- Penalizing millionaires won’t help President Obama get re-elected, but partnering with Republicans on corporate tax reforms and spending cuts would boost the economy — and his prospects.
- Of course, both Republicans and President Obama will have to stop pretending to cut defense spending if either want the economy to recover.
- Chasing the energy independence white rabbit isn’t helping much, either.
- Soaking the rich definitely won’t work.
- When you look back at the grueling [sic] debate over an underwhelming $38 billion in spending cuts, you realize the fight was never about cutting spending–it was over how much to grow the size and scope of government:
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Why Are Geithner and Bernanke Trying to Panic Financial Markets with Debt Limit Demagoguery?
By taking advantage of “must-pass” pieces of legislation, Republicans have three chances this year to restrain the burden of government. They didn’t do very well with the “CR fight” over appropriated spending for the rest of FY2011, which was their first opportunity. I was hoping for an extra-base hit off the fence, but the GOP was afraid of a government shutdown and negotiated from a position of weakness. As such, the best interpretation is that they eked out an infield single.
The next chance to impose fiscal discipline will be the debt limit. Currently, the federal government “only” has the authority to borrow $14.3 trillion (including bookkeeping entries such as the IOUs in the Social Security Trust Fund). This is a very big number, but America’s gross federal debt will hit that limit soon, perhaps May or June.
Republicans say they will not raise the debt limit unless such legislation is accompanied by meaningful fiscal reforms. The political strategists in the Obama White House understandably want to blunt any GOP effort, so they are claiming that any delay in passing a “clean debt limit” will have catastrophic consequences. Specifically, they are using Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke to create fear and uncertainty in financial markets.
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‘You’re Crazy’: What Edu-analysts Say to Avoid Reality
Over the last few days the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli has been blogging about one of his favorite topics: “tight-loose” coupling of education power. Basically, the federal government should be “tight” on performance requirements and “loose” on how to meet them. I don’t, though, want to get into that right now. Next week, Fordham will be releasing a proposal for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act that, Mike promises, will show how to be simultaneously tight and loose, and I’ll have much to say then. But today I want to use a New Republic article by Education Sector’s Kevin Carey, which Petrilli critiques in his tight-loose tipoff, to illustrate what those of us who’d like to actually apply the Constitution to federal education policy are up against: the assumption of craziness.
This paragraph from Carey’ s piece — which cites not one word from the Constitution, nor deals with so much as an ounce of the arguments against federal intervention — pretty much captures the essence of his assault on constitutionalists:
[House Education Committee Chairman John] Kline is, by all accounts, not a crazy person when it comes to education. But he leads a committee whose members include North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx, who is noted for bizarre statements on the House floor and has publicly asserted that federal funding for education is unconstitutional. (Foxx chairs the subcommittee on higher education.) Other committee members include Tim Walberg of Michigan and Joe Heck of Nevada, both of whom support abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. The larger Republican caucus appears to have little interest in or knowledge of education—the word does not appear in the Republican “Pledge to America.” Caught between rationality and the House Republican caucus, Kline has offered virtually no details of his plan for NCLB, other than support for “innovation” at the state level. This is code for “letting states do whatever they want.”
You see, anyone who believes such things as federal funding for education is unconstitutional is simply crazy. End of story.
How convenient! Rather than dealing with the absence of education in Article I, Section 8, which lays out the federal government’s specific powers, you just dismiss as nuts those who think the Feds should be bound by the document through which their powers come. And don’t worry that the Federalist Papers dismiss the notions that the general welfare, necessary and proper, and taxation clauses actually give the Feds unlimited power — only loons are against federal control. And ignore why the Framers of the Constitution first and foremost feared national concentration of power; that they knew people with access to such power would eventually use it for their own ends, not the vaunted “public good.” Only a kook would think that could actually happen. Finally, ignore what has come of not listening to the crazy people, such as this:
And this.
And even this.
Obviously, you don’t have to be a little touched to see that the case for getting Washington out of our schools is a powerful one. Unfortunately, some people would rather dismiss it as delusional than deal with it on its hugely important merits.
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Happy Tax Day! Rest Assured. Your Money Is Well Spent Defending Rich Allies
A little over a year ago, I posted two different graphs (with the help of my colleague Charles Zakaib) that showed the growth of U.S. national security spending vs. that of other NATO allies over the last ten years. The data, based on the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual Military Balance, showed that U.S. taxpayers spend far more on our military, both as a share of total economic output, and on a per capita basis, than do any of our allies.
New data, for 2009, was made available in IISS’s Military Balance 2011, and the revised graphs are shown below. (Again, thanks to Charles for his help). As I suspected, the gap remains as wide as ever. In a few cases, it has grown wider.
As you can see, the $2,101 that every American man, woman, and child spends is nearly two and a half times as much as the average Frenchman, over three and a half times that of the average German, and more than fourteen times what the average Turk spends.
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The Arab Revolutions — Monday at Cato
Jack Goldstone, who will speak Monday at a Cato Forum, “Civil Resistance and Revolution in the Arab World,” has two interesting articles published today in Foreign Affairs and the Washington Post.
In the Post, Goldstone, who is the Hazel Professor and director of the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University, suggests that China’s rapid economic growth is going to slow down. In Foreign Affairs, more relevantly for Monday’s forum, his topic is “Understanding the Revolutions of 2011″ (reg. req.). The magazine’s summary:
Revolutions rarely succeed, writes one of the world’s leading experts on the subject — except for revolutions against corrupt and personalist “sultanistic” regimes. This helps explain why Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak fell — and also why some other governments in the region will prove more resilient.
At the Cato Forum — 4:00 p.m. Monday — Goldstone will join Peter Ackerman to discuss similar questions:
What explains the swift collapse of what were considered some of the most stable regimes in the Arab world? Drawing on scholarship and his Center’s experience in supporting pro-democracy activists in Egypt and around the world, Peter Ackerman will describe factors — such as strategy and careful planning — that are common to successful civil resistance movements. According to Ackerman, nonviolent campaigns have a better record at bringing down dictators than violent confrontations. Jack Goldstone will describe the conditions that give rise to revolutions, highlight the vulnerabilities of “sultanistic” dictatorships, and identify which Middle Eastern regimes are most likely to retain power.
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The New Hungarian Constitution
My colleagues and I talk a lot about the need for fidelity to our founding document, in part because any power the federal government exercises that’s not listed there is illegitimate and in part because our Constitution is an essentially libertarian (or classical liberal) document. And part of having a proper, Madisonian view of the Constitution is not to use foreign law to interpret it (or other domestic law).
But it is absolutely appropriate — and good practice — to look to foreign example and experience when drafting a new constitution (or even crafting new legislation). I find such occasions, when a country comes up with a new founding document — either because it’s a new nation (South Sudan), has undergone regime change (Iraq and Afghanistan recently, Eastern Europe in the 1990s, much of Latin America in the 1980s), or just because (France, periodically) — fascinating. I wrote my college thesis on comparative constitutionalism and now occasionally peruse the Comparative Constitutions blog (apparently there’s a blog, facebook page, or twitter feed for just about anything).
Which is all a long preface to introducing the new Hungarian constitution (English version here) — intended to correct some lingering deficiencies from the immediate post-Communist one. There are plenty of good things in this draft, which is due to be voted on by parliament on April 18 (and expected to be adopted due to the governing party’s majority). It moves in the right direction in many respects on property rights, economic liberties, government transparency, and an independent judiciary, but also contains provisions that would empower the state beyond what is suitable for protecting individual rights (property and otherwise) and provides weak institutional guarantees.
Marion Smith, president of the Common Sense Society (a free-market think tank in Budapest) offered a critique last week in the Wall Street Journal Europe:
Read the rest of this post →The drafters and Mr. Orbán [the prime minister] have committed themselves to Hungary’s future economic sustainability, having already adopted a flat personal income tax of 16% and included a government-spending cap at 50% of GDP in the proposed constitution. At a time when national economies in Europe are collapsing left and right due to years of runaway public spending, Budapest is moving in the right direction.
But the proposed constitution also includes a series of second-generation rights and state objectives that will commit future governments to providing “adequate housing,” “access to work,” “sports,” public education and a state-run pension system to all Hungarians. Whereas natural rights (such as life, liberty and property) are rights that governments protect from infringement by others, positive rights (such as housing and leisure) are things that governments are expected to provide. This redefinition of the nature of rights necessarily and fundamentally alters the relationship between individual and the state and increases the scope of state power. The wealth redistribution necessary to provide these rights undermines the protection of private property.
The Takings Clause Has No Expiration Date
Just a decade ago in Palazzolo v. Rhode Island, the Supreme Court rejected the idea that those who buy property subject to burdensome regulations lose the right the seller otherwise has to challenge those regulations. The Court ruled that the Takings Clause does not have an “expiration date.”
Sadly, not all government authorities or courts took Palazzolo to heart. In 1997, Daniel and Susan Guggenheim bought a mobile home park that, at the time of purchase, was in “unincorporated territory” of Santa Barbara County, California. The Guggenheims did not challenge the county’s 1979 rent control ordinance but instead challenged the 2002 adoption of that ordinance by the City of Goleta when the city incorporated the Guggenheims’ land.
The Ninth Circuit essentially limited Palazzolo to its particular facts and circumstances, deciding to convert the established three-factor test for regulatory takings (Penn Central) into a one-factor test focused solely on “investment-backed expectations.” The court did this largely on the premise that the Guggenheims did not present an “as-applied” challenge — as Palazzolo did — to the ordinance’s application to their mobile home park, but instead filed a facial challenge to the constitutionality of the ordinance itself. As a result, the Ninth Circuit turned two Supreme Court precedents on their head and put that “expiration date” on the Takings Clause in this case.
Significantly, the Ninth Circuit isn’t alone in its misapplication of Palazzolo; the Federal Circuit in CRV Enterprises v. United States (in which Cato will also be filing a brief) also recently issued an opinion severely narrowing Palazzolo’s scope and deepening a circuit split.
Cato filed an amicus brief supporting the Guggenheims’ request that the Supreme Court review the Ninth Circuit decision and reaffirm its decision in Palazzolo. The brief argues the Supreme Court should review the case because: (1) a rule that allows the transfer of title to immunize government regulation from constitutional or other legal challenge expands government power and diminishes property rights; (2) the Ninth Circuit “flouts” the rule of Palazzolo; and (3) this case — as well as CRV Enterprises — indicates the need for the Supreme Court to settle the spreading confusion about Palazzolo.
Otherwise, the existence of a “post-enactment” rule will create a “massive uncompensated taking” from small developers and investors that would preserve and enhance the rights of large corporations. The ability of property owners to challenge government interference with their property is essential to a proper understanding of the Fifth Amendment; the Court must reestablish the principle that transfer of title does not diminish property rights.
Thanks to legal associate Nick Mosvick and former legal associate Brandon Simmons (acting as our outside counsel in this case) for their work on this case, Guggenheim v. City of Goleta.