In advance of today’s book forum for Jesse Walker’s The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, I chatted with him a bit in Cato podcast form (Subscribe!) about Illuminatus!, Robert Anton Wilson and the remarkable growth of conspiracy theories in popular culture.

Whatever his motivations, it’s good that President Barack Obama has departed from past practice—let the Tomahawks fly and Congress be damned—and gone to the people’s representatives so they can stand and be counted. 

But, as I note in today’s Washington Examiner, that vote isn’t without danger. The draft authorization for the use of military force the administration circulated Saturday is strikingly broad. And if we know anything from the history of past AUMFs, it’s that presidents will push the authority they’re given as far as language will allow—and possibly further. 

In his Rose Garden press conference Saturday, Obama said “we would not put boots on the ground.” The action he’s contemplating would be “limited in duration and scope.” Just a “shot across the bow”—a light dusting of cruise missiles.  

The draft AUMF says no such thing:

• It authorizes the president to use U.S. “armed forces,” not just air power. 

• He can do that “as he determines to be necessary and appropriate,” so long as it’s “in connection” with use of unconventional weapons in Syria—and again, he determines what connection exists.

• It doesn’t limit him to striking Syrian government forces, and it doesn’t limit him to Syria. It’s loose enough, as former Bush Office of Legal Council head Jack Goldsmith points out, to allow the president to wage war against Iran or Hezbollah in Lebanon, so long as “he determines” there’s some connection to WMD in Syria.

• And it doesn’t contain a “sunset clause” time-limiting the authority granted—which means that authority will be available for future presidents as well. 

As a reminder, here’s LBJ announcing his decision to go to Congress for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, piously intoning that “we Americans know, though others appear to forget, the risks of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.”

A wider war, based on phony intelligence, is exactly what we got, and nearly five decades later we’re still learning new details about what a sickening disaster it was. 

More recently, our last two presidents have warped the post‑9/​11 AUMF beyond recognition, using it to justify to secret surveillance programs; military imprisonment, without charges, of American citizens on American soil; dronestrikes against American citizens abroad, and other actions never contemplated by Congress. Both Bush and Obama have treated a resolution empowering the president to go after those responsible for the September 11th atrocity and anyone who “harbored” them as a wholesale delegation of Congress’s war power, to be used against increasingly marginal groups that didn’t even exist on 9/11/01. The result has been war without end, drones over Timbuktu. 

Politico reports that Senate leaders are currently working on a narrower authorization for use of force in Syria, with limits on timing and methods. If passed, those limits may not stick. Recall that, in the days after 9/11, Congress worked to narrow the Bush administration’s staggeringly broad draft AUMF—only to have presidents Bush and Obama treat the resolution as a blank check for perpetual war.

With that backdrop, why bother trying to “fix” the president’s draft resolution on Syria? Even if the risks of presidential abuse aren’t as broad as they’ve turned out to be with the 2001 AUMF, the odds of the president doing anything useful with the new authority he seeks are vanishingly small. 

We’re contemplating entanglement in yet another Middle Eastern civil war to…to… achieve what, exactly? To show “our resolve to stand up to others who flout fundamental international rules” by waging a war that’s clearly illegal under the UN Charter? To vindicate the presidential prerogative to blurt out arbitrary “red lines” and back them up with U.S. military might? To defend the high principle that when dictators slaughter civilians, they damned well better do it conventionally? 

President Obama’s case for congressional authorization cannot withstand serious scrutiny. And Congress shouldn’t “fix” what the president shouldn’t have. 

The following headlines were on a magazine cover I saw over the weekend: 

• “Why People are Mad at Washington” 
• “Less Zip in Business” 
• “Republican Split” 
• “New York on Brink Again” 
• “Mideast War Jitters” 

With, perhaps, the exception of the headline about New York, one could easily conclude that the magazine is a current issue. However, that’s not the case. The cover actually belongs to the June 21, 1976 issue of U.S. News & World Report.

My parents kept it because that was the day I was born. Evidence, I believe, that God has a sense of humor. I can’t help but wonder though: will headlines in another 37 years be that much different?

Matt Yglesias today cites data to the effect that, while the gap between blacks and whites in completing high school has been steadily closing in recent decades, racial gaps in income and wealth have remained stubbornly large. This discrepancy suggests that blacks have made real progress in raising their relative skill levels but for some reason they aren’t reaping the rewards of that progress in the workplace.

Alas, the solution to this puzzle is that the purported racial progress in the classroom is in fact a statistical mirage. The big problem is that the official stats on high school completion rates count GED holders as high school completers, despite the fact that both economic and social outcomes for GED holders much more closely resemble those for high school dropouts than those for people who actually earn a high school diploma. And it turns out that the GED program is used disproportionately by blacks — to a significant extent because black inmates are earning them in prison. So a big increase in GED certifications for blacks is portrayed as educational progress when in fact it is a byproduct of socially catastrophic mass incarceration.

Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman from the University of Chicago and coauthor Paul LaFontaine have found that only about 65 percent of blacks finish high school with a diploma, far below the level indicated by the official stats on high school completion. Furthermore, they find no evidence of black-white convergence in high school graduation rates over the past 35 years. Along similar lines, a study by Derek Neal of the University of Chicago found that the black-white gap in educational attainment stopped shrinking around 1990. Neal also looked at test scores and reached similar conclusions: convergence in black-white test score gaps came to a halt in the late 1980s.

The sad fact is that, after great progress through much of the 20th century, racial disparities in human capital levels have remained stuck for decades. The problem isn’t that the marketplace is shortchanging blacks for their rising job skills; the problem is that blacks’ job skills are still so low. This, in turn, is part of a much larger slowdown in human capital accumulation that I talk about in my most recent book.

“I didn’t simply choose to delay this on my own,” President Obama reassured the nation about his unilateral decision to delay Obamacare’s employer mandate. “This was in consultation with businesses all across the country,” he said, as if that made the situation better instead of worse. Obama threw his “consultants” another bone when he decided to delay the reporting requirements the law imposes on employers, also until 2015. The president’s generosity toward large corporations will be financed by the American taxpayer. The Congressional Budget Office projects these delays will cost taxpayers another $3 billion in new government spending and reduce federal revenues by $9 billion, for a total increase in the federal debt of $12 billion. Yet the president fails to show the same concern for individual taxpayers. When the House of Representatives, including dozens of Democrats, voted to extend the same break to individuals by delaying Obamacare’s individual mandate by one year, President Obama threatened to veto that bill. Bizarrely, he also threatened to veto another bill (approved by an even broader bipartisan majority) that would make legal his illegal delay of the employer mandate.

So perhaps we should not be too surprised now that the New York Times reveals yet another delay the president approved at the behest of big business:

In another setback for President Obama’s health care initiative, the administration has delayed until 2015 a significant consumer protection in the law that limits how much people may have to spend on their own health care.

The limit on out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments, was not supposed to exceed $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. But under a little-noticed ruling, federal officials have granted a one-year grace period to some insurers, allowing them to set higher limits, or no limit at all on some costs, in 2014…

[F]ederal officials said that many insurers and employers needed more time to comply because they used separate companies to help administer major medical coverage and drug benefits, with separate limits on out-of-pocket costs…

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said: “We knew this was an important issue. We had to balance the interests of consumers with the concerns of health plan sponsors and carriers, which told us that their computer systems were not set up to aggregate all of a person’s out-of-pocket costs. They asked for more time to comply.”…

Theodore M. Thompson, a vice president of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, said: “The promise of out-of-pocket limits was one of the main reasons we supported health care reform. So we are disappointed that some plans will be allowed to have multiple out-of-pocket limits in 2014.”

It is a sign of Obamacare’s complexity that the Obama administration felt it needed to issue this delay. It is a further sign of the law’s complexity that this delay was announced in February, yet is only coming to light now.

It is a sign of how individuals will fare under Obamacare that this is yet another break the administration is offering to big business but not individual Americans. Obamacare imposes these same caps on out-of-pocket exposure on millions of consumers who purchase coverage directly from an insurance company on the “individual” market, and this mandate like all such mandates will increase premiums. But the administration offered to delay this premium hike only for businesses. Why? Because large businesses have resources and lobbyists that ordinary Americans don’t have. They can work the system, and the Obama administration is more than willing to buy their silence.

Which isn’t to say that employees of large businesses are protected from Obamacare. Delaying this mandate for one year just means workers in exempted firms will feel Obamacare’s full wallop until 2015. Unless the president delays them for another year, that is.

Finally, this is a sign, as if more evidence were needed, that Obamacare is not ready for prime time. Congress should repeal it, or at a minimum delay all 2014 provisions until 2015.

I guess I’ll have to tout this myself. Last week, the Hill newspaper put me on its list of “the 100 people you can’t ignore this fall if you’re wondering how events in Congress and the White House will play out.” Here’s the write-up: 

Michael Cannon Director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute

Think the Supreme Court has settled the question of ObamaCare’s legality? Not if Cannon has anything to say about it. Cannon is a tireless advocate for the argument that the IRS has illegally implemented the healthcare law’s insurance subsidies, which will help low-income households cover the cost of their premiums. 

His argument is that healthcare law, as written, does not allow for the subsidies to be used in healthcare marketplaces that are set up by the federal government.

He helped the state of Oklahoma file a lawsuit against the subsidies, and a group of small businesses filed a separate suit on the same grounds, in case Cannon’s runs into procedural roadblocks.

If the lawsuits Cannon has spearheaded are successful, they could have a devastating impact on the healthcare law. A final decision in favor would stop the flow of tax subsidies to people in more than half of the states, making ObamaCare far less attractive to consumers and stripping away much of the law’s promise of affordability.

Corrections and amplifications. The argument is as much Jonathan Adler’s as mine; we develop it together in this law-journal article. The argument is not that the IRS is illegally implementing otherwise lawful subsidies; it is that the IRS is trying to dispense some $700 billion in illegal subsidies that Congress expressly did not authorize, and impose illegal taxes on millions of employers and individual Americans starting in 2014; that the Obama administration is attempting to tax, borrow, and spend nearly $1 trillion without congressional authorization. Finally, I am neither a party nor counsel nor financier to either Pruitt v. Sebelius or Halbig v. Sebelius.

As it happens, there have been developments in each of those cases. On Friday, the Halbig plaintiffs (1) opposed the federal government’s motion to dismiss their complaint, and (2) filed their own motion asking the court to treat the government’s dilatory seven-week delay in responding to their motion for summary judgment as an implicit concession that the court should grant summary judgment to the plaintiffs. On Monday, the federal judge presiding over Pruitt just granted the state of Oklahoma standing to challenge the IRS’s action. I’ll have more to say in subsequent posts. 

If you want to be notified of those posts or otherwise follow my work, you can use this RSS feed for my Cato@Liberty posts, follow me on Twitter (@mfcannon) or Facebook, or “like” the Anti-Universal Coverage Club.

President Obama promised he would unite the world…and he’s right.

Representatives from all parts of the globe have bitterly complained about an awful piece of legislation, called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), that was enacted back in 2010.

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(Michael Ramirez/​Investors Business Daily)[/caption]

They despise this unjust law because it extends the power of the IRS into the domestic affairs of other nations. That’s an understandable source of conflict, which should be easy to understand. Wouldn’t all of us get upset, after all, if the French government or Russian government wanted to impose their laws on things that take place within our borders?

But it’s not just foreign governments that are irked. The law is so bad that it is causing a big uptick in the number of Americans who are giving up their citizenship.

Here are some details from a Bloomberg report.

Americans renouncing U.S. citizenship surged sixfold in the second quarter from a year earlier… Expatriates giving up their nationality at U.S. embassies climbed to 1,131 in the three months through June from 189 in the year-earlier period, according to Federal Register figures published today. That brought the first-half total to 1,810 compared with 235 for the whole of 2008. The U.S., the only nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that taxes citizens wherever they reside.

I’m glad that the article mentions that American law is so out of whack with the rest of the world.

We should be embarrassed that our tax system—at least with regard to the treatment of citizens living abroad and the treatment of tax exiles—is worse than what they have in nations such as France.

And while there was an increase in the number of Americans going Galt after Obama took office, the recent increase seems to be the result of the FATCA legislation.

Shunned by Swiss and German banks and facing tougher asset-disclosure rules under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, more of the estimated 6 million Americans living overseas are weighing the cost of holding a U.S. passport. …Fatca…was estimated to generate $8.7 billion over 10 years, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

I very much doubt, by the way, that the law will collect $8.7 billion over 10 years.

And it’s worth noting that President Obama initially claimed that his assault on “tax havens” would generate $100 billion every year. If you don’t believe me, click here and listen to his words at the 2:30 mark.

So we started with politicians asserting they could get $100 billion every year. Then they said only $8.7 billion over ten years, or less than $1 billion per year.

And now it’s likely that revenues will fall because so many taxpayers are leaving the country. This is yet another example of how the Laffer Curve foils the plans of greedy politicians.

You may be tempted to criticize these overseas Americans, but I’ve talked to several hundred of them in the past few years and you can’t begin to imagine how their lives are made more difficult by the illegitimate extraterritorial laws concocted by Washington. Bloomberg has a few more details.

For individuals, the costs are also rising. Getting a mortgage or acquiring life insurance is becoming almost impossible for American citizens living overseas, Ledvina said. “With increased U.S. tax reporting, U.S. accounting costs alone are around $2,000 per year for a U.S. citizen residing abroad,” the tax lawyer said. “Adding factors, such as difficulty in finding a bank to accept a U.S. citizen as a client, it is difficult to justify keeping the U.S. citizenship for those who reside permanently abroad.”

Imagine what your life would be like if you had trouble opening a bank account or conducting all sorts of other financial activities. Things that are supposed to be routine, but are now nightmares.

I collected some of the statements from these overseas Americans. I encourage you to visit this link and get a sense of what they have to endure.

And then keep in mind that all of these problems would disappear if we had the right kind of tax system, such as the flat tax, and didn’t let the tentacles of the IRS extend beyond America’s borders.

P.S. Based on people I’ve met in my international travels, I’d guess that, for every American that officially gives up their citizenship, there are probably a dozen more living overseas who simply drop off the radar screen. Many of these people can’t afford—or can’t stand—to deal with the onerous requirements imposed by hacks, bullies, and lightweights in Washington.

P.P.S. Remember the Facebook billionaire who moved to Singapore to escape being an American taxpayer? Many of us—including me—instinctively find this unsettling. But if we believe that folks should have the freedom to move from California to Texas to benefit from better tax policy, shouldn’t they also have the freedom to move to another nation?

The same is true for companies.

If our tax law is bad, we should lower tax rates and adopt real reform.

Unless, of course, you think it’s okay to blame the victim.