Politics, Government & Public Policy: March 2005 Archives

Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills have an excellent article in City Journal about "Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power". They explain the history of American power generation and consumption, how we've switched from fuel to fuel over the decades, and why the best solution for the future is nuclear power. It's far cheaper than coal or oil, safer for the environment, and carries far fewer political costs than Middle Eastern oil.

Many Greens think that they have a good grip on the likely trajectory of the planet’s climate over the next 100 years. If we keep burning fossil fuels at current rates, their climate models tell them, we’ll face a meltdown on a much larger scale than Chernobyl’s, beginning with the polar ice caps. Saving an extra 400 million tons of coal here and there—roughly the amount of carbon that the United States would have to stop burning to comply with the Kyoto Protocol today—would make quite a difference, we’re told.

But serious Greens must face reality. Short of some convulsion that drastically shrinks the economy, demand for electricity will go on rising. Total U.S. electricity consumption will increase another 20 to 30 percent, at least, over the next ten years. Neither Democrats nor Republicans, moreover, will let the grid go cold—not even if that means burning yet another 400 million more tons of coal. Not even if that means melting the ice caps and putting much of Bangladesh under water. No governor or president wants to be the next Gray Davis, recalled from office when the lights go out.

The power has to come from somewhere. Sun and wind will never come close to supplying it. Earnest though they are, the people who argue otherwise are the folks who brought us 400 million extra tons of coal a year. The one practical technology that could decisively shift U.S. carbon emissions in the near term would displace coal with uranium, since uranium burns emission-free. It’s time even for Greens to embrace the atom.

It must surely be clear by now, too, that the political costs of depending so heavily on oil from the Middle East are just too great. We need to find a way to stop funneling $25 billion a year (or so) of our energy dollars into churning cauldrons of hate and violence. By sharply curtailing our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, we would greatly expand the range of feasible political and military options in dealing with the countries that breed the terrorists.

It's a great read, and a must for anyone interested in energy policy.

(HT: GeekPress.)

Despite Hollywood's glamorization of communism, that evil ideology still holds the record for murder and destruction, far surpassing even the Nazis. Take for instance last year's The Motorcycle Diaries that portrayed a beatified "Che" Guevara but neglected to note the millions of people he helped murder and oppress.

Villains [of truthful movies about communism] would include--you guessed it--Che Guevara, whose legacy includes both ordering and conducting executions and founding forced labor camps. "Guevara . . . quickly gain[ed] a reputation for ruthlessness; a child in his guerrilla unit who had stolen a little food was immediately shot without trial," writes Pascal Fontaine in "The Black Book." Guevara also wrote in his diary about executing peasant Eutimio Guerra, a suspected informant, with a single .32-caliber shot to the head. Guevara, in his will, praised the "extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless, and cold killing machines." He tried to spread the havoc caused by the Cuban revolution in other countries from Africa to South America, rallying for "two, three, many Vietnams!"

Guevara oversaw executions at La Cabana prison; some of those executed were his former comrades who wouldn't relinquish their democratic beliefs. "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," he said. He didn't assuage his barbarity by being a brilliant statesman, either, helping drive the economy to ruin as head of Cuba's central bank and minister of industries. "Though claiming to despise money," writes Fontaine, "he lived in one of the rich, private areas of Havana." Guevara told a British reporter after the Cuban Missile Crisis that the nukes would have been fired if they were under Cuban control--which would have wasted all of those future American suburban revolutionary wannabes.

I don't like communists, and naive, healthy, rich Americans who sanitize the history and evil of communism disgust me.

Philip Klinker has some stats from the National Election Survey that demonstrate that George Bush won re-election because of terrorism. Terrorism and Iraq were the number one and two issues for voters (42% and 18% respectively), but those who cited terrorism were 70% likely to vote for Bush, whereas those who cited Iraq were only 31% likely to vote for Bush. Interesting numbers. From this, T. Rex concludes that morals played no role in the outcome of the election.

Kerry lost because he couldn't overcome the fact that no terrorist attacks had happened on U.S. soil since 9/11. People who think about such things in passing concluded that since there were no more attacks and Bush was president, he must've been doing enough to prevent further attacks. Values were 100% unimportant in the election. People who say values such as abortion and gay rights are the most important issue are NEVER going to vote Democrat, so they are not a swing constituency and they didn't determine the election. Voters who supported Bush on terrorism can be won, Kerry just didn't make the sale.

I don't buy T. Rex's analysis. Sure, terrorism was the most important issue this time around, but eventually it won't be. Plus, there are pleny of gay voters (such as Andrew Sullivan) to whom gay rights are the number one concern, and who vote for Democrats. Perhaps T. Rex should have said that voters for whom morals are a number one concern are much less likely to be swayed from one party to the other... as long as morals remain their number one concern.

However, a great deal of time is spent trying to convince voters that issue A is more important than issue B. That's why of the 9% of the electorate who cited the economy as their most important issue, 75% voted for Kerry. Does that mean Bush was weaker on the economy, or that Bush hasn't the economy well? Not at all. It may be the case that many of the people who cite terrorism as their top concern also approve of Bush's economic performance. The survey simply doesn't say. What it indicates is that the people who were persuaded that the economy (or Iraq) was more important than terrorism tended to prefer Kerry -- which makes perfect sense since the Democrats were constantly arguing that Bush was overstating the threat of terrorism, and their most ardent supporters would have been eager to believe that to be true.

Hugh Hewitt has a great post that demonstrates that the term "religious right" cannot be well defined and is just a rhetorical device that allows speakers to attack anonymous, ambiguous people that the listeners can define for themselves.

Many e-mailers have tried to define "the religious right" thus far this morning, but their definitions are either ad hominem attacks or way too broad as they inevitably end up including folks like the African American pastors who oppose same-sex marriage even when those pastors are pretty reliable Democrats. Here's one example:

"A member of the Religious Right is a person who, for whatever reason, believes that his or her interpretation of a religious doctrine ought to be reflected in the laws that apply to all Americans - especially those who do not adhere to the proponent's personal belief system."

Not only too broad, but also applicable to pretty much every American who thinks polygamy ought to remain illegal. See Under the Banner of Heaven. The inability to define "religious right" reveals it is a term used rhetorically to allow the audience to hear whatever it wants to hear.

I think this sort of non-specific attack reflects that, more than ever, the left has lost its way. It'll probably take a very charismatic leader to pull the left together under whatever banner he chooses to raise, and then we'll have to listen to nonsense about how all the flip-flops were really what the Democrats have stood for all along.

(HT: Michelle Malkin.)

The Democrats have been derided for failing to offer an alternative to President Bush's Social Security reform plan, but Brendan Miniter relates House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer's take on the Democrats' manuvering and how they hope to wrestle even more power away from the American electorate.

First what ideas do Democrats have for reforming Social Security? Mr. Hoyer wouldn't put a clear plan on the table, saying that in this fight the side that puts out a detailed plan first will likely lose. President Bush is "tanking" on this issue, he said, and Democrats aren't going to help him out by giving Americans something else to focus on and pick apart. He did say that Mr. Bush should consider as a model for compromise the deal President Reagan struck in 1983 to raise the retirement age. He also noted that there are several other options, chief among them raising the "wage cap" (so that Social Security taxes would be due on income above $90,000) and repealing Mr. Bush's tax cuts for the so-called wealthy.

Mr. Hoyer also made a concession first reported last week in our premium e-mail newsletter Political Diary (subscribe here). The No. 2 Democrat in the House said that he is in favor of private accounts as an "add-on" to Social Security. He also said that Social Security trustees--one of whom is Labor Secretary Elaine Chao--should be given the authority to invest Social Security funds in the stock market and other high-yield financial instruments. Instead of personal accounts, Mr. Hoyer is envisioning public accounts controlled by the government and used to raise funds for Social Security, much the way Calpers invests funds to pay for California state employee pensions. More on this in a minute. ...

The danger in losing the Social Security fight this year isn't that President Bush's reform agenda will die along with it, but rather that it will live on. President Clinton had to be brought to welfare reform kicking and screaming. But President Hillary or another Democrat will likely be more shrewd and embrace reform. Doing so would allow Democrats to infuse those reforms with Mr. Hoyer's ideas of using the government to invest funds in the stock market. We'll likely get a mix of higher taxes, reduced benefits for some, and "diversified risk" with publicly invested money. It will sound like a middle-of-the-road compromise. But if it comes to pass, it will give the secretary of labor and the other trustees a new tool to influence financial markets for political reasons.

Republicans didn't have to let this genie out of the bottle. But they were sent to Washington to make fundamental changes to the welfare state, and now they have a limited time to get their ownership society wish. If they miss this opportunity, it may turn out that all Republicans will have succeeded at doing is setting the stage for a massive expansion of the federal government.

Add-on accounts are a scam "fix" that wlll do nothing but increase the reach of Social Security without solving the fundamental problem of too many recipients and too few workers. The very last thing we need is goverment bureaucrats manipulating the stock market with vast Social Security money.

It shouldn't be a surprise that the party that benefits most from fraudulent voting is now pushing to make voter fraud even easier.

A bill proposed by Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., would enable anyone to register to vote on election day and cast a ballot without a photo ID, proof of citizenship or other personal identification.

Clinton calls the Count Every Vote Act of 2005 "critical to restoring America's faith in our voting system," but critics see it as an open door to fraud.

In the wake of all the voter fraud perpetrated by Democrats over the past two election cycles, is it any wonder that Hillary wants pass laws to eliminate the evidence?

I'd prefer going in the opposite direction. If you want to vote, you should have to register in advance, not at the polling place. You should get a voting ticket mailed to you, and you can only vote when you turn it in; if you lose your ticket, too bad. Then we ink your thumb just to make sure.

But then Democrats wouldn't be able to win elections, so....

(HT: DeoDuce.)

I've written about the horrible inefficiencies of light rail lines in the past, and now P.J. O'Rourke is pondering the expense of mass transit in general.

There are just two problems with mass transit. Nobody uses it, and it costs like hell. Only 4% of Americans take public transportation to work. Even in cities they don't do it. Less than 25% of commuters in the New York metropolitan area use public transportation. Elsewhere it's far less--9.5% in San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, 1.8% in Dallas-Fort Worth. As for total travel in urban parts of America--all the comings and goings for work, school, shopping, etc.--1.7 % of those trips are made on mass transit.

Then there is the cost, which is--obviously--$52 billion. Less obviously, there's all the money spent locally keeping local mass transit systems operating. The Heritage Foundation says, "There isn't a single light rail transit system in America in which fares paid by the passengers cover the cost of their own rides." Heritage cites the Minneapolis "Hiawatha" light rail line, soon to be completed with $107 million from the transportation bill. Heritage estimates that the total expense for each ride on the Hiawatha will be $19. Commuting to work will cost $8,550 a year. If the commuter is earning minimum wage, this leaves about $1,000 a year for food, shelter and clothing. Or, if the city picks up the tab, it could have leased a BMW X-5 SUV for the commuter at about the same price.

My favorite suggestion of his is, "a lot of commuters don't want to go to work anyway. Slot machines could be put on all forms of mass transit." I like it!

Anyway, mass transit is a wasteful joke. As Clayton Cramer recognizes, mass transit isn't designed to move people around cheaply, "the primary purpose of public transit is putting union workers on the public payroll". As I wrote about light rail in Los Angeles:

The Los Angeles light rail system is costing taxpayers around $500 million annually by now (that was written in 1999); for the price of light rail for one year we could add new lanes to freeways that people actually use. I know, it's a revolutionary thought.

Despite speculation, particularly among Bear-Flaggers, Condoleezza Rice says she has no desire to run for President.

"I don't have any desire to run for president; I don't intend to, I won't do it," she told ABC's "This Week." "I don't know how many ways to say 'No.'" Dr. Rice told CBS's "Face the Nation," "I've never wanted to run for anything." She says she enjoys being secretary of state, adding: "One of these days very soon, I am going to return and be an academic again and get back to the California life and to the world of ideas."

The CNSNews brief is undated, unfortunately.

The Spork has a good post about being unable to vote for Condi because she's pro-choice.

As many of you know, there is running speculation that it may end up being Condi vs. Hillary. In that circumstance, who are we, Pro-Lifers, supposed to vote for? Condi is a self-coined "mild" pro-choice supporter, and well, we all know what Hillary is. Does the Categorical Imperative apply to this case? Are we suppose to vote for the "lesser of two evils" or vote for someone who is staunchly pro-life? Some argue that voting for Condi would help keep Clinton out of DC, which would absolve any concerned Pro-Lifers since they chose the "mild" abortionist versus the "staunch" abortionist. This issue is a weight on my shoulders, though.

On the face, it may seem obvious that voting for potentially fewer abortions is better than failing to vote and increasing the possibility of more abortions. However, no decision stands in isolation. If a pro-choice Republican wins there may be fewer abortions than if a pro-choice Democrat wins for the near future, but such a victory would open the flood-gate for pro-choice Republicans. Perhaps it would be better to endure a pro-choice Democrat for a short time just to ensure that the Republicans know that taking a pro-choice stance is a recipe for failure, thereby potentially reducing the number of abortions in the long-term.

Politics is like war, and sometimes it's inevitable that people will die. The decisions then are who?, and how many?. Voting for a pro-choice Republican over a pro-choice Democrat may spare a few lives now but cost many more lives in the future if the pro-life stance is weakened. In contrast, withholding a vote from a pro-choice Republican may result in more abortions now, but end up preventing many more by strengthening the pro-life position.

Tough call.

I've written about alternative punishments in the past, and I like Rajahmundry's idea of using drummers to force tax evaders to cough up.

Tax evaders in a southern Indian city are having cash beaten out of them - by troupes of drummers.

Authorities in the city of Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh state are sending drummers around to create a noise outside homes until evaders cough up.

Officials say they recouped 200,000 rupees ($4,600) on the first day.

Harried residents emerged from their homes to be told by accompanying tax collectors to pay up or continue facing the music.

I like the idea of public shaming, plus the nuisance of the noise would encourage pressure from the neighbors of the evaders.

Scott A. Hodge and Curtis S. Dubay at the non-partisan Tax Foundation explain that the same leftist groups who brutally denounce President Bush's Social Security modernization plan trust their futures to pension systems that are based on the same principles.

The debate over allowing younger workers to invest a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes in personal retirement accounts has become increasingly politicized, with some groups charging that the plan will amount to “gambling” in the stock market and giving billions in Social Security dollars to Wall Street pension fund managers. ...

Despite these harsh attacks, in reality pension fund investing is anything but a political exercise. Fund managers have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the rate of return on the fund’s investments by carefully balancing short-term and long-term risk in order to assure enough assets to pay future retirement benefits.

Some of the largest pension funds in America today are public employee and union pension funds. Most of these funds are managed on a contract basis by private investment houses such as Alliance Capital, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Solomon Smith Barney. Very few are managed in-house.

According to the Federal Reserve Board, public employee pension plans alone had nearly $2 trillion in assets as of September 2004. Overall, 54.8 percent of these assets were invested in corporate equities, 36.1 percent were invested in fixed income instruments (such as corporate and foreign bonds), with the remaining funds in cash or other investments.

I've already written about the "transition cost" myth which explains why implementing a modern Social Security system is affordable, and these existing pension plans demonstrate that a modern Social Security system will be effective.

Hat tip to Larry Kudlow, who also links to a Peter Ferrara piece warning against a potential Bush sell-out. Mr. Kudlow also writes that unions are pressuring pension managers to oppose Social Security modernization. Some of my commenters who worry so much about hypocrisy should take a look.

I've written before that Hillary is unelectable due to her incredibly high negatives among conservatives, but I also was one of the first to say that the adoration she enjoys from the far left will enable her to take moderate positions that no other Democrat could get away with. If Hillary wants to win in 2008 she doesn't need to win over a huge number of Republicans, she just needs to lower her negatives so that the right doesn't turn out in droves just to vote against her.

Another Republican, Representative Peter T. King of Nassau County, struck a similar note in recent interview. He described Mrs. Clinton as a celebrity senator who is willing to take a subordinate role on an issue she cares about, rather than allowing her involvement to become a distraction.

For instance, Mr. King recalled an occasion when Mrs. Clinton suggested that he find another senator to be a co-sponsor of legislation that would benefit New York, because she figured that her presence on the bill would fire up the opposition. "There are very few politicians in public life who have the composure to step back, knowing that they will win in the end," he said.

Mr. King also said that Mrs. Clinton had been anything but the liberal extremist that her conservative critics accused her of being. "I'm not going to vote for her and probably disagree with her on 70 percent of the issues," he said. "But I think that too many Republicans who criticize Hillary Clinton sound like Michael Moore criticizing George Bush."

The New York Times article couldn't have been better framed if Hillary had written it herself. Will she be able to completely reinvent her leftist-lunatic persona over the next few years without losing the love of the other leftist lunatics? If so, then it'll be the Republicans sounding like hate-machines in 2008, just like the Dems did in 2000 and 2004.

Update:
This sort of thing doesn't seem likely to help her chances.

One of the main arguments you'll hear against President Bush's plan to modernize Social Security is that the "transition costs" will be too high. However, most economists -- including Edward Prescott, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economics -- recognize that the "tranistion costs" are a myth; all that will happen is that instead of borrowing from the Social Security trust fund, as it does now, the federal government will have to borrow from another source once SS is modernized.

"We hear a lot about transition costs," Arizona State University professor Edward Prescott, 2004 winner of the Bank of Sweden Nobel Prize in Economics, said. "But I'm going to use some economic jargon, not 'political accounting' jargon.

"There are no transition costs," Prescott said at the Cato Institute Feb, 9. "Re-labeling debt is not a cost." ...

Prescott and Hunter are two of a growing number of economists who argue that the so-called "transition costs" are actually an accounting fiction, a misrepresentation of the current status of Social Security by those who do not want to see the system changed.

Basically, the FICA money that isn't immediately paid out to SS recipients is immediately "borrowed" by the federal government and spent on other things. Once SS is modernized, the government won't be able to "borrow" that FICA money, so they'll have to borrow money from somewhere else. That won't be new borrowing though, it will just changing the type of borrowing, so there really is no transition cost. It's a myth.

The so-called "transition costs" are, according to Hunter, really just the money Congress has to find elsewhere to pay for current Social Security benefits, the other programs it has been funding with FICA tax revenues and the amount already borrowed from the Social Security "Trust Fund."

Under a partially privatized Social Security system, "the balance sheet looks better because they're borrowing less money," Hunter explained. "But, in the short term, because they're not borrowing the [FICA tax] money, that means they've got a cash flow problem.

"If the government turns around and borrows money to alleviate that cash flow problem, it hasn't borrowed 'new money,'" Hunter continued, "because, by putting the [FICA tax] money in personal accounts, it's borrowed a dollar less [from current taxpayers]. Now, if it turns around and borrows a dollar [from another source] to cover the cash flow problem, all it's done is to replace that dollar in debt.

"In other words," Hunter concluded, "it's substituted one form of debt for another."

If it's hard to understand, it's because the government has been screwing us with Social Security for decades and purposefully obfuscating the program.

I'll be really surprised if 2008 is Rice v. Hillary. Drudge is running a top story about Geena Davis playing the president on some new ABC show, and maybe I'm totally sexist, but it just looks absurd. I'm hesitant to write about this because I don't want to get deluged with hatemale, but I just don't think having a female for president would be a good idea.

I know, I know, lots of other countries do it. Margaret Thatcher did a good job for the UK, from what I know. Eh. Maybe my discomfort is due to my own experiences working for women: not good. I've worked for women employers and supervisors and professors in the past, and most of them have been very hard to deal with and not particularly effective. Not all of them, but most.

Maybe it has to do with Rice and Hillary. Rice will probably make a great Secretary of State, but she's pro-choice and holds some other positions that I just wouldn't want in a president. Hillary, of course, is straight out. Maybe if there were a female candidate I really liked I wouldn't feel so reluctant. Maybe I'm a misogynist pig.

Mostly I'm writing this because I'd like to be convinced that my gut reaction is wrong. And anyway, it's not like I'd vote against Rice if the Democrats nominate a man instead of Hillary.

The libertarian Cato Institute has graded the governors that it thinks are likely to run for president in 2008.

Colorado Gov. Bill Owens (R) leads the pack of governors eyeing a 2008 presidential run when it comes to small government, according to a new study from the Cato Institute.

The libertarian-leaning think tank’s Fiscal Policy Report Card scored governors on an A-to-F scale based primarily on whether they cut taxes and spending or raised them over the past two years. Owens was the only potential presidential contender to receive an A. Not far behind, with a B grade, was a Democrat, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

Last among the ’08 possible contenders was Virginia Gov. Mark Warner (D), who pushed a $1.5 billion tax increase through the commonwealth’s GOP-controlled Legislature last year. Warner received a D. None of the potential White House aspirants got an F grade.

I'm pleased that my own Governor Arnold received the highest rating, but he will of course not be running for president. I'll be happy if he can just keep our military bases from closing, which neither Governor Davis nor Governor Wilson was very successful at.