E.  J. Dionne Jr. has suddenly discovered the big-government George W. Bush, 12 years late, and he’s feeling nostalgic:

Perhaps I should thank the current crop of Republican presidential candidates for providing me with an experience I never, ever expected: During this week’s debate in New Hampshire, I had a moment of nostalgia for George W. Bush….

Unlike this crowd of Republicans, Bush acknowledged that the federal government can ease injustices and get useful things done.

Say what you will about his No Child Left Behind education-reform program. It accepted, correctly, that the federal government has to play an important part in reforming our public schools and held them accountable to a set of standards….

And while there are many problems with the way Bush chose to provide prescription drugs under Medicare, he was quite right to believe it had to be done….

Oh, yes, and I really do miss some of Bush’s early rhetoric. I cannot imagine a Republican today giving Bush’s 1999 speech in Indianapolis titled — shades of Barack Obama? — “The Duty of Hope.”

Bush criticized the view “that if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved” as a “destructive mind-set.” He scorned this as an approach having “no higher goal, no nobler purpose, than ‘Leave us alone.’ ”

Stick with us, E. J. We could have told you this in 2007, when Michael Tanner published Leviathan on the Right; or in 2003, when I complained in the Washington Post about Bush’s spending, education program, and entitlement expansion;  or in, ahem, 1999, when Ed Crane wrote in the New York Times:

Bill Clinton’s impact on the American polity was never more evident than in the major address that the Republican Presidential aspirant George W. Bush gave in Indianapolis last week. The speech was, well, Clintonesque [in its] assumption that virtually any problem confronting the American people is an excuse for action by the Federal Government.

E. J. likes that view better than we do, but at least readers of the Washington Post will now realize that Obama’s out-of-control spending, nationalizations, and health care interventions are an extension, not a reversal, of Bush’s policies.

Washington Post Grows Nostalgic for Big-Government Bush is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Habeas corpus applies to anyone, citizen or not, in custody under American law, no matter what President Bush and President Obama decree.
• House Republicans’ cuts to the Department of Education, which will spend over $70 billion next year, didn’t even amount to $1 billion.
• “Regardless of whether Pakistan gets its way, its impudence in pushing Afghanistan to abandon America exposes the real balance of power in the region.”
• “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to refer to a government whose intelligence service assists military efforts by al Qaeda and the Taliban against U.S. troops in Afghanistan as an ‘ally.’”
• Here are five ways to cut military spending today without changing our strategic focus:

Monday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The public has finally started to give President Obama’s economic policies a big “thumbs down”.  This shouldn’t surprise anyone who is familiar with the Misery Index.

While President Obama sings the glories of big government, it is ironic that he has been marked by the curse of government failure.  One metric that measures how this curse will affect the President’s performance is the Misery Index (see the accompanying chart).

The Index is calculated by adding the difference between the average inflation rate over a president’s term and the average inflation rate during the last year of the previous president’s term; the difference between the average unemployment rate over a president’s term and the unemployment rate during the last month of the previous president’s term; the change in the 30-year government bond yield during a president’s term; and the difference between the long-term, trend rate of real GDP growth (3.25%) and the real rate of growth during a president’s term.

I have forecast what President Obama’s most likely Misery Index score will be at the end of his current term.  This miserable score — one that is relative to George W. Bush’s very weak performance in his second term — is already baked in the cake and can be laid squarely at the feet of President Obama’s own policy errors and government failure.  For a president whose agenda is designed to overthrow the Reagan Revolution, the Misery Index should be a sobering reminder that free markets, not big government, generate prosperity.

Obama’s Economic Policies Create Misery is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As Iain Murray points out at National Review‘s “Corner,” there’s no date on the calendar each year that reminds us, the way income tax filing day does, of the huge share of our economic labors that the government commands in the name of regulation. In part this is because the costs of regulation are even better disguised than those of taxation: while paycheck withholding may lull us into complacency about our income tax burden, it is downright transparent compared with the costs of regulation, which the ordinary citizen may never recognize when passed along in the form of higher utility bills or sluggish performance by some sector of the economy. Iain notes the good work done by his colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

Regulations cost $1.75 trillion in compliance costs, according to the Small Business Administration. That’s greater than the record federal budget deficit — projected at $1.48 trillion for FY 2011 — and greater even than all corporate pretax profits. This is only one of many findings of the new edition of Wayne [Crews'] “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State,” a survey of the cost and compliance burden imposed by federal regulations.

As is now becoming evident, the Obama Administration is presiding over one of the most extraordinary expansions of regulation in all American history, in areas from health care to consumer finance, university governance to “obesity policy,” labor and employment law to the environment. Not all these developments originated with Obama appointees — some had their start under President George W. Bush or with lawmakers in Congress — but this administration has pursued stringent regulatory measures with extraordinary zeal, notwithstanding the odd feint to soothe business-sector misgivings.

Here are three more or less random samplings from recent days of the quiet momentum that’s built up in Washington toward a much bigger regulatory state:

• Reflecting the historical development of the Food and Drug Administration, the introduction of new medical devices such as pacemakers and joint replacements is still somewhat less intensively regulated than the introduction of new pharmaceutical compounds. As Emory’s Paul Rubin relates at Truth on the Market, pressure is building in Washington to correct this supposed anomaly by intensifying the regulation of devices. As Rubin notes, “virtually all economists who have studied the FDA drug approval process have concluded that it causes serious harm by delaying drugs,” yet the premise of the new campaign for regulation “is that we should duplicate that harm with medical devices.”
• Much of the new regulation of consumer finance has taken the form of rules governing what information lenders can ask for or consider about borrowers’ situation in extending credit. One such proposed rule, from the Federal Reserve, “would require credit card issuers to consider only a person’s independent income, and not the household’s income, when underwriting credit cards in an effort to protect young adults unable to repay debt.” Great big unforeseen consequence: many stay-at-home parents will now be unable to establish credit in their own names (via).
• Among a slew of other high-profile regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has chosen this moment to demand very rapid new reductions in emissions from industrial boilers (“Boiler MACT” rules). Per ShopFloor, Thomas A. Fanning, who runs one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, the Southern Company, thinks trouble lies ahead:
  

  EPA has proposed Utility MACT rules under timelines that we believe will put the reliability and affordability of our nation’s power system at risk. EPA’s proposal will impact plants that are responsible for nearly 50 percent of total electricity generation in the United States. It imposes a three-year timeline for compliance, at a time when the industry is laboring to comply with a myriad of other EPA mandates. The result will be to reduce reserve margins—generating capacity that is available during times of high demand or plant outages—and to cause costs to soar. Lower reserve margins place customers at a risk for experiencing significant interruptions in electric service, and costs increases will ultimately be reflected in service rates, which will rise rapidly as utilities press ahead with retrofitting and projects to replace lost generating capacity due to plant retirements.

At least we’ll be able to avert brownouts by switching over readily to fracked-natural-gas, Alberta tar-sands, and latest-generation-nuclear options — or we would had all those options not been put under regulatory clouds as well.

If There Were An Annual ‘Regulation Day’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• “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“:

Wednesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Recently, I’ve been blogging over at the Washington Examiner‘s lively “Beltway Confidential” site, mostly on the subject of congressional war powers and President Obama’s Libyan adventure. Today’s post, “Obama Makes ‘Kinetic Military Action’ on the English Language” has a little fun with the administration’s wordgames and the legal rationales behind them. Other posts and a column on the subject are here, here, and here.

Today also brings a pair of columns–in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, respectively–from conservative luminaries defending the notion that Obama has the constitutional power to bomb Libya without congressional authorization. Yoo, the legal architect of George W. Bush’s Terror Presidency, chides Tea Party Republicans like Jason Chaffetz of Utah and Justin Amash of Michigan for questioning Obama’s authority to launch a nondefensive war:

Their praiseworthy opposition to the growth of federal powers at home misleads them to resist Washington’s indispensable role abroad. They mistakenly read the 18th-century constitutional text through a modern lens—for example, understanding “declare war” to mean “start war.” When the Constitution was written, a declaration of war served diplomatic notice about a change in legal relations between nations. It had little to do with launching hostilities. In the century before the Constitution, for example, Great Britain fought numerous major conflicts but declared war only once beforehand.

Similarly, in the Post, David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Lee A. Casey write:

As commander in chief, the president has the authority to determine when and how U.S. forces are used…. When the Constitution was adopted, the power to “declare war” was not equivalent to permitting the use of military force.

The president certainly can’t derive the authority to bomb Libya from the commander-in-chief clause. As Hamilton explained in Federalist 69, that provision merely indicates that the president is the “first General and admiral” of US military forces. Important as they are, generals and admirals don’t get to decide whether and with whom we go to war.

It’s more common for presidentialists to combine a broad reading of Article II, sec. 1′s “executive Power” with an exceptionally narrow interpretation of Article I, sec. 8′s congressional power “to declare War,” to conclude that the president can start wars, leaving it up to Congress to make it official if they so choose.

One problem with that view is that virtually no one from the Founding Generation seems to have understood the clause in that way. For example, James Wilson told the Pennsylvania ratifying convention that ‘‘this system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress; for the important power in declaring war is vested in the legislature at large.’’ Pierce Butler, like Wilson, had been a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention, and–to the dismay of some delegates–had actually argued for vesting the power to go to war in the president. Yet during the ratification debates, Butler assured the South Carolina legislature that the proposed constitution prevented the president from starting wars: ‘‘Some gentlemen [i.e., Butler himself] were inclined to give this power to the President; but it was objected to, as throwing into his hands the influence of a monarch, having an opportunity of involving his country in a war whenever he wished to promote her destruction.’’

As Professor Michael Ramsey puts it:

Every major figure from the founding era who commented on the matter said that the Constitution gave Congress the exclusive power to commit the nation to hostilities. Notably, this included not only people with reservations about presidential power, such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, but also strong advocates of the President’s prerogatives, such as George Washington and Alexander Hamilton.

“How could this be, though,” Ramsey asks, “if Congress has only the power to ‘declare War’, which we may think refers to making a (now-outmoded) formal announcement? Why can’t the President begin a war informally, merely by ordering an attack, without a declaration?” The answer:

…is that in founding-era terminology war could be “declared” either by formal announcement or by military action initiating hostilities. John Locke’s classic Two Treatises of Government from the late 17th century referred to “declar[ing] by word or action.” Blackstone and Vattel, two of the 18th century legal writers most influential in America, also used “declare” in this way…. Johnson’s dictionary gave as one definition of “declare” to “shew in open view” – which, applied to warfare, would obviously encompass military attacks…. Thus in 18th century terms initiating an attack was as much “to declare war” as was making a formal announcement; Congress’ Article I, Section 8 power is not narrowly about issuing formal announcements, but broadly about authorizing the sorts of actions that begin war.

Professor Ramsey lays out the argument in greater detail in his book The Constitution’s Text in Foreign Affairs, and in his (for my money) devastating 2002 rebuttal of Yoo [JSTOR] in the University of Chicago Law Review. Ramsey has further thoughts on the poverty of the argument from “past practice” here as does GMU law professor and Cato adjunct scholar Ilya Somin here.

One last point. While this doesn’t speak directly to the original meaning of the “Declare War” clause, I think it’s worth noting nonetheless:

Like Yoo, Rivkin, and Casey, I’m convinced that Obamacare’s individual mandate is unconstitutional. But consider how that view fits with their other views on federal power. They’ve argued, among other things, that the president can order up bombing raids without so much as a by-your-leave to Congress. As Yoo puts it, the president has the “right to start wars”, for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all, presumably. If the president suspects you’re a terrorist, he doesn’t need a warrant to tap your phone, and, right here in America, he can send soldiers to search your house without offending the Fourth Amendment. He can (according to Yoo, at least) ignore the federal statute prohibiting torture, and he can lock you up for the duration of the war on terror (forever?) without charges.

But there is one thing that he can never, ever do: he cannot penalize you for failure to purchase health insurance. Ours is a government of limited powers, you see.

Taken all in all, doesn’t that constitutional vision strike you as… strange?

“To Declare [Kinetic Military Action]“ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• When is an entitlement not an entitlement, but a command? When a federal judge contradicts herself, of course.
• As the Arab League’s influence over its own member states wanes, of course they support the creation of an international no-fly zone over Libya.
• Of course, there’s really no such thing as a “Social Security trust fund.”
• Should the United States and Saudi Arabia remain allies? Of course—but Washington should probably re-think the terms of the partnership.
• Of course, when George W. Bush was president, you couldn’t go anywhere in Washington without seeing an anti-war protest. Where have they all gone?

Friday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• America’s involvement in the war in Libya can’t be justified on either security or humanitarian grounds.
• Obamacare can’t be fixed, and now is the time to dismantle it.
• The no-fly zone over Libya can’t mean good things for American politics or policy.
• Bureaucrats can’t allocate goods more efficiently than market actors.
• President Obama can’t blame former President Bush for Guantanamo Bay anymore:

Tuesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• “The New Health Care Law: What a Difference a Year Makes,” featuring a keynote address from constitutional attorney and counsel in Florida v. HHS David Rivkin, and panels including economist and former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Cato director of health policy Michael F. Cannon and vice president for legal affairs Roger Pilon, and many more, begins at 1pm Eastern today. Please join us as we stream the event at our new live events hub, or watch on Facebook. If you prefer television, the forum will be broadcast live on C-SPAN 2.
• “The next time gun-control advocates point to violence in Mexico and call for more restrictions on gun sales or a revived assault-weapons ban, they should consider that the problem may not be with the laws on the books, but with those who enforce them.”
• The Bush administration far underestimated the divide between Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish Iraqis before 2003–the Obama administration may be making the same type of mistake in Libya.
• The U.S. military currently far exceeds its legitimate function of national defense:

Monday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This week Obama announced that he intends to prosecute prisoners before military tribunals.  The administration is taking pains to point out that Obama is not embracing the Bush policy.  These will be Obama’s tribunals, not Bush’s.  But since Mr. Obama’s executive order can be revised or withdrawn at any time, the new and improved procedures do not amount to much.   The tribunals were wrongheaded under Bush and the critique applies equally well to Obama’s “new” policy.

As others have noted, Obama has now embraced tribunals, Gitmo, and the Patriot Act.    Bad news, but at least Obama kept his promises to end the wars and get us on a sound financial footing.

For additional Cato work related to military tribunals, go here and here.

Obama’s Military Tribunals is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama and Mexican President Calderon announced this afternoon that the U.S. government will finally allow qualified, safety certified Mexican truckers to deliver goods in the United States, fulfilling a commitment our government made more than 17 years ago in the North American Free Trade Agreement. It’s about time.

America’s violation of the agreement had resulted in sanctions against $2.4 billion worth of U.S. exports to Mexico. According to one press report today,

The plan, announced at a news conference by the two presidents, will allow for half of those tariffs to be lifted immediately. It will establish a reciprocal, phased-in pilot program that allows Mexican trucks to operate inside the U.S. provided they comply with a series of safety and driver-skills and language tests monitored by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Under the NAFTA agreement, the United States and Mexico agreed to allow trucks from each country to deliver goods to destinations inside the other country, provided the trucks met the same safety regulations that apply to domestic truckers. But under pressure from the Teamsters Union, President Clinton refused to implement the program during his presidency.

President George W. Bush, to his credit, tried to fulfill the U.S. obligation under NAFTA. His administration launched a pilot program in 2007, which allowed a limited number of Mexican trucking companies to deliver goods to U.S. destinations beyond the 25-mile commercial zone along the U.S.-Mexican border. Citing unsubstantiated safety concerns, and in the face of ongoing union pressure, a bipartisan majority in Congress voted to cut off funding for the program in 2009.

After years of patiently waiting for its northern neighbor to do the right thing, and after lawfully pursing its grievance through procedures set up by NAFTA, the Mexican government responded to the end of the pilot program by imposing punitive duties on $2.4 billion worth of U.S. exports to Mexico. The duties were strategically aimed at a range of politically sensitive products.

The safety issue was never a valid reason to suspend the program. As we’ve noted at the Center for Trade Policy Studies (time and time again), the NAFTA agreement requires Mexican trucks to meet every safety standard and then some that are imposed on U.S. trucks. Under the pilot program, Mexican trucks actually proved to have a better safety record than U.S. trucks.

Under the NAFTA agreement, President Obama has the authority he needs to bring the United States into full compliance. He should act quickly to bring this embarrassing and damaging episode to an end.

Will U.S. Finally Keep Its Word with Mexico on Cross-border Trucking? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The George W. Bush administration ushered in a new era of big government. The Obama administration has built on Bush’s profligacy, and the president’s new fiscal 2012 budget proposal would further cement the trend.

Spending as a percentage of GDP has increased dramatically since the surplus years of the late 1990s. As the chart shows, the president’s budget once again seeks a permanently high level of federal spending as a share of the economy:

While the numbers drop from their stimulus- and recession-induced highs, it is not because the president has suddenly decided that he desires a less active government. Rather, optimistic economic assumptions largely account for the slight retrenchment.

Tax increases and optimistic economic assumptions explain the projected rise in revenue as a share of the economy. While the president would like us to believe he’s found religion on spending cuts, he’s actually relying on a rosy economic forecast and sucking more money out of the private sector to reduce annual deficits.

Taking more money from the productive private economy to maintain destructively high levels of federal spending is not a recipe for economic growth. Therefore, this budget proposal is as dangerous as it is disingenuous. Fortunately, it’s also dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House.

New Era of Big Government is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Karl Rove, the architect of Republican victories in 2000 and 2004 and Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008, denounces President Obama’s “spending binge” and “liberal activism” as described in the State of the Union address. The Wall Street Journal‘s tagline on the column is, “On Tuesday, Republicans offered an alternative to the president’s big-government vision.” What Rove omits is that he and President Bush started the spending binge, delivered big government, and indeed came into office with a big-government vision, as Ed Crane pointed out in 1999.

Just take a look at the analysis in Rove’s Wall Street Journal column:

Most of his hour-long speech was a paean to liberal activism, as the president called for redoubling outlays on high-speed rail and “countless” green energy jobs.

Liberal boondogglery indeed. But Rove’s former colleague, White House speechwriter Michael Gerson, wrote on the same day in his Washington Post column:

 In his 2006 State of the Union address, which I helped write, President George W. Bush proposed a 22 percent increase in clean-energy research at the Energy Department, a doubling of basic research in the physical sciences and the training of 70,000 high school teachers to instruct Advanced Placement courses in math and science. I have no idea if these “investments” passed or made much difference. I doubt anyone knows.

Green nonsense is rampant in Washington.

Rove criticizes Obama for

a federal budget that’s increased 25% in two years, raising government’s share of GDP to 25% from roughly 20%.

Obama is a world-class spender. But spending increased 83 percent during Bush’s presidency, from $1.863 trillion to $3.414 trillion. He increased federal spending faster than any president since Lyndon Johnson. And yes, Obama is pushing the government’s share of GDP up; but Bush increased the federal government’s share of GDP by 2.2 percentage points, before the financial crisis, the bailouts, and TARP.

Rove writes:

The challenge is about more than budgets and debt. It is about government’s basic purposes and its role in our lives. If we don’t act soon, the nature of American society will change in deep, lasting ways.

Yes, that is the real problem. I have written critically of Obama’s “sweeping statist agenda.” But the Bush administration gave us stepped-up federal intrusions into our local schools, the biggest expansion of entitlements in 40 years, a proposed constitutional amendment to nationalize marriage law, unconstitutional restrictions on core political speech, intrusion of the federal government into Terri Schiavo’s hospital room, and, in the words of Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch,

a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech — and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;  a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;  a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as “enemy combatants,” strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror — in other words, perhaps forever; and  a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.

Bush and Rove, too, changed American society in deep and lasting ways.

Rove writes that Paul Ryan, the new Republican chair of the House Budget Committee, “knows that reforming these programs, especially Medicare, is the only path to fiscal sanity and economic growth.” Too bad the Bush administration made the Medicare problem $18 trillion worse.

Rove writes that

the debate about the role and purpose of government has been joined in a way America hasn’t seen in three decades.

Let’s hope so. We at Cato have been trying to have that debate for years, including Ed Crane’s 1999 critique of the Bush-Rove big-government vision and Michael Tanner’s 2007 book, Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution. And certainly Rove’s comrade-in-arms Gerson has been vigorously arguing against the limited-government libertarian vision that opposes Bush-Obama statism.

Finally, Rove reminds us:

The total debt was $10.6 trillion before [Obama's] inaugural and $14.2 trillion today.

True. President Obama is increasing deficits and debt even faster than President Bush, under whom the national debt rose by $4.9 trillion. But it takes a lot of chutzpah for the architect of the biggest debt increase ever to criticize the guy who comes along and tops the record.

Surely the Wall Street Journal can find more credible critics of President Obama’s big-government vision than people who ran the “big government disaster” that was the Bush administration.

Karl Rove’s Big-Government Myth is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Stuart Reid’s Twitter points to this Condi Rice discussion with Katie Couric in which the following exchange takes place over the decision to invade Iraq:

RICE: …I’m also, frankly, just very glad [Saddam Hussein is] out of power. Now, to be frank, we tried to take him out of power without going to war. We tried to take him out of power by — we got a report from an Arab state that shall remain nameless that he would take a billion dollars to lead — to leave. We said, deal. Right? (Laughter.) We tried to (find ?) him –

COURIC: Has that — has that been made public before?

RICE: Yeah, I — it may be in President Bush’s book. I’m not sure. I don’t remember. But we did. We said, if he’ll go, everybody’s happy.

A colleague intrepidly Googled this, and turned up this 2007 article in the Washington Post.  The article reports that for a billion dollars and if allowed to “keep information on weapons of mass destruction,” Saddam Hussein told Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak that he would have been willing to go into exile.  President Bush’s own book, per Secretary Rice’s mention, covers the matter in this way:

…Our last ditch hope was that Saddam would agree to go into exile.  At one point, an offer from a Middle Eastern government to send Saddam to Belarus with $1 to $2 billion looked like it might gain traction.  Instead, in one of his last acts, Saddam ordered the tongue of a dissident slashed out and left the man to bleed to death.  The dictator of Iraq had made his decision.  He chose war.

Lots of people like to make fun of President Bush’s prose style, but even for him (or his ghostwriter) this is pretty peculiar.  First of all, it isn’t clear why “person who cuts off dissidents’ tongues and leaves them to bleed to death” is mutually exclusive with “person willing to take a billion or two dollars and go into exile.”  Saying Saddam cut a dissident’s tongue out doesn’t necessarily bear on his willingness to take a payout and go into exile.

Second, it’s almost certain that this was pursued and didn’t go anywhere, but if there was anything approaching a realistic opportunity to make this happen, we really missed out on the bargain of the century here.  You’re looking at something like 500%-1000% returns, not counting several thousand American and a-hundred-or-so-thousand Iraqi lives saved.

Thirdly: Belarus?

Did We Miss Out on the Bargain of the Century in Iraq? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Virginia governor Bob McDonnell must be a Bush Republican. The Washington Post reports today:

Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell plans a massive spending campaign that he said would unclog state roads, award thousands more college degrees and spur job creation, part of an aggressive legislative agenda he is expected to roll out this week.

McDonnell (R) will press lawmakers to approve a series of statewide projects he said would be paid in part through Virginia’s $403 million budget surplus, $337 million in higher-than-expected tax revenue, and $192 million generated through cuts and savings….

He plans to borrow nearly $3 billion over the next three years.

That doesn’t sound like the agenda of a Reagan Republican or a Tea Party Republican. It sounds a lot like the program of George W. Bush, the biggest-spending president between LBJ and, well, the president who followed Bush.

Of course, McDonnell might also be called a George Allen Republican. Allen, who served as governor of Virginia from 1994 through 1997, has a reputation as a staunch conservative. But he earned a grade of 40 on the Cato Institute’s Fiscal Policy Report Card. McDonnell seems to be headed for a similar grade.

George W. McDonnell is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this week:

• Taxpayers received a rare, albeit small and temporary, victory when a pork-laden omnibus bill died in the Senate. We’re now about to find out how serious Republicans are about cutting spending.
• Chris Edwards looks at breastfeeding and argues that bigger isn’t better when it comes to subsidies.
• “The nearest earthly approach to immortality is a bureau of the federal government.”
• Former President George W. Bush defends his abysmal spending record in his book Decision Points. Upon further review, perhaps the book should be retitled Deception Points.
• A new Cato essay discusses the problems of the U.S. Postal Service and concludes that taxpayers, consumers, and the broader economy would stand to gain with reforms to privatize the USPS and open mail delivery up to competition.

This Week in Government Failure is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Former President George W. Bush’s book Decision Points is apparently selling quite well. The book includes a defense of the president’s fiscal record, and a table on page 447 compares Bush to prior presidents on spending and debt (you can see the table on Amazon’s search inside feature).

One problem with the table is that Bush claims credit for the low spending and debt of President Clinton’s last year, fiscal 2001. The first budget Bush crafted was for fiscal 2002. Here are the data reported by Bush, and data recalculated to better reflect the budgets that each president had some control over. Figures are averages over the fiscal year periods, measured as a share of GDP:

Decision Points Comparison: Clinton (1993-2000) 19.8%, Bush (2001-2008) 19.6%.
More Accurate Comparison: Clinton (1994-2001) 19.4%, Bush (2002-2009) 20.4%.

The book makes Bush look better on spending, but a more accurate comparison shows Clinton to have a better record.

It’s true that Bush was not responsible for some of fiscal 2009 spending, and if we take that year out Bush would have average spending of 19.8%. But consider the direction of spending under the two presidents–spending fell under Clinton from 21.4% to 18.2%, but it increased under Bush from 18.2% to 20.7% by fiscal 2008 (and even higher in fiscal 2009). (Spending data are here). 

The table in Decision Points also shows Bush looking better than Clinton on public debt as a share of GDP, averaged over each president’s tenure. But the debt data has the same time period problem as the spending data. More importantly, Clinton delivered surpluses his last four years in office, which handed Bush a budget with very low debt and low interest costs. The low interest costs helped mask the spending-increase policies of Bush for a number of years. But Bush’s profligacy eventually became clear to analysts and the public alike, and this autobiography cannot undo his record as the biggest spender since LBJ.

Final note: yes, I understand that Congress plays a large role in federal budgeting, but so do presidents. Presidents propose annual budgets, they twist arms and use the bully pulpit to increase or cut programs, they support legislation to expand or contract entitlement programs, and they sign or veto appropriation and authorization bills.

Bush Deception Points is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The U.S. and South Korean governments have agreed to changes in the free trade agreement negotiated by the Bush administration. The president rightly lauded the FTA as a good deal for Americans:

“This agreement shows the U.S. is willing to lead and compete in the global economy,” the president told reporters at the White House, calling it a triumph for American workers in fields from farming to aerospace.”

Approving the FTA has taken on added urgency after the European Union negotiated a similar accord with the South. Once that agreement takes effect, Europeans would have better access than Americans to the world’s 13th largest economy. Protectionism is always foolish, but especially so when one’s competitors are promoting open markets.

The accord also offers important geopolitical benefits. With much nervousness in the U.S. and throughout East Asia over an increasingly assertive China, Washington should work to break down barriers to Americans trading with China’s neighbors. Already Koreans do more business with China than the U.S. While the FTA won’t reduce the appeal of products from next door China in South Korea, it will allow American producers to compete more freely in that market.

The president deserves credit for pushing the agreement forward, but he also needlessly held up ratification by two years. Moreover, his “fix” punishes American consumers. As the official government fact sheet explains:

Car Tariff Elimination: The 2007 agreement would have immediately eliminated U.S. tariffs on an estimated 90 percent of Korea’s auto exports, with remaining tariffs phased out by the third year of implementation. The 2010 supplemental agreement keeps the 2.5 percent U.S. tariff in place until the fifth year. At the same time, Korea will immediately cut its tariff on U.S. auto imports in half (from 8 percent to 4 percent), and fully eliminate that tariff in the fifth year.

Truck Tariff Elimination: The 2007 agreement would have required the United States to start reducing its tariff on Korean trucks immediately and phase it out by the agreement’s tenth year. The 2010 supplemental agreement allows the United States to maintain its 25 percent truck tariff until the eighth year and then phase it out by the tenth year – but holds Korea to its original commitment to eliminate its 10 percent tariff on U.S. trucks immediately.

That is, the Obama administration forced a delay in the reduction of U.S. auto tariffs. This obviously hurts Korean exporters, but the highest price will be paid by American consumers. The provision is simply a special interest payoff to the auto industry, which already has benefited from a big federal financial bail-out. So much for bringing “change” to Washington.

Free trade is good for Americans. That means bringing down foreign trade barriers. It also means bringing down U.S. trade barriers.

Promoting Free Trade–Sort Of is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the meaning of GM’s IPO today.  A common narrative in today’s media is that GM’s return to the stock market affirms the wisdom of the auto bailout.  Some tougher customers in the media insist on a higher threshold being met—that taxpayers get back the entirety of their $50 billion investment in GM—before declaring “mission accomplished.” And then there are the rabid partisans who—in their seething animosity toward the Obama administration—reach conclusions devoid of logic and rich only in conspiratorial-mindedness.  For example, yesterday I was contacted by a media outlet vetting this conclusion: “The IPO is evidence of the failure of the bailout because taxpayers were excluded from buying shares at the IPO price and, therefore, denied the opportunity to get their money back.”  Huh?

All of those analyses are wrong.  Let me dispense with the last one first, as it simply betrays a gross misunderstanding of how taxpayers are on the hook.  By divesting of GM (i.e., selling its shares), the government is beginning to make the taxpayer whole.  But just as there were no checks written directly from taxpayers to GM, there will be no checks written to taxpayers, as the Treasury liquidates the public’s share of GM.  Whether main street Americans could participate in the IPO has nothing to do with making the taxpayer whole.  And, by the way, IPOs typically limit sales of shares at the initial price to a chosen few.  So let’s just shelve the canned indignation on this claim.  It’s a distraction.

Here’s the real issue.  Today’s IPO is nothing more than testament to the fact that the government threw GM a lifeline, enabling the company to expunge most of its debts and firm up its balance sheet on terms more favorable than a normal bankruptcy process would have yielded.  That enabled GM to partake of the cyclically growing U.S. auto market in 2010 and turn a profit through the first three quarters.  So what?  Did anyone really think that a chosen company so coddled and insulated from market realities couldn’t turn a short-run profit?  Yes, even GM, under those favorable conditions should have been expected to turn a profit this year.

But at what cost?  That answer—even the question—seems to be elusive in the public discussion of the IPO.  The cost was not only $50 billion—the amount diverted to GM in the first place.  Nor was it that $50 billion minus the proceeds raised in today’s IPO (and minus the proceeds raised later when the government divests entirely of GM – it will still hold 33% of GM after today).  In other words, making taxpayers whole does not absolve the Bush and Obama administration’s for the auto intervention.  Recouping the $50 billion only gets us partially out of the hole.  (And I’m not even sure who “us” includes because the costs are so far reaching.)

Yes, GM is making sales and accounting for market share, but only at the expense of the other automakers.  Had GM been forced to severely atrophy or liquidate, the other automakers would have had greater revenues, more market share, and probably higher profits).  They would have been able to attract GM’s best engineers and line workers.  They would have more money to invest in R&D and to lead the industry into the future.  Instead, by keeping GM in the mix, some of those industry resources remain misallocated in a company that the evolutionary market process would have made smaller or extinct. 

The auto industry wasn’t rescued with the GM bailout.  GM was “rescued.”  By rescuing GM, the government overrode market forces, and there are significant costs to assign for that.  Witness the stagnant economy with 9.6 percent unemployment.  Is it not plausible that businesses are sitting on their cash and not investing or hiring because of the fear inspired by the government interventions starting with the bank and auto bailouts?  It’s more than plausible.  The regime uncertainty that persists to this day was spawned by the GM bailout and other interventions.

What about the weakening of the rule of law?  Doesn’t the diversion of TARP funds by the Bush administration, in circumvention of congress’s wishes and in contravention of the language of the law, represent a cost?  How about the property right of preferred bondholders who were forced to take pennies on their investment dollars under the Obama bankruptcy plan?  Any costs there?  What about U.S. moral authority to dissuade other goverments from meddling in their markets or indulging industrial policy?  That may be costly to U.S. enterprises.  And with the government still holding a third of GM, its hard to swallow the idea that public interest will be the driver of policies affecting the auto industry.  And that suggests even more costs.

But don’t mistake this blog post for an anti-IPO rant.  I’m in favor of the IPO.  It couldn’t have happened sooner.  But I suspect the investment bankers, the administration, and the other members of GM’s Board of Directors reckoned that, with the hype over the new Chevy Volt and the recent newsleak of GM’s $43 billion in unorthodox tax deferrments on the balance sheet, now was the perfect time to go public.

A Successful IPO Does Not a Justifiable Bailout Make is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I dislike taxes as much as the next person (and probably a lot more), but other policies matter as well, so if I had the choice of replacing current government policies with the ones that existed at the end of the Clinton years, I would gladly make that trade. Yes, it would mean higher tax rates, but it also would mean slashing government spending from 24 percent of GDP down to 18 percent of GDP. It would mean no sleazy TARP bailout, no Sarbanes-Oxley red tape, no expansion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and no added power and authority for the federal government.

This is the argument that I made in this interview on CNBC, though my opponent tried to do his version of the Brezhnev Doctrine (what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable), so I concluded the interview by stating that in the real world higher taxes are completely unacceptable.

To elaborate on this discussion, here’s a chart showing actual revenue over the past decade and what spending would be if policy makers had simply maintained the overall budget level from the last year of the Clinton Administration and allowed spending to grow in line with inflation and population. The deficit would be much smaller. More important, the burden of federal spending would be almost $1 trillion lower.

Would You Trade Higher Taxes for Much Lower Spending and Less Red Tape? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog