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George Will on our “decadent democracy.”
Connoisseurs of democratic decadence can savor a variety of contemporary dystopias. Because familiarity breeds banality, Greece has become a boring horror. Japan, however, in its second generation of stagnation is fascinating. Once, Japan bestrode the world, jauntily buying RockefellerCenter and PebbleBeach. Now Japanese buy more adult diapers than those for infants.
America has its lowest birth rate since at least 1920 — family formation and workforce participation (which hit a 30-year low last year) have declined in tandem. But it has an energy surplus, the government-produced overhang of housing inventory is shrinking and the average age of Americans’ cars is an astonishing 10.8 years. Such promising economic indicators, however, mask the country’s democratic decadence, as explained by the Hudson Institute’s Christopher DeMuth in the Dec. 24 Weekly Standard:
Deficit spending once was largely for investments — building infrastructure, winning wars — which benefited future generations, so government borrowing appropriately shared the burden with those generations. Now, however, continuous borrowing burdens future generations in order to finance current consumption. Today’s policy, says DeMuth, erases “the distinction between investing for the future and borrowing from the future.” …
… Barack Obama has (as Winston Churchill said of an adversary) “the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.” His incessant talking swaddles one wee idea — raising taxes on “millionaires and billionaires,” including people earning less than half a million. He has nothing pertinent to say about the steadily worsening fiscal imbalance that will make sluggish growth — less than 3 percent — normal. …
NIle Gardiner wonders with 128 million Americans on some kind of government programs, if the US can survive as the world’s superpower.
I have just read a staggering report written by my colleagues Patrick D. Tyrell and William W. Beach for the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis (I direct the Margaret Thatcher Centre for Freedom at Heritage.) It is a real eye-opener for anyone who cares about America’s future as the world’s superpower, on either side of the Atlantic. Ironically, Britain, through the tremendous determination of Iain Duncan Smith and his team at the Department of Work and Pensions, is starting to roll back the welfare state, precisely at the same time the current US administration is expanding it.
The United States isn’t just gliding towards a continental European-style future of vast welfare systems, economic decline, and massive debts – it is accelerating towards it at full speed. Or as Acton Institute research director Samuel Gregg puts it in his excellent new book published today by Encounter, America is already “becoming Europe,” with the United States moving far closer to a European-style welfare state than most Americans realize.
Tyrell and Beach point out in their Heritage paper, which is based on extensive analysis of the recently released March 2011 US Census Bureau Current Population Survey (CPS), that more than two in five Americans are now on government programs:
“The number of people receiving benefits from the federal government in the United States has grown from under 94 million people in 2000 to more than 128 million people in 2011. That means that 41.3 percent of the US population is now on a federal government program.” …
Jennifer Rubin posts on the president’s annoyance with Boehner for suggesting the country has a spending problem.
Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) recently recounted the comment that the president made to him in the midst of the fiscal cliff talks: “We don’t have a spending problem.” A source familiar with the conversation tells Right Turn that instead the president insisted we have a health-care problem.
The comment is absurd, given the huge increases in discretionary spending, the addition of more health-care spending in the form of Obamacare and the president’s unwillingness to address, for example, Medicare spending. A senior House adviser described the remark: “Obviously, he believes Obamacare is going to help drive down costs and help solve that problem. La la land.” Moreover, it does make fools of those who insisted during the election that Obama was serious about fiscal discipline and entitlement reform.
In a written statement today Boehner went back to the president’s comment, arguing, “At $16 trillion and climbing (more than $50,000 for every American), our national debt is a drag on our economy and a threat to our future. But when Republicans demanded serious spending cuts to begin addressing the debt, President Obama said: ‘We don’t have a spending problem.’ On the contrary – as Investor’s Business Daily points out – government spending is the ‘driving force’ behind our debt crisis. . .This is the year we need to work together to solve these problems with real spending cuts, meaningful reforms of the entitlement programs that are driving us deeper into debt, and a fairer, cleaner tax code.”
Clearly, the fiscal cliff negotiations have, it seems, convinced the speaker that the president is hopeless …
Jonathan Tobin takes note of Dick Morris’s debt-ceiling negotiation suggestion.
… A number of ideas are floating around, but Dick Morris floated one yesterday in the Hill that is worth considering: phasing in limited debt ceiling hikes that would avoid a government shutdown but would not be enough to allow the president to avoid having to negotiate on entitlement reform and other spending issues.
As Morris writes:
“The Republicans should offer to pass a bill now setting a debt limit that rises each quarter pegged to one-third of the revenue growth of the preceding quarter. Thus, two-thirds of all revenue growth — natural or due to tax hikes — would go to deficit reduction.
Republicans are unwilling to pull the trigger on default by refusing to raise the debt limit. But a bill to allow gradual increases in the debt limit, at a pace slower than revenue growth, need not trigger default. Instead, the president would be forced to prioritize his spending and borrowing so as to avoid default, pay the military and send out Social Security checks. All the rhetorical handles he has to battle an effort to kill the debt-limit increase will be gone in the face of a phased-in debt-limit hike.”
Critics of the idea can certainly point out that this proposal could turn out to be as ineffectual as Boehner’s Plan B fiscal cliff plan that was dead on arrival in the House and never would have been passed in the Senate or signed by the president. We should certainly expect the president to stick to his refusal to negotiate on the debt ceiling at least initially. But Morris is right that what the GOP needs to avoid is an all-or-nothing approach to the debt that will only make Obama look like the reasonable one in the negotiation, even if his stand is no less ideological than that of his Tea Party foes. …
Conn Carroll says there are some governments controlling spending – those with GOP folks in charge.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government posted a $293 billion deficit in the first fiscal quarter of 2013, setting the Obama administration up for a record fifth-year of trillion dollar deficits. But while the fiscal condition of the Democratically controlled federal government is still atrocious, Republican controlled states are now swimming in surpluses.
Thanks to a Republican governor committed to developing its natural resources, not punishing entrepreneurs who do, Texas legislators are facing an $8.8 billion surplus over the next two years. To the east, Republican governors Bill Haslam of Tennessee and Rick Scott of Florida have also turned recession deficits into budget surpluses. Moving north, Michigan’s Gov. Rick Snyder, Iowa’s Gov. Terry Brandstad, and Indiana’s out-going-Gov. Mitch Daniels, also can now all boast surpluses in the hundreds of millions of dollars. All of these governors managed to turn their state’s fiscal situation around through spending cuts, not tax hikes. Now their budgets are in the black and their economies are growing.
Things do not look as good in Democrat-controlled states. Illinois, who massively raised taxes on the rich, still has a $5.9 billion stack of unpaid bills. California, who also raised taxes on the rich, was supposed to post a small surplus this year. But tax collections are coming in at 10.8 percent below budget projections. As a result, the state is now projected to be $1.9 billion in the red by the end of this fiscal year.
It does not appear that that Congress and the White House will come to any consensus on how best to solve our fiscal crisis at the federal level. Conservatives and liberals simply have diametrically opposed views on how our fiscal crisis can best be resolved while preserving economic growth. But at the state level, conservative and liberal models of governance are being fully implemented. And it is becoming increasingly clear which of those visions is producing the best results.
Andrew Malcolm catches Pelosi’s phake photo.
You know how it is when you plan a group photo of any kind, especially a large group. Not just families.
There’s always someone moving or blinking or mugging or clowning with two fingers sticking up behind another’s head.
Or, worst of all, there’s always someone late.
Everybody else somehow organizes their life to appear at the appointed time for the group photograph. But then they’re forced to stand around and wait and wait for the tardy folks, who deem themselves more important and not subject to the normal rules of social etiquette.
Finally the group gives up. And lines up. The photographer goes ahead with the photo. Several photos actually, because it’s not easy getting about five dozen busy people all in the same place at once.
And then, wouldn’t you know, just as the group is breaking up, the self-important late-comers arrive, muttering fake apologies, but really enjoying their grand entrance.
Well, that’s just what happened when Nancy Pelosi organized the new women’s Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives. …