• “Whatever your views on climate change, you ought to find it unsettling that, here and elsewhere, most of the actual ‘law’ in this country is crafted by unelected executive-branch bureaucrats.”
• “The Framers’ Constitution freed us, to make our own individual choices.”
• “The world’s dictators are fleeing for their lives, all because of Secretary Clinton’s efforts.”
• “Total spending jumped by almost $2 trillion during the Bush-Obama spending binge, so a $39 billion cut is almost too small to mention.”
• The Founders would agree with the idea that “it should be hard to get into wars and easy to leave them”:
  
  

In his speech this afternoon, President Obama is expected to call for, among other things, an increase in taxes on investors, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and other “rich” people who make over $250,000 a year. The goal, the President claims, is to reduce deficits.

America has a spending problem, not a revenue problem, as the Congressional Budget Office chart below shows. The federal budget has ballooned nearly $2 trillion in the past 10 years and that increased burden of spending is undermining growth. And if left on autopilot, the spending crisis will get worse in coming decades. Rather than trying to keep up with that growing burden of government — an impossible task — by raising taxes, our leaders should be looking at ways to treat the underlying problem: Our government is too big and it spends too much. We cannot tax our way out of this problem, particularly since politicians will spend any additional revenue.

The federal tax burden will rise above the historical average of 18 percent of GDP with no help from President Obama. Even without expiration of the Bush tax cuts or the alternative minimum tax, the tax burden is expected to climb because even modest economic growth slowly but surely pushes more and more people into higher tax brackets.

The chart below shows CBO’s estimate of personal income tax revenue based on current policy (as opposed to estimates based on current law, which includes already legislated tax hikes). To be more specific, it shows how much revenue the government will collect from the individual income tax even if the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are made permanent and the AMT is indexed.

The aggregate individual income tax burden will increase by roughly 5 percentage points of GDP when compared to the long-run average of about 8 percent of GDP (the CBO estimate only goes to 2035, so I extrapolated to show the same time period as the first chart). And remember, this is the forecast of what will happen to income tax revenues even if politicians don’t impose any new laws to coercively extract more revenue.

This might not be too bad if other taxes were falling, but that’s not what CBO is projecting. As such, this big increase in revenue from the individual income tax means that the overall tax burden will climb by approximately the same amount.

In other words, revenue likely will rise close to 25 percent of GDP as we approach the next century. So if we use this more realistic baseline, we can say that more than 100 percent of the long-run deficit problem is because spending is out of control.

The second reason for a firm no-tax increase position is that higher taxes are a very ineffective way of reducing budget deficits. Indeed, tax increases generally backfire and lead to more red ink. To understand why, it’s important to put away the calculator and instead consider the real world of politics and public policy. For instance:

Tax increases rarely raise as much revenue as predicted by government forecasters. This is because of “Laffer Curve” effects, as taxpayers change their behavior to earn less income and/​or report less income. Simply stated, people respond to incentives, and this means taxable income falls as tax rates increase.

o Tax increases erode pressure to control spending. Why would politicians want to make tough decisions and upset special interest groups, after all, when there is going to be more revenue (or at least the expectation of more revenue)? Using more colloquial language, trying to control spending with higher taxes is like trying to cure alcoholics by giving them keys to a liquor store.

o Milton Friedman was right when he said that, “In the long run government will spend whatever the tax system will raise, plus as much more as it can get away with.” In other words, if politicians think they can get away with deficits averaging, say, 5 percent of GDP in the long run, then the the only impact of higher taxes is an equal amount of additional spending – while still retaining deficits of 5 percent of GDP.

The real-world evidence certainly points in this direction. We’ve seen “bipartisan budget summits” several times in Washington, and the result is more spending rather than lower deficits.

America’s fiscal challenge is too much spending. Government is too big and it is wasting too much money. Taking more money from the American people is not the way to solve that problem.

Every lover of liberty and the Constitution should be offended by the moniker “Privacy Bill of Rights” appended to regulatory legislation Senators John Kerry (D‑MA) and John McCain (R‑AZ) introduced yesterday. As C|Net’s Declan McCullagh points out, the legislation exempts the federal government and law enforcement:

[T]he measure applies only to companies and some nonprofit groups, not to the federal, state, and local police agencies that have adopted high-tech surveillance technologies including cell phone tracking, GPS bugs, and requests to Internet companies for users’ personal information–in many cases without obtaining a search warrant from a judge.

The real “Privacy Bill of Rights” is in the Bill of Rights. It’s the Fourth Amendment.

It takes a lot of gall to put the moniker “Privacy Bill of Rights” on legislation that reduces liberty in the information economy while the Fourth Amendment remains tattered and threadbare. Nevermind “reasonable expectations”: the people’s right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures is worn down to the nub.

Senators Kerry and McCain should look into the privacy consequences of the Internal Revenue Code. How is privacy going to fare under Obamacare? How is the Department of Homeland Security doing with its privacy efforts? What is an “administrative search”?

McCullagh was good enough to quote yours truly on the new effort from Sens. Kerry and McCain: “If they want to lead on the privacy issue, they’ll lead by getting the federal government’s house in order.”

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker column looks at the claim that this week’s budget deal delivers the biggest spending cuts in history:

For instance, during World War II, the federal budget soared from $9.4 billion in 1940 to nearly $93 billion in 1945. Talk about an expansion of government! But then in 1946, the budget was cut to $55 billion. That’s a cut of $37 billion, technically less than the $38.5 billion in cuts reached last week. But it’s also a cut of 40 percent, which means it is 40 times larger than the deal that is routinely described as historic.…

There is yet another way to measure these cuts. As little as $15 billion of the cuts are in the domestic nondefense discretionary budget. How do these cuts stack up to the historical record, when adjusted for inflation (2005 dollars)? From 1981 to 1982, this part of the budget fell by $43 billion (this was during President Ronald Reagan’s term, so at the same time, the defense budget went up $30 billion.) This part of the budget also fell about $15 billion — twice — during the Clinton administration. So, again, the current round of cuts are not the biggest even when looked at through this narrow prism.

Fact Checker Glenn Kessler concludes:

The Pinocchio Test

We’re going to give the politicians a pass here. Technically, these appear to be the largest raw-dollar spending cuts in history, and we have not found evidence that either Obama or Boehner has pretended otherwise — at least in public. (Note that Obama and the White House always are clever to insert the word “annual” before the phrase “spending cut.”) At worse, these are one-Pinocchio violations, typical bragging that all of the strum and drang over the budget was worth the effort.

But it is up to the media to provide context to these claims. On that score the media, including (alas) The Washington Post, misled its readers.

Two Pinocchios

(to the media)

Hats off to Glenn Kessler for holding his colleagues to a higher standard than politicians. And note that Chris Edwards and I have also questioned these claims about “the biggest cuts ever.”

Now that details of the please-no-shutdown budget deal are emerging, at least one thing is clear: Republicans caved on education spending. Rather than demand meaningful cuts to the absurd panoply of federal education programs that succeed only at sucking money out of taxpayers’ wallets, GOP negotiators agreed to mere token trims. Quickly adding together the education programs in the list of cuts put out by Republicans, the total comes to only about $1.6 billion, from an FY 2010 Department of Education appropriation of $64.1 billion. That’s a measly two-percent shave.

And Republicans didn’t just surrender on big cuts that any reasonable analysis screams should be made post-haste. They actually handed President Obama additional money and power with $700 million in new funding for Race to the Top, the supposedly one-time “stimulus” program that the President has used to bribe states into adopting, among other things, national curriculum standards.

If the goal of budgeteers is to cut programs that don’t work and are unconstitutional — as it absolutely should be — education is the first area in which they should start swinging the spending axe, or better yet, the chainsaw. But no: Because few in Washington have the political fortitude to eliminate spending done in the name of “education” — think of the children! — all the negotiators took were a couple of half-hearted strokes with a worn down emery board.

This is terrible news on its own, and it sure doesn’t bode well for negotiations yet to come.

I have an op-ed in the Huffington Post today arguing that it’s possible to ensure universal access to education without compelling anyone to support types of instruction that violate their convictions. This eliminates the central objection that the ACLU and ADL have given for their opposition to private school choice. Indeed, if those organizations really care about freedom of conscience, they should prefer the policy solution I outline to the status quo system in which every taxpayer is compelled to support a single government organ of education. Or is there some other reason why the ACLU and ADL oppose liberating American education?

Feel free to chime-in in the comments section on Huff Po.

The legal battle over SB 1070 is far from over, so neither side should cheer or despair. The upshot of the Ninth Circuit’s splintered and highly technical opinion is merely that the district court did not abuse its discretion in enjoining four provisions. The court could not and did not rule on the legislation’s ultimate constitutionality and, of course, SB 1070’s remaining provisions—the ten that weren’t challenged and the two on which Judge Bolton rejected the government’s argument—remain in effect.

But the legal machinations are only half the story. While I personally think that all or almost all of the Arizona law is constitutional, at least as written (abuses in application are always possible), it’s bad policy because it harms the state’s economy and misallocates law enforcement resources. But I also understand the frustration of many state governments, whose citizens are demanding relief from a broken immigration system that Congress has repeatedly failed to fix. Whether it’s stronger enforcement (Arizona) or liberalizing work permits (Utah), states should not be forced into the position of having to enact their own piecemeal immigration solutions while living within a system where the regulation of immigration is a federal responsibility. Congress has dropped the ball in not passing comprehensive immigration reform, despite facing a system that doesn’t work for anyone: not big business or small business, not rich Americans or poor ones, not skilled would-be immigrants or unskilled.

The federalism our Constitution establishes sometimes demands that the federal government act on certain issues. This is such a time and immigration is such an issue.