the New York Times), (3) the conspiracy conviction in civilian court is solid on appeal, but not necessarily so in a military commission (conspiracy is not a traditional law of war violation, and three sitting Supreme Court justices have questioned its application in that forum); (4) the forum of conviction is less ripe for attack in courts of law and public opinion.
As it turns out, getting convicted on one of 285 serious charges still gets you a serious sentence… life without parole. Regardless of what Andy McCarthy and Marc Thiessen think, chalk this up as a win.
Krugman (Both of Them) on Competitiveness
When it became clear that President Obama would make “competitiveness” a theme of his SOTU address, I looked forward to seeing Paul Krugman’s statement pointing out how much nonsense that is. Here he is, after all, in his excellent 1997 book, Pop Internationalism (MIT Press):
…International trade, unlike competition among businesses for a limited market, is not a zero-sum game in which one nation’s gain is another’s loss. It is [a] positive-sum game, which is why the word “competitiveness” can be dangerously misleading when applied to international trade.
Sure enough, President Obama’s speech last night was peppered with references to “the competition for jobs,” “new jobs and industries take root in this country, or somewhere else, “the competion for jobs is real,” etc. And of course there was a healthy dose of the usual mercantalist obsession with exports.
Although written before the President’s address was delivered, what would Paul Krugman 2.0 think of this sort of talk? The title of his column Sunday was certainly encouraging: “The Competition Myth.” But the substance of the column went in a … er… different direction from that which I had anticipated/hoped:
…talking about “competitiveness” as a goal is fundamentally misleading. At best, it’s a misdiagnosis of our problems. At worst, it could lead to policies based on the false idea that what’s good for corporations is good for America…
So what does the administration’s embrace of the rhetoric of competitiveness mean for economic policy?
The favorable interpretation, as I said, is that it’s just packaging for an economic strategy centered on public investment, investment that’s actually about creating jobs now while promoting longer-term growth. The unfavorable interpretation is that Mr. Obama and his advisers really believe that the economy is ailing because they’ve been too tough on business, and that what America needs now is corporate tax cuts and across-the-board deregulation. [emphasis mine]
In other words, Krugman’s objections to the “competitiveness” rhetoric are based on his fear that it will lead to policies favorable to corporations, not that the whole concept is flawed.
[Disclaimer: the above is by no means an exhaustive analysis of the problematic parts of the column]
I yield to no-one in my admiration for Paul Krugman, trade economist. He made a real contribution to the discipline I’ve loved since I was a teenager. But Paul Krugman, columnist…not so much.
VIDEO: Nine Cato Experts Break Down the 2011 State of the Union Address
In this video reaction to President Obama’s State of the Union address last night, Cato experts Gene Healy, Benjamin H. Friedman, Jagadeesh Gokhale, Neal McCluskey, Sallie James, John Samples, Justin Logan, Daniel J. Mitchell, Michael F. Cannon, and David Rittgers analyze the president’s address, and make note some of the outright fabrications in it:
If you missed our live blog coverage of the State of the Union address, you can scroll back through the conversation this morning.
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