Recently in Politics, Government & Public Policy Category

I've written extensively about how voting is not a "right" and that we should view democracy as a means to an end rather than an end unto itself. I would heartily endorse some form of the proposal described here by Jamie Whyte to reduce the quantity and increase the quality of American voters.

If a loan officer’s initial decision required sign-off by a majority of 100 other bankers, his own judgement would have little effect on the final outcome. So he would have little incentive to think hard about the application and the likelihood that the loan will be repaid. Since this would be equally true for each of the other 100 bankers, none would bother to think hard. Why struggle to make the right decision when your decision will have no effect?

This is the position of voters in a general election. Each individual’s vote makes no difference to the outcome. Even marginal districts are won with majorities of hundreds. If you had stayed home instead of voting, the same candidate would have been elected. ...

So what is the best way to improve modern politics? The answer is not to increase voter turnout. On the contrary, the number of voters should be drastically reduced so that each voter realizes that his vote will matter. Something like 12 voters per district should be about right. If you were one of these 12 voters then, like one of 12 jurors deciding if someone should be imprisoned, you would take a serious interest in the issues.

These 12 voters should be selected at random from the electorate. With 535 districts in Congress – 435 in the House and 100 in the Senate – there would be 6,420 voters nationally. A random selection would deliver a proportional representation of sexes, ages, races and income groups. This would improve on the current system, in which the voting population is skewed relative to the general population: the old vote more than the young, the rich vote more than the poor, and so on.

To safeguard against the possibility of abuse, these 6,420 voters would not know that they had been selected at random until the moment when the polling officers arrived at their house. They would then be spirited away to a place where they will spend a week locked away with the candidates, attending a series of speeches, debates and question-and-answer sessions before voting on the final day. All of these events should be filmed and broadcast, so that everyone could make sure that nothing dodgy was going on.

Love it. I'm not sure if all the numbers are right, but the general idea is spot-on. As a side benefit, the entire issue of "campaign finance reform" and "special interests" would be completely negated. The role of money in politics would be vastly lessened.

Bad language, but this scene from Goodfellas pretty well sums up how Obama and his Democrats want to run the government.

(HT: American Digest and Instapundit.)

Homer Simpson on alcohol:

“Here's to alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.”

Michael Ramirez points out that substituting "debt" for "alcohol" pretty well captures President Obama's view of the world.

(HT: Power Line.)

Matthew Yglesias says that America has become ungovernable.

The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it’s the fact that the country has become ungovernable.

But I'm not aware of any Constitutional Amendments that have been ratified since President Obama took office, or since the Democrats took control of Congress in 2006. I remember President Bush passing a lot more bills than Obama has, even when Bush had far fewer votes at his disposal in Congress (setting aside the question of whether or not those bills were good).

The smarter voters are starting to realize that America is not ungovernable, America is ungovernable by Democrats.

More from Ed Morrissey and Glenn Reynolds.)

Here's a disturbing story: now that China is growing reluctant to lend America money, the federal government wants to "borrow" your retirement savings by force.

The Department of Labor and the Department of the Treasury (the "Agencies") are currently reviewing the rules under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and the plan qualification rules under the Internal Revenue Code (Code) to determine whether, and, if so, how, the Agencies could or should enhance, by regulation or otherwise, the retirement security of participants in employer-sponsored retirement plans and in individual retirement arrangements (IRAs) by facilitating access to, and use of, lifetime income or other arrangements designed to provide a lifetime stream of income after retirement. The purpose of this request for information is to solicit views, suggestions and comments from plan participants, employers and other plan sponsors, plan service providers, and members of the financial community, as well as the general public, on this important issue.

I.e., the government is considering nationalizing your IRA, Roth, and 401(k) and replacing the money there with some new form of Treasury bill that will pay a "guaranteed" "lifetime stream of income".

Homework questions:

1. Isn't this what Social Security is already supposed to be doing?

2. China doesn't think t-bills are a good investment anymore... do you?

The fact that the message of this billboard is obvious to all viewers, despite lacking an explicit subject, certainly means something.

OK, this sign on Interstate 29 is over the top. For the record, I don't think President Obama is a Marxist. But what's funny is that it's instantly clear to whom the sign refers, which makes it, literally, a sign of the times.

(HT: LM.)

Senator John Cornyn says no, but Larry Kudlow is more optimistic.

There are 18 Democratic senators up for grabs. Right now, the GOP is in excellent shape to take Illinois (President Obama’s seat), Delaware (Vice President Biden’s seat), Nevada (Harry Reid’s seat), and North Dakota (Byron Dorgan’s seat). So that’s four. It would give them 45 seats. So they need six additional seats out of 14.

If Scott Brown can do it, riding the tidal wave of conservative, populist, low-tax-and-spend, free-market revolt, including tough stands on terrorism and national security, then the GOP should be proclaiming a tidal wave that could carry them to Senate victory this fall.

On top of all that, it’s not out of the question that independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut could switch parties. Nor is it out of the question that beleaguered Ben Nelson of Nebraska could switch parties. So I was very disappointed in my friend John Cornyn for making this statement.

I'm optimistic about the House, but I've been skeptical about a Republican takeover of the Senate (despite my prescient wife's optimism).

In December, Karl Rove thought that a Republican Senate takeover was unlikely despite stellar recruits, but his article didn't mention Scott Brown or Massachusetts even once, so his views may have changed.

Predictably, Wikipedia has a good laydown of the facts surrounding the 2010 Senate elections.

The Senate is currently composed of 57 Democrats, 41 Republicans, and two independents who caucus with the Democrats. Of the seats currently up for election in 2010, 18 are held by Democrats and 18 are held by Republicans.

So Republicans would need to keep all 18 seats they already control and then win 10 of the 18 seats currently controlled by Democrats. Six of these seats look to be pretty safe: Hawaii, Maryland, Schumer in New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. If that's true, then Republicans need to win 10 of the following 12 seats:

• Arkansas
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• Delaware
• Illinois
• Indiana
• Nevada
• New York (Gillibrand)
• North Dakota
• Pennsylvania
• Wisconsin

North Dakota, Nevada, Delaware, and Arkansas all seem to be within easy reach for the Republicans. I can imagine New York splitting their seats and giving the seat currently held by Kirsten Gillibrand to a Repblican. Arlen Specter is growing increasingly unpopular in Pennsylvania. That's six.

The rest are more of a stretch, in my inexpert opinion. Scott Brown's election in Massachusetts had completely overturned my expectations, and at this point I won't be surprised by anything. It will be a very exciting year!

It sounds like President Obama is neglecting a strategy for his administration and Congress that the majority of the American people could get behind:

"They didn't send us to Washington to fight each other in some sort of political steel-cage match to see who comes out alive. ... They sent us to Washington to work together, to get things done, and to solve the problems that they're grappling with every single day."

Actually, I'd rather have the steel-cage match. I bet CSPAN would enjoy the ratings boost.

This feels apocryphal but may be historically based... I've got no idea. In any event, here is a pointed story about Davy Crockett explaining why Congress cannot spend taxpayer money on charity, no matter how worthy. Obviously we're far past this point now in America.

One day in the House of Representatives a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in its support. The speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose:

"Mr. Speaker--I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the suffering of the living, if there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has not the power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member on this floor knows it.

We have the right as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I ever heard that the government was in arrears to him.

"Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week's pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks."

It seems to me that forcibly collecting funds from taxpayers to distribute as charity to favored groups is now the primary occupation of our government.

(HT: RB.)

President Obama thinks that Scott Brown rode his coattails to victory.

"The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office," said Obama. "People are angry, and they're frustrated, not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years but what's happened over the last eight years."

Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they're voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts. Boy, I can't wait for that 159th interview.

Presumably, the president isn't stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it's dispiriting to discover he's stupid enough to think we're stupid enough to believe it.

I think I'm going to have to side with Mark Steyn on this one.

Jeffrey Scott Shapiro writes that President Obama has completely vindicated President Bush by adopting nearly all of his predecessor's foreign policy positions.

One year after taking office however, Obama has done a total reversal on his isolationist, non-interventionist foreign policy, and is now pushing President Bush’s neo-conservative philosophy as a justification for starting a new war in Afghanistan. What the Democratic Party once criticized as an over-simplified good vs. evil argument has become the cornerstone of Obama’s reasoning.

“Evil does exist in the world,” Obama recently admitted. “A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of man.”

In the wake of this stunning adoption of the Bush foreign policy doctrine, there is little, if any dissent. The same people who crucified Bush for liberating Iraq are hardly criticizing Obama for using force to promote democracy in Afghanistan. ...

As Obama continues to make decisions that mirror the Bush doctrine, it is becoming apparent that the former president was not ignorant or irrational in his foreign policy decisions despite the harsh criticism and disloyalty he endured. He was in fact, ahead of his time, a visionary who understood politics and warfare in the modern age of terrorism.

That is why Obama is now following his lead.

President Bush performed superbly under extremely difficult circumstances, and it is shameful that his political opponents at home took shots at him while secretly agreeing with the actions he took to protect America.

Obama's health care reform plans have been dead for a long time -- Scott Brown's election yesterday was just the autopsy. I'm sure that a lot of Democrat politicians are disappointed at Martha Coakley's loss, but I'm sure that Barney Frank isn't the only one who is secretly pleased that they've now got a good excuse for letting the monstrosity of a health care bill die.

“I have two reactions to the election in Massachusetts. One, I am disappointed. Two, I feel strongly that the Democratic majority in Congress must respect the process and make no effort to bypass the electoral results. If Martha Coakley had won, I believe we could have worked out a reasonable compromise between the House and Senate health care bills. But since Scott Brown has won and the Republicans now have 41 votes in the Senate, that approach is no longer appropriate. I am hopeful that some Republican Senators will be willing to discuss a revised version of health care reform because I do not think that the country would be well-served by the health care status quo. But our respect for democratic procedures must rule out any effort to pass a health care bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened. Going forward, I hope there will be a serious effort to change the Senate rule which means that 59 votes are not enough to pass major legislation, but those are the rules by which the health care bill was considered, and it would be wrong to change them in the middle of the process.”

Translation: Sorry left-wing wack-jobs/President who have forced us into a corner. We want your votes, labor, and money, so we can't tell you you're crazy to your face, but now we can finally say "no" to your insanity by hiding behind the almighty Process.

Apparently there won't be exit polls after the Massachusetts Senator election today! Very sad. However, you can watch how Scott Brown fares on Intrade if you're really addicted to data... (like me).

Politifact tracks the status President Obama's promises and assigns then varying levels of truthiness. There are a lot of promises, so it's hard for me to get a handle on whether or not I agree with their general scoring system. One feature I'd like to see: a way for readers to rate the "importance" of various promises, so that we could get an idea of whether he keeps the big ones or the small ones.

(HT: MG.)

This piece about Obama's "Colossal Miscalculation On Health Care" by Charlie Cook contains two insightful factoids that I was not previously aware of. First, with regards to unemployment, most people know that the official unemployment numbers do not count people who have given up looking for work. One of the effects of this omission is that the unemployment rate can actually improve without the creation of new jobs if people get so discouraged that they begin giving up in droves. However, I hadn't fully grasped the counterpoint: just because new jobs are created doesn't mean the unemployment rate will go down!

A number of economists expect that unemployment will get worse before it gets better. Even if that prediction is wrong, some analysts estimate that Labor's household employment survey would have to show a net increase of 150,000 jobs a month for 48 straight months for the unemployment rate to drop to just 9 percent. ...

Even before December's negative jobs report, economist Robert Reich, who was Labor secretary in the Clinton administration, wrote on talkingpointsmemo.com that "the chances of unemployment being 10 percent next November are overwhelmingly high." The number of newly created jobs will be offset by discouraged workers beginning to once again seek employment, Reich predicted, resulting in little change in the overall unemployment rate.

No wonder the unemployment rate is a trailing indicator of the economy!

Second, presidents never get more popular during their second year in office.

As political analyst and data-cruncher extraordinaire Rhodes Cook noted in the December issue of The Rhodes Cook Letter, no other president in the past half-century has seen his Gallup job-approval rating drop as far as Obama's has in his first year (down 21 points), and no president in that same half-century has seen his approval rating go up, even as much as 1 point, between the end of his first year and the eve of his first midterm election.

I think Obama and the Democrats are in trouble.

President Obama has taken the War on Terror to a whole new level by ordering a review of our "detection methods" in the wake of the thwarted Christmas bombing.

President Barack Obama has ordered the government to review detection methods to determine how a suspected terrorist ignited an explosive aboard a Northwest Airlines plane en route to Detroit on Christmas Day.

“We are investigating, as always, going backwards to see what happened, and when, who knew what and when,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said today on ABC’s “This Week.” “There was simply throughout the law enforcement community never information that would put this individual on a ‘no-fly’ list,” she said.

Then again, does our bureaucracy really require a Presidential order to perform such a review?

Furthermore, I'd prefer if the Obama Administration referred to this as an attack that was thwarted rather than "botched".

"President Barack Obama's Christmas Day began with a briefing about a botched attack on an airliner in Detroit," began an Associated Press account published Christmas evening. "Obama's military aide told the president about an incident aboard a plane as it was landing in Detroit just after 9 a.m. here [in Hawaii]. The president phoned his homeland security adviser and the chief of staff to the National Security Council for a briefing…'We believe this was an attempted act of terrorism,' one White House official said on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive situation."

All the details haven't been released yet, but from what I've read it seems to me that the bombing failed due to the heroic actions of the other passengers and was not merely "botched". Is it hard for the government to admit that the billions of dollars spend on the Transportation Safety Administration have been largely wasted on security theater and that we citizens are still and always will be our own best defenders?

It's almost as if our government exists not to protect our lives and liberty, but to transfer wealth from unfavored groups to the friends of those in power.

A new analysis of the $157 billion distributed by the American Reinvestment and Recovery act, popularly known as the stimulus bill, shows that the funds were distributed without regard for what states were most in need of jobs.

“You would think that if the stimulus money was actually spent to create jobs, there would be more stimulus money spent in high unemployment states,” said Veronique de Rugy, a scholar at the Mercatus Center who produced the analysis. "But we don't find any correlation." ...

Additionally, Mercatus found that stimulus funds were not disbursed geographically with any special regard for low-income Americans. “We find no correlation between economic indicators and stimulus funding. Preliminary results find no statistically significant effect of unemployment, median income or mean income on stimulus funds allocation,” said the report.

The Mercatus Center analysis also found that Democratic congressional districts received on average almost double the funding of Republican congressional districts. Republican congressional districts received on average $232 million in stimulus funds while Democratic districts received $439 million on average.

Over the centuries our government has become a gigantic Ponzi scheme, and the average citizen is always on the bottom of the heap.

I'll bring the tar if you bring the feathers.

(HT: RB.)

Last August I told you that Barack Obama's health care reform is dead, and it still is. Senators and Nelson Lieberman have stated that they will not vote for a "public option" of any kind. I suspect that many Democrats are secretly pleased, despite outrage among the base.

The progressives are, of course . . . well, livid is probably too weak a word. At this point it's hard to see them getting to sixty votes on anything. Frankly, I'm not sure that a majority of legislators want them to get to sixty votes on anything. Every time health care makes the news, its poll numbers drop further, and at 54-38 against, it's already dangerously close to "Republican landslide if you pass it" territory. Outside of coastal enclaves, Democrats cannot win the next round of elections with no one but their base. And independents, already against the plan, especially hate partisanship. This makes it especially unhealthy to pass a bill they don't like on a straight party line vote.

Health care reform is still dead, as it has been for many months. It will not happen. It has been, however, an exciting way to waste Congress' time and has prevented the Democrats from passing many potentially harmful bills that they could have mustered the votes for.

44% of voters wish we had President Bush back instead of Obama.

Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama's declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they'd rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that's somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country's difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited. The closeness in the Obama/Bush numbers also has implications for the 2010 elections. Using the Bush card may not be particularly effective for Democrats anymore, which is good news generally for Republicans and especially ones like Rob Portman who are running for office and have close ties to the former President.

The wife and I are especially looking forward to the results of Harry Reid's re-election campaign. The night we met another Democrat Majority Leader, Tom Daschle, lost his re-election bid.

The Senate race poll found Harry Reid trailing Republican Sue Lowden by 51%-41%, and trailing Republican Danny Tarkanian by 48%-42%.

That's a huge spread for Reid to make up in less than a year. How fun!

(HT: Politico.)