Archive for April, 2011
Egalitarianism Run Amok
The modern liberal’s quest for equality over liberty takes many forms, and you can count on the editorialists at The New York Times to promote them all, sooner or later. Today, they’re urging the Pentagon to “officially integrate small armor and infantry units with women.”
Why? Well, female soldiers, they note, are already involved in de facto combat situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least peripherally. But the main reason, they make clear, is that women’s “careers are crimped as leadership promotions flowed more to men with combat experience.” Indeed, the editors tell us that the March 7 report of the Military Leadership Diversity Commission found “ethnic, gender and cultural problems hindering career advancement in the military,” leading the Times to aver that “the nation’s female soldiers deserve a fair chance at advancement.”
Never mind the Israeli experience with women in combat. (There’s a nation that can’t afford social experiments in its military.) The Times dismisses objections as mere “shibboleths.” And not at all do the editors acknowledge that our military has one and only one function – not global law enforcement, not humanitarian intervention, certainly not facilitator of equal-opportunity career advancement, but to protect our liberties against threats from abroad, by means that will ensure that end, swiftly and with the least cost to our soldiers and ourselves.
Reforming Indigent Defense
The Wall Street Journal law blog has a piece up on how the budget crisis is impacting public defenders:
Funding constraints have prompted states and counties to lay off public defenders, hold the line on salaries, and reduce the amount defenders can spend case investigators and staff training, the WSJ reports.
Public defenders maintain that they should be insulated from budget cuts for two reasons, the first being that they were sorely underfunded before the recession came along. Secondly, they point to the fact that states have a duty, enshrined in Gideon v. Wainwright, to provide indigent criminal defendants with the right to counsel.
Stephen J. Schulhofer and David Friedman recently published a Cato Policy Analysis, Reforming Indigent Defense that proposes a free market solution: use vouchers instead of public defenders. This would eliminate the overhead of keeping defense attorneys on the public payroll and improve the quality of representation. As they put it in a related op-ed:
Vouchers would greatly improve the quality of defense representation, because attorneys hoping to attract business would have to serve their clients well. Better representation will, in turn, produce at least three benefits for society. First, improving defense services will reduce the potential for mistakes. It will be less likely that innocent persons will be wrongfully convicted and less likely that the actual perpetrators will remain free to repeat their offenses.
Second, improving defense services will minimize adverse consequences even for those who would be acquitted under current systems of indigent defense. A better defense makes it more likely that the innocent will be released from custody sooner, with less disruption to their lives and less expense for the jails that hold them.
Third, improving indigent defense will bring better information to the sentencing process — making it more likely that appropriate, cost-effective punishments will be imposed on those who are guilty.
My colleague Tim Lynch will speaking on Capitol Hill today at a related event, The Last Sacred Cow: How Congress Can Cut Criminal Justice Spending Without Compromising Public Safety.
Thursday Links
- One thing is clear after President Obama’s speech yesterday: He envisions a smaller national debt, but a much bigger government.
- One percent is better than nothing, but it’s still pretty close to nothing.
- One thing is clear about climate change: it’s causing a rising tide of red ink in Washington. See the forthcoming book Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of Our Government and Our Lives and join us for the accompanying book forum, featuring MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen and American Meteorological Society fellow Bob Ryan, on Wednesday, May 4 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern. Complimentary registration is required of all attendees by 12:00 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, May 3. If you cannot join us in person, we hope you’ll watch live online.
- One cannot be serious about reining in reckless spending without putting the Pentagon on the chopping block.
- One need not look very far to see how similar Republicans and Democrats are:
‘We’re All In This Together’
Today POLITICO Arena asks:
Given that Planned Parenthood’s online donations have shot up over the last two months, is Mike Pence (R-Ind.) correct to say it could — and should — operate without taxpayer funds?
My response:
Given that many Americans believe that abortion is murder, of course Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading abortion provider, should not be publicly funded. (And please don’t say that no taxpayer funds go for abortions: money is fungible.)
Democrats think that almost everything should be publicly funded – education, health care, retirement, the arts. What’s next? News? Entertainment? Oh, I forgot: NPR and PBS. But only that programming that meets their exacting standards. FOX News? Faget about it! Where you from? Kansas? And they wonder why there’s a Tea Party.
The Obama OLC’s Bogus Argument for a ‘Historical Gloss’ on the Constitution
Last week, the Obama Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel released its formal opinion [.pdf] on the President’s “Authority to Use Force in Libya.” OLC is the professional corps providing advice to the president on the legality of his actions, and it’s a much-coveted berth for ambitious lawyers. But, reading the memo over (it’s officially dated April Fool’s Day—make of that what you will), it occurred to me that, personally, I’d sleep better at night as in-house counsel for Fannie Mae or Archer Daniels Midland.
Though the Office is supposed to help the president “take Care that the laws be faithfully executed,” OLC lawyers typically end up telling their immediate employer, “why, yes: the action you’ve already decided to take turns out to be perfectly constitutional.” The Libya memo perfectly illustrates that dynamic.
Per OLC, the constitutionality of our Libyan adventure “turns on two legal questions”:
1. Do the bombing raids and airstrikes the president ordered “serve sufficiently important national interests” to make them permissible exercises of his constitutional powers as “Commander in Chief and Chief Executive”?
2. are “the military operations that the President anticipated ordering” limited enough in ”nature, scope, and duration,” such that they do not “constitute a ‘war’ requiring prior specific congressional approval under the Declaration of War Clause?”
In a post over at the Washington Examiner’s blog, I address the second argument, pointing out that, by the Secretary of Defense’s own admission, what we’re doing in Libya is “war,” even if the Obama team prefers Orwellian euphemisms like “kinetic military action.”
As for the first question, whether airstrikes on Libya serve “sufficiently important national interests,” is quite beside the point. The Constitution either gives the president the power to start nondefensive wars or it doesn’t. (It doesn’t). Whether any particular use of the asserted power is “in the national interest” isn’t a legal question, and executive branch lawyers in the president’s thrall are about the last people anyone actually interested in the national interest would consult for the answer.
Obama’s Tax Increase Trigger: Punishing Taxpayers with Automatic Tax Hikes When Politicians Overspend
Responding to widespread criticism of his AWOL status on the budget fight, President Obama today unveiled a fiscal plan. It already is being criticized for its class warfare approach to tax policy, but the most disturbing feature may be a provision that punishes the American people with higher taxes if politicians overspend.
Called a “debt failsafe trigger,” Obama’s scheme would automatically raise taxes if politicians spend too much. According to the talking points distributed by the White House, the automatic tax increase would take effect “if, by 2014, the projected ratio of debt-to-GDP is not stabilized and declining toward the end of the decade.”
Let’s ponder what this means. If politicians in Washington spend too much and cause more red ink, which happens on a routine basis, Obama wants a provision that automatically would raise taxes on the American people.
In other words, they play and we pay. The last thing we need is a perverse incentive for even more reckless spending from Washington.
Budget Agreement: Overall Spending Increases
Republican and Democratic leaders have agreed to cut federal funding by $38 billion this year (versus fiscal 2010). What does that mean for the overall spending picture?
Based on estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, total federal outlays will still rise by approximately $177 billion.
New Evidence on the Costs of Mandating Disclosure
Over the next few years, most arguments about campaign finance regulation will be about extending mandated disclosure to some of the independent spending freed up by the Citizens United decision.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, James L. Huffman offers a unique perspective on mandated disclosure: he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate last year. He argues that mandated disclosure means incumbents know who funded the campaigns of their challengers. Incumbents do not have to actually threaten anyone; disclosure plus circumstances means a cautious businessperson will stay clear of electoral participation. Huffman also claims that some people who might have contributed to his campaign heard from associates of his opponent who said contributing to Huffman might be a bad idea.
We have heard such testimony before about the malign effects of disclosure. George Soros said some potential contributors to his efforts to unseat former President George W. Bush stayed on the sidelines because of concerns about publicity (see James V. Grimaldi and Thomas B. Edsall, “Super Rich Step Into Political Vacuum; McCain-Feingold Paved Way for 527s” The Washington Post, October 17, 2004). Now we have a Senate candidate citing “dozens” of examples of a similar chilling of political speech.
Some might think incumbent protection is no longer a problem since 69 House seats changed hands in 2010 (and a similar number in the two previous House elections). If you think that, please recall that the House has 435 seats, all of which could potentially change hands. Yes, the advantages of incumbency have become somewhat smaller in recent years. But those advantages remain significant, and disclosure does increase the risk of contributing to a challenger, especially when the odds are overwhelming that those now in office will win re-election.
What should be done? Huffman notes that many Americans consider mandated disclosure to be all benefits and no costs. We might begin by gaining a more realistic view of the disclosure calculus. That more realistic view should include the costs of disclosure including lower participation and the ways mandated disclosure make public debates more irrational. At a minimum, existing disclosure thresholds should be dramatically raised. Forcing disclosure of the names of those who contribute less than $1,000 serves no public purpose.
We also should not mandate disclosure of the names of those who support speech independently of candidates and the parties. The only justification for such a mandate would be educating the voters. In other words, voters are thought to look for cues about who to vote for by considering who spends money on speech favoring a candidate. Does that seem plausible? If not, forced disclosure of independent spenders would not be constitutional. If Congress nonetheless enacts disclosure for independent spending, the U.S. Supreme Court should rigorously consider both the end served by such laws and the relationship between the means of disclosure to that end. Does disclosure of independent spending really educate any voters? If so, what about the costs to free speech identified by Professor Huffman? Once we set aside conventional pieties, does forcing people to tell government officials about their political activities really offer much to nation? Or does such coercion do little more than indulge those who equate politics with the pleasures of preaching hatred of those they despise?
Last year I wrote a Cato policy analysis of the justifications for disclosure after Citizens United.
Just a Cog in the National Project
Brad Thompson’s excellent new book, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, adroitly dissects this pernicious political philosophy. He has received some criticism for attempting to demonstrate that Leo Strauss, the philosophical godfather of so many neocons, had a certain sympathy with fascism. Indeed, while stating that he is not saying neoconservatives have fascist designs, Thompson does suggest that their philosophy could pave the way to a kind of “soft fascism.” Far be it from me to pass judgment on such academic debate, but it is interesting to consider the following from the noted neocon columnist for the New York Times, David Brooks, writing in that paper on March 10:
Citizenship, after all, is built on an awareness that we are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a common enterprise. Our lives are given meaning by the service we supply to the nation. I wonder if Americans are unwilling to support the sacrifices that will be required to avert fiscal catastrophe in part because they are less conscious of themselves as components of a national project.
Wednesday Links
- “Whatever your views on climate change, you ought to find it unsettling that, here and elsewhere, most of the actual ‘law’ in this country is crafted by unelected executive-branch bureaucrats.”
- “The Framers’ Constitution freed us, to make our own individual choices.”
- “The world’s dictators are fleeing for their lives, all because of Secretary Clinton’s efforts.”
- “Total spending jumped by almost $2 trillion during the Bush-Obama spending binge, so a $39 billion cut is almost too small to mention.”
- The Founders would agree with the idea that “it should be hard to get into wars and easy to leave them“:
Obama Needs to Look at the Other Side of the Ledger
In his speech this afternoon, President Obama is expected to call for, among other things, an increase in taxes on investors, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and other “rich” people who make over $250,000 a year. The goal, the President claims, is to reduce deficits.
America has a spending problem, not a revenue problem, as the Congressional Budget Office chart below shows. The federal budget has ballooned nearly $2 trillion in the past 10 years and that increased burden of spending is undermining growth. And if left on autopilot, the spending crisis will get worse in coming decades. Rather than trying to keep up with that growing burden of government — an impossible task — by raising taxes, our leaders should be looking at ways to treat the underlying problem: Our government is too big and it spends too much. We cannot tax our way out of this problem, particularly since politicians will spend any additional revenue.
The federal tax burden will rise above the historical average of 18 percent of GDP with no help from President Obama. Even without expiration of the Bush tax cuts or the alternative minimum tax, the tax burden is expected to climb because even modest economic growth slowly but surely pushes more and more people into higher tax brackets.
The chart below shows CBO’s estimate of personal income tax revenue based on current policy (as opposed to estimates based on current law, which includes already legislated tax hikes). To be more specific, it shows how much revenue the government will collect from the individual income tax even if the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are made permanent and the AMT is indexed.
The aggregate individual income tax burden will increase by roughly 5 percentage points of GDP when compared to the long-run average of about 8 percent of GDP (the CBO estimate only goes to 2035, so I extrapolated to show the same time period as the first chart). And remember, this is the forecast of what will happen to income tax revenues even if politicians don’t impose any new laws to coercively extract more revenue.
This might not be too bad if other taxes were falling, but that’s not what CBO is projecting. As such, this big increase in revenue from the individual income tax means that the overall tax burden will climb by approximately the same amount.
In other words, revenue likely will rise close to 25 percent of GDP as we approach the next century. So if we use this more realistic baseline, we can say that more than 100 percent of the long-run deficit problem is because spending is out of control.
The second reason for a firm no-tax increase position is that higher taxes are a very ineffective way of reducing budget deficits. Indeed, tax increases generally backfire and lead to more red ink. To understand why, it’s important to put away the calculator and instead consider the real world of politics and public policy. For instance:
Tax increases rarely raise as much revenue as predicted by government forecasters. This is because of “Laffer Curve” effects, as taxpayers change their behavior to earn less income and/or report less income. Simply stated, people respond to incentives, and this means taxable income falls as tax rates increase.
o Tax increases erode pressure to control spending. Why would politicians want to make tough decisions and upset special interest groups, after all, when there is going to be more revenue (or at least the expectation of more revenue)? Using more colloquial language, trying to control spending with higher taxes is like trying to cure alcoholics by giving them keys to a liquor store.
o Milton Friedman was right when he said that, “In the long run government will spend whatever the tax system will raise, plus as much more as it can get away with.” In other words, if politicians think they can get away with deficits averaging, say, 5 percent of GDP in the long run, then the the only impact of higher taxes is an equal amount of additional spending – while still retaining deficits of 5 percent of GDP.
The real-world evidence certainly points in this direction. We’ve seen “bipartisan budget summits” several times in Washington, and the result is more spending rather than lower deficits.
America’s fiscal challenge is too much spending. Government is too big and it is wasting too much money. Taking more money from the American people is not the way to solve that problem.
The ‘Privacy Bill of Rights’ Is in the Bill of Rights
Every lover of liberty and the Constitution should be offended by the moniker “Privacy Bill of Rights” appended to regulatory legislation Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ) introduced yesterday. As C|Net’s Declan McCullagh points out, the legislation exempts the federal government and law enforcement:
[T]he measure applies only to companies and some nonprofit groups, not to the federal, state, and local police agencies that have adopted high-tech surveillance technologies including cell phone tracking, GPS bugs, and requests to Internet companies for users’ personal information–in many cases without obtaining a search warrant from a judge.
The real “Privacy Bill of Rights” is in the Bill of Rights. It’s the Fourth Amendment.
It takes a lot of gall to put the moniker “Privacy Bill of Rights” on legislation that reduces liberty in the information economy while the Fourth Amendment remains tattered and threadbare. Nevermind “reasonable expectations”: the people’s right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures is worn down to the nub.
Senators Kerry and McCain should look into the privacy consequences of the Internal Revenue Code. How is privacy going to fare under Obamacare? How is the Department of Homeland Security doing with its privacy efforts? What is an “administrative search”?
McCullagh was good enough to quote yours truly on the new effort from Sens. Kerry and McCain: “If they want to lead on the privacy issue, they’ll lead by getting the federal government’s house in order.”
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