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Kevin Williamson wrote a powerful essay about the president’s place as the front man for the bureaucracy. Williamson says he shows this by his …
… utterly predictable approach to domestic politics: appoint a panel of credentialed experts. His faith in the powers of pedigreed professionals is apparently absolute. Consider his hallmark achievement, the Affordable Care Act, the centerpiece of which is the appointment of a committee, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the mission of which is to achieve targeted savings in Medicare without reducing the scope or quality of care. How that is to be achieved was contemplated in detail neither by the lawmakers who wrote the health-care bill nor by the president himself. But they did pay a great deal of attention to the processes touching IPAB: For example, if that committee of experts fails to achieve the demanded savings, then the ball is passed to . . . a new committee of experts, this one under the guidance of the secretary of health and human services. IPAB’s powers are nearly plenipotentiary: Its proposals, like a presidential veto, require a supermajority of Congress to be overridden.
IPAB is the most dramatic example of President Obama’s approach to government by expert decree, but much of the rest of his domestic program, from the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law to his economic agenda, is substantially similar. In total, it amounts to that fundamental transformation of American society that President Obama promised as a candidate: but instead of the new birth of hope and change, it is the transformation of a constitutional republic operating under laws passed by democratically accountable legislators into a servile nation under the management of an unaccountable administrative state. The real import of Barack Obama’s political career will be felt long after he leaves office, in the form of a permanently expanded state that is more assertive of its own interests and more ruthless in punishing its enemies. At times, he has advanced this project abetted by congressional Democrats, as with the health-care law’s investiture of extraordinary powers in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has advanced it without legislative assistance — and, more troubling still, in plain violation of the law. President Obama and his admirers choose to call this “pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the president’s administration and his party. Barack Obama is the first president of the democracy that John Adams warned us about.
Democracy never lasts long,” Adams famously said. “It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” For liberal regimes, a very common starting point on the road to serfdom is the over-delegation of legislative powers to the executive. France very nearly ended up in a permanent dictatorship as a result of that error, and was spared that fate mostly by good luck and Charles de Gaulle’s patriotism. Long before she declared her infamous state of emergency, Indira Gandhi had been centralizing power in the prime minister’s office, and India was spared a permanent dictatorship only by her political miscalculation and her dynasty-minded son’s having gotten himself killed in a plane wreck. Salazar in Portugal, Austria under Dollfuss, similar stories. But the United States is not going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a dictator when you’ve already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As is made clear by everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad, the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians will come and go, but if you expand the power of the bureaucracy, you expand the power of the Left, of the managers and minions who share Barack Obama’s view of the world. Barack Obama isn’t the leader of the free world; he’s the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics. …
Luckily we end with Andy Malcolm’s late night humor because the next item from Steve Malanga about the debt owed by states and localities will make you cry.
Maria Pappas, the treasurer of Cook County, Illinois, got tired of being asked why local taxes kept rising. Betting that the answer involved the debt that state and local governments were accumulating, she began a quest to figure out how much county residents owed. It wasn’t easy. In some jurisdictions, officials said that they didn’t know; in others, they stonewalled. Pappas’s first report, issued in 2010, estimated the total state and local debt at $56 billion for the county’s 5.6 million residents. Two years later, after further investigation, the figure had risen to a frightening $140 billion, shocking residents and officials alike. “Nobody knew the numbers because local governments don’t like to show how badly they are doing,” Pappas observed.
Since Pappas began her project to tally CookCounty’s hidden debt, she has found lots of company. Across America, elected officials, taxpayer groups, and other researchers have launched a forensic accounting of state and municipal debt, and their fact-finding mission is rewriting the country’s balance sheet. Just a few years ago, most experts estimated that state and local governments owed about $2.5 trillion, mostly in the form of municipal bonds and other debt securities. But late last year, the States Project, a joint venture of Harvard’s Institute of Politics and the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government, projected that if you also count promises made to retired government workers and money borrowed without taxpayer approval, the figure might be higher than $7 trillion.
Most states have restrictions on debt and prohibitions against running deficits. But these rules have been no match for state and local governments, which have exploited loopholes and employed deceptive accounting standards in order to keep running up debt. The jaw-dropping costs of these evasions have already started to weigh on budgets; as the burden grows heavier, taxpayers may decide that it’s time for a new fiscal revolt.
Most state constitutions and many local-government charters regulate public debt precisely because of past abuses. In the early nineteenth century, after New York built the Erie Canal with borrowed funds, other states rushed to make similar debt-financed investments in toll roads, bridges, and canals—projects designed to take advantage of an expanding economy. But when the nation’s economy fell into a deep recession in 1837, many of the projects failed, and tax revenues cratered as well, prompting eight states and territories to default on their debt. Stung by losses, European markets stopped lending even to solvent American states. The debacle inspired a sharp reevaluation of the role of state governments, with voters looking “more skeptically” on legislative borrowing, wrote political scientist Alasdair Roberts in 2010 in the academic journal Intereconomics. A member of New York’s 1846 constitutional convention even warned that “unless some check was placed upon this dangerous power to contract debt, representative government could not long endure.” Over a 15-year period, 19 states wrote debt limitations into their constitutions.
Since then, the history of state and local debt has been a tug-of-war between those struggling to keep governments from overextending themselves and elected officials seeking legal loopholes for further debt spending. …
… Though New York’s constitution requires that voters approve any new government debt, only 5 percent of the state’s $63 billion in outstanding borrowing has received voter authorization, down from 10 percent a decade ago. Meantime, the cost of servicing that debt has risen by an average of 9.4 percent annually. Partly because of such unsanctioned borrowing, New Yorkers bear the nation’s second-highest per-capita load of state debt, says New York’s comptroller. The state is still paying off what it owes from the infamous 1991 Attica prison deal, in which New York, trying to close a budget deficit, “sold” the facility to one of its independent authorities, which borrowed the money to pay for it. New York also still counts on its books debt from the 1970s bailout of New York City, which, thanks to refinancing, it won’t pay off until 2033.
Other New York deals engineered without voter say-so include a $2.7 billion bond offering in 2003, backed by 25 years’ worth of revenues from the state’s gigantic settlement with tobacco companies. To circumvent borrowing limits, the state created an independent corporation to issue the bonds and then used the money from the bond sale to close a budget deficit—instantly consuming most of the tobacco settlement, which now had to be used to pay off the debt. Legislators engineer such borrowing because they aren’t confident that voters would agree to new debt: of the seven bond offerings that Empire State voters have considered over the past 25 years, four went down to defeat.
Thanks to its low state debt, Texas enjoys a reputation for budgetary restraint. Yet as Texas comptroller Susan Combs found to her dismay, the state’s towns, cities, counties, and school districts have racked up the second-highest per-capita local debt in the nation, behind only New York’s spendthrift municipalities. The total, nearly $8,000 per resident, is more than seven times higher than Texas’s per-capita state debt. …
… Reformers should also seek to get rid of the many loopholes that state legislators use to get around debt-limit rules. In particular, states should be banned from assuming debt through independent authorities or by direct appropriation of the legislature. Reform should also cap state-supported debt by tying it to some flexible measure of economic or revenue growth, such as state personal income, rather than just stating a dollar limit.
Reformers should strive, too, to end governments’ use of debt to balance budgets, perhaps by introducing a requirement that all taxpayer-supported debt be used for capital projects, such as schools, roads, and bridges. Such structures endure for decades, so it’s reasonable to ask future residents to contribute to their construction through debt payments. By contrast, bonds floated to close a particular year’s budget, pledging to the bondholders that they’ll be paid with future lottery, toll, or tobacco revenues, give today’s residents a benefit at future residents’ expense.
There’s no single cure for the debt crisis afflicting state and local governments. But unless taxpayers start pulling harder in that everlasting tug-of-war, they can expect to keep losing ground.
Andrew Malcolm with late night humor. And he added a feature; he asked for tweets to honor the president’s birthday.
Conan: Bill Clinton is very upset with Anthony Weiner comparing his sexting to Clinton’s affair with Monica. Bill Clinton said, “Real men cheat in person.”
Fallon: I just read that 25% of toddlers in America know how to use an iPad. While 100% of toddlers in China know how to make one.
@Brock2120 To honor Pres. Obama’s birthday, I’m going to fail at something and blame it on the rich.
@texasman2008 I’m going to hide and seal all my school records.
@Brock2120 My final act of celebrating Obama’s birthday was to throw a baseball like a girl.