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Michael Barone on the “gangster government.”
… There are other examples. For several years the Obama administration has refused to obey a law requiring the president’s budget to be submitted on a certain date. As budget director, Treasury nominee Jack Lew refused to obey the law requiring him to issue a report in response to the trustees’ report on Medicare.
During the 2012 campaign the Pentagon told defense contractors not to inform employees that they may be laid off if the sequester took effect as required by the WARN Act.
They were even told that the government would pay any fines for not complying. What law authorizes that?
Similarly, the Department of Health and Human Services has stated that the federal government can fund health insurance exchanges run by the feds for states that refuse to create their own exchanges. But nowhere does the Democrats’ hastily crafted Obamacare legislation say that.
In spring 2009 we got our first glimmers of this modus operandi. In arranging the Chrysler bankruptcy administration, officials brushed aside the rights of secured creditors in order to pay off the United Auto Workers.
University of Pennsylvania law professor David Skeel pointed out that this violated the standard rules of bankruptcy law established, interestingly, during the New Deal.
“We have just seen an episode of gangster government,” I wrote at the time. “It is likely to be a continuing series.”
It looks like that’s one prediction I got right. This president, like all his predecessors since Woodrow Wilson started delivering these speeches in person, looks magnificent in the temple where laws are made. But he doesn’t seem to consider himself bound by them.
John Fund writes on someone who would not run a gangster government – Dr. Ben Carson.
Dr. Ben Carson, a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon who helped lead the first surgery separating twins joined at the head, has received a fair amount of attention in his 61 years. But none of it before begins to compare to the response he has gotten since he spoke at the February 7 National Prayer Breakfast with President Obama sitting five feet away.
While most of his remarks were motivational or spiritual, he made some pointed political comments about the need for freer markets in health care and a less complicated tax code that includes a flat tax. He also issued a warning that the U.S. was in danger of following the path of ancient Rome’s “moral decay and fiscal irresponsibility.”
“The response has been overwhelming,” Carson told me in an interview this week from his office at JohnsHopkinsUniversity in Baltimore. He had just come from taping an hour-long panel discussion with opinion leaders that will air on Fox News tonight at 9 p.m. He can’t count how many people have urged him to run for office in the past week. The Wall Street Journal editorial page even ran a headline, “Ben Carson for President.”
But as much as he appreciates the media attention to his message, he says the “most touching responses to my speech have come from elderly Americans, who told me they had given up on our nation, and now they feel that maybe there’s a chance.” Carson insists that he’s a member of no political party. “If I were part of one, it would be called the ‘Logic party,’ and it would be dedicated to commonsense approaches we all should be able to see.” Among them would be “recognizing that our debt is so great we have got to stop digging the hole and spend less.”
As for health care, he says it’s imperative not to further damage the doctor-patient relationship. “The key is to cut out the middleman and empower both doctor and patient with information about what things cost,” he tells me. …
Jack Kelly has more about Dr. Carson.
The longest 27 minutes of Barack Obama’s presidency may have come at the National Prayer Breakfast Feb. 7 as he listened to Benjamin Carson’s keynote address, thinks John Giokaris of Policymic.com.
Without saying a word critical of the president, Dr. Carson eviscerated the core assumptions of the Obama administration. He spoke eloquently about individual responsibility, the consequences of moral decay and soaring debt, the sinfulness of class envy and the pernicious effects of political correctness.
“From the look on his face, it was obvious Obama was none too pleased,” said columnist David Limbaugh.
It must have been especially galling to have his premises challenged by an African-American of such sterling character and profound accomplishment.
Ben Carson was reared in inner-city Detroit by a mother who made time to parent despite working 18-hour days. She restricted her sons’ TV watching, wouldn’t let them play outside until they’d done their homework, required them to read two books a week. …
Joel Kotkin says blue states have doubled down on their suicide strategy.
Whatever President Obama proposes in his State of the Union for the economy, it is likely to fall victim to the predictable Washington gridlock. But a far more significant economic policy debate in America is taking place among the states, and the likely outcome may determine the country’s course in the post-Obama era.
On one side are the blue states, who believe that higher taxes are not only just, but also the road to stronger economic growth. This is somewhat ironic, since, as we pointed out earlier, higher taxes on the “rich” would seem to hurt their economies more, given their high concentration of high-income earners. However, showing themselves to be gluttons for punishment, many of these states have decided to double down on high taxes, raising their rates to unprecedented levels.
This cascade of higher income taxes started in 2011 when Illinois, arguably the big state with the weakest economy, and the lowest bond ratings, raised income taxes by 66% and business taxes by 46%. Over the past year several other Democratic state governments have pushed through income tax increases, notably California, which raised the tax rate on people with annual income over $1 million to 13.3%, the highest in the nation. And now it appears that Massachusetts and Minnesota are about to raise their taxes as well.
This is happening at the same time that some red states — notably Kansas and Louisiana — are looking at lowering income tax rates by shifting to rely more on consumption or sales tax revenues. Some red states don’t have income taxes — notably Florida, Texas and Tennessee — and most of those who do are holding the line. Red state leaders, most notably Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, are placing their bets on expanding their economies, which would create new taxpayers, boost consumer spending and expand collections of sales taxes.
The contrast with the blue states — not so much those who voted for Obama, but those controlled totally by Democrats — could not be clearer. They appear to have chosen an economic path that essentially penalizes their own middle and upper-middle class residents, believing that keeping up public spending, including on public employee pensions, represents the best way to boost their economy.
Yet the gambit of raising state income taxes could not be coming at a worse time. …
Naomi Schaefer Riley, ever willing to challenge accepted thinking, has topped herself by suggesting the college essay on entrance applications is turning kids into narcissists like the president.
… The common application, which is now accepted by more than 500 colleges, is the best example of how the admissions process has become an exercise in encouraging 17-year-olds’ narcissism. Also new this year, rising high-school seniors will be allotted 650 words in which to indulge themselves. Was that because the 500 they have been given previously just didn’t do these topics justice?
The college essay as absurdist self-reflection isn’t new. When I applied to MiddleburyCollege some two decades ago, I was asked to answer the question: “What’s the worst advice you’ve ever received?”
Alas, this was no passing fad. “Many people involved in the admissions enterprise believe — or want to believe — that personal essays are essential,” Eric Hoover of the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote in a blog post after interviewing a number of admissions officers. “As long as students are free to write autobiographical vignettes and creative riffs on quirky topics, then nobody can say the process is just about numbers, which it often is.”
Well, often it’s not. More and more colleges are dropping the SAT requirement. Measures of every sort of diversity — race, geography, religion, sexual orientation — compete with grade-point averages.
It’s discouraging enough that colleges have increasingly discounted hard measures in favor of essays, which are often “edited” by the adults in their lives. Hoover interviewed Danya Berry, a member of the common application’s panel of counselors, who said the essay requirements are a way to measure writing skills: “If you can’t write a succinct, five-paragraph essay, you’re not going to succeed in college.”
Fair enough. Yet the essays themselves don’t ask college students to do the least bit of critical thinking. They are merely exercises in what Twitter users label #humblebrags.
Of course, this generation of social-media-savvy teens already excels at trying to show how each moment of their lives is filled with significance. There is no need to encourage it. How about asking applicants about a favorite author? Sure, it’s possible it will become an exercise in how reading “Old Yeller” (does anyone read that anymore?) reminded you of the death of your pet turtle. But it’s also possible that it will make you offer some insights beyond your own, no doubt fascinating, autobiography. …