Politico‘s Jason Millman writes:

How much does Rick Santorum hate President Barack Obama’s health care law? So much that he even opposes the parts a lot of Republicans like.

The Republican presidential candidate, talking health care across the street from Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic Monday morning, blasted parts of the Affordable Care Act that poll well even among Republican voters — like guaranteeing coverage for people with pre-existing conditions and making health insurers cover preventive care.

Santorum, who has touted free market health principles like health savings accounts as an alternative to the Affordable Care Act, defended insurance industry practices the law eliminates, like setting premiums based on people’s health status.

Sigh. I refer my right honorable friend to the smack-down I gave such silliness some time ago:

Asking people whether they support the law’s pre-existing conditions provisions is like asking whether they want sick people to pay less for medical care.  Of course they will say yes.  If anything, it’s amazing that as many as 36 percent of the public are so economically literate as to know that these government price controls will actually harm people with pre-existing conditions.  Also amazing is that among people with pre-existing conditions, equal numbers believe these provisions will be useless or harmful as think they will help.

But as the collapse of the CLASS Act and private markets for child-only health insurance have shown, and as the Obama administration has argued in federal court, the pre-existing conditions provisions cannot exist without the wildly unpopular individual mandate because on their own, the pre-existing conditions provisions would cause the entire health insurance market to implode.

If the pre-existing conditions provisions are a (supposed) benefit of the law, then the individual mandate is the cost of those provisions. If voters don’t like the individual mandate–if they aren’t willing to pay the cost of the law’s purported benefits–then the “popular” provisions aren’t popular, either.

Or, as Firedoglake’s Jon Walker puts it, ObamaCare is about as popular as pepperoni and broken glass pizza.

Even among Republican voters? Good grief.

But, But…Price Controls Poll Well! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In his State of the Union address, President Obama emphatically declared, “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” Obama sought to put to rest the notion that he is embracing American decline, as GOP candidates Romney, Gingrich and Santorum have accused him of doing. He likewise affirmed his belief in the country’s exceptional place in history.

In particular, this president believes, as his predecessor did, in the necessity of the U.S. military to act beyond its constitutionally mandated function, put out any fires that flare across the globe, and underwrite world security. I examine this in an op-ed published today on CNN.com:

The president sounded like a neoconservative when he declared during his recent State of the Union address that the United States was, and would remain, the world’s “indispensable nation.” Obama’s proposed Pentagon budget, released last week, affirmed his intention to retain most of the U.S. military’s current missions, even when they aren’t needed to safeguard the United States’ vital security interests.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s latest strategy document was carefully designed to convince allies and adversaries alike that the United States can continue to prosecute multiple armed conflicts in far-flung corners of the globe. Taken together, Obama’s strategy document, budget and State of the Union remarks articulate a coherent philosophy on military spending and global engagement that ought to hold a lot of appeal for the neoconservatives in the GOP.

But … our foreign policy leaders have consistently ignored … an argument that should have strong sway at a time of economic uncertainty: this country’s tax dollars can be better spent than on defending wealthy allies who are more than capable of protecting themselves.

This talk of the United States as the “indispensable nation” is straight out of the neoconservative playbook. They should have no quarrel with President Obama’s policies. And it is interesting that while Mitt Romney criticizes the president in this arena, Romney foreign-policy advisor, neoconservative stalwart Robert Kagan, has gotten the president’s attention.

Like Kagan and Romney, President Obama believes the world is better off with the United States doing for wealthy allies what they should be doing for themselves: securing their interests. President Obama talked of “fairness” in his State of the Union and a “shared sacrifice” among citizens in these trying economic times. But this sacrifice apparently does not extend beyond the borders of the United States. Under President Obama, as under a Romney presidency, the American taxpayer will continue to pay for the security of Europe and East Asia, and our troops will be saddled with a nearly endless list of missions. That isn’t fair, nor is it wise.

Obama’s Neocon Moment is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Secretary Panetta’s announcement that the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan will end as early as mid-2013 is a positive development. But it is long overdue and still leaves too many questions unanswered. After more than ten years of war in Afghanistan, the administration should follow through on its commitment to end combat operations and withdraw all troops by 2014. Continuing to narrow our objectives will make this war winnable.

Politically, this makes perfect sense for the Obama administration. It is a shot across the bow of his political opponents and those wishing for an indefinite combat mission in Afghanistan. Secretary Panetta’s announcement allows the administration to get on the side of voters who want to draw-down in Afghanistan. By opposing any draw-down, his critics side with the much smaller segment of the American people who still support the nation-building mission.

President Obama is in a position similar to the debate over Iraq in his 2008 presidential campaign. He argued in 2008 that he would end a grinding war he inherited. The president can claim victory (and vindication) in Iraq and argue that if you liked the first act, you’ll love the second. He will end another grinding war he inherited—and conveniently gloss over the fact that he sent more troops to Afghanistan than President Bush ever did.

Of course, these developments are neither new nor are they a sure thing. Despite the media attention given to this announcement, it was somewhat predictable. Panetta acknowledged that this was always part of the plan behind the scenes. Buried in the coverage of Panetta’s statement are multiple qualifiers. He admitted that no decision has been made on the number of troops that will leave in 2013. The secretary offered no details on what this transition from combat operations would look like. Indeed, the line between an “advise and assist” mission and combat operations is a sketchy one. A spokesman clarified that U.S. forces could still be involved in combat operations in 2014. In the end, our policy has not changed. It is still unclear how many U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan at the end of 2013.

But to the extent that Panetta’s recent statement reaffirms the administration will adhere to the timeline of withdrawal, it is an encouraging sign. It signals to the Afghans that they must take responsibility for their own security, and it provides an incentive for them to continue to put themselves in harms way and take the initiative.

Let’s hope that this is indeed a confirmation of the administration’s commitment to a withdrawal. The United States should have scaled-down to a limited, targeted counterterrorism mission many years ago. A large-scale, nation-building mission has never been necessary to protect the vital interests of the United States and hunt down the few remaining terrorists in Afghanistan that aim to strike the homeland.

The strategic misconceptions that guide our current mission in the country are overwrought, lack evidence, and are based on worst-case scenarios. We should continue to transition to a counterterrorism mission that utilizes intelligence, special operations forces, and our considerable technological advantages, such as UAVs. And we must continue to encourage the Afghan people to take responsibility for their security and their nation.

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

On Afghanistan, Panetta Leaves Questions Unanswered is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama is catching some well-earned blowback for his decision to force religious institutions “to pay for health insurance that covers sterilization, contraceptives and abortifacients.” You see, ObamaCare penalizes individuals (employers) who don’t purchase (offer) a certain minimum package of health insurance coverage. The Obama administration is demanding that coverage must include the aforementioned reproductive care services. The exception for religious institutions that object to such coverage is so narrow that, as one wag put it, not even Jesus would qualify. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius reassures us, “I believe this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services.” Ummm, Madam Secretary…the Constitution only mentions one of those things. The Catholic church is hopping mad. Even the reliably left-wing E.J. Dionne is angry, writing that the President “utterly botched” the issue “not once but twice” and “threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus.”

As I wrote over and over as Congress debated ObamaCare, anger and division are inevitable consequences of this law. I recently debated the merits of ObamaCare’s individual mandate on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a paragraph that got cut from my essay:

We can be certain…that the mandate will divide the nation. An individual mandate guarantees that the government—not you—will decide what medical services you will purchase, including contraceptives, fertility services that result in the destruction of human embryos, or elective abortions. The same apparatus that can force Americans to subsidize elective abortions can also be used to ban private abortion coverage once the other team wins. The rancor will only grow.

Or as I put it in 2009,

Either the government will force taxpayers to fund abortions, or the restrictions necessary to prevent taxpayer funding will reduce access to abortion coverage. There is no middle ground. Somebody has to lose. Welcome to government-run health care.

The same is true for contraception. The rancor will grow until we repeal this law.

ObamaCare highlights a choice that religious organizations — such as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, where my grandfather served as counsel — have to make. Either they stop casting their lots with Caesar and join the fight to repeal government health care mandates and subsidies, or they forfeit any right to complain when Caesar turns on them. Matthew 26:52.

Contraceptives Mandate Brings ObamaCare’s Coercive Power into Sharper Focus is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

One of President Obama’s better applause lines the other night came when he stepped into the unaccustomed public role of a deregulator:

We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill — because milk was somehow classified as an oil. With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk.

I will note for the record that we had made a bit of a hobbyhorse of EPA’s dairy-oil-spill controls, taking note of them in no fewer than four posts as the sort of regulatory overkill the Obama administration should disavow. House Republicans complain that the president is now putting himself at the head of someone else’s parade, since their members had long urged repeal of the rules and the Obama EPA under administrator Lisa Jackson had dragged its heels about going along. But I’m not going to complain. The ability to get out in front of the other side’s parades served President Bill Clinton well, and I just wish President Obama would use it more often.

The President’s Spilled-Milk Joke is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It was clever, though a bit too opportunistic, for the president to begin and end his State of the Union address with references to Iraq, and the sacrifices of the troops. The war has been a disaster for the United States, and for the Iraqi people, of course. But the subject has always been a win-win for him. Whenever he talks about Iraq, it serves as a not-so-subtle reminder about who got us into this mess (i.e. not him).

Others might gripe about the president wrapping himself in the troops, and the flag (or, in the case of this speech, the troops’ flag). But Americans are rightly proud of our military, and there is nothing wrong with invoking the spirit of service and sacrifice that animates the members of our military. (There is something wrong with suggesting that all Americans should act as members of the military do, a point that Ben Friedman makes in a separate post.)

But while some degree of chest-thumping, “America, ooh-rah” is to be expected, this passage sent me over the edge:

America is back.

Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about. …Yes, the world is changing; no, we can’t control every event. But America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs – and as long as I’m President, I intend to keep it that way.

Have we learned nothing in the past decade? Have we learned anything? To say that we are the indispensable nation is to say that nothing in the world happens without the United States’ say so. That is demonstrably false.

Of course, the United States of American is an important nation, the most important, even. Yes, we are an exceptional nation. We boast an immensely powerful military, a still-dynamic economy (in spite of our recent challenges), and a vibrant political culture that hundreds of millions of people around the world would like to emulate. But the world is simply too vast, too complex, and the scale of transactions in the global economy is enormous. It is the height of arrogance and folly for any country to claim indispensability.

The president is hardly alone, however. Many in Washington—including some of his most vociferous critics in the Republican Party— celebrate the continuity in U.S. foreign policy as an affirmation of its wisdom. The president’s invocation of the “indispensable nation” line from the mid-1990s is merely the latest manifestation of a foreign policy consensus that has held for decades.

But the world has changed, and is still changing. Our grand strategy needs to adapt. When we embarked on the unipolar project after the end of the Cold War, the United States accounted for about a third of global economic output, and a third of global military expenditures; today, we account for just under half of global military spending, but our share of the global economy has fallen below 25 percent.

What we need, therefore, is a new strategy that aims to promote our core interests, but that doesn’t expect U.S. troops and taxpayers to also bear the burdens of promoting everyone else’s. After all, the values that are so important to most Americans, and that the president cited in his speech last night, are also cherished by hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people in many countries around the world. It is reasonable to expect them to pay some of the costs required to advance these values, and to sustain a peaceful and prosperous international order. Our current strategy still presumes that it is not.

Obama’s State of the Union Signals Grand Strategy Status Quo is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey are scheduled to brief the media tomorrow morning on the recently completed strategic review that will inform the Pentagon’s budget priorities for the coming five to ten years. Early indications suggest that the status quo will hold. And that is bad news for U.S. troops, and U.S. taxpayers.

Obama, Panetta, and Dempsey should clearly spell out:

1. The types of missions that the U.S. military will be expected to perform on a regular basis
2. Those operations that the military will occasionally conduct on short notice, and for short periods of time
3. How defense capacity can be augmented in those very rare cases calling for significant mobilization of additional resources.

Some suggest that the strategy document will abandon the requirement that the Pentagon must be prepared to fight two sustained ground wars at the same time, something that the country hasn’t done since well before Barack Obama was born. Such a change, if true, should be welcomed.

It is significant the president is attending, and the most important questions should be reserved for him. It is particularly incumbent upon the civilian leadership within the Obama administration, beginning with the president himself, to spell out their intentions regarding the use of force, and of the role of the U.S. military more broadly. These should go beyond vague signals; our military leaders shouldn’t be forced to guess what missions that they will be asked to perform. The president must tell them.

For example, does he intend to deploy U.S. troops to more weak and failing states, missions that require a very sizable ground presence for an indefinite period of time? Or have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan taught the president and his advisers that such missions are costly and counterproductive (and politically unpopular at home)? If the latter, the Pentagon should be planning for significant reductions in the Army and Marine Corps.

Does President Obama plan to conduct more Libya-style missions, operations conducted from the air, with some involvement by other militaries? Or is the recent deployment to Uganda emblematic of future missions, with a small-scale U.S. military presence on the ground in support of indigenous forces? Either way, the Air Force and the Navy are likely to be involved, though perhaps not as active as in the past decade.

More broadly, will the White House and the State Department continue to task the U.S. military with the defense of the global commons, providing security for all countries, and expecting nothing in return? Or will the twin constraints of fiscal insolvency and dwindling public support here at home lead to a less grandiose foreign policy, one that will call on the U.S. military to defend the United States and secure vital U.S. interests, while encouraging other countries to take responsibility for their own defense? The former requires a military even larger than the one that we have today, one that costs more than all other militaries in the world, combined, and that expects and demands much of our men and women in uniform. The latter mission, by contrast, could be easily handled with a smaller, more elite force, based largely here in the United States.

The answers to these key questions are what should guide the Pentagon’s force planning for the coming decade. The president, Secretary Panetta, Secretary of State Clinton, and other senior officials have stated that the United States must continue to be the world’s policeman, effectively discouraging other countries from doing more. The end result is likely to be a smaller U.S. military, tasked with a longer to-do list. That isn’t fair to the troops, or to the U.S. taxpayers who will foot the bill.

What the Pentagon’s New Military Strategy Should Look Like is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The end of the Iraq war is a rare win-win situation for President Obama. So far, he has played his hand skillfully. And it is a fair bet that he will continue to do so. Indeed, it might be one of the only policy areas that won’t cost him votes come next year.

This week’s events surrounding the end of the nearly nine-years long U.S. military mission in Mesopotamia reveal Obama’s acumen and good fortune. On Monday, Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Makiki punctuated the fact that the U.S. mission was finally ending. Today, the president will travel to Fort Bragg to thank the troops for their service in a war that he opposed at the outset.

There is irony in this, but one that Americans have managed for many years: unlike Vietnam, the American people have learned to love the troops while still hating the war. We don’t blame the military for the fact that the war has turned out to be a bloody, costly quagmire. And with good reason: the military didn’t claim that it would be easy or cheap. The soldiers knew better. With few exceptions, the cheerleaders for the war had no first-hand experience in warfare.

President Obama will likely emerge unscathed even if the worst-case scenarios transpire in Iraq. Unlike his worn-out claim that he inherited most of the country’s economic problems, “the other guy did it” excuse rings true when it comes to Iraq. The dwindling but vocal few who call for the U.S. military to remain in Iraq indefinitely cannot fairly accuse President Obama of implementing a reckless policy driven by the political calendar. He merely executed the plan according to the timeline developed by his predecessor.

Obama was not in a strong position to renegotiate the Status of Forces Agreement, given the Iraqi people’s overwhelming opposition to a continued U.S. presence in their country. But it wasn’t in his interest to do so. The American people want this war to end, and he wins credit, fairly or not, for following through on his promise to end it. And if Iraq descends into chaos, and civil war, or if Iran somehow manages to consolidate power over its restive neighbor, Obama can claim, justifiably, that these things wouldn’t have happened had people listened to him in 2002. But he doesn’t have to say it. Others will say it for him. Nearly every news story reporting on this week’s events have reminded viewers, listeners, and readers that the president opposed this war. That one fact translates to a relatively favorable perception of the president’s handling of foreign policy, generally.

Indeed, the president likely wins whenever the subject of Iraq arises. Excepting Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, the other GOP contenders are unable or unwilling to speak to the nearly two-thirds of Americans who believe the war to have been a mistake. Most of the president’s Republican challengers are reluctant to cross the neoconservative cheerleaders for the war who, inexplicably, still have great sway over aspiring chief executives. On the crucial question, “Was the war worth it?” Iraq war true believers expect a simple, one word answer: yes. They will not tolerate any apostasy, even though, for most Americans, the answer is a resounding no.

Any of his Republican challengers who cannot give that same answer can only hope that they won’t be asked the question. The more they say about Iraq, the less credible they become. And Barack Obama doesn’t have to say a thing.

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

Obama’s Win-Win on Iraq is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It is well established that presidents do not gain much of anything when they launch unsuccessful military ventures. However, they generally don’t gain much from successful ones either. The public does not seem to be interested in rewarding—or even remembering—foreign policy success.

The data are now in on the most recent such military venture: the expedition in Libya. The United States and its NATO allies materially supported popular rebels in their ultimately successful efforts to overthrow the decidedly unpopular regime of Muammar Qaddafi, efforts that resulted in the terminal demise of Qaddafi, a certifiable devil du jour in the American mind for decades. And all this at no cost in American lives.

After the rebel success and the death of the dictator in November, CBS News conducted a poll and asked a fairly mild question about the mission. It revealed that the public was quite capable of containing its enthusiasm for the venture, no matter how successful it may seem to have been:

Although it seems unlikely the venture will hurt President Obama’s reelection prospects, it seems equally unlikely it will furnish him with any real bragging rights.

The same thing happened in 1999 during Bill Clinton’s war over Kosovo, a venture that seemed considerably more risky and that inspired much more attention. As the bombs were being dropped there in support of the persecuted Albanian side, quite a few press accounts argued that the presidential ambitions and political future of Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, hung in the balance. From the standpoint of public opinion, the Kosovo venture seems to have been a success, not the least because no American lives were lost. But when Gore launched his campaign for the presidency a few months later, he scarcely thought it important or memorable enough to bring up.

And of course there is the legendary inability of George H. W. Bush to garner much lasting electoral advantage from the Gulf War of 1991. Although the success in that huge and dramatic victory caused even his ratings on the handling of the economy to rise notably, this effect was reversed within days in the polls. His slide continued into electoral defeat in the next year.

Lesser accomplishments seem to have been at least as unrewarding. Nobody gave much credit to Bush for his earlier successful intervention in Panama, to Dwight Eisenhower for a successful venture into Lebanon in 1958, to Lyndon Johnson for success in the Dominican Republic in 1965, to Jimmy Carter for husbanding an important Middle East treaty in 1979, to Ronald Reagan for a successful invasion of Grenada in 1983 or to Bill Clinton for sending troops to help resolve the Bosnia problem in 1995. Although it is often said that the successful Falklands War of 1982 helped British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the elections of 1983, any favorable effect is confounded by the fact that the economy was improving impressively at the same time.

Even Harry Truman, who presided over the massive triumph in World War II, saw his approval plummet to impressive lows within months after the war because of domestic concerns.

And surely the ultimate case is that of Britain’s Winston Churchill. After brilliantly holding the country together during that war—at times, it seemed that the only thing the country had going for it was his rhetoric—he was summarily voted out of office a few weeks after its end. Or, as he put it, “At the outset of this mighty battle, I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for the five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.”

In his perhaps-ironically titled book Triumph and Tragedy, Churchill recalls that, when the news about his electoral defeat arrived, his wife suggested, “It may well be a blessing in disguise.” Churchill replied, “At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.” Other victors have had reason to express similar sentiments.

Cross-posted from “The Skeptics” at the National Interest.

Will Obama’s Libya ‘Victory’ Aid Re-Election Bid? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today Politico Arena asks:

Should Obama have led the supercommittee?

My response:

Whether or not Obama had led the supercommittee in its effort to trim a pittance from our federal deficits and debt, the effort was doomed from the start for the reasons committee co-chairman Jeb Hensarling stated in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:  “Ultimately, the committee did not succeed because we could not bridge the gap between two dramatically competing visions of the role government should play in a free society, the proper purpose and design of the social safety net, and the fundamentals of job creation and economic growth.”

Obama has proven himself clueless about economics from the time he first entered public life, as evidenced by the economic disaster surrounding him and his party. Their vision was soundly rejected by the voters a year ago. If it is rejected again a year from now, we may start the slow climb out of the hole that they, as well as Republicans who share their vision, have put us in. But if the voters give us a mixed result, it’s only a matter of time before our creditors exact the price of our economic irresponsibility. These lessons, the subjects of children’s books and learned lectures, are as old as humanity itself. We have only to heed them.

It Goes Beyond the Supercommittee is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right.’ — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §258

Among the arguments for which the great 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is famous, perhaps the best known—and most controversial—is his argument for the impossibility of a truly “private language.” Since Wittgenstein’s own language was, if not quite “private,” notoriously opaque, it’s a matter of some controversy exactly what the argument is, but here’s a very crude summary of one common interpretation:

Language is, by it’s nature, a rule-governed enterprise. Under normal circumstances, for instance, I use words correctly when I say “there’s a yellow school bus outside,” just in case there is a yellow school bus outside. If, instead, there’s a blue Prius, then I may be lying, or trying to make some sort of signally unfunny joke, or confused about either the facts or about what words mean—but I am, one way or another, using the words “incorrectly.” And indeed, the only way words like “yellow” and “school bus” can have any specific meaning is if they’re correctly applied to some things, but not to others.

Now suppose I decide to invent my own private language, meant to describe my own internal sensations and mental states, maybe for the purpose of recording them in a personal diary. On the first day, I experience a particular sensation I decide to call “S,” and record in my diary: “Today I felt S.” As time passes, on some days I write S to describe my private sensations, and on other days maybe I come up with different labels—maybe T, U, and V. This certainly looks like a private language, but there’s a problem: each time I write down “S,” the idea is suppose to be that I’m recording that I had the same sensation I had the first day—S—and not T, U, or V. But what’s the criteria for “the same”? What makes it true that my sensation on day 27 really is “more like” the sensation S that I had on day 1, and not V, which I first had on day 16? How do I know that this new sensation is really an S and not a V? (Say S was an itch in my hand; will I be correct to use S to refer to an itch in my shoulder? Or a pain in my hand? Or for that matter a pain in my shoulder?) The only criterion is that it seems or feels that way to me. But in that case, I’m not really engaged in a rule-governed language system at all, because in effect S applies to whatever I decide it does. Since I can never really be wrong, it doesn’t really make sense to say I’m ever right in my use either. Since the terms are truly private, there’s no difference between “correctly applying S” and “specifying in greater detail what S means.” What looked like a “private language” was actually just a kind of pantomime of a true, rule-governed language.

I found myself thinking of Wittgenstein and his private language argument, oddly enough, when thinking about the various forms of “secret law” and “secret legal interpretations” that increasingly govern our endless War on Terror. Consider, for instance, the secret legal memorandum justifying the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, discussed in an October 8 New York Times piece:

The legal analysis, in essence, concluded that Mr. Awlaki could be legally killed, if it was not feasible to capture him, because intelligence agencies said he was taking part in the war between the United States and Al Qaeda and posed a significant threat to Americans, as well as because Yemeni authorities were unable or unwilling to stop him.

Whether or not one agrees with the substantive principle articulated here, this at least sounds like a real rule limiting the discretion of the executive. Except…who decides when a capture is “not feasible” (as opposed to merely risky, costly, or inconvenient)? The same executive who is meant to apply and be bound by the rule. Who determines when the threat posed by a citizen is “significant” enough to permit targeting? Again, the executive.

This is not, one might object, a wholly “private” interpretive problem, because the Office of Legal Counsel provides some kind of quasi-independent check: it will occasionally tell even a president that what he wants to do isn’t legal. But in that case, the president can simply do what Barack Obama did in the case of his intervention in Libya: keep asking different legal advisers until one of them gives you the answer you want, then decide that the more favorable opinion overrides whatever OLC had concluded.

Similar considerations apply to the “secret law” of surveillance. The FBI may issue National Security Letters for certain specific types of records—including “toll billing records”—without judicial approval, but these secret demands must at least be “relevant to an authorized investigation.” A weak limit, we might think, but at least a limit. Yet, again, the apparent limitation is illusory: it is the Justice Department itself that determines what may count as an “authorized investigation.” When Congress initially passed the Patriot Act a decade ago, an “authorized investigation” meant a “full investigation” predicated on some kind of real evidence of wrongdoing. Just a few years later, though, the attorney general’s guidelines were changed to permit their use in much more speculative “preliminary investigations,” and soon enough, the majority of NSLs were being used in such preliminary investigations. Needless to say, “relevance” too is very much in the eye of the beholder.

In most of these cases, the prospects for external limitation are slim. First, of course, anyone who disagreed with the executive’s secret interpretation would have to find out about it—which may happen only years after the fact in whatever unknowable percentage of cases it ever happens at all. Then they’d have to overcome the extraordinary deference of our court system to assertions of the State Secrets Privilege just to be able to have a court consider whether the government had acted illegally. In practice, then, the executive is defining the terms of, and interpreting, the same rules that supposedly bind it.

The usual thing to say about this scenario is that it shows the importance of checks and balances in preventing the law from being perverted or abused. If we think there is at least a rough analogy between these cases and Wittgenstein’s diarist writing in a “private language,” though, we’ll see that this doesn’t go quite far enough. What we should say, rather, is that these are cases where “secret law,” like “private language” is not merely practically dangerous but conceptually incoherent. They are not genuine cases of “legal interpretation” at all, but only a kind of pantomime. Perhaps what we should say in these cases is not that the president or the executive branch may have violated the law—as though there were still, in general, some background binding principles—but that in these institutional contexts one simply cannot speak of actions as “in accordance with” or “contrary to” the law at all.  Where the possibility of external correction is foreclosed, the objectionable and unobjectionable decisions alike are, inherently, lawless.

Wittgenstein, Private Language, and Secret Law is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last week on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, President Obama discussed the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, the 2012 Republican presidential field, and ubiquitous Hollywood socialite, Kim Kardashian. But the conversation got really interesting when it veered to the recent intervention in Libya.

Obama said that with the arrival of the Arab Spring, the late Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi had an opportunity “to finally loosen his grip on power and peacefully transition to democracy. We gave him ample opportunity and he wouldn’t do it.” On the former leader’s killing, Obama said, “There’s a reason after [Osama] bin Laden was killed, for example, we didn’t release the photograph. I think that there’s a certain decorum with which you treat the dead even if it’s somebody who’s done terrible things.”

Hmmm, decorum. To some in the Beltway it may seem tired and trite to hear that U.S. foreign policy is flagrantly hypocritical when it comes to the subject of human rights. But it’s nonetheless noteworthy to hear prominent American leaders openly advocate intervening abroad in places like Libya in advance of the universal human aspiration to be free while continuing to support Middle East client states that repress their own people. Sadly, President Obama and other American leaders, especially in the wake of the momentous Arab Spring, are often perceived as liberty’s worst emissaries.

For numerous strategic and historical reasons, no American government has intervened militarily in countries such as Algeria, Jordan, or Yemen in defense of human rights. In Saudi Arabia, a long-time U.S. partner, homosexuals, apostates, and drug smugglers can be sentenced to execution, sometimes by beheading. In extreme cases, the convict’s body is crucified in public. And yet, the same U.S. government that offers unflinching support to the Saudi Kingdom led from behind for an intervention in Libya to stop an alleged massacre in Benghazi. In neighboring Egypt, meanwhile, for 29 years the U.S. government showered former President Hosni Mubarak with praise, despite his widespread use of torture and systematic repression of political prisoners. Washington also continues to support and arm the regime in Bahrain, which deliberately kills unarmed protesters and oppresses its people.

To promote human rights in Libya while supporting some of the world’s most heinous tyrannies may reflect America’s geopolitical preferences, but it makes a mockery of human rights and reveals an enormous discrepancy between what America claims to be doing and what it actually does. As much as Obama and his defenders want to strut around and promote their triumph over Moammar Qaddafi, people in the Middle East and around the world are well aware of this discrepancy. Such policies are not only abhorrent but also detrimental to America’s long-term interests. Advancing liberty is a painful and arduous process, but it can be done, and often independent of U.S. government efforts.

Cross-Posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

Of Qaddafi and Kim Kardashian is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In case you missed it, President Obama gave a big speech out in Las Vegas about both his “jobs” plan and a new plan to help underwater borrowers re-finance their mortgage. First, let’s recognize that it is not really “his” plan. The proposal is being issued by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), an independent regulator that the President is supposed to have no control over. Frankly, I find it troubling for a president to be so involved with an independent agency. If a president was out giving speeches when the Federal Reserve changed interest rates, we would all call that bizarre. It is no different here. As someone involved in drafting the law that created FHFA, I can say Congress considered, and rejected, the option of having this agency accountable to the president.

On to the substance. Perhaps most striking is that this plan does nothing for the housing market. Does it increase demand for housing? No. Does it reduce the supply of excess homes or help move the massive shadow inventory? Again, No. Does it even help those most in need? No. It is available only to those who have already had a mortgage for over two years, are current on their mortgage, and have missed no more than one payment per year. Basically helping only those that do not need any help.

The logic of the plan is that by reducing mortgage rates, you reduce monthly payments, which would increase consumer spending. The flaw in that logic is that while a mortgage is one person’s liability, it is another person’s asset. So you are simply making one party wealthier while making another poorer. It is not clear that the impact on aggregate spending should be anything other than zero.

Most troubling about the the plan, is that the program it is based upon, HARP, is likely illegal. Both the Fannie and Freddie charters require that if a loan is above 80 percent loan-to-value, it must have mortgage insurance. Yet the heart of HARP is a waiver of this requirement. Apparently FHFA claims these are not “new” loans, but just modifications. In that case why in the world would you modify a loan that is current and does not appear in any danger of default. Sadly one of the many things lost in the financial crisis is a basic respect for the rule of law. Our financial regulators have too often embraced a culture of lawlessness in name of saving our financial system (with little to show for it).

Random Thoughts on Obama’s New Mortgage Plan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Three issues are likely to dominate the talks this week between President Obama and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak. On the economic front, the two leaders will emphasize the extensive potential benefits of the bilateral free trade agreement.

On the security front, there will be considerable discussion of both North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program and the future of the U.S.-South Korean alliance. Unfortunately, leaders of the two countries are locked into increasingly obsolete and dysfunctional policies with respect to both issues. New thinking on those security matters is badly needed.

Seoul and Washington routinely contend that they will not tolerate North Korea having a nuclear arsenal. But other than the long-standing attempt to isolate Pyongyang internationally, U.S. and South Korean officials present no plausible strategy for preventing Kim Jong-il’s regime from expanding its nuclear capabilities. The much-touted six-party talks clearly have not worked. Moreover, without China’s active cooperation to deny crucial food and energy aid to North Korea (and there is no indication that Beijing is willing to take that step), North Korea cannot be truly isolated. Obama and Lee need to consider the possibility of learning to live with a nuclear North Korea, since the current U.S.-South Korean strategy for dealing with the nuclear issue is hopelessly ineffectual.

Policy regarding the bilateral security alliance is no better. Predictably, Lee and Obama will reaffirm the importance of that alliance. But from the standpoint of American interests, this commitment makes little sense. The principal effect of Washington’s security blanket for South Korea is to enable that country to shamelessly free-ride on America’s military exertions. Despite being located next to perhaps the most dangerous and unpredictable country in the world—Kim Jong-il’s North Korea—South Korea continues to spend an anemic 2.5 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. That is woefully inadequate, and the only reason Seoul can get away with such irresponsible behavior is that South Korean leaders believe they can rely on the United States to take care of their country’s security—at the expense of American taxpayers.

That arrangement was dubious even when South Korea was a weak, traumatized country facing a North Korea strongly backed by both the Soviet Union and Communist China. Today, South Korea is a wealthy country, and Moscow and Beijing regard North Korea as an embarrassment, not a crucial ally.

President Obama should inform Lee that an America whose government is hemorrhaging red ink at the rate of $1.5 trillion a year can no longer afford to subsidize the defense of free-riding allies—especially those that are perfectly capable of providing for their own defense. This summit meeting creates an opportunity for Washington to begin phasing-out the obsolete military alliance with South Korea.

Obama-Lee Summit: Time for New Thinking on the Korean Peninsula is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama says that we are a  ”generous and compassionate” country and that “through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.” And to fulfill that “progressive vision,” he’s going to work on “making government smarter, and leaner and more effective. ”

Today, under the rubric “Breakaway Wealth/Reaping Riches from Federal Spending,” the Washington Post gives us a front-page picture of where a lot of those generous and compassionate federal dollars actually go:

Millions of dollars worth of federal contracts transformed Anita Talwar from a government accounting clerk into a wealthy woman—one who can afford a $2.8 million home in the Washington suburbs with its own elevator, wine cellar and Swarovski crystal chandeliers.

Talwar, a 59-year-old immigrant from India, had no idea that she and her husband would amass a small fortune when she launched a company providing tech support to the federal government in 1987. But she shrewdly took advantage of programs for minority-owned small businesses and rode a boom in federal contracting.

By the time Talwar sold Advanced Management Technology in 2004, it had grown from a one-woman shop to a company with more than 350 employees and $100 million in annual revenue—all of it from government contracts.

Talwar’s success—and that of hundreds of other contractors like her—is a key factor driving the explosion of the region’s wealth over the last two decades. It also has exacerbated the gap between high- and low-wage workers, which is wider in the D.C. area than almost anywhere else in the United States.

Washingtonians now enjoy the highest median household income of any metropolitan area in the country…

More than $80 billion in federal contracting dollars will flow to the region this year, up from $4.2 billion in 1980.

That’s my kind of smart, lean, and effective government!

Your Tax Dollars at Work is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Rhetorically, President Obama is a champion of industry—as long as it’s green. To put our money where his mouth is, the president has already devoted over $100 billion in direct subsidies and tax credits to promote investment in solar panel, wind harnessing, lithium ion battery, and other industries he deems crucial to “winning the future.” (See Economic Report of the President, 2011, P. 129, Box 6-2 “Clean Energy Investments in the Recovery Act” for a list of some of those subsidies.) Concerning those industries, the president said in his 2010 SOTU address:

Countries like China are moving even faster… I’m not going to settle for a situation where the United States comes in second place or third place or fourth place in what will be the most important economic engine of the future.

To be sure, I am opposed to industrial policy, which presumes that one person or a cabal of self-anointed soothsayers knows how the future will unfold. But the story I am about to share is, I think, instructive in describing endemic policy dissonance within this administration and speaks to what even the president’s staunchest supporters describe as half-heartedness and an incapacity or unwillingness to follow through. Some chalk it up to indifference, but it’s really an aversion to making choices that could offend potential supporters.

While the president talks up the solar panel industry and commits our resources to its development, other policies of his administration undermine its success and encourage offshoring of production and the jobs that go with it. Dow Corning is one of the world’s largest producers of silicones, which are the most crucial components of solar panel production. The foremost ingredient in these silicones is silicon metal, which costs nearly twice the world market price in the United States because of antidumping restrictions on imports of the raw material from China and Russia (two of the world’s largest suppliers). Under U.S. antidumping law, Dow Corning and all other consumers of silicon metal were forbidden from participating formally in the proceedings that lead to the imposition of the duties.

As I described in a recent Cato policy paper, this is more than just tough luck for a few companies. This is economic self-flagellation on a grand scale. The antidumping statute prohibits consideration of the impact of prospective duties on downstream industries or on the economy as a whole, yet policymakers—having been steamrolled by the pro-antidumping lobby—have given scant consideration to the idea that this is plainly stupid policy, particularly in a globally integrated economy characterized by transnational supply chains and cross-border investment. In such an environment, if one hopes the best for the country’s value-added industries, there should be no restrictions on raw material inputs ever (a policy being embraced by other governments around the world).

Alas, the silicon metal restrictions constitute a big problem for Dow Corning and other industrial consumers of silicon metal, but a bigger problem for the economy. To compete with producers of silicones—the solar panel industries—in Europe, Japan, Canada, and China, Dow Corning is forced to consider moving production abroad so that it is not at such a large cost disadvantage from the outset. As Dow Corning officials put it in a very informative letter:

If Dow Corning were to move the production occurring within its Kentucky operations to any country outside the U.S., it would be more competitive by simply having access to the same global supply of raw materials as all other competitors.

Dow Corning could move offshore, a move it would prefer not to make, and probably recover the costs of the transition in short order. But doing so would reduce U.S. economic activity and destroy U.S. jobs, which would have a more lasting adverse impact. So, in an effort to avoid offshoring its operations—a move that one would think the administration would welcome—Dow Corning submitted an application to have some of its silicone production facilities in Kentucky designated as a Foreign Trade Subzone. The key policy objective of foreign trade zones, according to the former president of the National Association of Foreign Trade Zones is:

The optimization of economic development in the United States creating jobs, investment and value-added activity. The current regulations strike a balance that considers antidumping and countervailing duty petitioners, importers and U.S. manufacturers. Imported products that are made with components that may be dumped or subsidized are not subject to antidumping duty or countervailing duty. If these duties can be avoided by locating a factory in a foreign country, the Board should at least consider allowing it to happen here for export so that American workers can benefit. That is what the regulation achieves.

Basically, Dow Corning was proposing that to balance its need for access to world-priced silicon metal with the country’s need for economic activity and jobs, it would bring in silicon metal from foreign sources, including silicon metal from China and Russia, to be transformed into silicons in that subzone. Antidumping duties on silicon metals that were used to make silicones that were subsequently exported without first “entering the commerce of the United States” would be waived, while antidumping duties on silicon metals used to make silicones sold in the United States would be subject to the full payment of duties.

But during the period in which the FTZ application was pending, an army of professional antidumping law supporters—the Committee to Support U.S. Trade Laws (CSUSTL), the United Steelworkers Union, the Steel Manufacturers Association, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), and others—argued that granting the designation would serve only to circumvent the antidumping order, and that the well-being of the petitioner was all that mattered under the antidumping law.

After hearings, several comment periods, and deliberation the Foreign Trade Zones Board granted Dow Corning’s FTZ request, but “subject to a restriction prohibiting the admission of foreign status silicon metal subject to an antidumping or countervailing duty order,” thereby negating the entire purpose of the application and effectively daring Dow Corning to shut down its Kentucky operations and move abroad. That decision was signed by the acting assistant secretary for import administration—the same person charged with overseeing the Commerce Department’s notoriously pro-petitioner, antidumping regime, and, for the record, a person who answers to President Obama.

Did the president know what was at stake and look the other way? Or did he not even know? Neither answer reflects particularly well on a man claiming to have a plan for job creation and economic growth.

President’s Fealty to Antidumping Lobby Kills Jobs and Depresses Growth is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Washington Post is reporting that President Obama has assigned his staff with the task of designing a new set of government guarantees behind the U.S. mortgage market. Although as the Post also reports the “approach could even preserve Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” That’s correct. Despite their role in driving the housing bubble and the already $160 billion in taxpayer losses, President Obama appears to be considering just putting the same failed system in place. Of course, we’ll be promised that it will all work better this time.

Perhaps most offensive is that the Post reports that Obama “officials don’t want to punish the thousands of Fannie and Freddie employees who have specialized knowledge about the mortgage market.” Seriously? What about the many blameless employees of AIG, Lehman Brothers, or Bear Stearns? Or New Century for that matter. Did the janitors and receptionists at those firms really cause the crisis? The truth is that the employees of Fannie and Freddie have been lining their pockets at the expense of the taxpayer for years. What the Administration is really saying is that they wouldn’t want all the political operatives at these favored firms to lose their perks. After all, Obama officials will need somewhere to land after 2012 and Goldman Sachs has only so many slots.

What’s most depressing is that you can’t say Obama hasn’t been given the facts. As the Post makes clear, his economic advisers spelled out the case against massive subsidies for the mortgage market. Austan Goolsbee, chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, points out: by subsidizing mortgage investments, the government drives capital away from other types of investments. If Obama truly wants to help the middle and working class, then he’d want capital to flow into investments that increase labor productivity, which is the ultimate source of wage growth.  Running up asset prices, like houses, does not make us wealthier in the long run.

But then what should I expect. The President has already entered campaign mode. It would be nice to see the economics win over the politics. But it looks like such a thing will have to wait for another administration.

No Hope or Change When it Comes to Fannie Mae is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A wave of violence spread across Iraq today with 70 dead and some 300 injured. Iraqi security forces are blaming al Qaida affiliates, but no group has officially claimed responsibility. The New York Times puts the events in context:

Coming a little less than two weeks after the Iraqi government said it would negotiate with the United States about keeping some of its 48,000 troops here after the end of the year, the violence raised significant questions about the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces.

This is indeed a tragic loss of life, but this level of violence actually has become less common and usually occurs when the Iraqi government is making important decisions on the future of the country and U.S. troop presence. Each time a bomb is detonated in Iraq, commentators argue that it proves we cannot leave Iraq yet; the job is not done.

If the job isn’t done, it should be. And soon. There will certainly be violence in Iraq for the foreseeable future, but a U.S. troop presence is not going to prevent these horrific incidents and often serves as a pretext for them. The continued violence shouldn’t obscure one unalterable fact: the Iraqis must solve their internal security problems. That, in turn, will likely require them to also solve their political problems, something that they have so far refused to do.

As Ted Galen Carpenter and Doug Bandow have explained those calling for an extended U.S. presence in Iraq base their arguments on faulty logic that is devoid of serious considerations about strategic U.S. interests in the region. The most committed of the stay longer/forever crowd hopes our presence in Iraq will resemble that of U.S. troops in South Korea or Germany. But this isn’t only a false analogy; it is based on false premises about vital U.S. interests: namely, that the U.S. government, and U.S. taxpayers, should be responsible for the security of other countries.

Those who worry about us leaving too soon/ever shouldn’t fret too much, however. Regardless of what happens in the negotiations over an extension of the U.S. troop presence, the United States will still maintain a staff of 17,000 employees (including contractors) based out of the world’s largest embassy.

Through it all, President Obama has been relatively silent. He has claimed that we are “winding down” the nation’s wars, but the prospect of tens of thousands of Americans remaining in Iraq hardly constitutes an end-game there. And no one knows what sort of long-term presence the president has in mind for Afghanistan.

President Obama won the presidency due in part to his opposition to the Iraq war at a time when most other politicians were either supportive or silent. This stand allowed him to build credibility with the American people, despite his relative lack of foreign policy experience. While other so-called experts were calling for war, he was concerned that the Iraq war was likely to undermine American and regional security, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and claim many tens of thousands of lives. Tragically, he was correct.

The combat mission may have ended, but Americans are still dying in Iraq. It is time for the President and his administration to keep the promise of ending U.S. military involvement there, and hasten the day when Iraqis are fully responsible for their own affairs.

Cross-posted from the National Interest.

Iraq Violence Not an Excuse for US Troops to Stay is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The legislation signed by President Obama yesterday, as a solution to the debt ceiling debate, includes the possibility of cuts to military spending. But as Chris Preble points out, the legislation guarantees no defense cuts. Republicans will try to dump all the required cuts on non-defense areas. And the White House has already distanced itself from the prospect of any real defense budget cuts, as did Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. Both support only the first round of cuts, which will at best halt Pentagon growth at roughly inflation.

On The Skeptics blog, I take a more detailed look at deal’s likely impact on military spending. I also examine its political effect, arguing that it will cause at least four political fights.

The first concerns war funding. As Russell Rumbaugh notes, hawks will be tempted to shift the Pentagon’s bill into the war appropriations (overseas contingency operations, officially), which the bill does not cap. That problem is not new, but the bill worsens it. We’ll see if the White House and Congressional Democrats fight to stop it.

Second, for the two years while the security cap is in place, the bill pits security agencies and their congressional advocates in zero sum combat. For obvious electoral reasons, no one will go after veterans. Defense hawks and top military officers will push to make DHS and State eat the minor cuts required. House Republicans negotiated to expand the security category for this reason. DHS, State and the subcommittees that pass their appropriations will fight back. Republicans and thus the House will tend to the first camp; Democrats and the Senate to the second. So the fight will occur in the appropriation committees, conference, and probably White House-Hill discussions. The paucity of cuts limits the carnage, of course.

Third, if the legislation remains in place after two years and a single cap covers all discretionary spending, the fight will shift and become more partisan. To get under the cap, Republicans will push domestic spending cuts. Democrats will prefer defense cuts. The 2012 elections will determine the institutional contours of this fight.

The fourth fight will center on the Joint Committee, with the most interesting conflict among Republicans. Democrats will likely advocate taxes and more defense spending cuts. Even if they can get a deal including taxes with Republican committee members, the House is unlikely to pass it. Democrats’ most attractive option may then be sequestration. Anti-tax Republicans will accept that outcome but clash with neoconservative Republicans happy to raise taxes to pay for military expenditures.

Those that see this plan as a disaster for defense ought to explain why hawks, like Rep. Buck McKeon (Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee), Rep. Bill Young (a leading House defense appropriator), and Senator John McCain, support it. They evidently prefer this deal to any available alternative and are gambling that they can protect military spending from the knife.

My guess is that defense spending will be level in 2012, growing roughly with inflation, but get hit by sequestration, meaning real defense cuts in 2013. After that, who knows? The political dynamics will then be quite different.

An original version of this post appeared on the National Interest.

Debt Deal Signed, Fights over Military Spending Next is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

These are the times that try budget analysts’ souls—especially budget analysts who’d like to see Washington dramatically cut spending. The debate over lifting the debt ceiling has produced a number of proposals from Capitol Hill—none of them have been worth celebrating. We can now add House Speaker John Boehner’s latest proposal to the pile.

Boehner’s proposal boils down to the following: cap discretionary spending over 10 years to achieve $1.2 trillion in savings; have (another) bipartisan group of policymakers come up with $1.8 trillion in “deficit reductions” over ten years; and get a vote on a balanced budget amendment. In exchange, the president would get to increase the deficit by $900 billion this year and by another $1.6 trillion next year.

Here are some thoughts on Boehner’s plan:

• Under the Congressional Budget Office’s optimistic spending baseline, the federal government will spend $46 trillion over the next ten years. Obviously, reducing spending by $1.2 trillion oven ten years is relatively small.

• The same dysfunctional congress that treats entitlement programs like lit sticks of dynamite is supposed to come up with $1.6 trillion in “deficit reduction.” Note that we’re not even talking specifically about spending cuts here, so that figure would likely include tax increases assuming they’re able to even come up with something.

• Under the Boehner plan, spending and debt will continue to rise. At the most, the plan would produce an average of $300 billion a year in cuts in exchange for increasing the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion over the next two years.

• Boehner’s bill includes language that tightens up the definition of what constitutes “emergency” spending. Congress regularly slaps the “emergency” designation on all sort of non-emergency spending bills. I have no faith that the new language will stop the foxes guarding the henhouse from continuing to devour chickens.

• Where are the immediate spending cuts? Once again, we have the promise of cuts but no specifics. Even if the discretionary caps hold the line on that portion of spending, total federal spending (and debt) will continue its unsustainable upward climb. Entitlement spending is the biggest driver of our long-term budgetary problems but entitlement spending isn’t capped under the Boehner plan.

In sum, this plan is another stinker. But with Harry Reid controlling the Senate and Barack Obama sitting in the White House, the votes just aren’t there to get a plan passed that sufficiently addresses our fiscal mess by reining in the size and scope of government.

Thoughts on the Boehner Plan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog