Asked on Meet the Press this weekend whether the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador was an act of war, Herman Cain gave the following response:

After I looked at all of the information provided by the intelligence community, the military, then I could make that decision.  I can’t make that decision because I’m not privy to all of that information… I’m not going to say it was an act of war based upon news reports, with all due respect.  I would hope that the president and all of his advisers are considering all of the factors in determining just how much, how much the Iranians participated in this.

That struck me as a refreshingly reasonable position. Yet the Washington Post‘s election handicapper, Chris Cillizza, decided to make that quote the centerpiece of an article on Cain’s “know-nothing foreign policy.” He then presents a poll showing that Republicans don’t care much about foreign policy this year, only to conclude that foreign-policy ignorance could be a fatal handicap for Cain. His evidence for that conclusion is a quote from Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations, who specializes in arguing for wars and imperialism. Boot, as it happens, just wrote a blog post for Commentary titled, “Iran Plot Goes Straight to the Top,” where he attacks those willing to question the evidence against Iran’s leaders and vaguely supports attacking them.

Cillizza’s article makes clear that foreign-policy ignorance is far preferable to the Washington Post‘s idea of expertise. The worst part is that Cain, who claims not to know what neoconservatives are, seems likely to become one, call Boot for advice, and win the Post‘s respect.

Cillizza on Cain and Know-Nothing Foreign Policy is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Jon Huntsman’s recent comments about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and the need to reduce our military footprint have drawn a good amount of media coverage this week. Huntsman, who will announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination next week, is the latest among the field to call for rethinking our strategy in Afghanistan. Huntsman is advocating a reduced presence in the country, in the area of 10 to 15,000 troops, to fight a narrowly focused counterterrorism mission. Coincidentally, a just-released Cato paper makes a similar recommendation.

Today, ForeignPolicy.com examines Huntsman’s comments and the “Drawdown Debate” in a round table of opinion pieces. My contribution: “Huntsman’s Right: Bring ‘em Home:

Jon Huntsman is on the right track with his call for a much smaller U.S. military presence and a more focused mission in Afghanistan. His suggestion makes sense for at least three reasons. First, the current nation-building mission is far too costly relative to realistic alternatives, particularly at a time when Americans are looking for ways to shrink the size of government. Second, nation-building in Afghanistan is unnecessary. We can advance our national security interests without crafting a functioning nation-state in the Hindu Kush. And third, the current mission is deeply unconservative, succumbing to the same errors that trip up other ambitious government-run projects that conservatives routinely reject here at home.

…

Alas, although many rank and file Republicans agree with Huntsman, many GOP leaders do not. Perhaps that will change when they realize that, at least in this instance, good policy and good politics go hand in hand. We should bring most of our troops home, and focus the attention of the few thousand who remain on hunting al Qaeda. The United States does not need to transform a deeply divided, poverty-stricken, tribal-based society into a self-sufficient, cohesive, and stable electoral democracy, and we should stop pretending that we can.

Read the full piece here.

Huntsman Right to Rethink Afghanistan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Few GOP presidential candidates have proposed specific budget cuts.
• “Peace is in the interest of Taiwan, China, and the U.S. … But the U.S. should view continuing arms sales to Taipei as perhaps the best means to maintain stability and peace across the Taiwan Strait.”
• Market liberalization has transformed newly independent states that formerly comprised Yugoslavia.
• President Obama is simply the new standard-bearer for the bipartisan contempt for constitutional limits on power.
• Cato chairman Robert A. Levy makes the libertarian case for marriage equality:

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

House Speaker John Boehner has promised to tie substantial spending cuts to upcoming debt-limit legislation. He said spending cuts will have to be at least as large as the dollar value of the allowed debt increase. Thus, if the legislation increased the legal debt limit by $2 trillion, then Congress would have to cut spending over time by at least $2 trillion.

How can we be sure that spending cuts are real?

There are only two types of solid and tough-to-reverse spending cuts—legislated changes to reduce entitlement benefit levels and complete termination of discretionary programs. Republicans will have to define what time period they are talking about, but let’s assume it’s the standard 10-year budget window.

• Entitlements: The legislation, for example, could change the indexing formula for initial Social Security benefits from wages to prices. The Congressional Budget Office says that change would reduce spending by $137 billion over 10 years (2012-2021). Other options include raising the retirement age for Social Security and raising deductibles for Medicare.
• Discretionary: Each session of Congress decides the following year’s discretionary spending. Promises of discretionary spending cuts beyond one year are meaningless. Thus, the various promises in Republican and Democratic budget plans to freeze various parts of discretionary spending through 2021 or reduce spending to 2008 levels over the long term have no weight. Those are not real cuts.

The only way to get real cuts in discretionary spending—cuts that would be tough to reverse out in later years—is complete program termination and repeal of the program’s authorization. That way, policymakers in future years would generally need at least 60 votes in the Senate to reinstate the spending.

Thus, if the GOP promises to save $50 billion over 10 years by reducing the levels of Title 1 grants to the states for K-12 schools, that is not a real and solid cut. However, if they pass a law to repeal Title 1 spending altogether, that cut may well be sustained over the long term.

To make spending cuts even more secure, the GOP should also insist on a statutory cap on overall outlays with a supermajority requirement to break, as I’ve outlined here. For program termination ideas, see www.DownsizingGovernment.org.

In sum, the GOP needs to ensure that spending cuts tied to the debt-limit vote are either:

1. Changes to entitlement laws to reduce benefit levels, or
2. Discretionary program terminations.

Promises to hold down future discretionary spending levels and partial program trims are not real spending cuts.

John Boehner’s Spending and Debt Promise is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today the Cato Institute placed an ad in major newspapers highlighting specific spending cuts that policymakers should make to restore our country’s fiscal sanity and economic stability. Our public call for policymakers to demonstrate leadership on spending cuts comes in the midst of the on-going battle on Capitol Hill over funding the government for the remainder of fiscal 2011.

A graphic at the top of the ad measures the $61 billion in cuts that Republicans have proposed against fiscal 2011 estimates for total spending, the deficit, and interest on the debt. As the graphic shows and the ad notes, it is clear that “leaders and members of both parties are in deep denial about the fiscal emergency we face.”

There are news reports that Republican and Democrat negotiators are heading toward a compromise figure of $33 billion in spending cuts. Let’s put that figure in perspective alongside the GOP’s original proposal to cut a whopping $61 billion:

Record spending levels…trillion dollar plus deficits…mountainous debt…a weak economy…

What, Congress worry?

2011 Budget Battle in Perspective is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Republican leaders in Congress announced Monday that they are all on board to ban spending “earmarks” when the newly elected Congress convenes in January. That is all to the good. While not a large share of the federal budget, the designation of tax dollars to fund specific pet projects in member districts has come to symbolize out-of-control spending in Washington.

Those same leaders should clarify that the earmark ban applies only to spending projects—not to the kind of tariff suspensions including in a recent miscellaneous tariff bill.

The U.S. Manufacturing Enhancement Act approved by Congress in July suspended tariffs on hundreds of imported items of special interest to U.S. manufacturers. House Republican leaders made the mistake earlier this year of including such tariff suspensions in an earmark ban they announced in March.

The overly broad definition of an earmark boxed the leadership into opposing a perfectly sensible trade bill. Despite the half-hearted opposition of the GOP leadership, the U.S. Manufacturing Enhancement Act passed overwhelmingly in the House on July 21, by a margin of 378-43, with Republicans supporting it by a 3-1 margin.

Most members of Congress already understood what the Cato Institute pointed out in a September 2010 study recommending reform of future miscellaneous tariff bills—that tariff cuts are not the same as spending earmarks. Here is what I wrote in the study about the difference between tariff cuts and the kind of spending earmarks that has angered voters:

Spending-bill earmarks distribute tax dollars not for any public purpose authorized under the U.S. Constitution, but rather to benefit a certain special interest or a specific city or district. They grant favors to a small group of beneficiaries at the public’s expense. In contrast, a tariff suspension repeals a narrow tax that falls disproportionately and unfairly on a small group of producers. Instead of granting a favor at the public’s expense, a tariff suspension relieves individual producers of a burden that falls on them and nobody else. Unlike a spending earmark, a tariff suspension creates no new claim on public resources. It does not expand the scope or size of government.

Including tariff suspensions in the moratorium is not a matter of curbing the power of lobbyists. There is a world of difference between lobbying for a $500,000 government grant for a project with narrow benefits, and lobbying to remove a $500,000 tax bill that only a handful of enterprises are required to pay. The former seeks an expansion of the government’s power and influence, the latter a reduction. Republicans who rightly complain about the growth of the federal government should be the first to embrace the suspension and repeal of hundreds of nuisance taxes distorting the economy and burdening American producers.

The new Congress may soon consider another miscellaneous tariff bill to further reduce discriminatory tariffs that impose real costs on U.S. companies trying to compete in global markets. Republican leaders should join with their Democratic counterparts in the new Congress to clarify that suspending or repealing unfair tariffs should not be banned but should be vigorously pursued.

Ban Spending Earmarks, But Not Tariff Cuts is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last week I urged readers to be on the lookout for Republicans seeking to exclude farm subsidies from any cuts they plan to make to federal spending. And it seems the first example of “smaller government for thee, but not for me” has been provided by incoming congresswoman Vicki Hartzler, who campaigned on a Tea Party-ish platform and defeated long-time congressman Ike Skelton (in Missouri’s 4th congressional district).

Ms. Hartzler calls Margaret Thatcher her role model because she “took principled stands.” (As, indeed, she often did.) Ms. Hartzler also says economic issues — cutting government spending, complete repeal of the health care bill — are her main concern. But read the fine-print in this article from the St. Louis Beacon:

Hartzler says cutting spending is a top personal priority; she wants to roll back non-discretionary funding levels to 2008 levels, before the economic stimulus and TARP programs. …

The congresswoman-elect would exempt some of the federal budget’s high-cost categories — including Social Security, Medicare and the Pentagon budget — from cutbacks. But she would not exempt agricultural subsidies,* another major area of federal spending popular in rural areas such as west-central Missouri’s Fourth District. Among the many farms to receive such subsidies is the 1,700-acre Hartzler farm, which — according to the Environmental Working Group’s “Farm Subsidy Database” — received about $774,000 in federal payments (mainly commodity subsidies for corn, soybeans and wheat) from 1995 through 2009.

“Everything should be on the table,” she says. While she says some agriculture programs represent a “national defense issue” because they help guarantee that “we have a safety net to make sure we have food security in our country,” Hartzler adds: “Should we continue the CRP [Conservation Reserve] program, where you pay farmers to not plant ground and set it aside for awhile? I’m not sure. The time for that may be over.” [emphasis added]

Let’s be clear about what Ms. Hartzler is talking about here. Those “some” agricultural programs she says should be guaranteed on “national defense” grounds (see below) are what we commonly think about as “farm subsidies” — payments to farmers to produce certain commodities, whether those payments are funded by taxpayers or consumers. They encourage overproduction and thus alienate our trade partners, complicate efforts to make global trade freer, harm poor farmers abroad and damage America’s reputation in the process. They cost us billions of dollars a year.

She is, on the other hand, open to cutting farm programs that at least pretend to have environmental benefits. I’m not commenting here on the validity of those sorts of ”public goods” claims, and of course I am not conceding that the federal government should be involved in them. But I think most reasonable  people would agree that they are less economically damaging than traditional farm subsidies.  In other words, in the hierarchy of damage, and therefore in the hierarchy of what should be cut first, I would put farm subsidies ahead of the CRP. And I fail, in any event, to see how anyone calling themselves a fiscal conservative can promote the idea of excluding a priori that which we commonly think of as “farm subsidies.”

[Also, can we please abandon once and for all this nonsense idea that we need farm subsidies to have food security? Appeals to "national defense" are disingenuous and cynical. They are also belied (rather obviously) by the fact that we see abundant supplies of fruit, vegetables and other horticultural goods even though those products attract no subsidies directly. The best way to ensure a food security is to ensure open markets, so food can flow from where it is abundant to where it is scarce. Self-sufficiency is a misguided policy, as the experience of North Korea can attest.]

So, in summary, when Ms. Hartzler says “everything should be on the table”, she basically means “not much, and certainly nothing that might harm powerful special interests that I care about.” I lost count of the number of Republican politicians being interviewed during the campaign and on election night talking about the need for “across-the-board cuts to discretionary spending” as their fiscal plan. Most if not all of them emphasized that so-called mandatory spending (which includes some farm subsidies) would be exempt from their cuts. I’m sorry, but I cannot take seriously the “fiscal conservative” credentials of any politician who adopts such a line.

*It appears, judging from the quote below, that she would indeed exempt farm subsidies from cuts, even if other farm programs would be on the chopping block. I’m going to assume here the reporter was using the term “farm subsidies” in an imprecise manner.

Republican Hypocrisy Watch is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

With Tuesday’s election widely predicted to bring a near-historic shake-up of the political establishment, here are some things we can say for certain even before the first results are tallied:

1. This election will be a win for economic conservatives, not social conservatives.  Not surprisingly given the economic climate, economic issues dominated the campaign, with social issues barely registering.  This was particularly helpful for Republicans, since economically conservative, socially moderate suburban voters, who backed Democrats in 2006 and 2008, switched to Republicans this year. There is a lesson here for Republicans in the future.
2. In the months leading up to the election, we have heard a great deal about the so-called “civil war” in the Republican Party.   As it turns out, there wasn’t one.  Despite some spirited, even bitter, primary fights, Republicans of all stripes were able to unify around a common opposition to the Obama agenda.  But having achieved electoral success, Republicans will now be forced to confront the serious divisions in their party: tea partiers vs. the GOP establishment; economic conservatives vs. social conservatives; budget hawks vs. neoconservatives.  The “civil war” will be back with a vengeance.
3. Voters will choose Republicans in this election because they aren’t Democrats.  It doesn’t mean that voters have fallen in love with the Republican party.  In fact, polls show that Republicans remain only slightly more popular than used car salesmen—or Democrats.  At best, voters are willing to give Republicans one last chance.  If they don’t deliver, it will be a long, long time before they get another one.
4. No issue hurt Democrats as much as the health care bill.  It wasn’t just that voters hate the bill—they do—but that it crystallized the average American’s antipathy to a government that was too big, too costly and too out of touch.  Voters will declare that they don’t want government running health care…and come to think of it, they don’t want government running much else either.

On Election Eve… is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

House Republican Whip Eric Cantor’s “YouCut” project has released a new video that attempts to visually underscore the impropriety of sticking future taxpayers with a mountain of federal debt.

The video begins with a voice saying “You wouldn’t do this to your child’s piggy bank” followed by visuals of a child’s piggy bank being smashed with a hammer. The voice then says:

But Democrat controlled Washington is leaving a $13 trillion debt for your children and future generations. It’s time Washington got its fiscal house in order. Start changing the culture of spending in Washington by voting on YouCut today.

That’s a wee bit disingenuous considering that Republicans and Democrats alike are responsible for the massive federal debt.

More frustrating is the fact that the GOP leadership rhetoric of grave concern is completely at odds with the party’s tiny proposed reforms. In Cantor’s YouCut commentary he says “America is at a critical crossroads, and the choices we make today will determine the kind of country we leave to our children and grandchildren.”

Now let’s look at this week’s proposed GOP spending cuts. A website banner says “CLICK HERE TO VOTE FOR THIS WEEK’S FIVE CUTS,” but takes the viewer to the YouCut page where they’re offered three spending cut options:

1. Terminate Taxpayer Funding of National Public Radio. The site says this would achieve “Savings of Tens of Millions of Dollars (potentially in excess of a hundred million dollars).” NPR shouldn’t receive taxpayer funding – and not just because it canned Juan Williams. But couldn’t the House GOP leadership have at least offered up the $500 million Corporation for Public Broadcasting that subsidizes NPR for cutting?

2. Terminate Exchanges with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners Program. The site says this would save $87.5 million over ten years.

3. Terminate the Presidential Election Fund. This would achieve a whopping projected savings of $520 million over ten years.

America is at a “critical crossroads” and the GOP leadership is offering to cut whaling history subsidies? Congress is bankrupting the nation and the possible next Speaker of the House – “never a details man” – can’t even specify what he would cut in the budget.

It’s pathetic.

GOP: Cut Whaling History Subsidies, Save Nation is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama has seemingly made an entire mountain range out of his Race-to-the-Top reform molehill, while he’s gotten more or less a free pass on all he’s done to enrich the status quo. And now, with big midterm losses looming for his party, he appears to be resorting to one of the easiest political ploys in the book: Claim the GOP will cut funding to education and, in so doing, hurt innocent children and cripple the nation’s economic future. As the President opined in his weekly address:

[I]f Republicans in Congress had their way….We’d have a harder time offering our kids the best education possible. Because they’d have us cut education by 20 percent — cuts that would reduce financial aid for eight million students; cuts that would leave our great and undervalued community colleges without the resources they need to prepare our graduates for the jobs of the future.

Now, it is true that when it comes to our budget, we have real challenges to meet. And if we’re serious about getting our fiscal house in order, we’ll need to make some tough choices. I’m prepared to make those choices. But what I’m not prepared to do is shortchange our children’s education. What I’m not prepared to do is undercut their economic future, your economic future, or the economic future of the United States of America.

Where did the President get the 20 percent number? It most likely stems from the promise in the House Republican’s “Pledge to America” to return federal spending unrelated to defense or senior citizens to pre-stimulus levels. Presumably, that means education spending would be reduced to the level it was at before passage of the stimulus. Considering that the stimulus was supposed to be a one-shot thing, that hardly seems like a draconian move.

That said, the much more important consideration is that based on decades of evidence – not to mention the strictures of the Constitution — federal education spending should not only be reduced, it should be phased out completely. Looking at the evidence since the feds started delving deeply into education in the mid-1960s, it’s clear that we’ve gotten very little for our money. 

Start with K-12 education, where we have results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a consistent measure of performance since the early 1970s :

As you can see, Washington has spent steeply increasing amounts of money and not moved the needle at all for the 17-year-olds that constitute the “final products” of our elementary and secondary schools.

How about higher education?

Here the main focus has been providing stduent financial aid to increase college access, and in defense of the feds we have seen big increases in college enrollment since the mid-1960s. Enrollment, however, had been increasing substantially for many decades prior to 1965 or the post-World War II G.I. Bill, suggesting that Washington might have just caught an enrollment wave that was coming in anyway. There is also strong evidence that federal student aid has helped fuel rampant tuition inflation, largely negating the aid’s value. And while we have no consistent, long-term measure of learning outputs, we can at a minimum see that literacy among holders of at least a bachelor’s degree dropped between 1992 and 2003. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, forty percent of people whose highest educational attainment was a bachelor’s degree were proficient prose readers in 1992 . By 2003, only 31 percent were. For Americans with graduate degrees, 51 percent were proficient in 1992. Eleven years later, only 41 percent were.

Unfortunately, for decades federal politicians have expended taxpayer money either in goodhearted — but misguided — efforts to improve education, or more selfishly, to appear to “care about the children” and make political hay. Regardless of the motivation, at this point it must no longer be ignored: Washington ’s spending on education has gotten us little of demonstrable value.  For President Obama to not even acknowledge the powerful evidence of this, but instead trot out the old canard that less spending is synonymous with worse education,  signals that he’s more than willing to play bankrupting education politics as usual.

President Obama and Education Politics As Usual is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The House Republicans’ release of its “Pledge to America” has been met with criticism from across the ideological spectrum. While excoriation from the left was inevitable, those who were hoping that the GOP would set out a detailed agenda for limiting government were also not satisfied.

The 48-page document contains more pictures of Republican members of Congress than it does evidence that the GOP is seriously prepared to cut spending. While the introductory commentary is designed to appeal to the tea party movement, the actual “plan” to return budgetary sanity to Washington is both timid and incomplete.

The following are some thoughts on the pledge’s “plan to stop out of control spending and reduce the size of government”:

• The document immediately notes that the “lack of a credible plan” to tackle the mounting federal debt causes uncertainty for employers and investors. The problem is the GOP leadership doesn’t have a credible plan to address the debt, or at least this document doesn’t offer one.

• It disingenuously promises to “cut government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels” when in fact it only intends to do so for a small portion of the overall federal budget. The reduction would apply to discretionary, non-security spending, which only accounts for about 15 percent of total federal spending.

• Not only does the GOP punt on the big-ticket programs like Social Security and Medicare, the document devotes an entire section to maintaining the interventionist foreign policy that is helping to bankrupt the country. The GOP doesn’t appear to understand that the American people are having an increasingly difficult time understanding why the government continues to take bricks out of our own economy in order to build nations around the globe.

• The document says that the GOP will “root out government waste.” Waste goes with government the way peanut butter goes with jelly. Nancy Pelosi has made the same promise, which demonstrates the vacuous nature of the proposal.

• The GOP says it will cut the operations budget of Congress. That’s fine, but the legislative branch’s budget is only about $5 billion.

• Calling for an end to the federal government’s control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is a good idea. But that’s an easy position. They should instead be calling for an end to the government’s entire disastrous role in subsidizing homeownership.

• The document calls for a freeze in federal non-security hiring. One would have thought the GOP would at least address exorbitant federal civilian employee pay. Freezing (or reducing) federal employment would take care of itself by eliminating agencies and programs, which is something the document doesn’t lay out a plan to do.

• The GOP proposes to continue holding weekly votes to cut spending via its YouCut initiative. It’s a fine idea, but most of the cuts offered for consideration thus far have been relatively insignificant. For example, one of the cuts being proposed this week would “reduce funding for the wild horse and burro program to previously projected levels.” Not only would this only save $280 million over ten years, the GOP couldn’t even find the nerve to call for its outright abolition.

• One piece of good news is that the GOP explicitly calls for the repeal of Obamacare.

With the Democrats content to irresponsibly promise more free lunches in the face of an unsustainable fiscal situation, it would have been refreshing for the House Republicans to square with the American people. However, with this document the GOP largely fell back on limited government platitudes.

GOP’s Pledge to America is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The early returns are in on the Democratic tactic of making trade an issue in the 2010 campaign, and the results are not encouraging for those who want to blame trade agreements for the state of the economy.

In a column this morning for the Wall Street Journal (“Ohio’s Test of Protectionist Rage”), Gerald Seib reports from Ohio that two Republican candidates have been unscathed so far by Democratic attacks on their past support for major trade agreements.

In races for U.S. Senate and governor, Democrats have unleashed hard-hitting ads accusing their GOP opponents of supporting trade deals “that shipped tens of thousands of Ohio jobs overseas.” So far the attacks have failed to draw blood. According to Seib:

Right now, both Republican contenders in those races—Rob Portman for the Senate and John Kasich for governor—are coming under fire for their past support of free trade. The fact that both enjoy big poll leads right now suggests the attacks have had limited effect so far.

A key question in the campaign stretch run, both for Ohio and for policy making in Washington after the election, is whether that remains the case.

Blaming trade for Ohio’s economic woes is wrong on substance, as I noted in 2008 when the issue came up in the state’s Democratic presidential primary. Politically it has proven to be a non-factor. As keen as I am to promote free trade, I’ll admit that it is probably not a big vote-getter on Election Day, but neither is it a vote-loser.

Candidates who support our freedom to trade with the rest of the world should not abandon that sound position under the desperate fire of their opponents.

Protectionist Candidates Firing Blanks So Far is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

House Republicans say they will force a vote to repeal ObamaCare’s individual mandate, which will subject nearly all Americans to fines and/or imprisonment if they do not purchase a government-designed health insurance plan.  They are soliciting public feedback on their America Speaking Out website, which explains:

We need to repeal and replace the health care law with common sense reforms that will actually lower health care costs and let Americans keep the plan they have and like. That’s why Republicans are offering a proposal to repeal the requirement forcing Americans to buy government-approved health insurance. Twenty states and the nation’s leading small business organization agree that this law is unconstitutional and that’s why they are suing to overturn it. The federal government shouldn’t be in the business of forcing you to buy health insurance and taxing you if you don’t.

I’d rather see the entire law repealed — including the price controls on health insurance, the trillions of dollars in health insurance subsidies, the CLASS Act, etc..  Why not do it all at once, just so you don’t miss anything important?

But this vote is unlikely to succeed, so I suppose there will be time for votes repealing the whole thing.

House GOP Announces First Vote to Repeal ObamaCare is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In his Kentucky Republican primary victory speech last night, Rand Paul took a well-placed shot at one of the more repulsive props used by Beltway politicians:

“We have come to take our government back from the special interests who think that the federal government is their own personal ATM … from the politicians who bring us over-sized fake checks emblazoned with their signature as if it was their money to give.”

The comment immediately brought to mind a C@L blog I wrote in 2008 that criticized the Senate Minority Leader from Kentucky, Republican Mitch McConnell, for being a hypocrite when it comes to big government spending.  I titled the post “The Bluegrass Porker” and included this picture:

That fellow on the right holding the fake, over-sized Treasury check is Mitch McConnell. Last night, Paul defeated McConnell’s hand-picked choice for the Republican nomination, Trey Grayson. Perfect.

I’d prefer to believe Paul’s victory last night was a repudiation of the GOP establishment as much as it was a repudiation of Washington in general. Popular discontent with the statist Democrat establishment in Washington is well recognized. But if Kentucky Republicans just signaled their displeasure with the statist Republican establishment, better days for liberty could be ahead.

Rand Paul Challenges the Establishments is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today, Politico Arena asks:

How helpful is it to the GOP to have its chairman say the party’s “credibility snapped” while in power and it became “just another party of Big Government?”

My response:

If GOP chairman Michael Steele means it, it’s very helpful for him to say that the party’s “credibility snapped” while in power and it became “just another party of Big Government?”  You first have to recognize a problem if you want to solve it.

For better or worse, we’ve had two major parties for most of our history, and that’s not likely to change any time soon.  At least since the New Deal, the Democratic Party has been the party of government, especially over economic affairs.  By contrast, since the Goldwater revolution of 1964, the Republican Party has claimed to be the party of individual liberty and limited government, although that claim was often undermined by calls for restricting certain personal liberties, and the party was slow, as were parts of the Democratic Party, in supporting the civil rights movement.  But broadly speaking, in our recent history the two parties have been distinguished, nominally, by their different conceptions of the proper role of government.

At no time was that contrast more sharply drawn than during the Reagan administration.  Yet even then there were internal struggles between the Reagan people and the Bush people.  Recall that when Bush ’41 became president, he called for a “kinder and gentler nation,” which was a slap at Reagan’s limited government principles.  And eventually, of course, he broke his “no new taxes” pledge.

After Bush lost the presidency, the Gingrich “Contract with America,” leading to the Republican take-over of Congress for the first time in 40 years, was supposed to return the party to a principled, limited government path.  It did so briefly, in those heady days of 1995, but by the end of the year the siren song of government power was calling and the party started its slow slide, at the end of which it was barely distinguishable from the Democratic Party.

Thus, it was no accident that in 2000 the party selected as its standard-bearer George W. Bush, who had been utterly absent from the intellectual ferment of the Goldwater-Reagan years.  Not unlike his father, Bush ’43 stood for “compassionate conservatism,” a slogan ripe with promise for government programs.  And the Republican Congress, now rudderless, was anxious to supply them.  If the party stood for anything, it was incumbency protection.  What better example than the McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform” bill, which Bush signed while saying he thought it was unconstitutional.  What’s the Constitution among friends?

But rudderless, unprincipled government could not go on forever, and so in time it came crashing down upon the Republican time-servers — and the real party of government took over.  Immutable principles, however, such as you can’t get something for nothing, favor no party, and so Democrats too are facing, or will soon face, the harsh realities that flow from abandoning political and economic discipline.  If the Republican Party can recover the fundamental principles that are captured in the nation’s founding documents, and take them to the people, it will then fall to us to decide what we want.  And if we too believe in something for nothing, we will have no one to blame but ourselves for the consequences that follow.  But at least we will have had a choice, which we have not had in recent years.  So, yes, Mr. Steele’s call for a return to principle is helpful.

Can the GOP Recover Its Principles? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This morning, Politico Arena asks:

Do you take Glenn Beck’s “new national movement” seriously? Is the GOP establishment letting itinerant celebrities and talk show stars set the party’s agenda?

As Winston Churchill understood, democracy is messy (and, as in his case, sometimes ungrateful).  Glenn Beck is no William F. Buckley Jr.  But then, “Joe the Plumber” probably never read National Review, which like most other journals of “high opinion” was never self-sustaining.  Liberals today, their noses in the air Obama style, look across America from the vantage of the famous New Yorker cover and see pitchfork brigades, forgetting that those who fill the brigades generally love America, which is more than can be said of some of the baggage that has surrounded Obama.

There is a problem in the Republican Party, to be sure.  Nominally the party of limited constitutional government, it recently gave us two presidents from the same family – one standing for a “kinder and gentler” government, the other for “compassionate conservatism” — plus a career Senate nominee for president, none of whom ever really understood the party’s core principles, much less nourished them as they must be nourished from generation to generation.  As a result, the party has been hollowed out intellectually and spiritually, and into that vacuum, which nature abhors, has poured an assortment of people, most from outside the party.

The struggle in democracies between intellectual rigor and populism is as old as that between Socrates and the sophists.  We all know the dangers of populist demagoguery.  But there is also great danger in rule by elites, which are hardly immune from demagogy and outright fraud (witness the “accounting” in the current health care debate).  Achieving that balance is often difficult and messy.  But I for one am encouraged by this populist movement to reform the Republican Party.  I know, for example, that at the Orlando rally The New York Times referenced this past Saturday, people passed out copies of the Cato Institute’s pocket Constitution, which includes the Declaration of Independence and my preface relating the two documents with respect to their underlying principles.  The people who attended the April 15 tea parties and the September 12 march on Washington were ordinary Americans who understand that something is fundamentally wrong, constitutionally, with the direction the country has taken over the past two decades, at least.  They see the Republican Party, in our two-party system, as the more likely institution for changing that, but not as the party is presently constituted.  Still, there are people within the party who give hope and are ready to take over.  Populists working outside the party, together with those of us who do “politics” (broadly understood) for a living, may just be the spark that enables that to happen.

Reforming the GOP is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This morning, Politico’s Arena asks:

Is Tea Party conservatism a help or a hazard for Republicans seeking a return to power?

My response:

Let’s start with some clarity:  “Tea Party conservatism” stands for several things, but it is not the caricature one often finds in the mainstream media, to say nothing of the left wing blogs.  It is a movement with deep historical roots, drawing its name and inspiration from the Boston Tea Party of 1773.  As with that event, taxes brought it to the fore — on Tax Day, April 15.  But taxes are simply the most obvious manifestation of modern government run amok, insinuating itself into every corner of life.  Trillions of dollars of debt for our children, out-of-control government budgets, massive interventions in private affairs — the list of wrongs is endless, and under Obama has exploded.  He stands for nothing if not for making us all dependent on the government he has promised us.  That’s not America.  That’s a foreign vision, which over the centuries countless millions have fled, searching for freedom.

To be sure, the Tea Party movement has its fringe elements, as did the revolt against British tyranny, which the establishment of its day disparaged.  So too does the Obama administration, some of whom have already resigned.  The basic question, however, is what does the movement stand for?  What are its principles?  And on that, the contrast with the Obama vision is stark:  However much confusion there might be on specific issues, which is to be expected, the broad principles are clear.  The Tea Party movement stands for limited constitutional government.  At its rallies, on hand-written sign after sign, that was the message repeatedly seen.  These are ordinary Americans – Republicans, Independents, and even Democrats — who want simply to be left alone to plan and live their own lives.  They don’t want “community organizers” to help empower them to get more from government.

But they do need to be organized to bring that about — to get government off their backs.  And the Republican Party should be the natural vehicle toward that end — the party, after all, that was formed to get government off the backs of several million slaves.  But today’s Republican Party is a mixed lot:  Some understand those principles; but others, as in the NY 23 race, are all but indistinguishable from their counterparts in the party of Obama.  The problem in NY 23 was not that a third party entered the race.  Rather, the party establishment botched things from the beginning, by picking a nominee who properly belonged in the Democratic Party, as her pathetic last-minute endorsement indicated, and that’s why a third party entered the race — with a novice of a nominee who nearly won despite the odds against him.

The question, therefore, is not whether Tea Party conservatism is a help or a hazard for Republicans seeking a return to power?  To the contrary, it is whether the Republican Party is a help or a hindrance to the Tea Party movement?  It will be a help only if it returns to its roots.  The mainstream media, overwhelmingly of the Democratic persuasion, will continue to push Republicans to be “moderate,” of course – meaning “Democrat Lite” — to which the proper response is:  Why would voters go for that when they can get the real thing on the Democratic line?  If Tuesday’s returns showed anything, it is that Independents, a truly mixed lot, are up for grabs; but at the same time, they are looking for leaders who promise not simply to “solve problems” but to do so in a way that respects our traditions of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government.  When Republican candidates stand clearly and firmly for those principles, they stand a far better chance of being elected than when they temporize.  That is the lesson that Republicans must grasp — and not forget — if they are to return to power.

Tea Party Conservatism and the GOP is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last November’s rejection of the failed GOP didn’t mean voters were ready to embrace a massive increase in the size of the federal government, says Scott Keeter, director of survey research at Pew Research Center:

Obama campaigned for strong government action on the economy and health care, and most of his voters agreed with this direction. But Obama’s efforts to expand the role of government have alienated many of those who did not vote for him but nonetheless gave him high marks when first he took office.

Pew Research’s political values survey this spring showed no surge in public demand for more government. Indeed, anti-government sentiment, which had been building for years, was heightened by the financial bailout and stimulus program.

A Warning for President Obama is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

 The current Attorney General, Eric Holder, left DC’s Covington and Burling to return to the Justice Department, where he held a senior post during the Clinton years.  Holder’s mission is to supposedly ”rein in the free market excesses of the last eight years.”  Bush’s people are done with their own crackdown and are now returning to DC’s big law firms to warn their client business firms about the coming crackdown by Holder’s prosecutors.  This is sorta like the GOP legislators who are now trying to lodge complaints about Obama’s spending.  Despite the rhetoric, both sides aggrandize federal power and then enrich themselves (pdf) while advising businesspeople on how to comply with myriad regulations  from the alphabet agencies.

For related Cato work, go here and here.

Prosperity in Washington is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Earlier this morning, my colleague, Michael Cannon, blogged a devastating critique of the Coburn-Burr-Ryan-Nunez alternative to the Obama health plan. As he shows, while the bill has some good features (changing the tax treatment of health insurance, expanding HSAs), the good is swamped by a bizarre collection of regulation, mandates, and hidden taxes.

In fact, the bill appears to be based, in large part, on what its sponsors call “the well-known, bi-partisan achievement of universal health care through a private system in Massachusetts.” But the Massachusetts model has failed to either achieve universal coverage or control health care costs. Rather, as I noted in this recent blog, it has led to more regulation, less consumer choice, and increased insurance premiums, while running huge budget deficits that have already led to one tax increase and are now causing the state to consider premium caps and global budgets. One wonders why congressional Republicans would want to head down that road.

Notably, Coburn-Burr-Ryan-Nunez abandons Rep. John Shadegg’s proposal to allow Americans to buy insurance across state lines in favor of a requirement that states establish Massachusetts-style connectors. But the Massachusetts Connector has been one of the worst aspects of that state’s reform, acting as a super-regulatory body, adding new mandated benefits, restricting consumer’s choice of plans, and adding both regulatory and administrative costs to insurance. (In fact, the Connector adds its own administrative costs, estimated at 4 percent of premium costs, for plans that are sold through it.) What the Connector has not done is live up to its promise of breaking the link between employment and insurance, giving workers personal, portable insurance that they could take with them from job to job, and which they would not lose when they lost their jobs. Unfortunately, the Connector has not lived up to its promise in the latter regard. In fact, as of May 2008, only 18,122 people had purchased insurance through the Connector. That’s very little gain for so much pain.

Since there is virtually no chance that the Coburn-Burr-Ryan-Nunez will actually be enacted, perhaps one shouldn’t get too excised about its failings. No doubt it is far superior to Obamacare. And, it is understandable that congressional Republicans want to appear as more than the “party of no.” Still, this looks like a sadly missed opportunity.

GOP Health Care Alternative: Drinking the Massachusetts Kool-Aid is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog