‘I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government.’
The people who receive “national security letters” from the FBI are basically conscripted into serving as secret informers for the government. Some of those served happily comply and turn over whatever information the government is seeking, and sometimes even more. Others resent the conscription and the impact it has on their lives. Here’s an excerpt from an op-ed by Nick Merill, the president of a small internet access and consulting firm, about his experience:
Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case — including the mere fact that I received an NSL — from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.
I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.
Read the whole thing. Mr. Merill will be speaking at Cato Capitol Hill Briefing tomorrow and will provide us with an update on his case since his 2007 op-ed in the Washington Post.
For related Cato work, go here.
All You Have to Do Is Let Go of the Monopoly
I don’t have to prove my bona fides when it comes to opposing top-down, standards-based education reforms. I’ve been highly critical of the No Child Left Behind Act; very aggressive in attacking the reckless drive for national curriculum standards; and have repeatedly noted the importance of educator autonomy. So when you read the following, keep in mind that it is definitely not coming from a command-and-control aficionado: The weakest position in today’s big education war is the one opposed to both standards-based reforms and school choice. It’s the one enunciated yesterday by the Washington Post’ s Valerie Strauss, but which is most firmly staked out by historian Diane Ravitch. It’s the position that essentially boils down to “don’t touch my local, teacher-dominated monopoly!”
Why is this so weak? Because it gives parents and taxpayers — the people who pay for public education and whom the system is supposed to serve — the fewest avenues to get what they want out of the schools.
Outraged over your neighborhood school because it is dangerous, the staff apathetic, and the building crumbling? Too bad — you get what you’re given and can’t even appeal to a higher level of government. And as we’ve seen in far too many places where the residents aren’t rich enough to exercise choice by buying expensive homes in better districts — the District of Columbia, Compton, Detroit, etc. — Ravitch’s utopian vision of school districts as places where “people congregate and mobilize to solve local problems, where individuals learn to speak up and debate and engage in democratic give-and-take with their neighbors” is just so much gauzy rhapsodizing. Reality is much harsher.
Of course, there are gigantic, fatal flaws with the standards-and-accountability movement, and people like Ravitch and Strauss have very compelling reasons for concern.
The standards movement, for one thing, is completely reliant on standardized testing. Indeed, it is heading for a single, national test, despite well-established evidence that tests are highly constrained in what they can tell us about learning.
In addition, as Ravitch and others regularly lament, the standards movement seems to be dominated by present and former business leaders who have tended to treat education as just another uniform-widget production problem. But children are not uniform; they are individual human beings with widely varied interests, rates of maturity, educational starting points, and life goals. But that never seems to enter into the standards equation, rendering it wrong from the start. Add to this that standards-based reformers tend to treat the education system as a single entity to be engineered, rather than an industry in which schools are the firms and competition is essential for sustained innovation and improvement, and standards-based reforms are as hopeless as teacher-dominated mini monopolies.
Unfortunately, top-down standardizers seem unlikely to join the fold of the one reform that includes both necessary educator autonomy and powerful accountability to parents: educational freedom. Yes, they often like school choice as long as government dictates what chosen schools teach, but they don’t embrace real freedom. Perhaps, though, the Ravitches and Strausses of the world can be brought on board. They won’t be able to keep the local monopolies they cherish, but they’ll be able to get most of what they want: much less stultifying uniformity; considerably more freedom for teachers; and the flourishing of communities, though communities based on shared norms and values, not mere physical proximity.
The flimsiest position in our great education debate is the one held by opponents of both top-down accountability and educational freedom. But if they’ll remove the rose-tinted glasses through which they see local public schooling, there is an option that should appeal to them, one that injects essential parent power and competition into education while giving educators the professional autonomy they crave. It is school choice — educational freedom — and it is the reform that wins the great education debate.
Tuesday Links
- Please join us this Thursday, April 21 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern for a book forum and debate on “green energy” policy, following the recent release of the Cato book The False Promise of Green Energy. On Thursday, University of Alabama Professor of Law and Business Andrew P. Morriss (one of the book’s authors) and Center for American Progress Vice President for Energy Policy Kate Gordon will debate the merits of the “green” economic agenda, moderated by Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jerry Taylor. Complimentary registration is required of all attendees by noon TOMORROW, Wednesday, April 20. We hope you can join us in person and for the reception following the event–if you cannot attend in person, we hope you’ll tune in online or on Facebook.
- “Nothing in international law, however, can change the United States Constitution’s procedures for when the United States can go to war — which require the consent of Congress.”
- Nothing says it’s time to convert Medicaid to block grants like letters from 17 governors opposing the idea.
- Nothing would spur economic recovery like a “liberate to stimulate” regulatory agenda.
- Nothing says “failure” like 37,000 dead and climbing.
- Nothing is more complicated and convoluted than the U.S. tax code, which changed 579 times in the last year–more than one change every day:
Budget Cuts Look Familiar
What do these federal agencies and programs have in common?
Agricultural Research Service, Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service, Rural Development programs, Women, Infants & Children, Foreign Agricultural Service, National Institute of Standards & Technology, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, Economic Development Administration, National Telecommunications & Information Administration, Small Business Administration, State Department foreign aid, Fund for African Development, International Development assistance, Economic Support Fund, Peacekeeping Operations, Trade Development Agency, Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Reclamation, National Forest System, Appalachian Regional Commission, Department of Energy administration, Fossil Energy Research & Development, energy conservation programs, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, Community Service Employment for Older Americans, National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, Low Income Home Energy Assistance, Administration on Aging, Youthbuild, Adult Education, programs for K-12 and higher education, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Highway Administration, rail subsidies, Federal Transit Administration, Financial Management Service, Veterans Affairs construction projects, Housing Counseling Assistance, public housing programs, Community Development Financial Institutions Funds, Corporation for National & Community Service, Legal Services Corporation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics & Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation.
They were all cut in 1995 under a rescissions package engineered by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and cut last week in the budget agreement reached by Republican and Democratic leaders.
The lesson here is that there’s a big difference between spending cuts and terminating entire agencies and their programs. Like the mythological Hydra, the stump has to be burned after the head is cut off or else it’ll grow back.
Just as they did back in 1995, Republicans are doing a lot of talking about cutting the size of the federal government. However, they aren’t doing much talking about reducing the scope of the federal government’s activities. The Gingrich Republicans failed to reduce the scope of federal activities, and the result was a bipartisan spending orgy that has left the country’s finances in shambles. We literally can’t afford for history to repeat itself.
Federal Tax Rules: 72,536 Pages
According to tax publisher CCH, there are now 72,536 pages of federal tax code rules, regulations, and IRS rulings.
If There Were An Annual ‘Regulation Day’
As Iain Murray points out at National Review‘s “Corner,” there’s no date on the calendar each year that reminds us, the way income tax filing day does, of the huge share of our economic labors that the government commands in the name of regulation. In part this is because the costs of regulation are even better disguised than those of taxation: while paycheck withholding may lull us into complacency about our income tax burden, it is downright transparent compared with the costs of regulation, which the ordinary citizen may never recognize when passed along in the form of higher utility bills or sluggish performance by some sector of the economy. Iain notes the good work done by his colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute:
Regulations cost $1.75 trillion in compliance costs, according to the Small Business Administration. That’s greater than the record federal budget deficit — projected at $1.48 trillion for FY 2011 — and greater even than all corporate pretax profits. This is only one of many findings of the new edition of Wayne [Crews'] “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State,” a survey of the cost and compliance burden imposed by federal regulations.
As is now becoming evident, the Obama Administration is presiding over one of the most extraordinary expansions of regulation in all American history, in areas from health care to consumer finance, university governance to “obesity policy,” labor and employment law to the environment. Not all these developments originated with Obama appointees — some had their start under President George W. Bush or with lawmakers in Congress — but this administration has pursued stringent regulatory measures with extraordinary zeal, notwithstanding the odd feint to soothe business-sector misgivings.
Here are three more or less random samplings from recent days of the quiet momentum that’s built up in Washington toward a much bigger regulatory state:
- Reflecting the historical development of the Food and Drug Administration, the introduction of new medical devices such as pacemakers and joint replacements is still somewhat less intensively regulated than the introduction of new pharmaceutical compounds. As Emory’s Paul Rubin relates at Truth on the Market, pressure is building in Washington to correct this supposed anomaly by intensifying the regulation of devices. As Rubin notes, “virtually all economists who have studied the FDA drug approval process have concluded that it causes serious harm by delaying drugs,” yet the premise of the new campaign for regulation “is that we should duplicate that harm with medical devices.”
- Much of the new regulation of consumer finance has taken the form of rules governing what information lenders can ask for or consider about borrowers’ situation in extending credit. One such proposed rule, from the Federal Reserve, “would require credit card issuers to consider only a person’s independent income, and not the household’s income, when underwriting credit cards in an effort to protect young adults unable to repay debt.” Great big unforeseen consequence: many stay-at-home parents will now be unable to establish credit in their own names (via).
- Among a slew of other high-profile regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has chosen this moment to demand very rapid new reductions in emissions from industrial boilers (“Boiler MACT” rules). Per ShopFloor, Thomas A. Fanning, who runs one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, the Southern Company, thinks trouble lies ahead:
EPA has proposed Utility MACT rules under timelines that we believe will put the reliability and affordability of our nation’s power system at risk. EPA’s proposal will impact plants that are responsible for nearly 50 percent of total electricity generation in the United States. It imposes a three-year timeline for compliance, at a time when the industry is laboring to comply with a myriad of other EPA mandates. The result will be to reduce reserve margins—generating capacity that is available during times of high demand or plant outages—and to cause costs to soar. Lower reserve margins place customers at a risk for experiencing significant interruptions in electric service, and costs increases will ultimately be reflected in service rates, which will rise rapidly as utilities press ahead with retrofitting and projects to replace lost generating capacity due to plant retirements.
At least we’ll be able to avert brownouts by switching over readily to fracked-natural-gas, Alberta tar-sands, and latest-generation-nuclear options — or we would had all those options not been put under regulatory clouds as well.
Millionaires and Billionaires on Tax Day
In a high-profile speech last week, President Obama said: “We cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. We can’t afford it. And I refuse to renew them again.”
Mr. President, it’s their money, not yours. And note that your speechwriters gave you a wildly exaggerated dollar figure for tax hikes on millionaires and billionaires.
What Americans “cannot afford” is the president’s ongoing demonization of high earners. Yahoo Finance ran an interesting story yesterday describing the crucial role played by high earners in the economy. Rather than the cartoonish image of high earners propagated by the political left, the article notes:
Today, most of those folks with a net worth of $1 million or more have earned it themselves. They’re mostly entrepreneurs who create everything from high-speed networks to garbage haulers. They dig ditches and build houses and grow corn and make jewelry. They deal stamps or coins or artwork and control pests and cut lawns. They also cure people and give them new teeth.
Perhaps the president wants to hike taxes on the wealthy because they were just lucky or benefited from misguided greed. Instead, the well-known researchers of the wealthy, Thomas Stanley and William Danko, note in the article:
It is seldom luck or inheritance or advanced degrees or even intelligence that enables people to amass fortunes . . . Wealth is more often the result of a lifestyle of hard work, perseverance, planning, and, most of all, self discipline.
Ironically, those are probably the traits that made President Obama a successful political entrepreneur. Yet he doesn’t seem to appreciate that the same traits drive market entrepreneurs to generate growth and earn profits. Profits are the reward for “good behavior” in the free market, so punishing them with higher taxes makes no economic sense.
Rather than breeding resentment against the wealthy, the president should use his bully pulpit to encourage people to emulate their success by working hard, increasing their savings, and eschewing debt. Unfortunately, those are the attributes that today’s income tax punishes, and on this Tax Day the president is pushing policies to make the situation even worse.
News Items: Internet Gambling and Agriculture
Some items from my inbox:
- The Department of Justice late Friday announced it had indicted 11 online poker executives, charging them with money-laundering and bank fraud. (HT: Jonathan Blanks). This crackdown is far stronger than any seen from the Bush administration, and is disappointing people like me, who had hoped for a better stance on civil liberties from the Obama administration. To quote my former colleague Radley Balko (language warning): “Good to know where the DOJ’s priorities lie. In this case, it’s preventing millions of people from consensually wagering money in online card games, an exchange that causes no harm to anyone else.”
- Ironically Insanely, the indictments came just days after the District of Columbia announced it would allow internet gambling.
- In keeping with the new set of talking points the farm lobby has devised (“we already gave at the office through crop insurance reforms” and “agriculture should face cuts no larger than the average of other programs”), the Democratic members of the House Agriculture Committee on Friday sent out a press release complaining about the “disproportionate” cuts agriculture would face if the House-passed FY2012 budget resolution went into effect. While Agriculture would face a 23 percent cut, they say, other committees’ program areas would face an average cut of 14 percent. And they complain that Defense faces only minimal cuts. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: all government programs are not created equal. Some — like Defense, although clearly there is significant room for cuts there — are legitimate uses of government’s power. Others — like farm subsidies — are not.
- An interesting article on the non-link between farm subsidies and obesity, by political scientist Robert Paarlberg (co-author of an excellent book on American farm policy). He cites Cato as being one of the groups engaging in “careless thinking” on this issue, and although I have in the past linked farm subsidies to certain food consumption patterns, over the past year or so I have become increasingly skeptical of that view, mainly as a result of reading stuff like this from smart folks at UCDavis.
School Officials Can’t Censor Student Speech, Not Even Religious Speech
Everyone knows that students have First Amendment rights, that the Constitution proverbially doesn’t stop at the schoolhouse door. Yet students in the Plano Independent School District in Texas (against whose speech code Cato previously filed a brief) were prohibited from handing out pencils with messages such as “Jesus is the reason for the season” and “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so,” or sending holiday cards to retirement homes that said “Merry Christmas.”
The students, through their parents, sued the district on First Amendment grounds, and were successful through a Fifth Circuit panel ruling that “qualified immunity,” a doctrine that prevents government officials from being held personally liable under certain circumstances for violating constitutional rights, did not apply in this case. The panel’s holding is as important as it is unremarkable: School officials have fair warning that viewpoint-based discrimination against student speech during non-curricular activities violates the First Amendment. The government certainly cannot do so simply because the speech happens to be religious.
The Fifth Circuit en banc (as a whole) vacated the panel’s decision, however, and decided to rehear the case. Cato has filed a brief supporting the students and their parents; not only is it settled law that students have the right to free speech in public schools, but school officials should be held liable for violating those rights on the basis of the content of that speech.
Indeed, if the First Amendment means anything, it is that the government cannot suppress speech based solely on its content. More specifically, when an area of the law is “clearly established,” officials cannot escape liability under the doctrine of qualified immunity. Qualified immunity simply doesn’t apply to public school officials who suppress speech in a non-curricular setting merely because the school district points to some legal disagreement in a dissent, concurrence, or other non-binding judicial opinion that disagrees with settled doctrine regarding viewpoint-based discrimination against student speech.
The en banc Fifth Circuit will hear the case, Morgan v. Swanson, later this spring. Thanks to legal associate Michael Wilt for his help with the brief and this post.
Monday Links
- Regulatory privilege is not consistent with competitive markets–that’s why Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac need reform.
- Thank goodness the U.S. Supreme Court found that education tax credits are not consistent with the fictitious notion of a “tax expenditure.”
- President Obama’s budget plan is not consistent with either his own deficit commission’s plan or the Constitution.
- The modern “Executive State” is not consistent with Article II of the Constitution.
- Cyberbullying laws are not consistent with the First Amendment and our concept of free speech:
Who’s Saving the New Deal?
Back in 2008 Time depicted President-elect Obama as a new FDR, delivering the country a “new New Deal.”
This week National Review takes a different approach, portraying House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan as the architect of a new deal. (Hat tip to Charlie Spiering.)
In today’s Britannica column I have some thoughts of my own about Ryan, the Republicans, and the New Deal state:
In 1960 Sen. Barry Goldwater called the policies of the Eisenhower administration “a dime store New Deal”—a promise to deliver to the voters everything the Democrats promised, but at a discount. And that has been a fundamental dividing line in the Republican party ever since: Should the GOP challenge the Democrats’ fundamental commitment to an ever-bigger federal government, or only promise to deliver services more efficiently and at lower cost to taxpayers?…
Paul Ryan’s budget doesn’t really eliminate anything the federal government does. He’d still have the federal government taxing us to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, and troops in a hundred countries. (He does propose to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so that’s one actual reduction in the scope of the federal government.) As big-government conservative David Brooks writes, “it is a serious effort to create a sustainable welfare state.”
But some of us don’t want to live in a “sustainable welfare state.” We don’t just want to “bend the cost curve.” We want a free society, a society in which people are free to make their own decisions and bear the responsibility, a society in which each of us is the owner of his or her own life….
The IRS: Even Worse Than You Think
Since it is tax-filing season and we all want to honor our wonderful tax system, let’s go into the archives and show this video from last year about the onerous compliance costs of the internal revenue code.
Narrated by Hiwa Alaghebandian of the American Enterprise Institute, the mini-documentary explains how needless complexity creates an added burden – sort of like a hidden tax that we pay for the supposed privilege of paying taxes.
Two things from the video are worth highlighting.
First, we should make sure to put most of the blame on Congress. As Ms. Alaghebandian notes, the IRS is in the unenviable position of trying to enforce Byzantine tax laws. Yes, there are examples of grotesque IRS abuse, but even the most angelic group of bureaucrats would have a hard time overseeing 70,000-plus pages of laws and regulations (by contrast, the Hong Kong flat tax, which has been in place for more than 60 years, requires less than 200 pages).
Second, we should remember that compliance costs are just the tip of the iceberg. The video also briefly mentions three other costs.
- The money we send to Washington, which is a direct cost to our pocketbooks and also an indirect cost since the money often is used to finance counterproductive programs that further damage the economy.
- The budgetary burden of the IRS, which is a staggering $12.5 billion. This is the money we spend to employ an army of tax bureaucrats that is larger than the CIA and FBI combined.
- The economic burden of the tax system, which measures the lost economic output from a tax system that penalizes productive behavior.
The way to fix this mess, needless to say, is to junk the entire tax code and start all over.
I’ve been a big proponent of the flat tax, which would mean one low tax rate, no double taxation of savings, and no corrupt loopholes. But I’m also a big fan of national sales tax proposals such as the Fair Tax, assuming we can amend the Constitution so that greedy politicians don’t pull a bait and switch and impose both an income tax and a sales tax.
But the most important thing we need to understand is that bloated government is our main problem. If we had a limited federal government, as our Founding Fathers envisioned, it would be almost impossible to have a bad tax system. But if we continue to move in the direction of becoming a European-style welfare state, it will be impossible to have a good tax system.
Jon Stewart: ‘Tax Expenditures’ = Newspeak
Along with other advocates of limited government, I have criticized the convention of referring to targeted tax breaks as “tax expenditures” or “tax subsidies.” Yes, targeted tax breaks share many characteristics with government spending. But they are not government spending. And if we concede that premise, then someday, some smarmy politician will try to increase taxes while telling us it’s a spending cut.
That someday has come. And in the below video, Jon Stewart is all over it. (Skip ahead to about 5:00.) Stewart’s comments are worth transcribing:
What? ”Spending reductions in the tax code”? The tax code isn’t where we spend, it’s where we collect. And tha–ohhhhh. I guess what you said is tax code — code for raising taxes. You managed to talk about a tax hike as a spending reduction. [Laughter.] Can we afford that and the royalty checks you’re going to have to send to George Orwell? That is the weirdest way — just say tax hike.
There ain’t no such thing as a tax expenditure. There ain’t no such thing as a tax subsidy.
Death by Decorator
The Wall Street Journal reports on a heated battle in Florida over whether to deregulate commercial interior designers — that is, to allow just anyone to hang out a shingle and seek customers looking for office design. It turns out the question is fraught with more danger than one might have realized. Herewith, the opening of the Journal‘s comprehensive report:
MIAMI—Interior designers may seem to inhabit a genial world of pastel palettes and floral motifs. But right now in this state, their industry is locked in an indecorous pillow fight over who has the right to design.
Florida is one of only three states that require commercial interior designers to become licensed before they hang a single painting in an office building, school or restaurant. A bill making its way through the state legislature, however, would deregulate the occupation, along with more than a dozen others, including yacht brokers and hair braiders.
That possibility has the state’s licensed interior designers ruffled. They’ve hired Ron Book, one of the state’s most influential lobbyists, to fight the bill. And they’ve stormed legislative hearings to warn of the mayhem that would ensue if the measure passes.
Among the scenarios they’ve conjured: flammable carpets sparking infernos; porous countertops spreading bacteria; jail furnishings being turned into weapons.
The thought of “someone in my position that thinks they know what they’re doing because they watched HGTV for two weeks scares me,” licensed interior designer Terra Sherlock said at a hearing in March.
Another licensed designer, Michelle Earley, argued that use of the wrong fabrics in hospitals could spread infection. By deregulating, she told lawmakers, “what you’re basically doing is contributing to 88,000 deaths every year,” citing a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on deaths from hospital-acquired infections.
Though the CDC study doesn’t mention interior design as a cause of infections, Ms. Earley says that bacteria can spread if moisture-resistant fabrics aren’t used on things like chairs and mattresses. That, in turn, can lead to urinary tract infections, staph and other life-threatening conditions, she says.
Interior design “sounds like this simple hanging curtains on a wall,” said Ms. Earley in an interview. But “it only takes a couple things to go wrong for people to lose their lives.”
Scary.
For a more skeptical look at the need to protect the public from unlicensed hair braiders, ballroom-dance-studio owners, and interior designers, see this column by Cato chairman and Floridian Bob Levy. In February the Wall Street Journal reported that occupational licensing is actually spreading, despite decades of criticism from economists.
TSA: If You Object to Giving Up Your Rights, We Should Take a Closer Look at You
TSA screeners and behavior detection officers may give you extra attention if you complain about security protocols (video at the jump). Former FBI agent Michael German sums up my feelings pretty well:
It’s circular reasoning where, you know, I’m going to ask someone to surrender their rights; if they refuse, that’s evidence that I need to take their rights away from them. And it’s simply inappropriate.
In related news, the GAO recently told Congress that the TSA’s Screening Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT) is not scientifically grounded. The GAO testimony is available here.
This Week in Government Failure
Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this week:
- If there’s this much resistance to a budget haircut, how can we hope to agree on surgery that would actually reduce spending, balance the budget, and avert national bankruptcy?
- Policymakers looking for spending cuts are finally turning an eye toward farm subsidies.
- Despite the budget cuts agreed to this week, total federal outlays will still rise by approximately $177 billion.
- President Obama wants to get reelected, and he will need a strong economy to succeed. Penalizing millionaires won’t help, but partnering with Republicans on corporate tax reforms and spending cuts would boost the economy and his job prospects.
- Spending increased an average $170 billion a year over the last decade. Thus, the $40 billion cut reverses out no more than one-quarter of one year’s worth of the last decade of increases.
- A new Cato video does an excellent job of visualizing the minuscule spending cuts Republicans and Democrats agreed to this week.
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Friday Links
- 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:
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.
‘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.
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.
But all of these numbers are slightly misleading. The gap between what Americans spend on national security, broadly defined, and what everyone else pays, is actually wider.
For example, IISS’s graphs include only U.S. DoD budgetary authority, meaning the Pentagon’s base budget plus the costs of the wars. A more accurate “national defense” total includes nuclear weapons spending in the Department of Energy ($22.9 bn in 2009) and a catch-all category of “other” defense-related spending tucked away elsewhere in the federal budget totaling $7.25 bn. That adds another $95 a year to every American’s tax bill.
But wait, there’s more. A more accurate apples to apples comparison of all U.S. national security spending to that of other countries would at least include the Department of Veterans Affairs ($96.9 bn). Other countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Belgium, and Portugal) include military pensions in their base budgets. Meanwhile, people in other countries would think it foolishly redundant to fund both a Department of Defense and a Department of Homeland Security, but Americans don’t (or at least Americans in Washington don’t). DHS funding in 2009 totaled $45.3 bn. All told, I estimate that the average American spent at least $2,644 on national security in 2009. The total was certainly higher in 2010 since the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan peaked in that year.
And in case you’re wondering, we spend at least 17 times as much as the average Chinese. Meanwhile, total U.S. security spending exceeds that of China, Russia, North Korea, Syria and Iran — combined – by a factor of 3.3.
As the debate over federal spending drags through the dog days of summer and into the autumn, you will hear many people talk of our government’s solemn obligation to defend the citizens of this country from foreign threats. President Obama reaffirmed on Wednesday, in case anyone doubted it: “As Commander-in-Chief, I have no greater responsibility than protecting our national security, and I will never accept cuts that compromise our ability to defend our homeland or America’s interests around the world.” (my emphasis)
Surely some of the missions that our military is asked to accomplish actually do have that effect, but the definition of “America’s interests” has expanded so dramatically over the past few decades that it is practically devoid of any meaning.
Thus, you — yes, you, American taxpayer — will be told that our national interests around the world compel us to treat the Straits of Gibraltar and Malacca as though they were of equal importance to U.S. security as that of the Straits of Florida, the 90 or so miles that separates Key West from Cuba. The Caribbean might be an American lake, but so is the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Sea of Japan. Ominous threats made by Russia, China, or Iran against their neighbors are treated as synonymous to threats to harm Americans. Every ungoverned place, everywhere in the world, you will be told, poses a dire and imminent threat to your safety and security, hence our need to fix them all. (For why this generally isn’t true, see here.)
Throughout the supposed impending discussion of our military’s roles and missions, the role that other countries should play in keeping the seas open and free, defending themselves from potentially hostile neighbors, and preventing terrorists and other non-state actors from setting up shop in a nearby land, will rarely be entertained. For many people here in Washington, that is entirely by design: they don’t want other countries to defend themselves and their interests around the world. Better that you, the U.S. taxpayers, pay these costs. To do otherwise, to reduce U.S. military spending, and to pull back our forces from certain regions around the world, thus “leaving partners elsewhere in the world to manage for themselves as best as they can,” wrote Robert Haddick yesterday at the Small Wars Journal, would result in “regional arms races, increased nuclear and missile proliferation, and the establishment of new outposts around the world by America’s rising rivals.”
Haddick is not alone in predicting that the world will descend into complete and utter chaos if other countries were responsible for defending themselves and their interests, but all such assertions are precisely that: assertions, not fact. They rely on dire predictions of a horrible future, usually based on historical examples that are completely irrelevant in the modern age, to convince American taxpayers to pay more and more, and still more, on our military, so that others do not have to spend money on theirs. What’s more, they tend to ignore the current fiscal crisis, and are generally reluctant to explain what, if anything, they would cut. So far, fearmongering has worked splendidly to distract attention from the more important discussion of what we spend today, and what we should spend tomorrow. But the facts are incontrovertible: Americans now spend more on our military than at any time since World War II, and we spend far more on a per capita basis than anyone else in the world.
So Happy Tax Day, Americans! Our reassured allies thank you for paying to defend them and their interests. (And please now excuse them as they return to their other priorities.)
