Archive for July, 2011
Al Qaeda on the Ropes
A front-page story in today’s Washington Post reports that al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self, and finds that there is even talk among senior defense and intelligence officials of the organization’s imminent demise.
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta declared during a recent visit to Afghanistan that “we’re within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda.” The comment was dismissed by skeptics as an attempt to energize troops while defending the administration’s decision to wind down a decade-old war.
But senior U.S. officials from the CIA, the National Counterterrorism Center and other agencies have expressed similar views in classified intelligence reports and closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill, officials said.
“There is a swagger within the community right now for good reason,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), the ranking Republican on the Senate intelligence committee.
“Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is nowhere near defeat,” Chambliss said, referring to the Yemen-based affiliate. “But when it comes to al-Qaeda [core leadership in Pakistan], we have made the kind of strides that we need to make to be in a position of thinking we can win.”
It is unfortunate that this story is filed in the “news” category. Al Qaeda has been on the ropes for some time. It is, at best, “a fragmented and unmanageable movement.“ But if senior officials are willing to speak so publicly about our recent gains, it may signal something significant.
As many have noted, one of AQ’s goals (and the goal of many other terrorist organizations) is to induce a counterproductive and self-injurious overreaction on the part of its target audience or government. The best approach, though it is difficult to achieve in practice, is to avoid terrorizing ourselves. If, many years from now, historians conclude that AQ was never as threatening as we made it out to be, they may deem the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on homeland security post-9/11, and the trillions more spent on wars that were once believed connected to the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT), to have been an enormous waste of resources. We will be seen as having played into Osama bin Laden’s “bleed and bankruptcy” strategy. Alternatively, in-depth analysis may find certain low-visibility (and likely low-cost) policies to have been particularly effective at degrading the organization’s capabilities, and ultimately foiling bin Laden’s ridiculously grandiose schemes for world domination.
For now, U.S. officials continue to issue advisories of a danger from al Qaeda. The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that a State Department global travel warning urged Americans to “take precaution and maintain vigilance about terrorist threats, demonstrations and the possibility of violence against U.S. citizens.” If Secretary of Defense Panetta is feeling confident, the folks in Foggy Bottom appear not to have received the memo. This policy disconnect–with some officials believing we are safer while others warn of impending danger–may be caused by bureaucratic inertia, the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, or merely an elaborate scheme to deflect blame in the unlikely event that an attack occurs at some later date.
For now, while we should cheer al Qaeda’s rapidly diminishing hold on our collective psyche, we still seem a long ways from that place Sen. John Kerry spoke of during the 2004 presidential campaign:
”We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.”
”As a former law enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”
How’s that Big-Government Environmentalism Workin’ For Ya’?
I don’t know what conclusion the correspondent who sent me this pair of articles meant for me to draw, but I think they nicely illustrate how centralizing power with the federal government fails to advance environmental values, while eroding others.
First, there’s the AP story showing deep and extensive ties between offshore oil and gas companies and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Enforcement and Regulation. That’s the renamed Minerals Management Service, the agency that was supposed to prevent things like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill last summer.
Everyone dreams of a “real regulator” that will clean up industry, protect public values, and smartly manage economic activity. What you routinely end up with is a pro-industry self-dealing agency that fails to protect the values it was assigned while mismanaging productive activity. Case in point.
Next, woe be it to the environmental activist who goes monkey-wrenching government-industry plans. Tim DeChristopher has been sentenced to two years in prison and fined $10,000 for derailing a government auction of oil and gas leases near two national parks in Utah. DeChristopher ran up bids on 13 parcels totaling more than 22,000 acres near Arches and Canyonlands national parks, then failed to make good on his bids.
I suspect I would find DeChristopher’s environmentalism at least overwrought, but when did it become a criminal offense to default on an auction bid? When the government got into the business, that’s when. Instead of, say, pre-qualifying bidders, it evidently just uses its monopoly on coercion to lock up people who mess around with its action.
Command-and-control is probably the simplest way to advance environmental values, but it has failed so dramatically so many times, and it fosters a punitive state that jails its citizens. The simplest way to advance environmental goals may not be the best.
If you prioritize the environment, and if you’ve read this far in this post, I suspect you might be willing to consider more harmonious ways of pushing for a greener planet, ways that respect and use private property rights and that don’t put people in jail. Free-market environmentalism exists, though it’s a ways off from here.
You Should Support a Value-Added Tax…if You Want Bigger Government and More Debt
I testified before the House Ways & Means Committee yesterday. As always, my trip inside the belly of the beast was an interesting adventure.
The tax-writing committee was holding a hearing on the value-added tax. I was on a panel with five other witnesses, and all of the other people testifying were sympathetic to a VAT. But since I had truth on my side, that made it a fair fight (though it did cross my mind that it’s not a good sign when a Republican-controlled committee stacks the witnesses in favor of a European-style tax system).
I made two points. First, a VAT is less destructive than the current income tax. As such, if we somehow repealed the 16th Amendment and replaced it with something ironclad that would prevent the income tax from ever again haunting the land, I would gladly make a trade.
But that’s not going to happen, so my second point was to warn that the VAT would be a recipe for bigger government. And even though some of my fellow witnesses said the revenue could be used to reduce deficits, I pointed out that Europe adopted VATs beginning in the 1960s and that hasn’t stopped welfare states such as Greece and Portugal from spending themselves into a fiscal crisis.
This chart, which is similar to what I included in my testimony, compares spending and debt levels in EU-15 nations (Western Europe) and the United States. As you can see, the burden of spending and debt is onerous in America (red columns), but even worse in Europe (blue columns).
That doesn’t prove that a VAT causes bigger government and more debt, to be sure, but it certainly seems to suggest that the other side is smoking dope when they claim a VAT will lead to deficit reduction. Instead, it seems like Milton Friedman was right when he warned that, “In the long run government will spend whatever the tax system will raise, plus as much more as it can get away with.”
I made some of these points in my VAT video.
P.S. Here are three very good cartoons on the VAT (here, here, and here).
Wyden Pressing Intel Officials on Domestic Location Tracking
Back in May, during the debates over reauthorization of the Patriot Act, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) began raising a fuss about a secret interpretation of the law’s so-called “business records” authority, known to wonks as Section 215, arguing that intelligence agencies had twisted the statute to give themselves domestic surveillance powers Congress had not anticipated or intended. At the time, I marshaled a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that, I thought, suggested that the “secret authority” involved location tracking of cell phones. Wyden backed off after being promised a secret hearing to address his concerns—but indicated he’d be returning to the issue if he remained unsatisfied. The hearing occurred early last month. Now I suspect we’re seeing the other shoe dropping.
At a confirmation hearing this morning for Matthew Olsen, who’s been tapped to head the National Counterterrorism Center, Wyden repeatedly asked the nominee whether the intelligence community “use[s] cell site data to track the location of Americans inside the country.” This comes on the heels of a letter Wyden and Udall sent to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper demanding an answer to the same question. Olsen was unsurprisingly vague, calling it a “complicated question” but allowing that there were “certain circumstances where that authority may exist.” The committee was promised a memo explaining those “circumstances” by September. That means that just about ten years after Congress approved the Patriot Act, a handful of legislators may get the privilege of learning what it does. Ah, democracy.
On a related note, one of the data points I cited in my previous post was that Wyden’s Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act had, somewhat unusually, been structured primarily as a reform to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which governs intelligence spying, only later incorporating the same protections into the statutes governing ordinary criminal investigations. Especially striking was the inclusion of a specific prohibition on the use of Section 215 for location tracking, above and beyond the general warrant requirement. Since that writing, however, the bill gained Republican co-sponsorship, and dropped the changes to FISA that had previously been the bill’s centerpiece. Instead, the bill now contains an explicit exception for FISA “electronic surveillance,” in addition to the section providing for location tracking authorized by either a criminal or a FISA warrant. I’m not privy to whatever negotiations necessitated that change, but it’s hard to imagine anyone would have insisted on such a substantial restructuring if the intelligence community weren’t doing at least some location tracking pursuant to a lower standard than probable cause.
It’s not entirely clear exactly what the current version of the bill would permit, however. FISA is mentioned twice in the draft: once as part of a vague general exemption for “electronic surveillance,” and then again as one of the sources of authority for a “warrant” to do geolocation tracking. At a first pass, though, those two definitions ought to overlap, because FISA requires a secret intelligence court to issue a warrant based on probable cause (to believe the target is an “agent of a foreign power”) for government monitoring that falls within the FISA’s definition of “electronic surveillance,” in contrast with the far laxer standards that apply to the use of Section 215. It’s therefore an interesting puzzle what, exactly, that exception is meant to permit. Possibly the idea is to permit the (otherwise prohibited) “use” and “disclosure” of geolocation information already obtained without a warrant in order to target future judicially authorized “electronic surveillance,” but it’s hard to be sure. What does seem increasingly sure, however, is that location tracking is connected to the controversy over Section 215—and that Congress owes the American people a debate over the proper use and scope of that power, which it has thus far refused to have.
Texas Court Rules For Eminent-Domain Critic
Good news from Texas, where a state appeals court has handed a major win to investigative journalist Carla Main, whose book Bulldozed: ‘Kelo,’ Eminent Domain, and the American Lust for Land took a critical look at the seizure of private land under eminent domain laws for purposes of urban redevelopment. Dallas developer H. Walker Royall didn’t like what Main wrote about his involvement in a Freeport, Texas marina project and proceeded to sue her, publisher Encounter Books (which I should note is also my own publisher on Schools for Misrule), and even liberty-minded law professor Richard Epstein over a dust jacket blurb Epstein had given for the book. (Earlier coverage of the suit here and here.)
A trial court had declined to dismiss Royall’s claims on summary judgment, but yesterday Judge Elizabeth Lang-Miers reversed in substantial part, ruling that Royall had failed to make the requisite showing that key passages in Bulldozed had in fact defamed him. The case is not yet over, but Institute for Justice senior attorney Dana Berliner, who argued for the defense, is understandably jubilant: “Walker Royall has failed in his attempt to use this frivolous defamation lawsuit as a weapon to silence his critics,” she said. Moreover, outrage at Royall’s suit contributed to Texas’s enactment this summer (joining 26 other states) of strong “anti-SLAPP” legislation aimed at curbing lawsuits intimidating speech. You can read the opinion here, and early coverage at Gideon Kanner’s blog, the Dallas Observer and D Magazine.
Thoughts on the Boehner Plan
These are the times that try budget analysts’ souls—especially budget analysts who’d like to see Washington dramatically cut spending. The debate over lifting the debt ceiling has produced a number of proposals from Capitol Hill—none of them have been worth celebrating. We can now add House Speaker John Boehner’s latest proposal to the pile.
Boehner’s proposal boils down to the following: cap discretionary spending over 10 years to achieve $1.2 trillion in savings; have (another) bipartisan group of policymakers come up with $1.8 trillion in “deficit reductions” over ten years; and get a vote on a balanced budget amendment. In exchange, the president would get to increase the deficit by $900 billion this year and by another $1.6 trillion next year.
Here are some thoughts on Boehner’s plan:
- Under the Congressional Budget Office’s optimistic spending baseline, the federal government will spend $46 trillion over the next ten years. Obviously, reducing spending by $1.2 trillion oven ten years is relatively small.
- The same dysfunctional congress that treats entitlement programs like lit sticks of dynamite is supposed to come up with $1.6 trillion in “deficit reduction.” Note that we’re not even talking specifically about spending cuts here, so that figure would likely include tax increases assuming they’re able to even come up with something.
- Under the Boehner plan, spending and debt will continue to rise. At the most, the plan would produce an average of $300 billion a year in cuts in exchange for increasing the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion over the next two years.
- Boehner’s bill includes language that tightens up the definition of what constitutes “emergency” spending. Congress regularly slaps the “emergency” designation on all sort of non-emergency spending bills. I have no faith that the new language will stop the foxes guarding the henhouse from continuing to devour chickens.
- Where are the immediate spending cuts? Once again, we have the promise of cuts but no specifics. Even if the discretionary caps hold the line on that portion of spending, total federal spending (and debt) will continue its unsustainable upward climb. Entitlement spending is the biggest driver of our long-term budgetary problems but entitlement spending isn’t capped under the Boehner plan.
In sum, this plan is another stinker. But with Harry Reid controlling the Senate and Barack Obama sitting in the White House, the votes just aren’t there to get a plan passed that sufficiently addresses our fiscal mess by reining in the size and scope of government.
The New York Times on Anders Breivik
My Washington Examiner column this week looks at the rush to score partisan points over the horrific slaughter in Norway last Friday.
In it, I argue that blaming Al Gore for the Unabomber, Sarah Palin for Jared Loughner, or Bruce Bawer for Anders Breivik makes about as much sense as blaming Martin Scorcese and Jodie Foster for the actions of John Hinckley. In general, “invoking the ideological meanderings of psychopaths is a stalking horse for narrowing permissible dissent.”
And right on cue, here’s today’s New York Times editorial on Breivik, decrying “inflammatory political rhetoric” about Muslim immigration in Europe:
Individuals are responsible for their actions. But they are influenced by public debate and the extent to which that debate makes ideas acceptable — or not. Even mainstream politicians in Europe, including Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France have sown doubts about the ability or willingness of Europe to absorb newcomers. Multiculturalism “has failed, utterly failed,” Mrs. Merkel said last October.
Oh, Grey Lady: you had me at “individuals are responsible for their actions,” but you lost me after “but.”
Because, maybe there are, in fact, limits to the ability or willingness of Europe to absorb newcomers. And perhaps multiculturalism has failed. I don’t know—I don’t live in Europe, and I don’t follow its immigration debates closely. But contra the Times‘ editorialists, it seems to me that these ideas are “acceptable,” in the sense that they might actually be true, and that you ought to be able to debate them without thereby becoming morally responsible for the actions of lone psychotics.
Virtually every European immigration skeptic manages to participate in that debate without resort to violence, just as vanishingly few hard-core environmentalists try to promote their ideas by means of armed assault. The actions of the deranged few don’t tell us much about what’s wrong with those political stances.
As others have pointed out, the notion that you should “watch what you say” in political debates amounts to giving a sort of “heckler’s veto” to the biggest nutjobs within earshot.
As a means of avoiding horrifying—but thankfully rare—events like mass shooting sprees, it doesn’t seem terribly promising. But it might help you temporarily intimidate your ideological opponents—which is why it’s a perennially popular tactic.
‘Project Veritas’ Releases New Medicaid Fraud Video
Available here. Something about Medicaid employees coaching faux Russians on how to hide income and assets so as to enroll their father in Medicaid.
I’m not sure how much of what Project Veritas has found counts as fraud. But I’m pretty sure it’s chump change compared to this stuff:
It is interesting, and consistent with the thesis of this video and my National Review article, that Project Veritas’s Medicaid-fraud videos haven’t garnered nearly as much attention as their other “stings.”
Senate Finance Hearing on Debt
I testified to the Senate Finance Committee today regarding federal spending and debt.
Here are some of the points I made:
- Last night, President Obama called for a “balanced solution” to our fiscal problems, including tax increases and spending cuts. However, CBO projections do not indicate that we face a “balanced” problem. Instead, projections show that the deficit problem is caused all on the spending side of the budget.
- The United States has sadly become a big-government country. Until recently, government spending in this country was about 10 percentage points less than the average of OECD countries. That smaller-government advantage has now shrunken to just 4 percentage points.
- In recent years, policymakers have given us the largest deficit-spending “stimulus” since World War II, yet we are suffering from the slowest economic recovery since World War II.
- Rising government spending suppresses GDP because the government’s “leaky bucket” gets leakier and leakier as spending increases.
- Leaders in Congress are talking about cutting spending by $3 trillion over 10 years, or roughly $300 billion per year. The result would be that spending would rise from $3.6 trillion this year to $5.4 trillion in 2021, rather than the currently projected $5.7 trillion. That would be only a 5 percent cut. Interest savings would reduce spending a little more—but, come on Congress, you can do better than that!
The Minefield of American Criminal Law
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran an excellent article about the problem of overcriminalization—the proliferation of criminal laws and how more and more people can find themselves on the wrong side the law without even realizing it. Here’s an excerpt:
In 2009, Mr. Anderson loaned his son some tools to dig for arrowheads near a favorite campground of theirs. Unfortunately, they were on federal land. Authorities “notified me to get a lawyer and a damn good one,” Mr. Anderson recalls.
There is no evidence the Andersons intended to break the law, or even knew the law existed, according to court records and interviews. But the law, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, doesn’t require criminal intent and makes it a felony punishable by up to two years in prison to attempt to take artifacts off federal land without a permit.
Read the whole thing.
It’s great that this phenomenon is getting more attention. Too many people in Washington seem to think that the more laws Congress enacts, the better the job performance of the policymakers. That’s twisted. Before an elected official can take any action whatsoever, he or she must first take an oath to uphold and preserve the Constitution—and the role of the federal government in the criminal area is supposed to be quite limited. I testified before a congressional committee two summers ago on this subject. And Judge Alex Kozinski, quoted in the WSJ article above, has a terrific essay in my book, In the Name of Justice, about the score of federal criminal laws now on the books. And Cato adjunct scholar Harvey Silverglate authored a fine book on the problem, called Three Felonies a Day. More here (pdf) and here.
Health Care Entitlements Are the Real Debt Bomb
I’m a few days behind on this, but over at The Corner Yuval Levin has written an important post about how health care entitlements are the real cause of the debt crisis facing the federal government. Using Congressional Budget Office projections, Levin creates this magnificent chart, which I plan to steal over and over again:
If Republicans want to conquer the federal debt, they need to embrace health policy like they embrace tax cuts.
Trade Helps Explain Texas-Sized Job Growth
As its governor, Rick Perry, weighs a run for the White House, Texas has drawn attention for its healthy job growth. Since the recession ended in June 2009, Texas has accounted for half of the net new jobs added to the U.S. economy, according to the lead story in this morning’s USA Today. That’s quite a record for one lone state.
We’ll leave it to others for now to argue over how much credit Gov. Perry can claim. Some credit surely goes to high oil prices, fueling job growth in a sector important to the Texas economy. Another reason for its relatively strong job growth is a friendly business climate, including no state income tax and relatively light regulations. And for those who scapegoat trade for the nation’s persistently high unemployment rate, consider that Texas is the nation’s number one trading state. As the USA Today story notes:
Overseas shipments by Texas’ strong computer, electronics, petrochemical and other industries rose 21% last year, compared with 15% for the nation, according to the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank. The state also benefits from its proximity to Latin American countries that are big importers of U.S. goods … The surge creates jobs for Texas manufacturers and ports.
As I can attest from recent speaking engagements in San Antonio and Laredo, Texans have embraced their state’s position as the nation’s leading gateway for trade with NAFTA-partner Mexico and the rest of Latin America.
While politicians and union bosses from other states grumble about allegedly unfair trade, the latest trade and job numbers show that the people of Texas are making the most of the opportunities created by our more open economy.
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