Click on WORD or PDF for full content
We start off with more on Congressman Paul Ryan’s reform plan, this time from Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle.
President Obama has dedicated his time in office to soaking up applause and shifting blame. Last year, when Democrats owned the White House, the House and the Senate, Congress didn’t even bother passing a budget. Obama didn’t seem to mind. But when Republicans put together a stopgap measure to fund the military and prevent a government shutdown, Obama promised to veto it. Obama called the measure “a distraction from the real work that would bring us closer to a reasonable compromise for funding the remainder of fiscal year 2011.”
There must have been a lot of distractions last year.
Obama has failed to propose a serious plan to reform entitlement spending and take control of runaway federal spending. Last week, however, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., stepped into the void by releasing a budget plan that would trim $6.2 trillion from Obama’s 10-year spending plan. Dubbed “The Path to Prosperity,” the GOP plan already has passed through Ryan’s committee.
Ryan rightly argues that the sooner Washington addresses annual deficit spending and unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare, the less harsh the cuts need be. But also, the GOP wants Washington to focus on “core” responsibilities. As the plan notes, “When government takes on too many tasks, it usually does not do any of them very well.” …
Jennifer Rubin thinks that politicians’ responses to the budget deal tell us more about the politicians than the deal.
…On the Democratic side you have the president, his flacks, the Democratic National Committee and a few others who see the deal as a big “win” for President Obama.When the White House sends David Plouffe rather than a serious policy adviser on “Meet the Press” and “Fox News Sunday,” you understand that the White House is in spin mode. And how preposterous is the spin that a continuing resolution with significant cuts Obama had opposed, which was struck with zero assistance from the White House, is a reflection of his leadership. Are we supposed to take seriously Plouffe’s line that Obama intended all along to “not get engaged” in the back-and-forth? You understand the game here is to justify a strategy of do-nothingism. Maybe that is why Obama signed the CR in private, with no press or fanfare.
But there is silliness on the Republican side as well. You hear a few hard-line congressmen proclaim that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) didn’t get “enough” or that a shutdown would have been a win for the Republicans. These are the voices of the perpetually aggrieved on the right who will oppose any deal because their aim is not conservative governance but confrontation and incitement of an anti-Washington base. For these folks the “best deal possible” is not a statement of mature leadership, but a sell-out.
Nevertheless, we also know that the cranky voices are a very small minority in the House (only 28 Republicans voted against the short-term CR in the wee hours of the night). Moreover, Tea Partyers whom the Democrats were setting up to take the fall in the event of a shutdown were overwhelmingly positive about the deal. Perhaps the anti-dealmaking right is largely a creation of liberal media and of a few sour conservative pundits. …
Robert Samuelson discusses what results from the government trying to solve every problem.
We in America have created suicidal government…government has promised more than it can realistically deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have. But government can’t easily correct its excesses, because Americans depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat. Government’s very expansion has brought it into disrepute, paralyzed politics and impeded it from acting in the national interest.
Few Americans realize the extent of their dependency. The Census Bureau reports that in 2009 almost half (46.2 percent) of the 300 million Americans received at least one federal benefit: 46.5 million, Social Security; 42.6 million, Medicare; 42.4 million, Medicaid; 36.1 million, food stamps; 3.2 million, veterans’ benefits; 12.4 million, housing subsidies. The census list doesn’t include tax breaks. Counting those, perhaps three-quarters or more of Americans receive some sizable government benefit. For example, about 22 percent of taxpayers benefit from the home mortgage interest deduction and 43 percent from the preferential treatment of employer-provided health insurance, says the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
“Once politics was about only a few things; today, it is about nearly everything,” writes the eminent political scientist James Q. Wilson…The concept of “vital national interest” is stretched. We deploy government casually to satisfy any mass desire, correct any perceived social shortcoming or remedy any market deficiency. What has abetted this political sprawl, notes Wilson, is the rising influence of “action intellectuals” — professors, pundits, “experts” — who provide respectable rationales for various political agendas. …
In the Daily Caller, Mickey Kaus gives evidence that the federal bureaucracy is unaffected by the recession.
If you worry that the federal government can’t afford $38 billion in cuts, please read Chris Moody’s article from two weeks ago. There’s a $1.6 trillion deficit but the feds are still hiring. As of March 23 they were hiring someone to run a Facebook page for the Deparment of the Interior (at up to $115,000 a year). They were hiring equal opportunity compliance officers at the Peace Corps and Department of Interior for $150,000 to $180,000 a pop. They were hiring deputy speechwriters for officials at relatively obscure agencies. …P.S.: The point isn’t so much that these federal employees are overpaid, though they are. The point is that if there were any actual sense of a deficit crisis in Washington these are jobs that would not be filled at all. … Well, maybe the Facebook editor. …In effect, the respectable ”pivot to entitlements” position says,”we’re going to cut Social Security checks and Medicare for mid-income old people to save the jobs of $180K equal opportunity officers at the DOT.” … Why not wring the fat out of government first? … Update: Here’s the current list of jobs the government is still filling. …
Check the list. It will blow your mind. …
The Economist unpacks the problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and what should be done to prevent it.
…All this matters because antibiotic resistance has both medical and financial costs. It causes longer and more serious illnesses, lengthening people’s stays in hospital and complicating their treatment. Sometimes people die unnecessarily. In one study, which sampled almost 1,400 patients at Cook County hospital in Chicago, researchers found resistant strains of bacteria infecting 188 people, 12 of whom died because they could not be treated adequately. At the moment, resistant bacteria threaten mostly children, the old, cancer patients and the chronically ill (especially those infected with HIV). However, there could be worse to come. Nearly 450,000 new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis are recorded each year; one-third of these people die from the disease. More than a quarter of new cases of TB identified recently in parts of Russia were of this troublesome kind.
…Broadly, there are three possible responses to this state of affairs. One is to do nothing, treating the various problems created by resistance as acceptable costs when set against drugs’ much greater benefits. Here, a sense of history helps. Before penicillin—that is, before the mid-1940s—it was possible for a perfectly healthy individual to die of septicaemia from a casual, everyday cut. Many other bacterial infections, most notably TB, were similarly routine killers. The Shakespearean curse, “a plague on both your houses”, would have had real resonance then. But antibiotics and vaccines have turned it into an anachronism. Worrying about even 150,000 TB deaths a year, compared with the millions who used to die, can thus sound like a counsel of perfection. …
…A big part of the trouble is that the gains from the overuse of antibiotics are private, whereas the losses are public. Problems such as these are rarely soluble without outside intervention. Ramanan Laxminarayan of Princeton University, who has been thinking for many years about how to deal with the question of resistance, suggests the answer is a mixture of incentives and scourges. Prize funds, or guaranteed-purchase arrangements for new drugs and the rapid-diagnostics systems that would allow them to be deployed appropriately, would help overcome the financial problem of antibiotics being cures, rather than just treatments. Stricter dispensing guidelines for doctors and pharmacists might help deal with the moral hazard of overtreatment.
A bit of realism would be good, too. Derrick Crook, a consultant microbiologist at Oxford, where Florey and Chain once worked, observes, “It is hard to massively restrict the use of antimicrobials when they are doing good. It is possible that the enormous use in Asia is a good thing for a short time in a given country.” That, combined with ignorance about precisely how much the unnecessary use of antibiotics contributes to increasing resistance, makes restriction highly controversial. …
In the WSJ, Peter Landers reports on a scientist who predicted the monster tsunami.
…Dr. Shishikura’s studies of ancient earth layers persuaded him that every 450 to 800 years, colliding plates in the Pacific triggered waves that devastated areas around the modern city of Sendai, in Miyagi Prefecture, as well as in Fukushima Prefecture.
…”We cannot deny the possibility that [such a tsunami] will occur again in the near future,” he and colleagues wrote in August 2010. That article appeared in a journal published by the Active Fault and Earthquake Research Center in Tsukuba, the government-funded institute where Dr. Shishikura works.
…His work is part of a young field called paleoseismology. Kerry Sieh, a pioneer in the specialty, says that the few dozen people who do this kind of work are usually doomed to be ignored. Humans are made to trust what they have seen themselves, or what someone they know has seen. They aren’t designed “to deal with these once-in-500-year events,” says Dr. Sieh, formerly of the California Institute of Technology and now head of the Earth Observatory of Singapore…