Politics, Government & Public Policy: June 2013 Archives
One of the biggest criticisms of sequestration was that the cuts were "dumb", like a "meat-cleaver" rather than a "scalpel". However, I always thought this bluntness was a feature not a bug; based on initial results it appears that I was right as usual! Sequestration is squeezing everything and eliminating a lot of waste. Read for details of wasteful spending eliminated, but here's an example:
The Justice Department, for instance, cut more than $300 million in what it called "expired balances." In essence, this was money that had been allocated to the department in past years but wasn't spent. When those years ended, the money expired; without Congress's permission, it generally couldn't be spent on anything new.But, with Congress's permission, it could still be "cut."
So, instead of saving money by furloughing FBI agents and prison guards, the department lost only what it wasn't free to spend anyway.
Well great, now the "expired balances" are gone. Success! Here's another:
The [Department of Homeland Security], for example, cut $7.8 million for a grant program that helped prepare for disasters. But it told Congress that this program had $36 million waiting in the bank, "neither dedicated to a project nor an activity." And it said the program was duplicative, anyway. Other federal programs were already doing the same thing. "There is no impact from this reduction because of the duplication," the department told Congress.
Do you think that duplicate program would ever have died without sequestration? Nope!
Uniform, "dumb" cuts force people to scrutinize everything rather than letting Congress make politically-motivated horse-trades that are usually designed to benefit rent-seeking insiders.
The Texas legislature has failed to pass a law banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy due to a Democrat filibuster featuring a legislator who had a baby as a teenager.
Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, spent most of the day staging an old-fashioned filibuster, attracting wide support, including a mention from President Barack Obama's campaign Twitter account. Her Twitter following went from 1,200 in the morning to more than 20,000 by Tuesday night."My back hurts. I don't have a lot of words left," Davis said when it was over, and she was showered with cheers by activists who stayed at the Capitol to see her. "It shows the determination and spirit of Texas women."
Determination to kill babies, I guess.
Democrats chose Davis, of Fort Worth, to lead the effort because of her background as a woman who had her first child as a teenager and went on to graduate from Harvard Law School.
How awful would it be to be Davis' child, knowing that she would have preferred to abort you? Ugh.
A statistical analysis shows that the IRS suppression of the various Tea Party groups may have been sufficient to win the 2012 election for Obama. The corruption of the IRS is an embarrassment to the country. I believe that only the institutional death penalty will be capable of restoring Americans' faith in our tax collection system.
In a new research paper, Andreas Madestam (from Stockholm University), Daniel Shoag and David Yanagizawa-Drott (both from the Harvard Kennedy School), and I set out to find out how much impact the Tea Party had on voter turnout in the 2010 election. We compared areas with high levels of Tea Party activity to otherwise similar areas with low levels of Tea Party activity, using data from the Census Bureau, the FEC, news reports, and a variety of other sources. We found that the effect was huge: the movement brought the Republican Party some 3 million-6 million additional votes in House races. That is an astonishing boost, given that all Republican House candidates combined received fewer than 45 million votes. It demonstrates conclusively how important the party's newly energized base was to its landslide victory in those elections, and how worried Democratic strategists must have been about the conservative movement's momentum.The Tea Party movement's huge success was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and a half leading up to the midterm elections volunteering, organizing, donating, and rallying. Much of these grassroots activities were centered around 501(c)4s, which according to our research were an important component of the Tea Party movement and its rise.
The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes-more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012. The data show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5 - 8.5 million votes compared to Obama's victory margin of 5 million.
Cities love to borrow and spend, and they can borrow at low interest rates because bondholders are first in line to get paid when there's a shortage of money. But what happens if the "bond" is severed and unions cut to the front of the line?
Unions seem determined to fight municipal bond market investors over who should shoulder the burden for Detroit's debts, setting up a lose-lose situation for blue politics.If the unions win, it could lead to an implosion in the municipal bond market across the country as lenders realize that money lent to struggling cities may never be paid back. As Walsh notes, this outcome would upend standards that "such bonds are among the safest investments and that for 'general obligation' bonds cities could even be compelled to raise taxes, if that's what it took to make good." This would be disastrous for other cities, which would find it much harder to borrow money, and would likely need to pay exorbitant interest rates to do so.
If the unions lose, however, it would deal a major blow to support from their own members. Detroit's pensioners would begin to wonder why they pay dues to a union that can't guarantee the pensions or benefits they were promised. A similar dynamic all but destroyed unions in the private sector as striking union members saw their jobs shipped away to China.
Thieves fighting over the last scrap of loot.
Ted Cruz is right: it's time to abolish the IRS and institute a simple Flat Tax. Get rid of the corruption by simplifying the system.
"I think we ought to abolish the IRS and instead move to a simple flat tax where the average American can fill out taxes on postcard," he explained in a Fox News interview over the weekend. "Put down how much you earn, put down a deduction for charitable contributions, home mortgage and how much you owe. It ought to be a simple one-page postcard, and take the agents, the bureaucracy out of Washington and limit the power of government."Cruz proposed a flat tax during the 2012 election, but he said he would keep a standard deduction for lower-income earners, as well as deductions for mortgage interest and charitable donations.
