More from McCain on ‘Isolationism’
Over at World Politics Review, Justin Logan and I collaborated on an article about the supposed rise of ”isolationism” within the GOP.
The charges come mainly from Sen. John McCain, though presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty copped that line yesterday, drawing praise from the editors of The Weekly Standard.
McCain directed his “isolationism” fire late yesterday at West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, one of 27 senators who signed a letter to the president calling for a substantial troop reduction in Afghanistan. On the floor of the Senate, Manchin explained his reasoning: “I believe it is time to for us to rebuild America, not Afghanistan.”
According to McCain, Manchin’s comments “characterize the isolationist withdrawal, lack of knowledge of history attitude that seems to be on the rise in America.”
But McCain needs to reconnect with recent history, and contemporary reality. Nation building is a fool’s errand: costly, counterproductive, and unnecessary. We could continue to hunt al Qaeda with far fewer troops in Afghanistan. A smaller presence would provide us with sufficient flexibility to deal with other challenges elsewhere — and help us to put our own house in order. McCain is OK with spending over $100 billion a year in a country with a GDP of around $16 billion, while our economy suffers.
Pawlenty Understands Incentives, Except When It Comes to Defense
Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty’s brief visit to Cato yesterday elicited some snide commentary in the blogosphere, especially this piece by the Huffington Post’s Jon Ward. Ward notes how the just-declared presidential candidate has been pretty adept at annoying audiences with his answers to questions. This one rankled the questioner, and a number of others in the auditorium.
I’m not one who is going to stand before you and say we should cut the defense budget.
[...]
I’m not for shrinking America’s presence in the world. I’m for making sure that America remains the world leader, not becoming second or third or fourth in the list.
One can sort of forgive a governor for not knowing much about foreign policy, although governors who aspire to be president should probably know that the U.S. government could cut military spending in half and still spend more than our next two potential rivals, combined.
The average governor, however, should know that people don’t feel obligated to pay for things that you are willing to give them for free. And Pawlenty does understand this when it comes to domestic spending. Check out his comments about the difference between a cash bar and an open bar at a wedding reception, via the Daily Caller:
If people have the impression that things are free, and they get to consume it endlessly, and the provider has the only incentive to provide on volume, and the myth or the lie is created that the bill goes somewhere else and that a third party pays for it, that is a system that I can tell you is doomed to failure and inefficiency. And that’s much of our government, unfortunately.
But the same principle applies in military spending. Our European and East Asian allies are consumers of the security provided by the U.S. military, and all Americans are the third party payers. As my colleague Ben Friedman likes to say, we agree to defend our allies, and they agree to let us. We shouldn’t blame them for under-providing for their own defense; it’s our fault for agreeing to do it for them.
Cato President and Founder Ed Crane’s quick take on Pawlenty’s view on defense military spending is worth repeating:
There is a difference between military spending and defense spending. The Constitution provides for a military to defend the U.S—not to democratize the world. One would hope that presidential candidates would consider America’s commitments overseas very seriously before endorsing those commitments.
Cato scholars have been out in front for years making the case for a principled, constitutional view of “defense” that does not include defending others who can and should defend themselves. If we adopted a strategy of restraint, we could responsibly make significant cuts in military spending, deliver the savings to American taxpayers, and remain the safest and most secure country on the planet. Yesterday, Tim Pawlenty took the opposite tack. He argued that the U.S. military should continue to serve as the world’s policeman/armed social worker, allow other countries to free ride, and require U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill.
Although that might be popular elsewhere in Washington, I can’t imagine it will sell in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, or Manchester, New Hampshire.
Thursday Links
- Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty received an “A” grade from Cato in 2010 (PDF) for his fiscal record in Minnesota, but in terms of national fiscal policy, he hasn’t gone far enough on ethanol subsidies.
- Regarding North Korea, “the United States should indicate its willingness to rethink its commitment to nonproliferation if the North continues its nuclear program. Maybe it would be better if South Korea and Japan were able to defend themselves than keeping them forever reliant on the United States and keeping America forever entangled.”
- Why is the federal government involved in state and local transportation issues?
- “Regulating, restricting, or eliminating [oil futures markets] would not bring prices down or make them more predictable.”
- Tim Pawlenty also sides with law enforcement on the medical marijuana issue. It’s too bad he doesn’t seem to side with taxpayers.
Wednesday Links
- DON’T FORGET: Today at 2:00 p.m. Eastern at Cato, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty will detail specific spending cuts Congress can make as it tries to rein in the size and scope of the federal government in “Limiting Government: What Washington Can Learn from Minnesota.” Tune in at our live events hub, or watch on Facebook.
- It’s not low taxes that caused the Greek crisis, but high spending.
- A new Internal Revenue Service account reporting rule would drive out foreign capital.
- A defense budget that does not force trade-offs assumes the United States can take on any mission, and that all are necessary.
- If the Affordable Care Act is so great, why are so many people seeking waivers?
Monday Links
- Please join us this Wednesday, May 25 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern for a Policy Forum with former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, “Limiting Government: What Washington Can Learn from Minnesota,” with opening remarks from Cato founder and president Edward H. Crane. Governor Pawlenty received an “A” grade on Cato’s biennial “Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors: 2010,” by Cato director of tax policy studies Chris Edwards. Complimentary registration is required of all attendees by noon Eastern tomorrow, Tuesday, May 24–seating is limited and not guaranteed. If you cannot join us in person, please join us on the web for a live video stream of the event.
- Washington’s use of tax dollars to strong-arm states into adopting national standards and tests doesn’t leave much room for state choice in education.
- Did you know Cato has a series of 60 and 90-second radio ads about the Constitution that you can download for free?
- “Unfortunately, suspicions about private property as a fundamental human right survive to this day, to the detriment of the coherence of human rights as a guiding political concept, and of fundamental freedoms and prosperity.” Read the rest of the new Cato Policy Report here.
- What will happen if we do nothing, and let Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security continue to grow?
How Dare Conservatives Stand athwart ObamaCare Yelling, Stop!
In a column for Kaiser Health News, Michael L. Millenson, President of Health Quality Advisors LLC, laments that conservatives in the U.S. House are approaching ObamaCare like, well, conservatives. He cites comments by unnamed House GOP staffers at a recent conference:
The Innovation Center at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services? “An innovation center at CMS is an oxymoron,” responded a Republican aide…”Though it’s great for PhDs who come to Washington on the government tab.”
There was also no reason the government should pay for “so-called comparative effectiveness research,” another said.
“Everything’s on the chopping block,” said yet another.
No government-funded comparative-effectiveness research? The horror! For my money, those staffers (and whoever hired them) should get a medal.
Millenson thinks conservative Republicans have just become a bunch of cynics and longs for the days when Republicans would go along with the left-wing impulse to have the federal government micromanage health care:
After all, the McCain-Palin health policy platform in the 2008 presidential election called for coordinated care, greater use of health information technology and a focus on Medicare payment for value, not volume. Once-and-future Republican presidential candidates such as former governors Mike Huckabee (Ark.), Mitt Romney (Mass.) and Tim Pawlenty (Minn.), as well as ex-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, have long promoted disease prevention, a more innovative federal government and increased use of information technology. Indeed, federal health IT “meaningful use” requirements can even be seen as a direct consequence of Gingrich’s popularization of the phrase, “Paper kills.”
He even invokes the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley, as if Buckley would disapprove of conservatives standing athwart ObamaCare yelling, Stop!
Millenson’s tell comes toward the end of the column, when he writes:
traditional GOP conservatives… [have] eschewed ideas in favor of ideological declarations.
Eschewed ideas in favor of…ideas? My guess is that what’s really troubling Millenson is that congressional Republicans are eschewing left-wing health care ideas in favor of freedom.
Better late than never. Now if only GOP governors would do the same.
Fiscal Report Card on the Governors
We released Cato’s report card on the fiscal policies of the governors today. We calculated data on the taxing and spending habits of 45 of the nation’s 50 governors, between 2008 to August 2010.
The governors are scored from 0 to 100 on seven separate taxing and spending variables. The scores are aggregated and converted to letter grades, A to F.
Four governors earned an “A” this year: Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. You can read the report to find out what these governors did right from our limited-government point of view.
As it turns out, the residents of these four states seem to like the fiscal stance of their winning governors, who favor tax cuts and spending restraint.
Pawlenty has a 52 percent approval rating in quite a liberal state.
Jindal has a 74 percent approval rating.
Manchin has a 69 percent approval rating.
Sanford has a 55 percent approval rating, despite the troubles in his personal life.
Governors shouldn’t just focus on being popular in a superficial sense. These polls tell us that governors who focus on cutting taxes and spending in an honest and intelligent way will be supported by the people.
Fisking Pawlenty
Having fisked Newt Gingrich’s and John Goodman’s “best” health care reform ideas, I probably should do the same for Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s similar oped in the Washington Post. Pawlenty makes five recommendations:
- “Incentivize patients to be smart consumers.” Setting aside his use of the grating word incentivize (down with suffix creep!), Pawlenty is on the right track. But he’s so vague as to leave (himself?) room for mischief. “Make quality and costs more transparent”? “Incentivize smarter health-care decisions”? A pol could claim to be doing those things while falling far short of what he should be doing: letting Americans — rather than employers or government — control their health care dollars and choose their own health plan. If that’s what Pawlenty means, heck, say it.
- “Congress should pass reforms that allow people to stop paying for procedures and start paying for results.” Pawlenty appears to think government should find the “right” payment system, rather than allow for competition between different ways of paying health care providers — between fee-for-service, capitation, and everything in between. Such competition promotes all dimensions of quality. Government isn’t equipped to define and pay for performance, and bad things happen when it tries.
- “Liability reform.” To recap: federal limits on med mal liability unconstitutional; Republicans unprincipled.
- “Interstate health-care insurance.” Pawlenty doesn’t seem to get that the point of letting individuals and employers purchase health insurance across state lines is to force regulators to compete. His “interstate purchasing pool with strict standards” idea makes it sound like he doesn’t get it.
- “Modernize health insurance.” Again, with the vagueness. If Pawlenty means he wants to let individuals control their health care dollars and choose their own health insurance — see here for how — then terrific. But when he recommends that we should “make health insurance transferable so employees can keep their coverage if they switch jobs” and “prohibit insurance companies from discriminating against individuals whose preexisting conditions were covered under insurance they lost through no fault of their own,” it sounds like he thinks regulation is the solution.
Who Wants to Make Sarah Palin the Leader of the Republican Party?
Could it be the Washington Post? Bannered across the top of the Post‘s op-ed page today is a piece titled “Copenhagen’s political science,” titularly authored by Sarah Palin. I’m delighted to see the Post publishing an op-ed critical of the questionable science behind the Copenhagen conference and the demands for massive regulations to deal with “climate change.”
But Sarah Palin? Of all the experts and political leaders a great newspaper might call on for a critical look at the science behind global warming, Sarah Palin?
What’s even more interesting is that the Post also ran an op-ed by Palin in July. But during this entire year, the Post has not run any op-eds by such credible and accomplished Republicans as Gov. Mitch Daniels; former governors Mitt Romney or Gary Johnson; Sen. John Thune; or indeed former governor Mike Huckabee, who might be Palin’s chief rival for the social-conservative vote. You might almost think the Post wanted Palin to be seen as a leader of Republicans.
I should note that during the past year the Post has run one op-ed each from John McCain, Bobby Jindal, Newt Gingrich, and Tim Pawlenty. (And for people who don’t read well, I should note that when I call the people above “credible and accomplished,” that’s not an endorsement for any political office.) Still, it’s the rare political leader who gets two Post op-eds in six months, and rarer still the Post op-eds by ex-governors who can’t name a newspaper that they read.
Pawlenty
I am very fearful that the Republicans will nominate another Bush-style candidate for 2012. With the government running trillion-dollar deficits, the country needs a hard-line budget-cutter as the next president.
Politico reports: “Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been quietly assembling the blueprint of a presidential campaign and will announce Thursday the support of a group of high-level political strategists and donors, complemented by a handful of top new media consultants.”
I gave Pawlenty a “B” in my fiscal report card on the governors last year. Here’s what I said about him:
Tim Pawlenty pledged not to raise taxes when he ran for governor, but his tax record in office is more mixed than that. He backed a $200 million tax increase on cigarette consumers in 2005 and a $109 million corporate tax increase in 2008. He has also supported substantial increases in fees and charges. Pawlenty has provided some targeted tax relief and imposed temporary limits on local property tax increases, but he has not focused on pro-growth tax rate reductions. Nonetheless, Pawlenty’s veto record is impressive, including rejecting a gasoline tax increase, a hike in the top personal income tax rate, and various bloated spending bills. Pawlenty has delivered fairly restrained budgets over the years and kept spending growth to modest increases.
This year, Pawlenty has proposed spending restraint and he has vetoed tax increases. He has also called for cutting the state corporate income tax rate. Still, I’m uneasy about him, so I sure hope the party’s fiscal conservatives thoroughly vet the fellow before he advances too far.
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