http://blog.heritage.org/2012/02/22/morning-bell-religious-liberty-under-attack/ | The controversy over the Obama Administration’s anti-conscience mandate and the fight for religious liberty only serves to highlight the inherent flaws in Obamacare. This conflict is a natural result of the centralization laid out under Obamacare and will only continue until the law is repealed in full.
I am an avid reader of the National Review and I remember watching those famous debates at Harvard between John Kenneth Galbraith and William Buckley. You probably were at some of those debates. Below is a portion of an article that talks about your recent State of the Union address:
VERONIQUE DERUGY
President Obama’s State of the Union address presented his top priorities for the coming year: mandates, regulations, taxes, and spending.
Ladies and Gentlemen, tighten your seatbelt, because the era of big government isn’t over.
We got it all: the troops, the children, goods made in America — clean energy and cars alike — the middle class, Buffet’s secretary, safe food, clean water, and college for all.
And unlike last year, the president didn’t have a Sputnik moment.
But if there were ever a time to get outraged and be completely and totally disgusted, that time is now.
After running up the three largest deficits in U.S. history (President Bush shares some responsibility for the deficit, of course, but Obama is the president now and has been for almost four years), adding $4.6 trillion to the national debt and failing to fulfill his promises about the recovery, and bailing out homeowners, car companies, banks and many others, the president made no real mention of the need to seriously reduce government spending. Worst, after the United States got downgraded last summer, after witnessing the consequences in Europe of decades of government spending, the president made no real efforts to address the idea that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid need to be reformed. Instead, the president promised that he would double down on the policies that have failed us in the last three years.
The president repeated a few times tonight that the United States isn’t in decline (voters disagree with him, by the way). But his denial shouldn’t distract us from what needs to happen. Entitlement programs must be reformed — so that we stop pushing more debt onto our children; so that our credit rating doesn’t get downgraded again; so that we continue to attract capital into the U.S. (and not just because the EU is in terrible shape).
As for Governor Mitch Daniels’ response: I liked much of what I heard. But I have to ask: Would mention of reforming entitlements have taken place if he was running for president or if the response to the SOTU had been given by Romney, Gingrich, Boehner, or Cantor?
— Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your committment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
Dan Mitchell, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, speaks at Moving Forward on Entitlements: Practical Steps to Reform, NTUF’s entitlement reform event at CPAC, on Feb. 11, 2011.
This testimony was delivered on September 20, 2011.
Rising Spending Reduces Growth
Let’s take a look at how federal spending damages the economy over the long-run. Federal spending is financed by extracting resources from current and future taxpayers. The resources consumed by the government cannot be used to produce goods in the private marketplace. For example, the engineers needed to build a $10 billion government high-speed rail project are taken away from building other products in the economy. The $10 billion rail project creates government-connected jobs, but it also kills $10 billion worth of private activities.
Indeed, the private sector would actually lose more than $10 billion in this example. That is because government spending and taxing creates “deadweight losses,” which result from distortions to working, investment, and other activities. The CBO says that deadweight loss estimates “range from 20 cents to 60 cents over and above the revenue raised.”19 Harvard University’s Martin Feldstein thinks that deadweight losses “may exceed one dollar per dollar of revenue raised, making the cost of incremental governmental spending more than two dollars for each dollar of government spending.”20 Thus, a $10 billion high-speed rail line would cost the private economy $20 billion or more.
The government uses a “leaky bucket” when it tries to help the economy. Stanford University’s Michael Boskin, explains: “The cost to the economy of each additional tax dollar is about $1.40 to $1.50. Now that tax dollar … is put into a bucket. Some of it leaks out in overhead, waste, and so on. In a well-managed program, the government may spend 80 or 90 cents of that dollar on achieving its goals. Inefficient programs would be much lower, $.30 or $.40 on the dollar.”21 Texas A&M University’s Edgar Browning comes to similar conclusions about the magnitude of the government’s leaky bucket: “It costs taxpayers $3 to provide a benefit worth $1 to recipients.”22
The larger the government grows, the leakier the bucket becomes. On the revenue side, tax distortions rise rapidly as marginal tax rates rise.23 On the spending side, funding is allocated to activities with ever lower returns as the government expands. Figure 4 illustrates the consequences of the leaky bucket. On the left-hand side, tax rates are low and the government delivers useful public goods such as crime reduction. Those activities create high returns, so per-capita income initially rises as the government grows.
As the government expands further, it engages in less productive activities. The marginal return from government spending falls and then turns negative. On the right-hand side of the figure, average income falls as the government expands. Government in the United States — at 41 percent of GDP — is almost certainly on the right-hand side of this figure. In a 2008 book on federal fiscal policy, Professor Browning concludes that today’s welfare state reduces GDP — or average U.S. incomes — by about 25 percent.24 That would place us substantially to the right in Figure 4, and it suggests that major federal spending cuts would boost incomes over time.
19 Congressional Budget Office, “Budget Options,” February 2001, p. 381. 20 Martin Feldstein, “How Big Should Government Be?” National Tax Journal, vol. 50, no. 2, June 1997, pp. 197-213. 21 Michael Boskin, “A Framework for the Tax Reform Debate,” in Frontiers of Tax Reform, ed. Michael Boskin (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1996), p. 14. 22 Edgar K. Browning, Stealing From Ourselves: How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2008), p. 179. 23 Deadweight losses rise more than proportionally as tax rates rise. 24 See Edgar K. Browning, Stealing From Ourselves: How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2008), p. 188
Obama’s Energy Policies Hurt the Poor and Middle Class the Most – Romina Boccia
This SOTU, President Obama called for doubling down on the clean energy industry through energy tax credits and a Clean Energy Standard. The President’s focus on costly and unreliable “clean” energy at the expense of more affordable and reliable energy is cutting deep into Americans’ pocketbooks.
Lower-income households who spent a much larger portion of their income on energy, and senior citizens who have the highest per-capita residential energy consumption, are hurt the most by policies that increase the price of energy. Meanwhile, only the better off are able to place taxpayer subsidized solar panels on their roofs.
The President’s latest decision, to reject the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline offers little relief for those who feel the pain of high gas prices at the pump. At record gasoline prices which are only expected to rise even further, it’s difficult to grasp why the President decided against increasing our energy supplies from our Canadian ally, unless it was a ploy to blame Republicans.
Furthermore, despite a failed attempt at passing economically harmful cap and trade legislation, the President’s administration continues to push forward with questionable environmental policies which curb production of one of the most affordable and abundant energy sources in the United States: coal.
In particular, Environmental Protection Agency regulations are poised to send electricity prices skyrocketing as older plants are forced to shut down and others must undergo expensive upgrades to comply with a litany of rules.
An energy policy which increases the availability of reliable and affordable energy is one that works for all Americans.
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your committment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
On Energy, the Two Words Obama Didn’t Say, Say the Most – Nick Loris
President Obama omitted two words from his State of the Union speech, but there’s two words that speak volumes about the president’s direction for America’s energy policy. Keystone and Solyndra.
Oil and Gas Production
With respect to oil and gas production, President Obama ignores the bad administrative decisions and takes credit where credit’s not due. He chose not to mention his rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline that would have created jobs immediately and brought much needed oil from Canada to Gulf refineries – all with minimal environmental risk. Despite broad support for the pipeline, the President catered to special interests and rejected the permit.
President Obama did, however, recognize that we need more domestic oil and gas drilling is a positive sign, but recognition does not create jobs. Yes, oil and gas production is the U.S. is up but only as a result of increased production on private lands in North Dakota, Texas and Alaska. On federal lands and offshore, the story is much grimmer. Yes, imports for oil are down but because demand is weaker in this recessionary environment.
It wouldn’t be a State of the Union without President Obama saying that we need to invest in clean energy. But the word “invest” in this sense means borrow and spend and this free lunch thinking is no way to grow our economy. The fundamental problem is that these taxpayer-funded programs do not create jobs; it reallocates them. The opportunity cost of government spending is the lost labor and capital extracted from other sectors (ones that do not need government support) of the economy to artificially support the politically preferred sectors of the economy. No evidence exists to suggest that the government has better knowledge to make investment decisions or to commercialize technologies when the private sector chooses to bypass these opportunities. If there is a role for alternative sources in America’s energy portfolio, it should be dictated by price and competition, not government handouts. As evidenced by Solyndra, subsidies lead to companies spending resources lobbying to create a relationship with government officials that will secure cash grants, tax credits or mandates to benefit their business while crowding out others. It’s this cronyism that denigrates Americans’ view of both government and capitalism. The solution is to end subsidies for all energy sources.
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your committment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
What about nuclear energy, Mr. President? –Jack Spencer
The President insists that he wants to build an economy using American energy resources to create American jobs. Nuclear energy might be a good place to start. America would need approximately 50 new plants over the next 30 years just to maintain the percentage of our electricity that is currently produced by nuclear power. Each of these plants requires around 2400 workers to build and then another 700 are required to operate each plant. Then there are all the workers needed to manufacture the plant components, to produce the fuel, and to manage the waste.
The President, at least rhetorically, understands the potential of nuclear energy. It creates jobs and produces the clean, domestic energy that he claims to want. But when it comes to policies to allow an expansion on nuclear energy, this Administration has fallen short in two regards.
First, like with most other energy related policies, his nuclear energy policies consolidate power in Washington and reject the value of the free market. He wants his bureaucrats to pick what technologies go forward and then to decide which projects get financed.
Second, with his decision to abandon the Yucca Mountain project, the President has moved the nation further from a nuclear waste solution than it has been for three decades. By killing Yucca without any back up plan, the President has introduced immense uncertainty into the long-term viability of American nuclear power.
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your committment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
The so-called War on Poverty has failed. Making government bigger and creating more federal redistribution programs has been bad news for taxpayers. But the welfare state also has been a disaster for the less fortunate, creating a flypaper effect that makes it difficult for people to lead independent and self-reliant lives. This Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation video shows how the poverty rate was falling after World War II — but then stagnated once the federal government got involved. www.freedomandprosperity.org
This testimony was delivered on September 20, 2011.
Baseline Projections Are Optimistic
In support of building a large “fiscal buffer,” policymakers should recognize that both short-term and long-term CBO projections are optimistic in various ways. Perhaps the future will include some positive budget surprises, but the big risk factors seem to be on the negative side.
In CBO’s baseline, federal deficits fall substantially over the coming decade, partly due to changes under the recent Budget Control Act. However, spending will be higher than projected if:
Policymakers lift caps in the Budget Control Act.
Policymakers launch new spending programs or respond to unforeseen crises or wars.
Higher interest rates push up interest costs, which is a risk that gets magnified as federal debt grows larger.
A major recession causes large cost increases in programs sensitive to economic cycles, such as unemployment insurance.
Policymakers respond to another recession with costly new “stimulus” plans. The persistence of Keynesian policy ideas in Washington is an important risk to the outlook for federal debt.
There are likely to be negative shocks in coming years that we don’t foresee. Consider that in its January 2008 budget outlook, CBO projected that U.S. economic growth would slow in 2008 but then rebound fairly strongly in subsequent years.15 CBO discussed the risk of a recession, but didn’t foresee the calamity that was already starting. The upshot is that policymakers should take a conservative approach and build a “fiscal buffer” with large spending cuts now before another recession causes the deficit to soar again.
CBO’s long-range projections — such as the “alternative fiscal scenario” (AFS) shown in Figure 1 — are also optimistic. In its basic projections, CBO does not factor in the negative effects of rising spending, debt, or taxes on GDP after 2021, but it does do that in a separate analysis.16 If spending actually followed the course shown in Figure 1, CBO estimates that GDP in 2035 would be up to 10 percent less than shown in the AFS, and GNP would be up to 18 percent less. In turn, spending-to-GDP and debt-to-GDP ratios would be worse than usually shown in long-range budget charts.
Under the AFS, rising deficit spending could reduce American incomes. The CBO finds that real GNP per capita could stop growing in the late 2020s, and then start falling after that. In a historic reversal, future generations of Americans would become successively poorer.
The way to ensure our continued prosperity is to cut federal spending and reduce debt. In a 2010 analysis, the CBO compared the high-spending AFS with Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” plan.17 The Ryan plan would restrain federal spending to roughly current levels for the next few decades, and then start reducing it. By the late 2020s, GNP per capita under the Ryan plan would begin rising above the flat and then falling levels under the AFS. By the late 2050s, GNP per capita would be 70 percent higher under the Ryan plan than under the AFS.18
15 Congressional Budget Office, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2008 to 2018,” January 2008, Chapter 2. 16 See Chapter 2 in Congressional Budget Office, “Long-Term Budget Outlook,” June 2011. 17 Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf letter to Paul Ryan, January 27, 2010, http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10851/01-27-Ryan-Roadmap-Letter.pdf. 18 Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf letter to Paul Ryan, January 27, 2010, p. 16.
More Job Training Programs on Top of All the Other Redundant and Ineffective Programs – David B. Muhlhausen, Ph.D.
Tonight, President Obama called for the federal government to engage in new job training and employment initiatives, especially for the hard to employ.
Before Congress signs off on any new initiatives, we must recognize that President Obama wants to add several new programs on top of the 47 job-training programs already operated by the federal government. Further complicating the matter, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has concluded that there is little evidence that these programs are effective.
When federal job training programs have been evaluated using random assignment to job training and control groups, these scientifically rigorous evaluations overwhelmingly find that these programs are ineffective. For example, Job Corps, the federal government’s flagship program for hard-to-employ youth, has been found to be ineffective on several measures:
Compared to non-participants, Job Corps participants were less likely to earn a high school diploma (7.5 percent versus 5.3 percent);
Compared to non-participants, Job Corps participants were no more likely to attend or complete college;
Four years after participating in the evaluation, the average weekly earnings of Job Corps participants was only $22 more than the average weekly earnings of the control group; and
Employed Job Corps participants earned $0.22 more in hourly wages compared to employed control group members.
Instead of adding new programs to an already bloated job training system, the President and Congress should stop wasting taxpayer dollars by terminating these programs.
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your committment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
I am an avid reader of the National Review and I remember watching those famous debates at Harvard between John Kenneth Galbraith and William Buckley. You probably were at some of those debates. Below is a portion of an article that talks about your recent State of the Union address:
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
This was a 2012 campaign speech poorly disguised as a State of the Union Address. But mostly, it was incoherent.
How far we have come in this mishmash from seas rising and temperatures cooling! Obama took credit for things that happened over his opposition, kept silent about his failures (especially the debt), omitted his “successes” (Obamacare) and largely made things up as he hoped and changed his way through. No one listening to Obama would ever dream that we are up to $16 trillion in debt, facing an implosion of Medicare and Social Security, and have a nonexistent housing market, high unemployment, and soaring gas and food prices.
Some details: The war on terror and Iraq are praised for having brought results, but unmentioned is that Obama once opposed all the very protocols and policies that he inherited — and now embraces.
September 2008 was just yesterday, frozen in amber as Obama’s talisman that wards off all responsibility for 2009–2012; the three-and-a-half years in between never happened.
The Democratic Congress’s $4 trillion-borrowing between 2009–2011did nothing; one year of a Republican House wanting a stop to the debt apparently means killing jobs.
The evil Chinese found a way to make things more cheaply than we did and must stop it.
Given soaring gasoline prices and Solyndra, green was sorta then, and natural gas is sorta now. So Obama takes credit for oil and gas production, but to do so shamelessly must tell untruths: Gas production is up only because of someone else’s private genius utilizing fracking and horizontal drilling — in spite of Obama’s cutting back on 40 percent of federal leases, EPA bullying, cap-and-trade utopianism, and his administration’s canceling things like Keystone — and gasoline demand is down because his economy has been so bad the last three years.
Wall Street greed must be watched. That’s why Obama has hired three straight Wall Street multi-millionaires who made their fortunes on Wall Street — much of it from the Freddie/Fannie bubble he serially faults others for.
Losing millions of jobs between 2009–12 was all Bush’s fault, gaining back less than half of them was all to the credit of Obama.
If the Hoover Dam is now Obama’s model, then canceling the massive Keystone Pipeline was his missed chance.
Every corporation must pay their fair share — perhaps even non-income-tax-paying Obama pal GE’s Jeffery Immelt?
Schools should be much more flexible — that’s why Obama opposed charter schools and backs teachers’ unions. Dropouts drop out not on their own volition, but because they can’t stay on the premises and therefore won’t be allowed out until they turn 18.
Obama wants job training instead of unemployment entitlements, but that’s why he vastly expanded the latter.
Outsourcing is bad, but we brag on a globalized Siemens when it outsourced European jobs to hire Americans. Somehow Wall Street (without help from Fannie and Freddie insiders and incompetent or risk-taking buyers) forced houses on the innocent who did not know what they were doing.
Illegal aliens somehow dropped in; none willingly broke the law getting or staying here.
Cutting deficits is critical; that is why Obama ran up $6 trillion in four years.
A man who tried to prevent up-and-down votes while was a senator no longer likes that as president.
Reaching out to Syrian dictator Assad and restoring diplomatic relations with him was part of the Obama plan to see him gone.
Reset with Iran was then, threatening it is now.
The worst relationship in history with Israel is really the strongest.
Massive defense cuts are proof of a brilliant Obama new strategic reassessment.
And on and on, with not a word about looming financial insolvency and a ruined health-care system. In Obama’s peasant idea of a limited good, a few bad guys get ahead only by ensuring lots of good guys don’t.
One bright note: In a brief, matter-of-fact rebuttal, Mitch Daniels said more in ten minutes than Obama did in over an hour — in over three years, in fact — and more than all the Republican candidates have said in four months.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of the just-releasedThe End of Sparta. You can reach him by e-mailingauthor@victorhanson.com..
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your committment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
I am an avid reader of the National Review and I remember watching those famous debates at Harvard between John Kenneth Galbraith and William Buckley. You probably were at some of those debates. Below is a portion of an article that talks about your recent State of the Union address:
JOHN HOOD
The president’s State of the Union Address contained the usual list of uncontroversial, small-bore ideas. It also contained some surprisingly good rhetoric, such as this passage: “Millions of Americans who work hard and play by the rules every day deserve a government and a financial system that do the same. It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody.”
If only President Obama really believed that. In the very same speech, he defended his administration’s past bailouts and handouts, and called for more.
But the real thrust of the speech came at the end, when Obama made his pitch for such ideas as higher taxes on the wealthy and a reorganization plan for the federal government. Once again, the current president invited comparison with Franklin Roosevelt.
In 1937, with his tax and regulatory policies kicking in to trigger another sharp economic downturn, President Roosevelt resorted to two main arguments to defend himself: (1) greedy capitalists were sabotaging the economy, and (2) he still lacked the power necessary to advance his agenda in Washington.
Roosevelt prevailed with his court-packing scheme to intimidate the conservative Supreme Court into capitulating on the constitutionality of Obamaca . . . – er, I mean the New Deal. But Roosevelt’s other initiative, a reorganization plan designed to increase his power vis-à-vis the Congress, didn’t fare so well. Led by Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and Democratic senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina, among others, a bipartisan coalition arose to defeat the bill in 1938. More than 100 Democrats crossed party lines to vote it down. That fall, Roosevelt suffered one of the worst midterm election defeats in American political history.
Now we have President Obama giving a State of the Union address in which he complains about undertaxed capitalists and calls for a reorganization plan that, no matter how attractive it may sound on the surface, is likely to transfer more power to the executive branch.
Who will challenge Obama’s politics of envy and block his latest grab for power? Who will play the role of Vandenberg or Bailey? Of the presidential candidates still auditioning for the part, none has yet proved he possesses the mix of personality and principle necessary to the task.
― John Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation, a public-policy think tank in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your committment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
The Daily Hatch 