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With price floors and quotas, the United States is looking to broker an international solar cartel.
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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.
From ArtsAndScience, the magazine of Vanderbilt University’s College of Arts and Science:
Assistant Professor of Chemistry John McLean has been awarded a $2.7 million Grant Opportunity grant from the National Institutes of Health as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
The chairman of the Business Roundtable, an association of top corporate executives that has been President Obama’s closest ally in the business community, accused the president and Democratic lawmakers Tuesday of creating an “increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation.” Ivan G. Seidenberg, chief executive of Verizon Communications, said that Democrats in Washington are pursuing tax increases, policy changes and regulatory actions that together threaten to dampen economic growth and “harm our ability … to grow private-sector jobs in the U.S.” …The final straw, said Roundtable president John Castellani, was the introduction of two pieces of legislation, now pending in Congress, that the group views as particularly bad for business. One, a provision of the administration’s financial regulation overhaul, would make it easier for shareholders to nominate corporate board members. The other would raise taxes on multinational corporations. The rhetoric accompanying the tax proposals has been particularly harsh, Castellani said, with Democrats vowing to campaign in this fall’s midterm elections on a platform of punishing companies that move jobs overseas. …Seidenberg polled the members of the Business Roundtable and a sister organization, the Business Council. The result was a 54-page document, delivered to Orszag on Monday, chock full of bullet points about actions taken or considered by a wide array of executive agencies, including the White House Middle Class Task Force and the Food and Drug Administration. We believe the cumulative effect of these proposals will help defeat the objectives we all share – reducing unemployment, improving the competitiveness of U.S. companies and creating an environment that fosters long-term economic growth,” Seidenberg wrote in a cover letter for the document, titled “Policy Burdens Inhibiting Economic Growth.”
Even though the Obama Administration claimed that squandering $800 billion on so-called stimulus would keep the joblessness rate below 8 percent, the unemployment rate today is almost 10 percent. There are many reasons for the economy’s tepid performance, including a larger burden of government spending and the dampening effect of future tax rate increases (tax rates will jump significantly on January 1, 2011, when the 2003 tax cuts expire).
A closer look at the unemployment data, though , suggests that minimum wage laws also deserve a big share of the blame. In this Center for Freedom and Prosperity video, a former intern of mine (continuing a great tradition) explains that politicians destroyed jobs when they increased the minimum wage by more than 40 percent over a three-year period.
Mr. Divounguy is correct when he says businesses are not charities and that they only create jobs when they think a worker will generate net revenue. Higher minimum wages, needless to say, are especially destructive for people with poor work skills and limited work experience. This is why young people and minorities tend to suffer most - which is exactly what we see in the government data, with the teenage unemployment rates now at an astounding (and depressing) 26 percent level and blacks suffering from a joblessness rate of more than 15 percent.
In a free society, there should be no minimum wage law. From a philosophical perspective, such requirements interfere with the freedom of contract. In the imperfect world of politics, thought, the best we can hope for is that politicians occasionally do the right thing. Sadly, the recent minimum wage increases that have done so much damage were signed into law by President Bush. It’s worth noting that President Obama’s hands also are dirty on this issue, since he supported the job-killing measure when it passed the Senate in 2007. When the stupid party and the evil party both agree on a certain policy, that’s known as bipartisanship. In the real world, however, it’s called unemployment.
The Supreme Court is expected to decide tomorrow whether to summarily overturn a Ninth Circuit Court ruling, hear an appeal of that ruling, or let the Ninth Circuit’s decision stand. The case involves Arizona’s k-12 scholarship tax credit program that helps families afford private schooling, which the Ninth Circuit found last year to violate the First Amendment.
Before the Ninth Circuit handed down its decision, I predicted that it would rule against the tax credit program, and that it would eventually be overturned by the Supreme Court. The first part of that prediction came to pass, and I still expect the second part to as well. For the reasons why SCOTUS will overturn the Ninth Circuit, see Cato’s brief in the case.
Ilya Shapiro (with whom I co-wrote that brief) draws attention today to a great column by George Will in which Will likens the Ninth Circuit to a “stimulus package” for the Supreme Court. It’s a funny analogy, but it’s too benign. It’s more accurate to see the Ninth Circuit as a Denial of Service Attack on American justice. A D.O.S. is a computer attack that prevents Internet surfers from accessing a particular website/server by flooding it with spurious requests. By failing to take Supreme Court precedents seriously, as the Ninth Circuit routinely does, it creates a torrent of ridiculous rulings that demand the Supreme Court’s attention, thereby preventing the nation’s highest court from taking other important cases.
If there is a way for SCOTUS to reprimand the Ninth Circuit for spuriously consuming the nation’s most important legal resources, it would be in the interest of justice for it to do so.
…the federal government was taking over education. At least, it was moving a lot further in that direction, with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wielding billions of “stimulus” dollars to coerce states to do Washington’s bidding. And that’s not just my take. It’s also the New York Times’:
Mr. Duncan is a man in a hurry. He has far more money to dole out than any previous secretary of education, and he is using it in ways that extend the federal government’s reach into virtually every area of education, from pre-kindergarten to college.
Race to the Top. SAFRA. National standards. For well over a year, we at the Center for Educational Freedom have issued warnings about all of these escalations of utterly unconstitutional federal power in education, but it has been nearly impossible to cut through all of the huge, non-education stories to get much notice.
Unfortunately, the hits just keep on coming. While the nation is fixated on oil in the Gulf of Mexico and the supposed evils of Wall Street, the administration continues to change the constantly moving target that is the Race to the Top program, now essentially offering individual districts in California a chance to compete in RTTT round two. This despite states explicitly being identified as THE competitors in the current RTTT. It almost makes you conclude that you just can’t trust anything you’re told about RTTT by the administration, and that there is no good reason for any state to expect a fair race.
Thankfully, there is some good news to report. According to the Times, the ever-expansive Department of Education is now about as popular as the tax man – but not quite:
A new survey by the Pew Research Center found distrust of government at its highest level in 30 years. Of all federal agencies, the department of education’s approval rating had fallen most sharply, to 40 percent from 61 percent in 1998. In fact, the department got the lowest rating of any federal agency, including the Internal Revenue Service.
And that is with ED operating largely under the radar. Imagine if people actually knew what Duncan and company were doing!
Think Washington lobbying is just for the big-money interests? Think you could never afford a lobbyist yourself? Well, think again! At Crazy Eddie’s Lobbying Service, our prices are insane!
The firm is actually called Keys to the Capitol. It was started not by Crazy Eddie or Sy and Marcy Syms, but by Paul Kanitra, who’s happy to call it McLobbying. Keys to the Capitol
targets small towns, humble associations and others of modest means that can’t even consider signing the $10,000-a-month retainers required by many top Washington firms. Instead, Kanitra’s company offers contracts starting at $995, month-to-month agreements and prices and other details spelled out on the company’s Web site.
Want some government money? Want to regulate your competitors? Come on down to Keys!
Now of course it might be that the new, low-priced, easy-to-understand lobbying firm would be helping people get government off their backs. Sort of a “leave us alone” lobbyist for Tea Party times.
Get real. What do you think those small towns want? They’re not hiring a Washington lobbyist, even a cheap one, to get government off their backs. They want a piece of that stimulus money, or that Race to the Top money, or that highway money, or whatever. And take a look at the Washington Post’s description of one of Keys’s first clients,
the aptly named Louie Key, national director of the 3,000-member Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association of Aurora, Colo. Key was shopping around for a lobbyist to help his union on several federal issues, including persuading lawmakers to tighten oversight of repair stations that use unlicensed mechanics.
That’s right. This little ol’ association just wanted a nice simple law to impose new regulatory burdens on their cheaper competitors. That’s Washington in a nutshell. As long as the government has favors to hand out, people will pay lobbyists to get access. So come on down and get yours!
President Obama delivered a commencement speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on Saturday.
He called on all Americans “to maintain a basic level of civility in our public debate.” Who could argue? Yet the president apparently believes that civility means protecting his policies from valid criticism.
He instructed graduates that “the practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship.” Right again. But the civics lesson rings hollow coming from a president who falsely claimed there was “no disagreement” over his massive “stimulus” bill, and that opponents of his health care takeover offered no proposals of their own.
He explained, “what we should be asking is not whether we need ‘big government’ or a ‘small government,’ but how we can create a smarter and better government.” Which is pretty much what every politician says when he wants big government and voters want small government.
Most troubling was this: “What troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad.” That remark reminded me of this passage from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense: “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.” And it has me thinking that our president, a former constitutional law professor, who just received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Michigan, really doesn’t get the American idea of government. At all.
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