Politics, Government & Public Policy: December 2007 Archives
In 2004 Phillip Longman wrote an article about declining birthrates around the world with a lot of data and many ideas. I don't agree with all his speculations or proposals, but he did mention a really intriguing idea for solving the both the Social Security low fertility problems of the United States in one fell swoop:
Governments must also relieve parents from having to pay into social security systems. By raising and educating their children, parents have already contributed hugely (in the form of human capital) to these systems. The cost of their contribution, in both direct expenses and forgone wages, is often measured in the millions. Requiring parents also then to contribute to payroll taxes is not only unfair, but imprudent for societies that are already consuming more human capital than they produce.
This proposal is much more logical than a straight tax credit. The Social Security deduction should vary from year to year based on current population projections -- that way we won't have to fine-tune the incentive once it starts working.
Maybe someone with more knowledge of history can help me, but my impression is that women tend to rise to higher ranks in parliamentary governments than in governments that split executive and legislative power between two branches (like the US does). I can think of many female prime ministers, but I can only think of a few female presidents (any in a government with strong presidential powers?).
Similarly, women have thrived in America's Congress but none have yet made it to the presidency. Hillary Clinton is the closest yet, but I personally don't think she has a chance at winning (unless she can run against Huckabee perhaps).
On the other hand, America has plenty of female governors who wield a reasonable amount of power -- but don't have any responsibility for foreign relations.
Is my impression wrong, or if it's true is there some reason for it? The only thing I can think of is that executive power parliamentary systems is wielded by members who gradually rise through the ranks through seniority, whereas in presidential elections seniority can actually work against you (voters always wanting "change").
My BS-ometer goes off whenever Democrats claim to base their policy preferences on "the children" or the welfare of "future generations". From the House Committee on Ways and Means we get this complaint over the President's tactics that forced the Democrats to patch the Alternative Minimum Tax without increasing taxes elsewhere (though nothing prevents the Democrats from cutting spending and thereby staying true to "pay-as-you-go").
Today, the U.S. House of Representatives took an important step to prevent 23 million Americans from receiving an average $2,000 tax increase per family because of the Alternative Minimum Tax.While the precise nature of the legislation—providing tax relief without adhering to the principle of “pay-as-you-go†(PAYGO)—was not the preferred option of House Democrats, allowing the AMT to eat away at incomes of middle-class families was something that the Democrats could not let happen.
The Democrats objection to waiving PAYGO is simple: Our children and grandchildren should not have to pay for tax cuts we give ourselves. The Republican solution of waiving PAYGO seems easy only because the people who ultimately incur tax increases—our children and grandchildren—don’t vote. ...
The Administration’s very clever and deceptive trick has left House Democrats in the difficult position of choosing between American taxpayers and future generations.
Considering that these same Democrats have absolutely no problem with murdering more than 1,000,000 of "our children and grandchildren" annually in the womb, I find their complaints here to be disingenuous at best. If members of "future generations" don't deserve enough consideration to have their very lives protected, why should we worry about how our tax laws will affect them?
The LA Times has a pretty cool-looking primary tracker. Next year should be pretty exciting!
Over the weekend I wrote about how dishonest reporting of Democrats' "pay-as-you-go" policy was concealing the true intentions of the majority party, and today's WSJ editorial basically says the same thing in a longer form.
Senate Democrats gave up on "paygo," as it's called, when they realized they lacked the votes to offset the $50.6 billion cost of protecting more than 20 million middle-class taxpayers from getting whacked by the Alternative Minimum Tax this year. They've spent the year floating all kinds of tax increases to make up the difference. But in the end they passed an AMT relief bill without a penny to pay for it. Paygo is now pay gone.We should stress that this is the right decision for the economy and the federal budget. The AMT was never supposed to hit the middle class, and it only does so now because the Democrats who designed it failed to index it for inflation and raised AMT rates under Bill Clinton in 1993. With the economy in a slowdown, the last thing anyone needs now is a tax hike. The budget deficit is a little above 1% of GDP, which is below the 25-year average, and should remain so as long as the economy keeps growing.
But paygo shouldn't be allowed to expire without everyone kicking sand on its grave. That's because it has been nothing but a confidence game from the very start. Paygo doesn't apply to domestic discretionary spending, and it doesn't restrain spending increases under current law in entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid. Its main goals are to make tax cutting all but impossible, while letting Democrats pretend to favor "fiscal discipline," a la Ms. Pelosi's boast above.
Not only did Democrats and their allies in the press misrepresent "paygo", they also evaded the policy completely whenever it would have restrained their spending.
In fact, the paygo farce has been unfolding all year. Since the day they took the gavel, Democrats have been using gimmick after gimmick to evade it. The Schip bill for health care, for example, includes a spending "cliff" that disguises its actual cost. It assumes spending would rise to $14 billion in 2012, but then pretends the costs would fall to less than half that level in 2013--which just so happens to fall outside the five-year budget scoring window. Some $60 billion in spending over the next 10 years were hidden through this ploy.
"Paygo" has always been a farce, but you'd never have known that if you only paid attention to the mainstream media.
Disingenuous journalists help disingenuous Congressional Democrats when they report "pay-as-you-go" at face value.
After 11 months of insisting that all major programs be paid for with tax increases or spending cuts elsewhere, Senate Democratic leaders acknowledged Thursday they cannot persuade enough Republicans to join them. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., reluctantly allowed a vote on a long-debated middle-class tax cut that would add billions of dollars to the deficit because it is not offset elsewhere.
As everyone knows, Democrats don't propose spending cuts, so "pay-as-you-go" really means tax increases exclusively. By failing to report the truth about "pay-go" Charles Babington reveals either the shallowness of his political understanding or his collusion with the Democrats, take your pick.
So say our vaunted intelligence services. I haven't commented yet on the recent revelations from the National Intelligence Estimate because I wanted to read and process the information. Despite characterizations by Democrats, it seems to me that the NIE says more about the incompetency of our intelligence services than it does about President Bush.
Twice now, President Bush's public assertions about threats of weapons of mass destruction—his prewar warnings of weaponry in Iraq and his warnings about the development of nuclear weapons in Iran—have been undermined by subsequent intelligence reports.
But the warnings themselves were based on intelligence reports generated by the same idiots who later issued the reports that undermined the president. It's not like President Bush has any sort of first-hand knowledge about Middle Eastern WMDs, he relies on America's intelligence agencies. If the new report undermines the previous one, that's not his fault -- except insofar as President Bush has been unable or unwilling to really reform our pathetic intelligence services.
Among the questions facing the president is at what point he knew the intelligence community was beginning to change its mind on Iran. Bush saw the new report on Iran for the first time last week, he said Tuesday, though Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell had advised him in August that a revised assessment was coming.
Bush lied!!!!!!!!!!
Or, maybe it can take a few months to verify important information. Before the President stands up in front of the American people and changes our stance towards our enemy, it would be nice to spend some time being sure.
As it is, I do not have "high confidence" in the accuracy of the new NIE. I sincerely hope it's right and that Iran isn't developing nuclear weapons, because at this point it seems clear that President Bush will punt the Iranian problem to his successor. If the NIE is right, it's very good news for America and for the world, so let's take a little time to appreciate that.
