Topic: Government and Politics

Nancy Johnson Does Well by Doing “Good”

By
John Samples

Sometimes what does not happen is the most important thing in politics.

Nancy Johnson is a twelve-term Republican member of the House of Representatives. But she has a problem. Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 ran better in her district than they did in the nation as a whole. Nancy Johnson, a Republican, represents a district that all things being equal would elect a Democrat.

Nancy Johnson should be facing the fight of her life this fall given the problems of the Bush administration and the general unpopularity of the congressional Republicans. As the New York Times reports (subscription required), she is facing a tough fight. Her opponent has raised some money and is trying to tie Rep. Johnson to President Bush.

But Johnson’s fight for survival will not be as tough as it might have been. Prior to McCain-Feingold passing in 2002, labor unions, corporations and other groups could buy ads that discussed issues in ways critical of incumbent members of Congress. For example, a group could support an ad that said: “Nancy Johnson helped George Bush pass a bad prescription drug plan that helped the Big Drug Companies and hurt our seniors. Call Nancy Johnson and tell her to stop helping the Big Drug Companies and hurting our seniors.”

Not surprisingly, vulnerable Republicans in Congress like Nancy Johnson did not like such ads. Such Republicans provided the crucial support in the House to pass McCain-Feingold, which prohibited labor unions and corporations and other groups from running these ads. So much for free speech, but Nancy Johnson will have an easier race this fall.

But maybe not. After all, Democrats used 527 groups to try to defeat President Bush in 2004. Maybe the 527s could show up in Nancy Johnson’s district saying mean things about the incumbent. But again, maybe not. The House has passed, and the Senate seems likely to approve, a bill that essentially ends the 527 option.

So Nancy Johnson is likely to survive this fall, precisely because her constituents will not hear political speech they might have heard if McCain-Feingold had not been enacted.

Nancy Johnson, by the way, was one of the first House Republicans to support McCain-Feingold.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

New at Cato Unbound: Dark Days for Small Government

By
Will Wilkinson

Today in Cato Unbound, Bruce Bartlett, author of Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, agrees with David Frum’s gloomy assessment of the prospects for small government and argues that conservatives and libertarians often compound the problem by failing to understand the magnitude and political intractability of the government’s non-discretionary entitlement programs. Slashing government is not “as easy as waving a magic wand.” Bartlett warns of the danger of resigning in frustration and calls for “a serious debate among libertarians and small government-types on a realistic political strategy for achieving their goals.”

Stay tuned! Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam will comment Friday, and Cato’s David Boaz will round out the replies to Frum with an essay on Monday.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics

Sometimes, Governments Lie

By
Michael F. Cannon

Year after year, federal officials speak of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds as if they were real.  Yesterday, the government announced that the Social Security trust fund will be exhausted in 2040 and that the Medicare hospital insurance trust fund will be exhausted in 2018 – projections that the media dutifully reported. 

But those dates are meaningless, because there are no assets for these “trust funds” to exhaust.  The Bush administration wrote in its FY2007 budget proposal:

These balances are available to finance future benefit payments and other trust fund expenditures—but only in a bookkeeping sense. These funds…are not assets…that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits…When trust fund holdings are redeemed to pay benefits, Treasury will have to finance the expenditure in the same way as any other Federal expenditure: out of current receipts, by borrowing from the public, or by reducing benefits or other expenditures. The existence of large trust fund balances, therefore, does not, by itself, increase the Government’s ability to pay benefits.

This is similar to language in the Clinton administration’s FY2000 budget, which noted that the size of the trust fund “does not…have any impact on the Government’s ability to pay benefits” (emphasis added).

I offer the following proposition:

  • If the government knows that there are no assets in the Social Security and Medicare “trust funds,” and yet projects the interest earned on those non-assets and the date on which those non-assets will be exhausted, then the government is lying. 

If that’s the case, then these annual trustees reports constitute an institutionalized, ritualistic lie.  Also ritualistic is the media’s uncritical repetition of the lie.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care, Social Security, Tax and Budget Policy

The High Cost of Obstructionism

By
Michael D. Tanner

Michael’s posts below looked at the Medicare Trustees Report. The 2006 Report issued by the Social Security Trustees isn’t any better. With another year of inaction, Social Security’s problems have grown worse. The program will begin running a deficit in just 11 years. In theory, the Social Security Trust Fund will pay benefits until 2040, a year earlier than predicted last year. That’s not much comfort to today’s 33-year-olds, who will face an automatic 26 percent cut in benefits unless the program is reformed before they retire.

But even that is misleading, because the Trust Fund doesn’t contain any actual assets. The government bonds it holds are simply a form of IOU, a measure of how much money the government owes the system. It says nothing about where the government will get the money to actually pay those IOUs.

Overall, the system’s unfunded liabilities—the amount it has promised more than it can actually pay—now totals $15.3 trillion.

That’s “trillion.” With a T.

Setting aside some technical changes in how future obligations are calculated, that’s also $550 billion worse than last year. In other words, because Congress failed to act last year, our children and grandchildren were handed a bill for another $550 billion.

How long will Congress continue to duck this issue?

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care, Social Security

New at Cato Unbound: Can Republicans Stop Thinking Big?

By
Will Wilkinson

Former Bush speechwriter and bestselling author David Frum kicks off this month’s edition of Cato Unbound, “The GOP and Limited Government: Do They Have a Future Together?,” with a provocative essay considering whether the window of political opportunity has forever closed for the small-government heirs of Goldwater, Reagan, and Gingrich. He is not optimistic:

[T]he day in which we could look to the GOP to have an affirmative small-government vision of its own has I think definitively passed.

Over the course of this week Cato Unbound will unveil response essays by Bruce Bartlett, author of Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy; fresh-faced political commentators Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, authors of a forthcoming book on “Sam’s Club Republicans”; and Cato’s own esteemed executive vice-president, David Boaz. Come for the finely crafted essays this week, but stay for the informal blog chat next week and watch our panelists lock horns (or sagely agree with one another) in real time, blog-style.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics

McCain: Speaking Freely

By
John Samples

The people who want to impose more restrictions on money in politics often say they are not against free speech.

No, they say, they simply want to bring about a better balance between free speech and other important values like preventing corruption of government or participation in our democracy. Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court is the most well-known advocate of this argument.

It all sounds so moderate, balanced, and reasonable.

As it turns out, the most notable and politically powerful advocate of campaign finance restrictions would strike a different balance with free speech – one that is neither moderate, nor reasonable, nor constitutional.

Sen. John McCain said recently on Imus in the Morning:

“He [talk show host Michael Graham] also mentioned my abridgement of First Amendment rights, i.e. talking about campaign finance reform….I know that money corrupts….I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I’d rather have the clean government.”

For McCain, clean government is an absolute value. When it comes to money, laws that prevent corruption of the government thus take priority over all else, including freedom of speech. After all, money is the root of all corruption, and “clean government” is worth any cost, especially if it’s paying for political speech someone like McCain doesn’t want to hear in the first place. Thus the McCain-Feingold law shuts down the speech of businesses, labor unions, and other groups with the tendency to attack incumbents during election season.

Once again, John McCain reminds us why the U.S. Constitution states rather clearly that the government “shall make no law…abridging freedom of speech.”

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

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