Featuring Benjamin H. Friedman, Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Studies, Cato Institute; Spencer Ackerman, Senior Writer, WIRED Magazine; and Julian Sanchez, Research Fellow, Cato Institute; moderated by Laura Odato, Director of Government Affairs, Cato Institute.
We are grateful to the Harry and Lynde Bradley Foundation and the Carthage Foundation whose support of the October 2012 Cato Conference “Europe’s Crisis and the Welfare State: Lessons for the United States” made possible this special issue of the Cato Journal.
Renowned development economist Deepak Lal draws on 50 years of experience around the globe to describe developing-country realities and rectify misguided notions about economic progress.
The Cato Institute tops a new measure of think tank performance in the United States, according to a recent report. Cato bested all other U.S. think tanks in the main category of “Aggregate Profile per Dollar Spent.” “I’m grateful to the Center for Global Development for showing that Cato gives its sponsors something I wish government gave more of to taxpayers: bang for the buck,” said Cato CEO John Allison.
The other day, Sarah Palin cited my work in an oped for the Wall Street Journal. So when the Democratic National Committee savaged her for it, ABCNews.com asked me for comment. Here’s an excerpt from George Stephanopoulos’ blog:
“Instead of poll-driven ‘solutions,’ let’s talk about real health-care reform: market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven,” wrote Palin. “As the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon and others have argued, such policies include giving all individuals the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each years in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines.”
Cannon, the Cato expert referenced by Palin, has not had any direct contact with the former Alaska governor or any of her advisers.
He did, however, come to her defense on the Medicare issue.
‘Vouchers would not make seniors less secure, it would make them more secure,’ Cannon told ABC News. ‘Everyone agrees that Medicare cannot go on spending as much money as it does now. The voucher idea allows individual consumers to make their own decisions about what they need and what they don’t need.’
‘Giving Medicare seniors a voucher is the most rational, the most humane way to contain Medicare spending,’ he added.
Asked about the DNC’s charge that Palin’s proposal would leave seniors with pre-existing conditions vulnerable, Cannon, the director of health policy studies at Cato, called it ‘pure uninformed demagoguery.’
Cannon says that under proposals he has developed, bigger vouchers would be given to people with pre-existing conditions as well as to people with low incomes.
Actually, I think what I said was that DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse was engaging in pure ignorant demagoguery. But whatever.
The DNC is even running an ad claiming that Republicans are trying to “cut” and “kill” Medicare, presumably with vouchers. Never mind that President Obama proposes to “cut” (i.e., slow the growth of) Medicare spending too.
If Republicans were smart – hey, where are you going? – they would be running ads that say:
President Obama wants government bureaucrats to decide whether seniors get health care. Republicans are fighting to control health care costs and preserve seniors’ ability to make their own health care decisions and choose the benefits that they value most. Support Medicare vouchers!
For more on reforming Medicare the right way, click here.
With unemployment continuing to climb and the economy struggling along, some lawmakers and pundits are raising the possibility of a second stimulus package at some point in the future. The Cato Institute was strongly opposed to the $787 billion package passed earlier this year, and would oppose additional stimulus packages on the same grounds.
“Once government expands beyond the level of providing core public goods such as the rule of law, there tends to be an inverse relationship between the size of government and economic growth,” argues Cato scholar Daniel J. Mitchell. “Doing more of a bad thing is not a recipe for growth.”
Mitchell narrated a video in January that punctures the myth that bigger government “stimulates” the economy. In short, the stimulus, and all big-spending programs are good for government, but will have negative effects on the economy.
Writing in Forbes, Cato scholar Alan Reynolds weighs in on the failures of stimulus packages at home and abroad:
In reality, the so-called stimulus package was actually just a deferred tax increase of $787 billion plus interest.
Whether we are talking about India, Japan or the U.S., all such unaffordable spending packages have repeatedly been shown to be effective only in severely depressing the value of stocks and bonds (private wealth). To call that result a “stimulus” is semantic double talk, and would be merely silly were it not so dangerous.
Palin’s future remains uncertain, but it’s hard to see how her cryptic and poorly drafted resignation speech positions her for a presidential run. Nonetheless, her departure presents a good opportunity to reflect on the Right’s affinity for presidential contenders who - how to put this? - don’t exactly overwhelm you with their intellectual depth.
It’s one thing to reject liberal elitism. It’s another thing to become so consumed with annoying liberals that you cleave to anyone they mock, and make presidential virtues out of shallow policy knowledge and lack of intellectual curiosity.
Writing at Politico, Cato scholars David Boaz and Roger Pilon weigh in on what her resignation means for the former Vice-Presidential candidate’s political future:
Will we one day say that her presidency was ‘born on the Fourth of July’? I doubt it. This appears to be just the latest evidence that Sarah Palin is not ready for prime time. The day McCain chose her, I compared her unfavorably to Mark Sanford. Despite everything, I’d still stand by that analysis. At the time I noted that devout conservative Ramesh Ponnuru said ‘Palin has been governor for about two minutes.’ Now it’s three minutes.
Running for president after a single term as governor is a gamble. Running after quitting in the middle of your first term is something else again. If this is indeed a political move to clear the decks for a national campaign, then she needs adult supervision soon. But I can’t really believe that’s what’s going on here. I suspect we’re going to hear soon about a yet-unknown scandal that was about to make continuing in office untenable.
It seems that since her return to the state following the campaign, activist opponents and bloggers have bombarded the governor’s office with endless document requests. And she’s faced 16 ethics inquiries, with no end in sight. All but one have since been resolved, but the politics of personal destruction has cost the state millions, as Palin noted. Add to that the unrelenting, often vicious and gratuitous attacks on her and even on her family, and it’s no wonder that she would say ‘Enough.’ It has nothing to do with ‘quitting’ or with being ‘unable to take the heat.’ It has everything to do with stepping back and saying you’re not willing to put your family and your state through any more. She seems confident that history will judge her more thoughtless critics for what they are. I hope she’s right.
Honduras’ President Is Removed from Office
In reaction to Honduran President Manuel Zelaya’s attempt to stay in power despite term limits set by the nation’s Constitution, armed forces removed him, sending the Latin American nation into political turmoil.
Juan Carlos Hidalgo, an expert on Latin American affairs, comments:
The removal from office of Zelaya on Sunday by the armed forces is the result of his continuous attempts to promote a referendum that would allow for his reelection, a move that had been declared illegal by the Supreme Court and the Electoral Tribunal and condemned by the Honduran Congress and the attorney general. Unfortunately, the Honduran constitution does not provide an effective civilian mechanism for removing a president from office after repeated violations of the law, such as impeachment in the U.S. Constitution. Nonetheless, the armed forces acted under the order of the country’s Supreme Court, and the presidency has been promptly bestowed on the civilian figure — the president of Congress — specified by the constitution.
To be sure, Hidalgo writes, the military action in Honduras was not a coup:
What happened in Honduras on June 28 was not a military coup. It was the constitutional removal of a president who abused his powers and tried to subvert the country’s democratic institutions in order to stay in office.
The extent to which this episode has been misreported is truly remarkable.
Once again, James Pethokoukis of U.S. News & World Report’s Capital Commerce blog suggests to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) that if she aspires to higher office, she needs to read Arnold Kling’s Crisis of Abundance.
