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Tony Blankley, who was Newt Gingrich’s press secretary during the 1995 budget battles, has advice for the GOP.
…We lost that battle for three reasons: 1) because the shutdown was falsely, but effectively, framed in the public mind as motivated by the personal pique of the speaker and the desire of the GOP to “cut Medicare in order to give tax cuts to the rich,” 2) the issue of deficit spending and public debt was of much less concern to the public than it is now and 3) we were not able to deliver our interpretation of the issues directly to even our own supporters.
Back in 1995, there was no Fox News, there was no broadly used Internet and conservative talk radio was not nearly as powerful as it is today.
…Today, we are in the aftermath of an election that was largely about deficit spending, Obamacare and the trillions of dollars most GOP voters correctly think will get us further in debt. So not only is the deficit issue far more powerfully motivating than it was in 1995, but if the GOP fails even to try seriously to reduce the deficit, which means addressing, among other issues, Medicare and Social Security, it is likely to pay harshly in the next election for such inaction.
But equally important, with the massive alternative media, the GOP can effectively frame the issues as necessary for our future prosperity and the creation of millions of new jobs – without having our message filtered out by the once-mighty liberal media. …
Charles Krauthammer advocates repealing the Obamacare monstrosity.
Suppose someone – say, the president of United States – proposed the following: We are drowning in debt. More than $14 trillion right now. I’ve got a great idea for deficit reduction. It will yield a savings of $230 billion over the next 10 years: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion.
…As National Affairs editor Yuval Levin pointed out when mining this remarkable nugget, this is a hell of a way to do deficit reduction: a radical increase in spending, topped by an even more radical increase in taxes.
…In fact, the whole Obamacare bill was gamed to produce a favorable CBO number. Most glaringly, the entitlement it creates – government-subsidized health insurance for 32 million Americans – doesn’t kick in until 2014. That was deliberately designed so any projection for this decade would cover only six years of expenditures – while that same 10-year projection would capture 10 years of revenue. With 10 years of money inflow vs. six years of outflow, the result is a positive – i.e., deficit-reducing – number. Surprise.
…amending an insanely complicated, contradictory, incoherent and arbitrary 2,000-page bill that will generate tens of thousands of pages of regulations is a complete non-starter. Everything begins with repeal.
Ronald Bailey in Reason columns on Obama’s push for regulation reform saying the president is only for good regs. Reminds us of Saul Bellow saying he was “for all the good things and against all the bad ones.”
…even before the president signed his new executive order, the super-efficient bureaucrats over at the EPA have already apparently done a review of the agency’s new greenhouse gas regulations. As The Hill reports:
…“EPA is confident that our recent and upcoming steps to address GHG emissions under the Clean Air Act comfortably pass muster under the sensible standards the president has laid out,” an EPA official told The Hill in a statement Tuesday.
Policy analyst Sterling Burnett over at the free market think tank, the National Center for Policy Analysis, writes in the vein of Claude Rains as Captain Renault in Casablanca that he is “shocked, shocked” [YouTube] to discover that a federal agency finds its regulations are cost-effective and helpful to business:
‘I was shocked, shocked I say, to find that a regulatory agency would find that none of its current or proposed rules unnecessarily burdens the economy or hurts job retention or growth. … After all, what agency is going to say, “yeah, we were wrong, these rules don’t work, they produce more harm than they prevent,” or “Sure we’re in a recession, and sure these rules won’t do any good [let’s say, for example, in preventing climate change], and sure there are going to be enormous costs but the country should adopt the regulations anyway – at least we’ll look like we are doing something.” ‘
…President Obama has mastered the art of vacuously promising to consider all “good ideas.” The problem is that he thinks that he already has all the good ideas and most of them entail ever more government intrusion into the lives of Americans.
In City Journal, Steven Malanga reports on how we are losing liberty as government departments seize more and more power with regulations.
…Further, the White House is using its rule-making powers in aggressively political ways. In its most notable move, the administration used the threat of extensive new environmental regulations to get Congress to pass a law to fight climate change. When Congress failed to act, the Environmental Protection Agency went ahead with the new rules, which included declaring carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas and demanding that manufacturers seeking permits for new facilities install the “best available technology” to control emissions, though the agency has yet to define what that technology is. A number of states and industry groups have launched lawsuits to fight the regulations. The EPA also issued controversial new goals for gas efficiency in cars and light trucks, with a target of 35.5 miles per gallon, on average, in cars sold in the U.S. by 2016, compared with 25 miles per gallon in 2009.
Other federal agencies have been nearly as busy. At Obama’s request, the Department of Labor now requires firms that contract with the federal government to inform employees that they have the right to unionize and bargain collectively. …The labor department also required any contractor doing stimulus-financed weatherization to pay prevailing wages, which are generally on par with union pay scales.
The union-friendly Obama labor department did, however, get rid of one significant regulation: a Bush-administration rule that unions file disclosure statements on how they spend their members’ money. The disclosure rule had helped prompt a number of investigations of abuses, including a Los Angeles Times series that resulted in the removal of the head of a Service Employees International Union local for misallocating hundreds of thousands of dollars of members’ money. The Obama administration considered the transparency requirement an excessive burden on unions. …
In Pajamas Media, Abraham Miller, who has been watching the moral and academic decay of our universities from inside the beast.
The recent study of 2,300 college students showing that half of them learn nearly nothing in the first two years is generating a lot of conversation. As someone who spent more than three decades in the professoriate, what surprises me is why this is news.
Certainly the students know this. We know this. The college administrators know this. Maybe, it’s only the parents who are suckered into thinking that the tens if not hundreds of thousands they are shelling out for a residential college education is really buying that.
…The next financial bubble is out there. It is comprised of people like your son who are carrying enormous debt without any prospect of paying it off. They are going to default. It’s our fault, you say. Well, you say that now. But if we gave your son the grades he deserved you both would have screamed foul and due processed us to death. If your son is a member of some protected class, we would have had to defend against the accusation that we discriminated against him. Anyhow, he got more than he deserved, and the rest of us subsidized his education directly or indirectly with our tax dollars. Of course, you do know that we are going to have to pick up the defaults, just as we picked up the sub-prime mortgages.
Oh yes, if you think the statistic that half don’t learn anything in the first two years is terrible, how does this one grab you? After four years 36% did not experience significant educational improvement. And that statistic is worse than it appears, because at many institutions nearly half the students drop out after two years. So among the self-selected that continued, more than a third learned almost nothing in four years of college. …
Der Spiegel has an astonishing story of a boy who scared off a pack of wolves with rock music.
…Walter Eikrem listened to music on his mobile phone as he often does as he made his way home from school in the southern Norwegian town of Rakkestad earlier this week. The path leading from the stop where he catches the school bus to his family’s farmhouse traverses a gently sloping hillside. All of a sudden, he made out something gray on the hillside. “At first, I thought it might have been the neighbor’s dogs,” he later told TV2, Norway’s largest commercial broadcaster. What he actually encountered, though, were four wolves.
“I was afraid they would attack me,” Walter told the Norwegian tabloid VG, describing the incident, which took place on Monday. But he didn’t let his fear show. Remembering his parents’ advice, Walter pulled the earphones out of his mobile phone, turned the volume all the way up and blasted heavy metal music over its miniature speakers. At the same time, he yelled as loud as he could while flailing his arms about wildly to scare off the pack of wild animals.
…The plan worked. Eikrem said he was able to drive away the wolves by playing the song “Overcome” by the American hard-rock band Creed. “They didn’t really get scared,” Walter said. “They just turned around and simply trotted away.” …
In the WSJ, James Wilson reviews a collection of essays from Irving Kristol, titled, the Neoconservative Persuasion.
…The views of Kristol and those who wrote for him became especially important because of two major developments in American life: the Great Society (the first issue of the Public Interest appeared in 1965) and the counterculture. The Great Society was an effort to show that a democratic government could do anything, the counterculture a movement that suggested it could do nothing. The first asserted that empowering poor people to challenge the status quo would end their poverty, the latter that student action would remake the human spirit. Kristol’s “neo” views included a decisive skepticism about both claims.
…Kristol decided that the success of neoconservatism arose from its having enlarged “the conservative vision to include moral philosophy, political philosophy, and even religious thought,” thereby making this persuasion “more politically sensible as well as politically appealing.” Perhaps, he added, this has helped make the Republican Party more interested “in the pursuit of happiness by ordinary folk” rather than just in the success of the business community.
Kristol’s neoconservative persuasion put him in opposition not only to conventional liberalism but to parts of American conservatism: He accepted many aspects of the New Deal (Social Security, unemployment insurance) and was upset when business leaders urged him to teach his students about the virtues of the profit motive—there are such virtues, he conceded, but he believed that we may accept them without celebrating them. As for “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” it certainly merits celebration. The publisher’s decision not to provide an index is the only defect in this wonderful book.