Gallup has a new poll that shows “Fear of Big Government at Near-Record Level.” The headline might also have been “Fear of Big Business Falls by 20 Percent in 2011.” Or perhaps “Fear of Big Government Has Risen Sharply during the Age of Obama.”

This is not good news for Progressives in general. They need for the government to be trusted, if not loved, to undertake great projects in pursuit of a presumed public good. But the real losers here are Occupy Wall Street. The Gallup survey was done in late November and early December of this year. After several months of attention to OWS, the fear of Big Government has gone up while the fear of Big Business has dropped. OWS is not moving public opinion in its preferred direction.

After the Citizens United decision, mandated disclosure of campaign spending has become the major tool of campaign finance reformers. The Supreme Court has validated forced disclosure as a way to inform voters about candidates. Knowing who supports an advertisement supposedly gives a voter a cue about a candidate’s positions and outlook. If labor unions support a candidate, a voter who supports (opposes) unions can then vote for (vote against) the candidate supported by the union.

David Primo reports on his research showing that voters do not use disclosed information in this way. He also finds that the disclosure process makes it harder to participate in politics.

For some time I have suspected that electoral players want disclosure so they can attack those who fund their speech favoring their opponents. Such attacks presumably make such fund (and such speech) less likely. Disclosure is just a weapon in the ongoing electoral struggle.

I spent the afternoon debating, among others, Rick Perlstein, on the economy. The debate was being taped for Aljazeera TV (set to air tonight some time in the 7 pm hour EST). Rick claimed that since both government and the economy were getting bigger between World War II and the 1970, then growing federal expenditures couldn’t be bad for the economy. The economist in me, was thinking, well what does the data say? Obviously we didn’t have the data at hand, so the issue was not explored any further.

I’ve tried to reproduce the core of the question in the graph below, which shows on the left axis federal spending as a share of GNP and on the right axis the real increase in GDP, both measures on a quarterly basis. If the visual trend is not enough for you, the correlation between the two is a negative 0.4. Keeping in mind that correlation isn’t causality, it does appear that as the federal government increased as a percentage of the economy, the growth rate of the economy slowed.

During most of this period federal spending to GNP averaged around 16% (can’t we at least get back to the magical 1960s level of government?), while the annual growth rate in GDP averaged 3.9 percent. I find the pattern starting around 1966 to be particularly interesting as we witnessed both a sharp increase in the size of government and a dramatic fall in the growth rate of the economy. Of course I don’t expect those wedded blindly to a faith in big government to find any of this convincing, but for those of us with an empirical fact-based bent, it does suggest to me that had we restrained the late 1960s growth in government, our economy would be a lot bigger today (but then who cares about the size of the pie when you can fight over the pieces?).

For quite a while Obama transportation officials have been campaigning against the safety hazard of “distracted driving,” but they must regard the American public as slow learners, because now the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is proposing something truly radical: a ban on drivers’ use of cellphones and other personal electronic devices even when they’re hands-free and thus don’t require taking anyone’s eyes or hands off the road or steering wheel. The only exceptions the agency would permit would be “emergency” phone use and “devices designed to assist the driving task,” such as GPS devices. NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman said the problem is “cognitive” distractions as well as the “visual” and “manual” kind. The agency cannot adopt such a ban directly, but it’s calling on the states to fall into line and to enlist in a campaign of “high-visibility enforcement.”

And there’s more. NTSB is also, to quote PC World, “encouraging electronics manufacturers — via recommendations to the CTIA-The Wireless Association and the Consumer Electronics Association — to develop features that ‘disable the functions of portable electronic devices within reach of the driver when a vehicle is in motion.’ ” In the perfect Nannyland of the future, your phone will turn itself off when the government wants it to — even if you were in the middle of placing one of those emergency calls (“Honey, get out of the house, the flood waters are rising”) that will supposedly still be permitted.

Tech commentators are blasting the agency for jumping the gun on the evidence, to say nothing of ignoring values of personal liberty. A PC Magazine writer points out that while there is a safety case to be made against texting behind the wheel — a practice that encourages the driver to look away from the road for extended periods — the NTSB is short of statistics (as opposed to scary anecdotes) to show that phone conversation itself is a dire problem. Ars Technica notes that even the board’s own (disputable) statistics link the hazards of “conversation with passengers” to more than twice as many fatal accidents as the hazards of device use — and no one has yet proposed banning passenger conversations with the driver. (Don’t give Washington ideas, though.) Among devices, the sort of touch-screen car entertainment systems that you can fiddle with for ten seconds at a stretch — which are apparently okay with NTSB — would seem to pose considerably more distraction than one-button phone-answering. And speaking of statistics, the Federal Highway Administration website reports the lowest per-mile auto fatality rate ever, and the lowest in absolute numbers since the year 1950 — even though, to quote the NTSB itself, device use has seen “exponential growth” in the past few years.

Something doesn’t add up here. Commercial drivers, since the early-1980s CB radio craze and long before, have been using mobile communications for purposes other than emergencies and driving assistance, and their safety record is not notably atrocious. Hang up on this bad idea now, please.

I’ve got a piece over at the Daily Caller this morning entitled “Newt’s Constitutional Confusions,” the title of which only hints at the constitutional apostasy to be found in Gingrich’s voluminous 21st Century Contract with America. Section nine, for example, “Bringing the Courts Back Under the Constitution,” is an unvarnished attack on what Newt sees as run-away courts frustrating the will of the people – as if that, and not run-away government, were our main problem today.

In fact, Newt praises Franklin Roosevelt’s infamous 1937 Court-packing threat, after which the Court largely abdicated its responsibility to check the political branches. And he condemns Cooper v. Aaron, the unanimous 1958 Little Rock school desegregation decision (remember the federal troops Eisenhower sent?) in which the Court told state officials they couldn’t “nullify” Supreme Court rulings. Thus his main target is “judicial supremacy,” the idea – implicit in the Constitution, explicit in the Federalist, and secured in 1803 in Marbury v. Madison – that it falls to the Supreme Court, not to the political branches, to say finally what the law is.

But in making that argument, he completely misreads the decisions. (In Kelo v. New London, his very first example of a willful judiciary, the Court wrongly upheld the city’s transfer of Ms. Kelo’s property to a private developer!) He misreads the Federalist. He relies on Leftist critics of the Rehnquist Court’s modest efforts at reviving enumerated powers federalism. And most important, politically, he’s misleading the Tea Party folks, most of whom stand for restoring limited constitutional government. Indeed, the Tea Party people hope to see an engaged Court overturn ObamaCare, just in case Newt – or better, someone who understands the Constitution – doesn’t win in November.

Apprehensions along America’s southwest border have plunged in the past decade. Although there have been plenty of stories about it this week, our politicians have yet to grasp this important fact.

From a peak in 2000, the annual number of arrests along our 2,000 mile border with Mexico has plunged by more than 75 percent. Apprehensions are considered a good although imperfect proxy for attempted border crossings. By any measure, the number of people trying to enter the United States illegally between ports of entry has dropped to its lowest level since comparable records began 40 years ago.

A few implications that are not being talked about enough by politicians of either party:

• For those who demand that we must “get control of our borders first” before discussing real immigration reform, that excuse is more hollow than ever. Net migration from Mexico right now is “essentially zero,” according to Jeffrey Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center. This is a political window of opportunity to change our immigration system.
• Immigration reform should be seen as an essential step in reducing illegal traffic across the border. As I’ve noted before, when we have expanded legal immigration in the past, illegal immigration has dropped. The best way to control our border is to expand opportunities for workers from Latin America to enter our country legally through established ports of entry.
• We are in no danger of being flooded by low-skilled immigrants. Yes, beefed up enforcement has played a role in the declining numbers entering illegally, but the economic downturn explains most of the drop off. The Great Recession hit illegal immigrants hard, especially in the construction industry. If the jobs are not available, fewer foreign-born workers come and more go home.
• Conditions in Mexico are improving. Despite bad press about the drug war, staying home has become relatively more attractive for Mexican workers. Thanks to gradual economic reforms, including trade liberalization and the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Mexican economy has enjoyed stable if unspectacular growth. The middle class is growing and poverty is declining. That growth, in turn, has contributed to a plunge in the Mexican birthrate, to where today it has fallen to replacement level.

We should reform our immigration system now. When the U.S. economy recovers to more normal levels of job creation, we will need immigrant workers more than ever. We should be prepared to welcome them legally rather than wasting resources in a futile effort to “control the border” through enforcement only.