Good News on Cotton
We’re another step closer to putting a shameful chapter of America’s trade policy behind us, with the good news that the House today approved (by a margin of 223-197, roll call here) an amendment offered by Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI) and Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) to prohibit the use of funds in the appropriations bill to provide payment to the Brazil Cotton Institute: the administration signed a deal last year with Brazil to send $147 million a year of taxpayers money to Brazil so they would look the other way while the United States continued to subsidize our cotton farmers illegally. Mr Kind and Mr Flake rightly argued that was an egregious use of taxpayer money. Some lawmakers agitated against stopping the payments in case it sparked a trade war, but the answer to that, of course, is to bring U.S. cotton policy into compliance with WTO rules (and rulings). More background here.
Cato on Stossel — at a New Time
Thursday evening, “Stossel” on FOX Business Network moves to a new time — 10 p.m. ET. This week’s show looks at waste in government, with Rep. Jeff Flake, Cato’s Chris Preble on military spending, and John McWhorter on the drug war.
Set your DVRs. Or, come to think of it, you can still watch TV live.
This Week in Government Failure
Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this week:
- Unfortunately, the president’s Fiscal Commission appears to have operated on the premise that the federal government should continue to do everything it now does.
- Getting Rep. Jeff Flake on appropriations is a step in the right direction, but his appointment can’t be a token gesture.
- A new study finds that policymakers needn’t fear spending cuts.
- House Republican leaders’ support for “Prince of Pork” Hal Rogers to chair the chamber’s appropriations committee is a slap in the face of voters who demanded change in November.
- Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, whose state’s unemployment rate is almost 13 percent, has advice for Washington on how to create jobs. No, it’s not April 1st.
Rep. Jeff Flake to Appropriations
In-coming House Speaker John Boehner’s endorsement of Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) for a seat on the chamber’s appropriations committee means that it’s probably a done deal. Flake is one of the few policymakers who actually lives up to the fiscal conservative label. Thus, Flake’s appointment to a committee that many members think only exists to increase spending on special interests would be welcome news.
Boehner also endorsed a suggestion from Rep. Jeff Kingston (R-GA), who has mounted a dark-horse campaign to chair the appropriations committee, to create a subcommittee focused on investigating federal programs. Flake would chair this subcommittee, and according to a release on his website, he has already lined up worthy targets like Head Start and farm subsidies.
How much success will Flake have within the committee?
The New York Times quotes Flake as boldly saying, “It has been a favor factory for years, and now it is going to become a slaughterhouse.” At the same time, Flake acknowledged to Politico that putting a few anti-spenders on appropriations isn’t going to be enough:
Flake said the conservatives that Boehner wants to get on the committee will be “marginalized” if they’re scattered throughout the panel.
“It’s not enough just to have a few going on the committee,” he said. “They could be dispersed among the subcommittees that are forgotten.”
I recently warned the House Republican leadership against serving tea party voters re-heated meatloaf by allowing old-school spenders to dominate the committees. Getting Jeff Flake on appropriations is a step in the right direction, but his appointment can’t be a token gesture. Anti-spenders like Flake will need support from their leadership to succeed because they sure won’t be making friends with the big-spending old bulls.
Dueling Earmark Op-Eds
With a key vote on earmarks slated for next Tuesday in the Senate Republican Conference, Republican leaders are having it out on whether their party should eschew earmarking or continue the practice. The debate centers on the division of power between Congress and the executive branch.
On NRO’s “The Corner” blog, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) calls earmarks a “phony issue.” Doing away with earmarks doesn’t reduce spending. It simply transfers authority for spending decisions to the executive:
Earmarks have been part of the congressional process since the founding of our country. As James Madison, the father of the Constitution viewed it, appropriating funds is the job of the legislature. Writing in the Federalist, he noted that Congress holds the power of the purse for the very reason that it is closer to the people. The words of Madison and Article 1 Section 9 of the Constitution say that authorization and appropriations are exclusively the responsibility of the legislative branch. Congress should not cede this authority to the executive branch.
And he criticizes the anti-earmark movement as “pseudo” fiscal responsibility:
While anti-earmarkers bloviate about the billions spent through earmarks, many of them supported the trillions of dollars in extra spending for bailouts, stimulus, and foreign aid. Talk about specks versus planks! Over the course of the last several years, the overall number and dollar amount of earmarks has steadily decreased. During that same time, overall spending has ballooned by over $1.3 trillion. In reality, ballyhooing about earmarks has been used as a ruse by some to seem more fiscally responsible than they really are.
Taking the other side, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) writes in the Washington Post that earmarks are part and parcel of Congress’s abdication:
Those who view earmarking as an expression of the “congressional prerogative” sell Congress short of its preeminent role as the first branch of government. As the defenders of earmarking are fond of saying, earmarks represent less than 2 percent of all federal spending. Precisely! By focusing on a measly 2 percent of spending, we have given up effective oversight on the remaining 98 percent.
This lopsided exchange can be examined empirically. As the number of earmarks has risen significantly over the past two decades, the amount of oversight exercised by the House Appropriations Committee — as measured by the number of hearings held, witnesses called, etc. — has declined substantially. It is as if Congress has called a truce with the executive branch: Don’t hassle us about our 2 percent, and we’ll offer only token interference with your 98 percent.
Gov. Barbour Breaks with GOP on Immigration
OK, the headline may be a bit overstated, but recent comments on immigration by Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi are different enough from what most of his fellow Republicans are saying to be newsworthy.
In a video interview released earlier this week (see link below), Barbour expressed appreciation for the Hispanic immigrant workers who helped rebuild his state after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and for the need to be more open to highly skilled immigrants from countries such as India.
Barbour is an important figure in the GOP. He is in his second term, chairs the Republican Governors Association, and led the Republican National Committee back in 1994 when the party swept into power in Congress.
When asked what he would say to people in California who are upset about illegal immigration, Barbour responded:
Let me just tell you, I’ve had a different experience than perhaps some other governors. I don’t know where we would have been in Mississippi after Katrina if it hadn’t been for the Spanish speakers that came in to help rebuild, and there’s no doubt in my mind some of them weren’t here legally. Some of them were, some of them weren’t. But they came in, they looked for the work—if they hadn’t been there, if they hadn’t come and stayed for a few months or a couple of years, we would be way, way, way behind where we are now.
Every country—I don’t care if it’s the United States of America or Papua New Guinea, every country has gotta have a secure border. If you can’t secure your border, you’re not much of a country, and we’ve gotta secure our border. But we’ve gotta do so with the recognition that even in our lifetime we’re gonna have a labor shortage in the United States. We don’t want to be like Japan, where the aging population is supported by fewer and fewer and fewer and fewer.
So there’s gotta be a way—a) we gotta secure the border, but b) we’ve got to work through how are we gonna make sure we’ve got the labor we need in the United States. H1B visas—a huge, huge thing. My idea is everybody from Stanford who’s from India that gets a PhD, we oughta stamp citizenship on his diploma, so instead of him going back to India and starting a business that employs 1,800 people, that he’ll start a business that employs 1,800 people in Des Moines, Iowa, instead of India. A lot of this is just common sense, and common sense tells us we’re not gonna take ten or twelve or fourteen million people [currently here illegally] and put them in jail and deport them. We’re not gonna do it, and we need to quit—some people need to quit acting like we are, and let’s talk about real solutions.
The Four Congressmen of the Cotton Subsidy Apocalypse?
Yet another show of that rare commodity, bipartisan efforts to reduce the size of government today. Four members of the House—two Republican and two Democrat—have sent a letter to President Obama, calling on him to reverse the insane policy of bribing Brazilian farmers with subsidies in an attempt to correct, in accordance with the perverse two-wrongs-make-a-right school of logic, for illegal U.S. subsidies. (There were other questionable parts of the deal with Brazil).
Barney Frank (D, MA), Ron Kind (D, WI), Paul Ryan (R, WI) and Jeff Flake (R, AZ) make compelling arguments for finding a better and more permanent solution to the dispute than the current (dodgy) deal with Brazil, including arguments about fiscal responsibility, the adverse effects of distorting markets in this way, and the implications for the U.S. economy of continuing to operate the cotton program in its current form.
They also cleverly allude to President Obama’s emphasis on enforcement in his trade policy, pointing out that enforcement runs two ways:
Should we fail to effectively reform [the cotton] program now, American businesses and workers wil pay the price because we refused to write a law that complies with our international obligations. We cannot expect our trading partners to play by the rules if we are not willing to do the same. [emphasis added]
The press release from Rep. Flake’s office contains some great quotes, too. Flake, for example, says, “This proposal takes our federal farm subsidy policy from the impractical to the absurd.”
But I’ll give the last word to Rep. Frank, who has this gem to offer:
[T]he Obama administration apparently feels compelled to preserve our right to subsidize American cotton farmers by extending that subsidy to Brazilian cotton farmers. People looking for an illustration of the meaning of the phrase, ‘from bad to worse,’ need look no further.
Monday Links
- Michael Tanner says the difficult part of passing the health care bill has only just begun: “The bill must now go to a conference committee to resolve significant differences between the House and Senate versions. And history shows that agreement is far from guaranteed.”
- Get ready for Cash for Clunkers…the Home Edition.
- Gene Healy on the new decade: “Yes, it was a rotten 10 years for America. But cheer up: Things aren’t as bad as they seem, and there’s a good chance they’ll get better.”
- Will the market rise or fall? Richard Rahn: “The long-term outlook for the stock market is not good, and here is why. For the past 100 years, there has been an inverse relationship between changes in the size of government and the growth or decline in the stock market.”
- Podcast: “A New Policy Toward Cuba” featuring Rep. Jeff Flake.
Disappointing Start for Immigration Reform
The good news is that a bill has been introduced in the House this week under the broad heading of immigration reform. Even during a recession, Congress should be working to change our immigration system to reflect the longer-term needs of our economy for foreign-born workers.
The bad news is that the actual bill put in the hopper by Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-IL, on Tuesday would do nothing to solve the related problems of illegal immigration and the long-term needs of our economy.
As I argued in a recent blog post and a Washington Times op-ed, immigration reform must include expanded opportunities for legal immigration in the future through a temporary worker visa.
Any so-called reform that is missing this third leg will be doomed to fail. We will simply be repeating the mistakes of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to 2.7 million illegal workers and ramped up enforcement, but made no provision for future workers. Rep. Jeff Flake, R-AZ, agrees.
Rep. Flake’s Wise Counsel on the Tire Tariff
Earlier today, Congressman Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican, sent a letter to President Obama urging him to reconsider his decision to impose a 35 percent tariff on tires imported from China.
Rep. Flake makes all the right points in his letter, reminding the president that:
Your decision to impose duties on Chinese tires is likely to encourage other domestic industries to file their own petitions for relief under Section 421. The potential for an endless cycle of U.S. restrictions and subsequent retaliation from China is the last thing our economic recovery needs.
I wish there were more members of Congress like Rep. Flake. Our Trade Vote Records feature on our web site offers a searchable data base of all major trade votes going back to the mid-1990s. Our data base confirms that Rep. Flake is the most consistent supporter in all of Congress in opposing both subsidies and barriers to trade.
The president should heed Rep. Flake’s wise letter.
Jeff Flake vs. the Spending Robots
Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona is one of the very few fiscal policy heroes in Congress. Last night, he was doing what he does best — offering amendments to cut funding from a wasteful appropriations bill moving through the House.
Flake tried to strike spending earmarks slipped into the bill by both Republicans and Democrats. Watching the action on C-SPAN, I was struck by what a bunch of robots the big spenders defending the bill were. They said things like “this project is very important,” “it will help people,” and “it has a rate of return of 30-to-1 for every tax dollar spent.”
Flake pointed out the simple logical flaws in the spenders’ arguments. If an earmarked project is so important, why doesn’t it get funding through the normal competitive process? If a project has such a high return, wouldn’t private investors swoop in to earn the big profits? The “high return” claim is a commonly used gambit by big-spending politicians. Economist Martin Sullivan calls it the “liberal Laffer curve.”
Anyway, the spending robots listened politely to Flake, then they focused back in on their staff-prepared bullet points and continued with their self-interested drivel about how the nation’s fate rested on federal aid for the Elvis museum back in their hometown, or whatever their particular project was.
Flake presented some interesting statistics on the earmarks in the agriculture appropriations bill being considered last night. As shown in the chart below, two-thirds of the earmarks go to a small, exclusive club within the House of those on the appropriations committee, committee chairs, and party leadership. He characterized the appropriations process as a “spoils system,” which is evocative of government corruption of the past, such as Tammany Hall.
But unlike the original Tammany Hall, today’s spoils system is not party-based. Instead, it’s run by an elite and bipartisan group of spending robots within Congress, who pose as representatives of the people when they travel outside the beltway. As Flake implied, it’s odd that the great majority of members and their constituents, who get the short end of the stick from the spoils system, don’t revolt.
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