Today POLITICO Arena asks:

 Does the GOP need to loosen ties with Fox? Limbaugh?

I offered a somewhat different response from Roger Pilon’s:

The first thing Republicans should do is stop reading only the conservative media. The conservative echo chamber apparently convinced them that Romney was winning the election. Romney himself is reported to have been “shell-shocked” by his loss. I wasn’t, because I’d been reading the polls, including the swing-state polls. If the conservative media are going to tell Republicans what they want to hear, then smart Republicans had better start looking at a broader range of media.

My colleague Roger Pilon can’t think of much the Republican Party should change. I’ll try to think more creatively. Let’s see … the Republican Party might have avoided running up federal spending by a trillion dollars during the Bush administration, alienating libertarian and tea-party type voters in the past few elections. It might have avoided miring the country in two endless wars, undermining its advantage on national security issues. And it might come to grips with its decades-long alienation of black, female, Hispanic, and gay voters.

During the civil rights era, conservatives - including party-switching Democrats such as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms - adamantly resisted the push for equal rights and equal dignity for African Americans. When women began to demand an equal place in society, politics, and the economy, conservatives said that a woman’s place was in the home. After those positions were no longer tenable, conservatives and Republicans came to accept race and gender equality, and they don’t understand why they still face a gender gap and overwhelming opposition from black voters. In our own time Republicans have sent hostile messages to Hispanics on the immigration issue and to gay voters on marriage and other issues. And they are in the process of permanently alienating those voters, too. As former Reason magazine editor Virginia Postrel says, “Policy aside, people rarely vote for pols they think despise them.”

Conor Friedersdorf blames Rush Limbaugh for Republicans’ image problems among minority voters. Maybe so. But it’s a problem that began before Limbaugh, and certainly can’t be blamed entirely on him or other pundits. The idealized Republican/conservative message of individual liberty, limited government, and economic growth ought to appeal to most voters. But Republicans have to accept, as even Dick Cheney saw, that “freedom means freedom for everyone,” and then they have to be consistent in delivering and applying that message. The hole they’ve dug with voters outside their straight white male base will take time to climb out of. They’d better get started.

I’ve commented before how the fiscal fight in Europe is a no-win contest between advocates of Keynesian deficit spending (the so-called “growth” camp, if you can believe that) and proponents of higher taxes (the “austerity” camp, which almost never seems to mean spending restraint).

That’s a left-vs-left battle, which makes me think it would be a good idea if they fought each other to the point of exhaustion, thus enabling forward movement on a pro-growth agenda of tax reform and reductions in the burden of government spending.

That’s a nice thought, but it probably won’t happen in Europe since almost all politicians in places such as Germany and France are statists. And it might never happen in the United States if lawmakers pay attention to the ideologically biased work of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

CBO already has demonstrated that it’s willing to take both sides of this left-v-left fight, and the bureaucrats just doubled down on that biased view in a new report on the fiscal cliff.

For all intents and purposes, the CBO has a slavish devotion to Keynesian theory in the short run, which means more spending supposedly is good for growth. But CBO also believes that higher taxes improve growth in the long run by ostensibly leading to lower deficits. Here’s what it says will happen if automatic budget cuts are cancelled.

Eliminating the automatic enforcement procedures established by the Budget Control Act of 2011 that are scheduled to reduce both discretionary and mandatory spending starting in January and maintaining Medicare’s payment rates for physicians’ services at the current level would boost real GDP by about three-quarters of a percent by the end of 2013.

Not that we should be surprised by this silly conclusion. The CBO repeatedly claimed that Obama’s faux stimulus would boost growth. Heck, CBO even claimed Obama’s spending binge was successful after the fact, even though it was followed by record levels of unemployment.

But I think the short-run Keynesianism is not CBO’s biggest mistake. In the long-run, CBO wants us to believe that higher tax burdens translate into more growth. Check out this passage, which expresses CBO’s view the economy will be weaker 10 years from now if the tax burden is not increased.

…the agency has estimated the effect on output that would occur in 2022 under the alternative fiscal scenario, which incorporates the assumption that several of the policies are maintained indefinitely. CBO estimates that in 2022, on net, the policies included in the alternative fiscal scenario would reduce real GDP by 0.4 percent and real gross national product (GNP) by 1.7 percent. …the larger budget deficits and rapidly growing federal debt would hamper national saving and investment and thus reduce output and income.

In other words, CBO reflexively makes two bold assumption. First, it assumes higher tax rates generate more money. Second, the bureaucrats assume that politicians will use any new money for deficit reduction. Yeah, good luck with that.

To be fair, the CBO report does have occasional bits of accurate analysis. The authors acknowledge that both taxes and spending can create adverse incentives for productive behavior.

…increases in marginal tax rates on labor would tend to reduce the amount of labor supplied to the economy, whereas increases in revenues of a similar magnitude from broadening the tax base would probably have a smaller negative impact or even a positive impact on the supply of labor. Similarly, cutting government benefit payments would generally strengthen people’s incentive to work and save.

But these small concessions do not offset the deeply flawed analysis that dominates the report.

But that analysis shouldn’t be a surprise. The CBO has a track record of partisan and ideological work.

While I’m irritated about CBO’s bias (and the fact that it’s being financed with my tax dollars), that’s not what has me worked up. The reason for this post is to grouse and gripe about the fact that some people are citing this deeply flawed analysis to oppose Obama’s pursuit of class warfare tax policy.

Why would some Republican politicians and conservative commentators cite a publication that promotes higher spending in the short run and higher taxes in the long run? Well, because it also asserts - based on Keynesian analysis - that higher taxes will hurt the economy in the short run.

…extending the tax reductions originally enacted in 2001, 2003, and 2009 and extending all other expiring provisions, including those that expired at the end of 2011, except for the payroll tax cut—and indexing the alternative minimum tax (AMT) for inflation beginning in 2012 would boost real GDP by a little less than 1½ percent by the end of 2013.

At the risk of sounding like a doctrinaire purist, it is unethical to cite inaccurate analysis in support of a good policy.

Consider this example. If some academic published a study in favor of the flat tax and it later turned out that the data was deliberately or accidentally wrong, would it be right to cite that research when arguing for tax reform? I hope everyone would agree that the answer is no.

Yet that’s precisely what is happening when people cite CBO’s shoddy work to argue against tax increases.

It’s very much akin to the pro-defense Republicans who use Keynesian arguments about jobs when promoting a larger defense budget.

To make matters worse, it’s not as if opponents lack other arguments that are intellectually honest.

• They could point out that higher marginal tax rates discourage productive behavior.
• They could point out that increased double taxation of saving and investment will hurt workers by reducing capital formation.
• They could point out that a larger tax burden will encourage a bigger burden of government spending.
• They could point out that revenues almost surely be less than what is projected because of the Laffer Curve.

So why, then, would anybody sink to the depths necessary to cite the Congressional Budget Office?

While they were turning out to the polls to help reelect President Obama on Tuesday, residents of Los Angeles County also approved a ballot initiative known as “Measure B,” requiring the producers of “adult films”—meaning porn, not Criterion Collection fare—to acquire a public health permit and adhere to a number of regulations, most controversially a mandate that performers wear condoms on the set. Prominent industry figures such as James Deen have opposed the measure on the grounds that it is unnecessary in light of the existing rigorous testing regime, counterproductive in the context of shoots that require performers to have intercourse for “nonstandard amounts of time,” and will ultimately be ineffective as filming will simply move outside Los Angeles County.

These are all compelling points, but the measure also raises some interesting theoretical questions in an industry where, as in journalism before it, new technology has blurred the once-sharp lines between amateur and professional content production.

While I will refrain from linking to any examples on this family-friendly blog, “traditional” professionally produced adult video now competes with an array of sites specializing in amateur or quasi-amateur sexual content. Some entrepreneurial couples and individuals launch their own personal sites, making home videos and live webcam streams available to subscribers. Other sites act as middlemen, purchasing home videos shot by amateur couples for online distribution. Still others serve as platforms on which individuals and couples can stream live sexual content from their home web cameras, earning revenue based on the number of viewers. While it seems clear that Measure B is not intended to target these amateur producers, they do seem to fall within the scope of the law’s definitions, strictly construed.

Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine a couple who sometimes tape their sexual activity for—at least initially—their own private enjoyment. In the past, when money was tight, they periodically sold these videos to a subscription-based website that specializes in homemade fare, and they expect that they may do so again in the future as the need arises. At what point are they required to  register with the state and pay a permit fee if they wish to continue taping in their own bedrooms? If they fail to do so, are they later liable should they attempt to sell or self-distribute those recordings, either for a subscription fee or on an ad-supported website?

Now, realistically, I find it almost inconceivable that Los Angeles would seek to enforce the law against the imaginary couple I’ve described. I find it slightly more plausible that an L.A.–based couple who maintain their own site could be affected, and one can also imagine an aggregation and distribution site or platform being targeted—perhaps at the urging of traditional studios looking to eliminate the competition—though it is hard to see how such sites could feasibly comply with some of the law’s requirements. If a similar law were adopted nationally, or by many states—making it harder for professional studios to resume business by moving elsewhere—some of these scenarios become a good deal less far-fetched.

Again, given that the intent of the law is fairly clearly to regulate traditional professional porn studios, I expect that in practice they are likely to be the exclusive targets of enforcement for the foreseeable future, and those who wish to continue shooting scenes sans-latex will find plenty of nearby jurisdictions happy to welcome their business. Still, I think it’s an interesting class of hypotheticals to contemplate, because it problematizes the widespread view that there’s some sharp and clear distinction between the realm of private intimacy shielded from state interference and the realm of commerce subject to broad regulation. Here, it becomes especially clear that the commercial regulation inevitably implicates rights of personal sexual choice and bodily autonomy. But commerce has never really been some hermetically sealed domain, where rules that conflict with the values or preferences of workers and entrepreneurs somehow don’t count as impinging on personal autonomy, in contrast with the sacrosanct domain of the home where such intervention would be anathema. In a digital economy that makes “home” and “workplace” the same place for a growing number of people—where the boundary between personal projects and production for profit becomes increasingly blurred—that distinction seems likely to become increasingly untenable in more and more areas.