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Much of Pickings today are comments on the speech used by the president to catch up to the concerns of the American public about government spending. In the Corner, Yuval Levin reviews the speech, and points out that perhaps reality is beginning to prevail.
…And yet, for all of its profound inadequacy…this speech is on the whole a good sign. …It accepted Paul Ryan’s definition of the fiscal problem, and it accepted more or less his broad outline of what a solution would look like in fiscal terms—in terms of deficit and debt reduction. And so it defined the debate going forward as a debate about how best to achieve the Republicans’ fiscal goals.
President Obama’s answer to that question is that we can achieve those goals by slight technical modifications of the welfare state we have had since the mid-1960s. Paul Ryan’s answer is that we can achieve those goals by reimagining the welfare state for the 21st century—for an age when the legitimacy of capitalism, the efficacy of markets, the capacity of consumers to make sensible decisions, and the value of choice and variety are hardly questioned; for an aging society that for too long has spent its economic and human capital without giving thought to how they might be replenished and now wants to correct its mistakes. That debate will be the essence of our domestic politics in the coming years. It is a debate about how to fix the terrible mess created by the Great Society—a debate we have put off for too long, and that most on the left would still like to avoid at all costs. It is a debate for which (thanks especially to Ryan) Republicans are suddenly unusually well prepared, and for which (as Obama’s speech demonstrated) Democrats are dismally unready.
It is a good sign that President Obama has judged that he can’t simply avoid this debate, even if he intends to engage in it in such an unserious way. It won’t be a calm, civilized dispute among wonks, and it shouldn’t be. It will be a political struggle, fought out over several elections and no doubt beset on all sides by gimmicks, distortions, and posturing. There is no getting away from that in our democracy. But it is a debate the country could really use and which, in the long run, if we’re lucky, might even allow us to find for ourselves again the path of shared prosperity and constitutional government. …
Charles Krauthammer comments on the speech.
The most serious charge against Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget is not the risible claim, made most prominently by President Obama in his George Washington University address, that it would “sacrifice the America we believe in.” The serious charge is that the Ryan plan fails by its own standards: Because it only cuts spending without raising taxes, it accumulates trillions in debt and doesn’t balance the budget until the 2030s. If the debt is such a national emergency, the critics say, Ryan never really gets you there from here.
But they miss the point. You can’t get there from here without Ryan’s plan. It’s the essential element. Of course Ryan is not going to propose tax increases. You don’t need Republicans for that. That’s what Democrats do. The president’s speech was a prose poem to higher taxes — with every allusion to spending cuts guarded by a phalanx of impenetrable caveats. …
… Given the Democrats’ instinctive resort to granny-in-the-snow demagoguery, the Republicans are right not to budge on taxes until serious spending cuts are in place. At which point, the grand compromise awaits. And grand it would be. Saving the welfare state from insolvency is no small achievement.
Roger Simon has the best take on Biden nodding off during yet another boring speech.
…what is it about Obama that makes him so boring? I submit it is something quite simple — he has nothing to say. He is a boring person, the quintessential “hollow man” in the T.S. Eliot sense. He is kind of a socialist, kind of a liberal, kind of a multi-culturalist, kind of an environmentalist, kind of globalist, kind of a budget cutter — but none of them with any real commitment. Basically, he’s a vague and uncommitted person pretending to be otherwise. He is the man that voted “present,” now in the presidency. The fact that he never specified the targets of “hope” and “change” during his election was far from a campaign ploy and more typical than we ever dreamed. …
Craig Pirrong’s turn at Streetwise Professor.
…No serious person believes that cuts in defense and tax increases on the wealthy will make a substantial difference in the nation’s long run fiscal health.
No serious person believes that large amounts of current spending is hugely stimulative, but that large tax increases are not a drag on the economy.
No serious person believes that labeling government spending “investment” magically transforms dross into gold.
No serious person believes that “clean energy” is a viable alternative to traditional fuels over the next several decades. And certainly no serious person believes that the government has the knowledge, wisdom, or incentives to invest wisely in it.
I could go on. Suffice it to say that no serious person would give credence to a word that Obama said. …
Peter Wehner criticizes the president’s characterizations.
President Obama’s speech today was both outrageous and insulting, a practically perfect combination of demagoguery and shallowness. It was not a serious substantive speech; it was a political missile whose intention is was to destroy, through libel, the House Republican’s 2012 budget. It was not an effort to engage in a serious discussion; it was an effort to create a cartoon image of Obama’s critics.
…If anyone had any doubts what we’re dealing with when it comes to Obama, those have been allayed. He is a deeply irresponsible and arrogant man whose thirst for political power is overriding virtually every good and decent instinct he might have.
W. W. from The Economist’s – Democracy in America Blog.
… In 2008, the top 1% paid 38% of all federal income taxes, and the top 5% paid 58%. Indeed, America is the industrialised world’s champion of income-tax progressivity! If any country’s upper-crust pays its fair share, America’s does.
But you wouldn’t know it listening to Mr Obama. He repeatedly and misleadingly portrayed the tax burden carried by America’s top earners as unfairly light, and the top-rate tax cuts under President Bush as a leading cause of America’s dire fiscal straits. He even proposed that itemised deductions available to every other American taxpayer be eliminated for the top 2%, which strikes me as precisely the sort of thing a country that values fairness would not do. In any case, to the extent our woes flow from a paucity of revenue, the problem is that America’s vast middle-class pays too little, not that its rich do. The widely-admired Scandinavian countries collect a much larger portion of GDP in taxes not because their top earners bear a relatively larger tax burden than do America’s top earners, but because they don’t. The president’s confusion on this matter was evident in his open admission that “I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans”. But without a tax hike on middle-class Americans, there’s simply no hope for serious deficit reduction. That is, there’s no hope as long as Mr Obama insists on cutting spending with a “scalpel” and “not a machete”. Were he really serious about deficit-reduction, Mr Obama would have let all the Bush tax cuts expire. …
Peter Wehner has more.
Jake Tapper, the best White House correspondent in the business, provides a devastating comparison of Barack Obama, Then and Now.
President Obama at the GOP House retreat, January 2010:
“We’re not going to be able to do anything about any of these entitlements if what we do is characterize whatever proposals are put out there as, ‘Well, you know, that’s—the other party’s being irresponsible. The other party is trying to hurt our senior citizens. That the other party is doing X, Y, Z.”
President Obama today:
“One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates. . . . This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. And who are those 50 million Americans? Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome. Some are kids with disabilities so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.”
No commentary was provided by Tapper. None was needed.
And more criticism of the speech, this time from Clive Crook in the Atlantic.
…Bowles-Simpson proposes a base-broadening assault on tax expenditures and a lowering of marginal rates, for an overall increase in revenue. Obama picked up the tax-expenditure idea, mentioning Bowles-Simpson as he did so, but combined it with reaffirmed hostility to lower tax rates for the rich. (Again with the millionaires and billionaires.) He is still proposing an increase, not a decrease, in marginal rates on high incomes combined with restricted tax expenditures for those at the top of the income distribution–that is to say, two rounds of increases in high-income tax rates. The rich can pay for it all. That is Obama’s tax policy. …
Jennifer Rubin reviews Paul Ryan’s response.
…Ryan’s statement was accompanied by a listing of some of the problems with Obama’s speech, including these on the debt commission:
• Runs away from the Fiscal Commission’s recommendations on Social Security — puts forward no specific ideas or even a process to force action.
• Calls for the appointment of another commission, after mostly omitting from his Fiscal Year 2012 Budget any of proposals submitted by the commission he appointed last year .?.?.
• Endorsed the Fiscal Commission’s ideas on taxes, which specifically called for lower tax rates and a broader base, but then called for higher tax rates. Which is it?…
David Harsanyi makes fun of liberal scare tactics gone awry.
…Markey went on to claim that Republicans wanted to “shut down the Internet” when they had voted to strip censors at the Federal Communications Commission of the power to regulate the Internet. Conservatives wanted to padlock the Web by keeping it open? As devious plots go, this one is as counterintuitive as it is dastardly. No, the Web has never been regulated, and it seems — to the untrained eye, at least — to function more efficiently and freely than any industry overseen by a three-letter acronym. But that’s probably the problem.
The irascible Markey, author of the cap-and-trade regulatory scheme, also groused about Republicans (he must have forgotten to mention the Democrats) who are attempting to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate carbon dioxide — or, in other words, everything. …
…And so it goes. The Democratic mayor of Washington, Vincent Gray, called on citizens to “fight back against oppression.” What oppression, you ask? Riders to the 2011 federal budget would end taxpayer funding for abortions and allow a handful of poor kids in D.C. to once again escape public schools. (Talk about fighting oppression.) Choice, as you know, is tyranny. Sometimes. …
Thomas Sowell explains that liberals aren’t merely looking to increase government revenue.
…For more than 80 years, the political left has opposed what they call “tax cuts for the rich.” But big cuts in very high tax rates ended up bringing in more revenue to the government in the Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan and Bush 43 administrations. This included more– repeat, more– tax revenue from people in the highest income brackets than before.
…”the rich” paid that larger sum of taxes only because their incomes had risen. Their paying a higher share of all taxes doesn’t matter to the “progressives,” who see high tax rates as a way to take a bigger bite out of the incomes of higher-income people, not just provide more revenue to the government.
Tax rates are meant to make an ideological statement and promote class-warfare politics, not just bring in revenue. …
…The idealism of the left is a very selfish idealism. In their war against “the rich” and big business, they don’t care how much collateral damage there is to workers who end up unemployed. …
Debra Saunders reports what happened when one scientist challenged a cherished liberal initiative.
If you think that academia is not the exclusive playground of the academic left, consider the fate of UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom.
In 2008, Enstrom thought that a report on the health effects of diesel emissions presented by the California Air Resources Board was faulty. As it turns out, CARB’s nitrous oxide emission estimates were overstated by 340 percent. Enstrom and others had trouble believing that a Ph.D. statistician would make some of CARB’s findings. They dug around and found that CARB researcher Hien Tran had falsely claimed to have a doctorate in statistics from UC Davis. In fact, Tran had a master’s degree from UC Davis, but his doctorate came from an unaccredited school.
CARB has since scaled back the diesel regulations it had previously approved – although spokesman Stanley Young asserts that the policy change “was not related to the research” – which officials have maintained were overestimated because of calculations made prior to the recession. CARB did demote Tran and cut his monthly pay by $1,066 to $7,899 per month.
…In February 2010, after renewing his research grants regularly since 1976, UCLA notified Enstrom that he had lost his funding. Unlike Tran, he would be out of a job. …