Making a Joke of Human Rights
Earlier this year, Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama signed legislation that threatens U.S. residents with prison if they fail to purchase health insurance.
This week, his administration told the United Nations that this legislation shows the United States is making progress on human rights.
Biden’s Fatal Conceit
The White House’s misbegotten “Summer of Recovery” continued today with the release of another administration “analysis” that purportedly demonstrates the stimulus’s success in “transforming” the economy.
Vice President Joe Biden unveiled the report alongside Energy secretary Steven Chu and numerous businesses officials willing to serve as political props in return for Uncle Sam’s free candy. Biden bemoaned the nefarious “special interests” that were coddled by the previous administration. What does the vice president think those subsidized business officials attending his speech are called?
The money the White House has lavished on these privileged businesses isn’t free. The money comes from taxpayers—including businesses that do not enjoy the favor of the White House—who consequently have $100 billion (plus interest) less to spend or invest. Therefore, the fundamental question is: Are Joe Biden — an individual who has spent his entire career in government— and the Washington political class better at directing economic activity than the private sector?
Biden repeatedly stated that the “government plants the seed and the private sector makes it grow.” Because the government possesses no “seeds” that it didn’t first confiscate from the private sector, what the vice president is advocating is the redistribution of capital according to the dictates of the Beltway. This mindset exemplifies the arrogance of the political class, which at its core believes that free individuals are incapable of making the “right” decision without the guiding hand of the state.
Unfortunately for Joe Biden, the state’s hand guided the private sector into the economic downturn that the administration and its apologists would have us believe was a consequence of imaginary laissez faire policies. From the housing market planners at HUD to the money planners at the Federal Reserve, government interventions led to the economic turmoil that the perpetrating political class now claims it can fix.
Enough already.
The following are Cato resources that challenge the vice president’s breezy rhetoric on the ability of the federal government to direct economic growth:
- Energy Subsidies: The government has spent billions of dollars over the decades on dead-end schemes and dubious projects that have often had large cost overruns.
- Energy Regulations: Most federal intrusions into energy markets have been serious mistakes. They have destabilized markets, reduced domestic output, and decreased consumer welfare.
- Energy Interventions: The current arguments for energy intervention and energy subsidies fall short.
- High-Speed Rail: Policymakers are dumping billions of dollars into high-speed rail, even though foreign systems are money losers and carry only a small share of intercity passengers.
- Special-Interest Spending: Many federal programs deliver subsidies to particular groups of individuals and businesses while harming taxpayers and damaging the overall economy.
The Public Isn’t Buying
Today POLITICO Arena asks:
Angry Left Obama’s bête noir?
My response:
Would the president help himself by making a clearer ideological declaration — as many on the “professional left” are asking him to do? Hardly. POLITICO tells us this morning that those “professionals” lament “the president’s reluctance to be a Democratic version of Ronald Reagan, who spoke without apology about his vaulting ideological ambitions.” One of those professionals, Robert Reich, urges Obama to present “a clear and convincing narrative into which all the various initiatives neatly fit, so that the public can make sense of everything that’s done.”
The public is quite capable of making sense of everything that’s been done. It’s doing it, and it doesn’t like what it sees. Reagan spoke boldly about his vision because it arose directly from fundamental American principles — individual liberty, free markets, and limited constitutional government. Obama avoids presenting “a clear and convincing narrative” because if he stated his vision more clearly it would be even less convincing than it already is.
Thus, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was right to complain about the criticism’s coming from members of the professional left, who spend their lives cloistered in academia, the mainstream media, and other such redoubts, talking to each other. But Gibbs’s problem is deeper: It’s the product, not the pitch.
Obama Backpedals on Ground Zero Mosque
Politico Arena asks today for continued comment on Obama’s Ground Zero mosque “correction.”
My response
Well, well: What a difference a day makes. Yesterday [Saturday] most POLITICO Arena contributors – including law professors, shockingly – were falling over themselves to defend President Obama’s Friday night Ground Zero mosque remarks — on constitutional principle, no less — while a very few of us were cutting through that nonsense.
Meanwhile, the president and the White House were struggling to get the word out that constitutional principle wasn’t really the point at issue here. It was, rather, the “wisdom” of building a mosque so close to Ground Zero. Now that we’re clear about that, perhaps Arena contributors can focus on that issue, not the straw man they erected to skewer the constitutionally benighted they imagined afoot.
But there’s another issue here, too. On Friday night we saw, once again, the real Barack Obama, the Obama who disparages Americans who “cling to guns or religion,” the Obama who rushes to condemn Cambridge policemen who act “stupidly.” No White House spinmeister can take any of that back
The Half-a-Loaf National Export Initiative
In his State of the Union address this year, President Obama announced a goal of doubling U.S. exports in five years. The “National Export Initiative” has since become the centerpiece of his administration’s trade policy, complete with its own Executive Order, organizational structure, and dedicated website.
Although I would be happy to see exports double in five years, I am skeptical of efforts to enshrine that goal as a national imperative. I worry that Five Year Plans and the setting of export targets puts the United States on the slippery slope to industrial policy, which is being touted nowadays with growing vim and vigor by columnists, politicians and other analysts who wish the United States were more like China.
But the economic straight jacket of industrial policy is not an imminent outcome of the NEI. And some of the reforms under consideration are sensible. For example, efforts to clarify, simplify, and streamline U.S. export control procedures are likely to reduce regulatory obstacles and spur meaningful export growth without imposing new burdens or diverting resources from elsewhere in the economy. Likewise, the administration’s discovery of the virtues of passing the long-pending bilateral trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama could lead to the reduction or elimination of artificial barriers to U.S. exports in a variety of economic sectors.
But while we might rejoice in export-led economic growth, the National Export Initiative suffers from myopia, as it institutionalizes public misperceptions about how trade bestows its benefits on consumers and businesses. Just take a look at the program’s eight focus priorities:
Obama Tells It Like It Is
The New York Times reports:
President Obama signed into law on Wednesday a sweeping expansion of federal financial regulation….
A number of the details have been left for regulators to work out, inevitably setting off complicated tangles down the road that could last for years…complex legislation, with its dense pages on derivatives practices….
“If you’ve ever applied for a credit card, a student loan, or a mortgage, you know the feeling of signing your name to pages of barely understandable fine print,” Mr. Obama said.
Obama Flip-Flops on the Individual Mandate (Again)
The individual mandate has been a tricky issue for Barack Obama, leading him to make some impressive self-reversals.
When campaigning against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama came out hard against an individual mandate to purchase health insurance, alleging that Clinton would garnish workers’ wages and that Massachusetts’ individual mandate has left many residents “worse off”:
He even dismissed an individual mandate by saying, “If a mandate was the solution, we could try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody buy a house”:
Once president, of course, Obama endorsed and signed into law both an individual mandate and an employer mandate.
During the debate over ObamaCare, Obama likewise mocked George Stephanopoulos — no really, he mocked the poor guy– for suggesting the individual mandate is a tax. Obama didn’t mince words: “I absolutely reject that notion.” The relevant exchange begins three minutes into this video:
Now, the Obama administration says the individual mandate is a tax. According to The New York Times:
When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”…
Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.
(My colleagues Randy Barnett and Ilya Shapiro explain how this flip-flop shows the constitutional challenges to ObamaCare aren’t quite as frivolous as supporters claim.)
The next time Obama is in the mood to reverse himself on the individual mandate, he might consider this statement from June 2009:
When you hear people saying, “socialized medicine,” understand that I do not know anybody in Washington who is proposing that–certainly not me.
When the government makes health insurance compulsory, that is socialized medicine. (Why else would ObamaCare win plaudits from Fidel Castro?) It would be nice to hear the president admit it.
ObamaCare Still Unpopular, Especially among Voters
As of mid-July, it appears the American public still opposes ObamaCare, with the opposition strongest among those most likely to vote.
Judging by the latest data at the poll-aggregating site Pollster.com, a solid plurality of adults continues to oppose ObamaCare (46.8 vs. 40.1 percent):
The trendlines don’t look so good for supporters of the law. (The public isn’t so hot about President Obama’s handling of health care, either.) Yet the above graph includes (polls that include) adults who are neither registered nor likely to vote.
If you want to know how public opinion about ObamaCare will influence the November elections, you’ll want to look at polls of likely voters. Those suggest a majority opposes the law (51.3 vs 42.9 percent):
It Depends on What the Meaning of “Tax” Is
The print edition of the Washington Post and the online Real Estate home page feature this headline:
Debunking rumors of a housing sales tax
The article begins:
Rumors are flying that the health-care legislation Congress passed this year will impose a sales tax on all real estate sales.
So I’m thinking, OK, more crazy Glenn Beck tea-party stories about mythical Obama tax hikes, and the Post is going to debunk them. Then I keep reading:
But the rumors are based only partly on fact. Although there is a new tax, it will not apply to everyone, and existing tax breaks for home sales will remain in place.
The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, which President Obama signed into law March 30, is comprehensive and complex. Section 1402, “Unearned Income Medicare Contribution,” imposes a 3.8 percent tax on profits from the sale of real estate — residential or investment.
But the levy is aimed at high-income taxpayers, leaving most people untouched. And it will not take effect until Jan. 1, 2013.
Let’s look at the facts of this new law.
First, it is not a sales tax, nor does it impose any transfer or recordation tax. It is called a Medicare tax because the money received will be allocated to the Medicare Trust Fund, which is part of the Social Security system.
Next, if your adjusted gross income is less than $200,000, you are home free….
How is the tax calculated? Through a complex formula that could be called “the accountants’ protection act.” As a taxpayer, you (or your financial adviser) must determine which is less: the gain you have made on the sale of your house, or the amount by which your income exceeds the appropriate threshold.
So let’s recap here. Post contributor Benny Kass promises to “debunk” the “rumors” that “the health-care legislation Congress passed this year will impose a sales tax on all real estate sales.” And he concludes, “In the meantime, don’t believe the rumors.” But in fact the health-care law did include a new tax on real estate profits. It’s not exactly a sales tax, and it won’t apply to most people. But the only real inaccuracy in the “rumors” that he said “are flying” was the word “all.” It’s only a 3.8 percent tax on some real estate sales, no doubt only a minority of sales, though perhaps affecting more readers of the Washington Post Real Estate section than people in less-affluent regions where housing prices didn’t soar and then remain high. Frankly, I’ve seen more effective debunkings.
This “rumored” real estate tax is also discussed on page 20 of Michael Tanner’s new study “Bad Medicine: A Guide to the Real Costs and Consequences of the New Health Care Law.” But if you’re really going to try to understand the new health-care legislation, you may want to clip the Kass article to keep with your copy of the Tanner paper, as no one study can guide you through every detail of a 2000-page law. Journalists and HR experts will be kept busy for years tracking down every sub-reference and interaction in the bill.
Active Government, Passive Economy
Today, Politico Arena asks a second question:
What does Obama need to do on jobs?
My response:
What does Obama need to do on jobs? Asked about that in his Arena interview today, Rep. Rob Andrews (D-N.J.) answers, “The best thing we could do is encourage banks to lend money.” Encourage them? Banks don’t need to be encouraged: if they can make money by lending it, they will. But that’s just the problem. The regulatory climate under Obama is so uncertain that capital isn’t moving. Andrews adds that “we need to stimulate,” as if we hadn’t already massively stimulated with little to show but massive debt. And he says that “the Wall Street reform bill will help.” Apparently he hasn’t read Stanford economist John B. Taylor’s analysis in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, which concludes: “People may be waking up to the fact that the bill does not do what its supporters claim. It does not prevent future financial crises. Rather, it makes them more likely and in the meantime impedes economic growth.”
Who Were the Best Presidents?
At Politico Arena, the question of the day is:
A new Siena College poll ranks Barack Obama as the 15th best U.S. president (landing him below Bill Clinton, ahead of Ronald Reagan). Franklin Delano Roosevelt earned top honors, while Andrew Johnson was last. Pollsters say Obama is high on imagination, communication and intelligence, but weak on background. On your list of best presidents, where would President Obama land? Who was the best president, and who was the worst?
I responded:
Of course Obama ought to be given an incomplete. But he got a Nobel Peace Prize purely on spec. He does now have 18 months of presidential action, and he has already done many things that establishment political scientists like. Presidential scholars love presidents who expand the size, scope and power of government. Thus they put the Roosevelts at the top of the list. And they rate Woodrow Wilson — the anti-Madisonian president who gave us the entirely unnecessary World War I, which led to communism, National Socialism, World War II, and the Cold War – 8th. Now there’s a record for President Obama to aspire to! Create a century of war and terrorism, and you can move up from 15th to 8th.
George Washington, who made real the Founders’ dreams of a free republic, should surely be rated first. That he is not speaks volumes about the interests and values underlying this survey.
In his book Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty, Ivan Eland gives high grades to presidents who left the American people alone to enjoy peace and prosperity, such as Grover Cleveland, Martin Van Buren, and Rutherford B. Hayes. The fact that you can’t remember what any of those presidents did is a plus. At the bottom he places Wilson, Truman, McKinley, Polk, and George W. Bush. Bush is also rated near the bottom by the Siena poll. But when current passions have faded, and the next generation’s establishment presidential scholars reflect on Bush’s expansion of federal power and executive power, Bush will start rising in the rankings.
I’m also amused by the presidential scholars’ ranking of Lyndon Johnson 1st in the category of relations with Congress. LBJ was known for his vulgar, arm-twisting, threatening, corrupt manipulation of a huge congressional majority. One would hope that congressional scholars might rate higher a president who recognized the constitutional limitations of the executive branch.
Rand Paul Not So Hardcore On Farm Subsidies
Rand Paul, after setting the newswires alight with his controversial stance on the Civil Rights Act, is busy touting his “moderate” credentials.
Moderate, in this case, being a euphemism for “laughably timid.”
In a recent interview with a Kentucky radio station, Paul rejected the charge of his political opponent that he was opposed to farm subsidies. Not true, sayeth Paul. He is “much more moderate than that.”
According to an article in yesterday’s Lexington Herald-Leader, Paul’s less-than-radical view on farm subsidies is that, well, maybe dead people should not receive them:
Let’s just agree that we will get rid of subsidies for dead farmers first,” he said.
After that, Paul said, the government should restrict subsidies to farmers who make more than $2 million a year.
Paul said 2,007 farmers last year whose income was greater than $2 million received subsidies.
“Let’s agree that maybe we can cut them out,” he said.
Despite his “ideologically pure” stance on the CRA, Rand Paul can compromise on issues of freedom when he wants to, for example on drug laws and gay marriage, as Tim Lee points out. And now, apparently, he is to the left of Barack Obama (who favored a $500,000 adjusted gross income limit) when it comes to farm subsidies. Paul’s choice of when to be ideologically pure is curious indeed.
HT: Don Carr at the Environmental Working Group
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