President Obama needs to find someone new to further socialize America’s health care system. Tom Daschle has withdrawn his name. Apparently, being Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services is not all that enticing, especially if you have to start (gasp!) complying with the internal revenue code. Unfortunately, rather than learn a good lesson about the need to junk America’s complicated tax system, the politicians are probably going to use this fiasco as an excuse to give the IRS even more power. But there is a lighter side to Daschle-Gate. This 1986 campaign commercial is rather ironic considering that Daschle got caught because he neglected to report his use of a luxury car and chauffer:

My blog yesterday on potential 2012 GOP candidates and the stimulus provoked a deluge of e‑mails from fans of Sarah Palin objecting to my characterization of her support for the bill. And Palin’s office, responding to news reports (like this one from Fox News and the Associated Press that I relied on), put out a statement attempting to clarify her position. It wasn’t particularly successful.

Palin does urge Congress to “consider” whether the stimulus bill is too big and burdens future generations with debt, but unlike some other governors (Sanford, Barbour, Jindal, for example), she does not call for the bill’s defeat or urge her congressional delegation to vote against it. Instead, she goes on to raise her big concern with the bill – it doesn’t give enough money to Alaska:

“Governor Palin discussed troubling elements in the stimulus package including provisions that punish Alaska for forward-funding education, the mass transit funding formula that will limit Alaska opportunities but will pour money into other states, and the “shovel-ready” criteria for projects that northern climates might not be able to accommodate consistently due to the shortened construction season.”

Earlier Governor Palin sent a letter to her congressional delegation in which she similarly complained, not about the spending in the stimulus bill per se, but about the formulas for distributing the funds, which she believes short changes her state (as if Alaska were not already a wholly-owned subsidiary of the federal government.) She also wants the bill to include five specific projects (we used to call those “earmarks.”)

So, I’ll stand (somewhat) corrected. Governor Palin didn’t lobby for the bill. She just lobbied for her share of the pork.

Yesterday, I participated in an online debate for the New York Times about Senator Daschle and other high-ranking Democrats who seem to like higher taxes for everyone except themselves. One of the participants asserted that everything would be okay if Daschle (and Treasury Secretary Geithner) voluntarily gave the government extra money. Another participant used the forum as an excuse to argue that the rest of us should give the government more money. Another participant actually wrote that “Tom Daschle is an exemplary public servant” and that the “country is lucky to get him back in this time of great need.” (I’m not making this up.) One of my favorite people, by contrast, indicts the internal revenue code and the corrupt culture in Washington:

The Tom Daschle imbroglio is…an indictment of a convoluted tax code that simultaneously hinders compliance by honest people and enables cheating by dishonest people. In past years, Money magazine asked professional tax preparers to estimate the tax liability for a hypothetical family. Almost without fail, every single answer the magazine received was different and every single answer was wrong. If people trying to come up with the right answers have this much trouble, imagine the opportunities for mischief by those who want to scam the system — especially now that the tax code is even more complex? …Mr. Daschle’s tax dodging…reveals how the political culture in Washington is fundamentally corrupt. As a senator, he constantly voted to expand the size and scope of government, and he expected the rest of us to pay the bills, stating in 1998 that, “the I.R.S. should enforce our laws to the letter.” Yet like Treasury Secretary Geithner and Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Daschle viewed compliance as optional. Unlike ordinary Americans, Mr. Daschle and other members of the political class will not have to worry about being harassed by the I.R.S. Washington insiders have a get-out-of-jail-free card that enables them to feign embarrassment, pay the back taxes and interest, but avoid any penalties or legal consequences. Best of all, they also can generate campaign contributions while in office and become rich out of office by making the tax code even more onerous for the rest of us. Nice work if you can get it.

At RealClearPolitics I wrote about the vast army of lobbyists jockeying for money from the TARP bailout and the stimulus bill:

The $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), better known as the Wall Street bailout, was cooked up mostly in secret by the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board. But the bill was no sooner proposed than lobbyists started flooding Capitol Hill and the Treasury to get a piece of it.

Every company and industry wanted to be sure that it would be eligible for some of the money, and members of Congress worked to slip their constituents and campaign donors into the bill’s 451 pages. By the time it passed, it included special provisions for Puerto Rican rum producers, auto race tracks, and corporations operating in American Samoa (such as Starkist, which is headquartered in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district). It required that insurance companies pay for mental health benefits and granted tax benefits for victims of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and makers of children’s wooden arrows.…

Next up is the nearly-trillion-dollar stimulus bill. Don’t expect anything different. Already senators are pushing to get their pet projects and home-state interests into the measure. “It’s very intense right now,” one Washington lobbyist told U.S. News. “I’m working late every day, until 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock. Every imaginable client has been calling me with ways of how their business, or their projects, should fit into the economic stimulus package. It’s wild. No idea is too far-fetched for people.”

No sooner was the article published than more examples fill the media: “A Republican [in Ohio] called it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” “Cities, towns ready to vie for stimulus funds.” “Road Builders Compete for Slice of Stimulus.” “West Michigan’s stimulus wish list.” “A State with a Wish List for Stimulus Spending.” “Steel industry lobbyists seem to have persuaded the House to insert a “Buy American” provision in the stimulus bill it passed last week.” “JetBlue Goes to Washington to Discuss Economic Stimulus Plan.”

When you lay out a picnic, you get ants. And this is the biggest picnic in the history of pork-filled picnicking.

Robert Reich joins President Obama and Vice President Biden in claiming that “economic advisers across the political spectrum support Obama’s plan.”

Now, President Obama and Vice President Biden probably aren’t reading whole newspapers these days, and like their predecessors they don’t talk much to people who don’t agree with them. So they may have genuinely believed that “Economists from across the political spectrum agree” on the need for a massive stimulus program.

But Reich doesn’t have that excuse. He’s a professor at Berkeley. He has full access to newspapers, email, the Internet, and the help of grad students — and so he cannot be unaware that lots of leading economists oppose the Obama plan and similar massive spending programs. But then, as I’ve noted before, he’s often been at wide variance with the facts. This time, knowing that his claim might be doubted, he cited the one conservative economist who has famously endorsed a large stimulus — Martin Feldstein of Harvard — but didn’t quite acknowledge that Feldstein has called Obama’s plan “An $800 Billion Mistake.”

It is never too early to start talking about the next presidential election, and for many of those expected to contend for the GOP nomination, the proposed economic stimulus package provides an early test of whether they will be Bush-style big-government conservatives or whether they will champion limited government and economic freedom. So far, the record is decidedly mixed.

In the “give me my pork” camp are governors Sarah Palin, Charlie Crist, and Tim Pawlenty. Palin, darling of many “movement” conservatives came all the way to Washington to lobby for the bill. Crist worked the phones, unsuccessfully trying to convince Republican House members from Florida to support the bill. Pawlenty admits some concern over the bill’s impact on the federal deficit, but says, governors “are entitled to ask for our share of the money.”

On the other side, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney says that he opposes the bill. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal also opposes the stimulus bill, though he admits he may accept the money if it passes. Taking the strongest stand against the bill is South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who not only opposes the bill but says he probably would not accept any funds for his state. “It’s incumbent on me as one of the nation’s governors to speak out against what I believe is ultimately incredibly harmful to the economy, to taxpayers and to the worth of the U.S. dollar,” Sanford said.

It’s a long way to 2012, of course, but it looks like Republican voters will have some clear choices.

Thank you for making this point. But two wrongs don’t make a right.

Respectfully,
Justin Logan