Archives: January, 2011

As If Gov’t Spending Had Nothing to Do with It

By
Michael F. Cannon

This is how a front-page story in this morning’s Washington Post portrayed the cause of this year’s $1.5 trillion deficit:

Record U.S. Deficit Projected This Year
CBO forecasts tax cuts will push budget gap to $1.5 trillion

The still-fragile economy and fresh tax cuts approved by Congress last month will drive the federal deficit to nearly $1.5 trillion this year, the biggest budget gap in U.S. history, congressional budget analysts said Wednesday.

Federal spending and federal tax revenue play equally important roles in creating the federal budget deficit.  Yet the Post blames the deficit only on inadequate tax revenue.  Federal spending isn’t too high, the Post implies, tax revenue is too low.

This may not be an example of media bias.  But it is an example of why supporters of limited government believe that major news organizations like the Washington Post are biased toward bigger government.  At a minimum, the Post has some explaining to do.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

And Good Riddance…

By
Jim Harper

The Department of Homeland Security is scrapping the color-coded terror alert system. The color-code system meant to serve as a way of keeping the public informed, but because it signaled some ambiguous sense of “threat” without providing a scintilla of information the public could use, it merely kept Americans ignorant and addled.

Scrapping the color-coded threat system is only the beginning. The next step is to begin informing the public fully about threats and risks known to the U.S. government. We’re adults. We can handle it. In fact, we can help.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Nondefense Discretionary Spending Freezes

By
Tad DeHaven

When it comes to reining in federal spending, House Republicans and the president have one idea in common: freezing nondefense discretionary spending. That category accounts for about 18 percent of total spending, so let’s see how such a freeze would affect the overall budget.

Today the Congressional Budget Office released updated budget figures and baseline projections of federal spending through fiscal 2021. Projecting the budgetary future is obviously an inexact science, and the CBO’s baseline reflects unrealistic assumptions. However, it does allow us to get an idea of the impact of a nondefense discretionary freeze on total federal spending.

Three proposals have been put forward:

  • In his State of the Union address, President Obama proposed freezing nondefense discretionary spending for five years, beginning in fiscal 2012, at fiscal 2010 levels.
  • The conservative House Republican Study Committee and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) recently proposed freezing nondefense discretionary spending for ten years, beginning in fiscal 2012, at fiscal 2006 levels.
  • Ever since the release of its “Pledge to America,” the House Republican leadership has been talking about returning spending to fiscal 2008 levels. They apparently have non-security discretionary spending in mind, which is an even smaller category than nondefense discretionary. It’s not clear if they intend to freeze it at the new lower level.

Using the CBO’s latest figures, I calculated baseline spending from fiscal 2012-2021 under ten year freezes in nondefense discretionary spending at fiscal 2006, 2008, and 2010 levels:

Note:   To make an apples-to-apples comparison, I extended the proposed Obama freeze at fiscal 2010 levels from five years to ten years, and I assumed a ten year freeze at fiscal 2008 levels for the House Republicans. Also, projected annual interest payments on the debt are excluded. Therefore, the chart refers to “baseline program spending,” which is the sum of nondefense discretionary, defense, and entitlement spending.

The chart makes it excruciatingly clear that freezing nondefense discretionary spending at the levels specified or implied by Republicans and Democrats is only a start toward needed reforms in the federal budget. Congress also needs to cut defense spending, and spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs.

Topics: 
Tax and Budget Policy

A Teaching Moment on Sputnik

By
Andrew J. Coulson

President Obama shows greater nostalgia for Sputnik than MST3K fans do for “The Satellite of Love.” But his narrative of how increased federal education spending and intervention spurred advances in student learning has a problem: it’s wrong.

Achievement went DOWN after passage of the National Defense Education Act—Congress’ response to Sputnik. I laid out the evidence here.

It is embarrassing that the president’s advisors have been telling him to repeat a patently false narrative for years. What are they being paid for?

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Judges Should Judge

By
Ilya Shapiro

I am pleased to pass on word from our friends at the Institute for Justice that they have established a new Center for Judicial Engagement.  The center is dedicated to reinvigorating the judicial branch to stand up and perform its constitutional role instead of showing the deference so many courts now give to the political branches of state and federal government.

As much lip service that has been paid to the bogeyman of “judicial activism,” the reality is that the courts have been all-too-reluctant to sacrifice constitutional questions to acquiesce to the supposed wisdom of political actors.  Veteran IJ lawyer and friend of Cato Clark Neily will be heading the center, and had this to say about its mission:

We need judges to judge.  What we see too often now is judges who ignore evidence, invent facts, and accept implausible explanations for government regulations.  That amounts to judicial abdication.  Judges should engage the facts of every case, including constitutional cases, and require the government to justify its actions with real reasons backed by real evidence.

As outlined by IJ in a press release, the basic principles of judicial engagement include:

1.  The Constitution limits both the means and ends of government action.

The Framers wrote the Constitution to constrain government power.  The Constitution explicitly defines a limited set of powers belonging to the federal government; government actions outside the scope of those powers are illegitimate and unconstitutional.  The Constitution also demands that even legitimate powers of government be exercised fairly and without discrimination.

2.  The Constitution guarantees a broad array of individual rights.

While the powers granted to government by the Constitution are few and limited, the rights guaranteed to individuals are many and broad.  Some of those rights are specifically listed in the Constitution, and some are not.  But all rights are entitled to meaningful judicial protection, regardless of their source.  There are no “second-class” constitutional rights.

3.  The job of judges is to enforce the Constitution.

Judicial review has been a vital part of our system of government for more than 200 years, and it remains a key bulwark against government tyranny and abuse of power.  It is the duty of judges to strike down government actions that assume powers not granted by the Constitution or that violate individual rights.  It is not “judicial activism” to strike down unconstitutional laws or government actions; it is judicial engagement—taking the Constitution seriously and applying it consistently in all cases.  Refusing to strike down unconstitutional acts is not admirable “judicial restraint,” it is judicial abdication—judges literally failing to do their jobs.

4.  The government should not have a leg up on citizens challenging government actions.

Laws are not entitled to judicial “deference” simply because they result from a democratic political process.  To the contrary, the Framers were deeply concerned about interest-group politics and majority tyranny, and they designed the Constitution to protect individual rights from those dangers.  Enforcing a presumption of government power over individual liberty, as courts typically do today, gets this design exactly backwards.

5.  Facts matter.

It is impossible to determine the constitutionality of any regulation without determining the government’s actual objectives in enforcing it.  But courts often ignore that question altogether, and will accept even the most ridiculous explanations at face value or, when necessary, simply invent justifications of their own in order to uphold government action against constitutional challenge.  This is profoundly mistaken.  Judges must carefully weigh the facts of each constitutional case, just as they would in any other case, and meaningfully evaluate the government’s action.  Ignoring evidence, inventing justifications and rubber-stamping the exercise of government power—which have come to be the norm in the vast majority of constitutional cases—represents abdication, not judgment.

We fully agree – and applaud IJ for adding innovative programming such as this new center to its continuing litigation against the government Leviathan.  Please check out the new center’s homepage here and its inaugural declaration here.

Topics: 
General, Law and Civil Liberties

Ghailani Gets Life without Parole

By
David Rittgers

In November, a New York jury found Al Qaeda bomber Ahmed Ghailani guilty on only one of 285 charges for his role in the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings. I called it “a good outcome” for a number of reasons, largely agreeing with Ben Wittes.

I’ve disagreed with Wittes on lawfare issues before, but he and Chesney are right on this case: (1) the defendant will serve a minimum of twenty years in jail, possibly life; (2) it’s not certain that the military commissions would have allowed evidence obtained by coercion (Charlie Savage also made this point in his article for the New York Times), (3) the conspiracy conviction in civilian court is solid on appeal, but not necessarily so in a military commission (conspiracy is not a traditional law of war violation, and three sitting Supreme Court justices have questioned its application in that forum); (4) the forum of conviction is less ripe for attack in courts of law and public opinion.

As it turns out, getting convicted on one of 285 serious charges still gets you a serious sentence… life without parole. Regardless of what Andy McCarthy and Marc Thiessen think, chalk this up as a win.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties

Krugman (Both of Them) on Competitiveness

By
Sallie James

When it became clear that President Obama would make “competitiveness” a theme of his SOTU address, I looked forward to seeing Paul Krugman’s statement pointing out how much nonsense that is. Here he is, after all, in his excellent 1997 book, Pop Internationalism (MIT Press):

…International trade, unlike competition among businesses for a limited market, is not a zero-sum game in which one nation’s gain is another’s loss. It is [a] positive-sum game, which is why the word “competitiveness” can be dangerously misleading when applied to international trade.

Sure enough, President Obama’s speech last night was peppered with references to “the competition for jobs,” “new jobs and industries take root in this country, or somewhere else, “the competion for jobs is real,” etc. And of course there was a healthy dose of the usual mercantalist obsession with exports.

Although written before the President’s address was delivered, what would Paul Krugman 2.0 think of this sort of talk? The title of his column Sunday was certainly encouraging: “The Competition Myth.” But the substance of the column went in a … er… different direction from that which I had anticipated/hoped:

…talking about “competitiveness” as a goal is fundamentally misleading. At best, it’s a misdiagnosis of our problems. At worst, it could lead to policies based on the false idea that what’s good for corporations is good for America…

So what does the administration’s embrace of the rhetoric of competitiveness mean for economic policy?

The favorable interpretation, as I said, is that it’s just packaging for an economic strategy centered on public investment, investment that’s actually about creating jobs now while promoting longer-term growth. The unfavorable interpretation is that Mr. Obama and his advisers really believe that the economy is ailing because they’ve been too tough on business, and that what America needs now is corporate tax cuts and across-the-board deregulation. [emphasis mine]

In other words, Krugman’s objections to the “competitiveness” rhetoric are based on his fear that it will lead to policies favorable to corporations, not that the whole concept is flawed.

[Disclaimer: the above is by no means an exhaustive analysis of the problematic parts of the column]

I yield to no-one in my admiration for Paul Krugman, trade economist. He made a real contribution to the discipline I’ve loved since I was a teenager. But Paul Krugman, columnist…not so much.

Topics: 
Trade and Immigration

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