AntiObamaBlog.com » Socialism

Obama’s Seizure and Truman’s

Admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:00:59 +0000

n November 14, 2011, the Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care act. The central question is, What limits does the Constitution — specifically, the Commerce Clause — impose upon the federal government’s exercise of power? This health-care act is the defining legislation of the president’s term, and the issue of limited government is at the very heart of the debate between Obama and his opponents. The political, economic, and constitutional stakes are very high. These arguments before the Court will provide a dramatic — and perhaps even decisive — backdrop for the 2012 election.

Constitutional crises of this magnitude are not without precedent. Indeed, the seeds of this case can be found in the court battles of the 1930s and 1940s, as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation challenged traditional constitutional bounds. Supported by record congressional majorities, FDR and his fellow Democrats passed a blizzard of programs designed to alleviate the economic hardship of the Great Depression — and to alter the very fabric of the U.S. capitalistic system.

The 1932 Democratic platform, largely written by the party’s 1924 nominee, John W. Davis, was a clear statement of conservative, Jeffersonian principles, but FDR abandoned this platform during his first hundred days in office. So radical were the changes that by 1935, conservatives — Democrats and Republicans alike — agreed with Davis when he wrote, “If the structure of this Government is to be preserved, the courts must do it.”

As conservatives looked in desperation to the judiciary for relief, Davis was their logical leader. A highly esteemed former solicitor general under President Wilson, former ambassador to Great Britain, former president of the American Bar Association, and senior partner at one of New York’s premier law firms, Davis commanded respect from all quarters of the political and legal spectrum. As a founder of the bipartisan, anti–New Deal Liberty League in 1934, Davis repeatedly wrote to his supporters, “I believe in the Constitution of the United States; I believe in the division of powers that it makes. I believe in the right of private property, the sanctity and binding power of contracts; the duty of self-help. I am opposed to confiscatory taxation, wasteful expenditure, socialized industry, and a planned economy controlled and directed by government functionaries. I believe these things to be inimical to human liberty and destructive of American ideals.”

Sensing the gravity of the crisis, Davis seized every opportunity and expertly wielded every legal weapon at his disposal to thwart the New Deal. Publicly labeling the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) “a bribe to farmers,” he signed the amicus curiaebrief and successfully led the fight that ultimately resulted in the court’s 6–3 ruling that the AAA was unconstitutional. He successfully opposed the Public Utility Holding Act in the lower courts and led the fight against it within the American Bar Association. Davis personally argued the unconstitutionality of the Frazier-Lemke Bankruptcy Act and the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act before the Supreme Court.

When Roosevelt responded to these courtroom defeats by setting forth his infamous court-packing scheme in 1937, it was Davis who advised the New Deal’s congressional opponents in defeating the measure. By the late 1930s, he had earned the New Dealers’ enduring enmity, and he wore with pride their sobriquet, “Public Enemy Number One.”

During the course of these battles, Davis repeatedly warned that “paternalism fastens its grasp upon the country, and, little by little, the practice of local self-government fades away. Baptize a scheme, even the most fantastic, with a high-sounding and attractive title, and it will elicit the public support.” Of the failure to limit government, he admonished, “Nothing but mischief, to my way of thinking, can come from any government attempting tasks which lie beyond its power to accomplish.” Ever clear about the indivisibility of property rights from human rights, Davis contended, “The two are not antagonistic. History furnishes no instance where the right of man to acquire and hold property has been taken away without the complete destruction of liberty in all its forms.”

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Unions & #OccupyWallStreet Reveal Their Hidden Agenda: A Worldwide Financial Tax

Admin — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:00:13 +0000

From RedState:

If there’s one thing about the Marxists controlling today’s unions, it is that they are

Who Are These Fat-Cat Few at the Top?

Admin — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:00:01 +0000

From NRO Articles:

First lady Michelle Obama the other day railed at “the few at the top,” who do all sorts of bad things. A few months ago, we began hearing of the “1 percent” who are responsible for the current economic mess. “They” apparently make all their money at the expense of the other 99 percent. Are they the same as last year’s villains, who had not paid “their fair share” while making over $200,000 in annual income?

Do they include the greedy doctors, who, the president once asserted, recklessly lop off limbs and yank tonsils for profits? Is my urologist a dreaded one-percenter? He found out what was causing my kidney stones but probably makes good money. Was a nearby farmer one, too? I bet he makes over $200,000 but, like many other growers in this area, has found a way to produce beef and cotton more cheaply and efficiently than farmers in almost any other part of the world, thereby enriching his county, state, and nation.

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Occupying My Time

Admin — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:09:00 +0000

From The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog:

I missed the Occupation of Europe by a few years so I’m
delighted to have an opportunity to Occupy America. Hey, it’s a
start. Today America, tomorrow China!

Critics of Occupy Wall Street (also Boston, Denver,
Oakland, Dubuque, etc.) claim that the protesters have no stated
goal, which could not be further from the truth. The current
movement is a major advance in protests — the first all-purpose
grassroots protest in American history, which very neatly serves
everyone’s purposes — mine anyway.

Former protest marches, sit-ins, love-ins and the like
were much too narrowly focused for me on specific outrages –
segregation, women’s inequality, anti-Vietnam war, that sort of
thing. Good causes, I’m sure, but not enough to get me really fired
up. I was never able to take part in any of them, for one reason or
another (inclement weather, a dental appointment, something always
came up), but the Occupiers have come up with a brilliant catch-all
solution that allows everyone to get anything bugging them off
their chest immediately.

This is a far more efficient way to protest major
problems, and I commend the organizers for coming up with such a
perfect tactic that suits every trouble — one size fits all. Can’t
get a home mortgage loan? Credit card interests rates too high?
Boss not appreciating you? Grocery prices going through the roof?
Spouse refuses to listen to you? Cost of movies and sports events
out of sight? The kids ignoring your advice? Wait time to see a
podiatrist too long? Leaf-blowers and plastic shrink-wrap driving
you nuts?

Folks, if any of those things are bothering you, it’s time
to grab your tent and get yourself down to your neighborhood
Occupiers location. There is one near you. If not, it isn’t too
late to begin your own protest site. Go to Occupiersunited.com to
find out more. Be the first on your block to establish an official
protest area and get on local TV. Learn to become a community
organizer, which could put you on the path to the White House.
Become a talented on-site cook. Perfect your outdoor survival
skills under blizzard conditions. Find new markets for T-shirts,
posters, coffee mugs, and trinkets. Yes, people, great career
opportunities await you!

In the past, as I say, I tended to sit out political
demonstrations of every kind (though I did once put a “Ban the DH”
sticker on my bumper), but the Occupy Whatever people showed me
that even I, a lifelong non-protester, could be roused into action
by taking a stand against whatever riled me — and, to my delight,
I found that not necessarily just one cause, but several, could be
taken care of in one fell swoop. Talk about catharsis.

So I made a list of stuff that’s been bugging me lately
and was surprised how long it was — 136 matters in all, starting
with noisy TV commercials. When I contacted officials at Occupy
Main Street (a wholly owned subsidiary of Occupy Wall Street), they
said that there was a limit of a dozen issues per month that one
person could protest against. “Otherwise, this thing could really
get out of hand,” they emailed me.

“We prefer major issues,” they said, “but whatever’s
troubling you may be included. The more the merrier. We have a
fairly lax policy here.” They said it wasn’t necessary for me to
run my issues past them. “Just show up and hand out fliers. Hey, it
gets you out of the house, and of course, like in the ’60s, it’s a
great way to meet girls.”

“That’s a good enough provocation right there,” I
said.

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Ryan Schools Obama on America

Admin — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:08:00 +0000

From The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog:

At the Heritage Foundation last week, House Budget Committee
Chairman Paul Ryan demonstrated why he doesn’t need to be running
for President to be framing the debate for 2012. He delivered there
on October 26 a breathtakingly beautiful speech on Saving the
American Idea, which defines the Spirit of 2012.

He began, “The mission of the Heritage Foundation is to
promote the principles of free enterprise, limited government,
individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong
national defense. These are the principles that define the American
idea. And this mission has never been timelier, because these
principles are very much under threat from policies here in
Washington.”

Ryan, a disciple of and former staffer for the late Jack
Kemp, then explained, “What makes America exceptional — what gives
life to the American Idea — is our dedication to the self-evident
truth that we are all created equal, giving us equal rights to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that means
opportunity.”

Since the early 1700s, America has been the land of
opportunity, offering world leading prosperity, stemming from world
leading freedom. And millions and millions of the dispossessed, the
homeless tempest tossed, and their progeny now totaling hundreds of
millions altogether, have voted for that American Dream with their
feet, crossing oceans, deserts, rivers, and mountain ranges to get
here. As I discuss in my recent book, America’s Ticking
Bankruptcy Bomb:

Which leaves the question, why did they come? And why do they
still come?…. Well, it’s not for the Food Stamps, or the public
housing, or even Social Security and Medicare. America’s world
leading prosperity dates all the way back to the early
18th century. The roots of that prosperity can be seen in the
Declaration of Independence, which recognizes the God-given right
of each man and woman to the pursuit of happiness. That is why
they came. They came because America has always been the land of
freedom and prosperity and opportunity. They came because of the
American Dream, that in this nation every man and woman enjoys the
freedom and opportunity to rise to achieve their dreams, regardless
of family background, class, race, or religion.

Ryan frames the question now facing us in 2012: “Have
those periods of unprecedented prosperity in America’s past been
the product of our Founding principles? Or, as some would argue,
have we made it this far only in spite of our outdated values? Are
we still an exceptional nation? Should we even seek to be unique?
Or should we become more like the rest of the world — more
bureaucratic, less hopeful, and less free?”

Or as I write in my book regarding America’s heritage of
world leading prosperity:

Is that over now? Is America just another nation now, like
Greece, as President Obama has suggested? In fact, just like
Greece? Is the American Dream done? Is that what is meant by the
“New Normal”? Or is that just a phrase to provide political cover
for the realities of a new socialism, where everyone as Churchill
explained shares equally in the curses of misery, rather than
unequally in the blessings of capitalism?

Ryan then discussed at Heritage how Obama is answering these
questions for 2012:

To my great disappointment, it appears that the politics of
division are making a big comeback. Many Americans share my
disappointment — especially those who were filled with great hope
a few years ago, when then Senator Obama announced his
candidacy….Do you remember what he said? He said that what’s
stopped us from meeting our greatest challenges is, “the failure of
leadership, the smallness of our politics — the ease with which we
are distracted by the petty and the trivial, our chronic avoidance
of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political
points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working
consensus to tackle big problems.

Imagine if Obama had been true to his political rhetoric
from 2008. Suppose he had been true to his promise that his
economic program would involve a “net spending cut,” several
trillion dollars of wasted unnecessary spending ago. Suppose he had
truly been a non-partisan President working with both parties to
enact a truly effective economic recovery program, like Reagan,
lifting up the poorest of Americans with booming economic
prosperity. Suppose like Ryan, Obama had adopted the inclusive,
pro-growth, prosperity vision of Jack Kemp.

Contrary to the abusive rhetoric of left-wing-extremist
know nothings in media and entertainment, some of them literally
clowns, Obama would be so universally beloved that we would be
clearing space for him on Mt. Rushmore right now. Instead Obama
played us with rhetoric promising prosperity and recovery, when all
along he planned to deliver dependency on his political machine
instead.

Ryan explained his disappointment with Obama in
devastating detail:

Nearly three years into his presidency, look at where we
are now:

Petty and trivial? Just last week, the President told a
crowd in North Carolina that Republicans are in favor of quote
‘dirtier air, dirtier water, and less people with health
insurance.’ Can you think of a pettier way to describe sincere
disagreements between the two parties on regulation and health
care?

Chronic avoidance of tough decisions? The President still
has not put forward a credible plan to tackle the threat of
ever-rising spending and debt, and it’s been over 900 days since
his party passed a budget in the Senate.

A preference for scoring cheap political points instead of
consensus-building? This is the same President who is currently
campaigning against a do-nothing Congress, when in fact, the House
of Representatives has passed over a dozen bills to help get the
economy moving and deal with the debt, only to see the President’s
party kill those bills in the do-nothing Senate.

Note that you never saw President Reagan attacking his opponents
this way. He engineered a truly revolutionary rollback of decades
of runaway liberalism on a bipartisan basis with the House of
Representatives controlled by liberal Democrat majorities for his
entire Presidency.

Obama is so divorced from the reality of America and his
own policies, that he calls essential relief from the regulatory
tsunami he has unleashed on America being for “dirtier air, dirtier
water, and fewer Americans with health insurance.” Do you see yet
why booming economic recovery is now two years overdue, and nowhere
in sight?

The President, indeed, is now denouncing what he calls
“the Republican Congress.” Maybe it is true his Democrat base is so
out of the loop they don’t know that the Democrats have continued
to control the U.S. Senate for going on six years now. But the
President is going to be sorely schooled on Election Day to find
that the great majority of the American people are, in fact, not
that stupid, and cannot be so easily misled by rhetoric that is so
dishonest that it can only be described as dishonorable.

Ryan noted that the House already not only proposed but
passed a 2012 budget this year that would have put the budget on a
path to balance and the economy on the path to prosperity. “But
instead of working together where we agree, the President has opted
for divisive rhetoric and the broken politics of the past. He is
going from town to town, impugning the motives of Republicans,
setting up straw men and scapegoats, and engaging in intellectually
lazy arguments, as he tries to build support for punitive tax hikes
on job creators.”

Exhibit A: between Republicans and moderate Democrats,
there are strong majorities in both houses of Congress for
individual and corporate tax reform exactly as proposed in Ryan’s
House budget. That involves a top 25 percent income tax rate for
families earning over $100,000 a year, with a 10 percent rate below
that, and generous personal exemptions of $10,000 per family
member. And it involves an internationally competitive corporate
tax rate of 25 percent, closer to the rates in Communist China, the
European Union and our neighbor to the north, Canada. These
policies would provide the tax framework for booming economic
growth.

But Obama has done nothing to work on that, even though
his own Simpson-Bowles Commission proposed quite similar reforms.
That Commission was another sham for Obama to pose as a deficit and
spending cutter, when his intentions all along have been just the
opposite. That was yet another example of what I have called
Obama’s calculated deception, taking advantage of what he is sure a
majority at least doesn’t know and won’t find out.

Instead, “The tax increases proposed by Senate Democrats
and endorsed by the President — when combined with the new taxes
in the health care law, and the President’s other tax preferences
– would push the top federal tax rate to roughly 50 percent in
just 14 months, while doing nothing to promote job creation. This
tax increase on so-called millionaires and billionaires would
actually constitute a huge tax hike on the nation’s most successful
small businesses.”

Ryan finally cuts to the heart of the President’s economic
fallacies in saying:

The President has talked a lot about math lately. He’s been
saying that, ‘If we’re not willing to ask those who’ve done
extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit…the math
says…we’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the
poor.’ This is really a stunning assertion from the President. When
you look at the actual math, you quickly realize that the way out
of this mess is to combine economic growth with reasonable spending
restraint. Yet neither of these things factors into the President’s
zero-sum logic.

Ryan here is actually counterproductively polite. In 2007,
before Obama was even elected President, after nearly 40 years of
Reagan Republican tax policy, the top 1 percent of income earners
paid more in federal income taxes than the bottom 95 percent of
income earners combined. The bottom 40 percent of income
earners as a group on net paid exactly zero percent of federal
income taxes. Yet President Obama is running around the country
telling us that Republicans want to put the entire tax burden on
the middle class and the poor.

This rhetoric is far worse than just wrong, or in error.
It is dishonorable calculated deception. It is so divorced from
reality that no other conclusion can be drawn.

Paul Ryan didn’t say the following, but I will. What
understanding Ryan’s speech reveals is that while Barack Obama was
born in Hawaii half a century ago, he is not culturally an
American. Raised during his formative years in the Indonesian
public schools, where he learned to appreciate the beauty of the
Islamic call to prayer, he was kept isolated from mainstream
America the rest of his life. That is why he doesn’t understand the
meaning and beauty of traditional American prosperity, and has no
clue as to how to restore it.

Worse, his model for political machine domination of
America is based not on restoring prosperity, but on fostering
dependency on government. That is why he is not and never has been
on track to restoring booming economic growth, which on the
historical record of America is now long, long overdue. Rush
Limbaugh has been right all along.

Worse still, traditional American prosperity is actually
morally embarrassing to Obama. These are the reasons why it is not
coming back until he and his co-conspirators are removed from
power.

That alienation you feel is because America is under
foreign occupation right now, by the hopelessly outdated
intellectual forces of Marxism rooted in the Eastern Europe of over
100 years ago. America doesn’t need to be transformed. America
needs to be restored. This is a Paul Revere moment, and every one
of you needs to be deputized to bring the word to everyone you
know, so that 2012 may be the year of the Rebirth of
America.

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Hey New York Times, How About Before Government Motors ‘Pays Back’ Obama, They Pay Back the Taxpayers?

Admin — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 22:20:33 +0000

From NewsBusters.org blogs:

The New York Times today has a piece entitled:

Auto Bailout Done, Obama Looks for Payback

Two problems – with just the headline. Which the Times either ignorantly doesn’t know – or knows and willfully ignores. The auto bailout isn’t “done.”

And We the People deserve “payback” a lot more than President Barack Obama does.

American taxpayers still own more than 500 million shares of General Motors (GM) stock.

For us to break even, those shares must be sold at $53 per. They are right now trading at around $25.

Were our shares to be sold today, we’d lose in the neighborhood of $15 billion.

(Hence our website www.BailoutCost.com – which tracks via a Jerry Lewis-esque tote board the amount we’ll lose on the Government Motors bailout.)

Government Motors owes We the People – huge. But the means do exist to make us whole.

GM is currently sitting on about $34 billion in cash. Our total stake in GM is about $26.5 billion.

Why doesn’t GM buy us out at the break even price?

GM will then be free to payback the President – or whatever it is the New York Times and Obama have in mind.

President Obama is campaigning for reelection on the “success” of the GM bailout – as the poster child of his vision of government Crony Socialist interloping in the private sector.

What he and his ilk are instead doing is building on failure – not picking winners and losers, but propping up losers at the expense of winners.

With the myriad of losers bailed out – to the tune of trillions of our coin lost and gone away – GM is an opportunity to just this once actually come out even.

There’s also a Pledge on www.BailoutCost.com:

I will not buy any Government Motors products until they've paid back American taxpayers.

The New York Times knows (or should know) that GM owes us the coin – and has the means to make good on the Pledge.

So do we.

Let’s work to ensure that they do.

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AARP Is Killing Entitlement Reform

Admin — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:11:00 +0000

From The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog:

I’m not a number. I’m not a line item on a budget. And
I’m definitely not a pushover. But I am a voter. So, Washington,
before you even think about cutting my Medicare and Social Security
benefits, here’s a number you should remember: 50 million. We are
50 million seniors who earned our benefits, and you will be hearing
from us — today and on Election Day.

So blusters the retirement-aged gentleman in the AARP’s
new TV
ad.

AARP is not just taking a partisan gamble with this brazen
threat against reformers, most of whom are Republicans; they’re
threatening our whole nation’s financial future. The organization
makes an enormous amount of money from selling insurance policies
that are desirable to its members precisely because the current
system is as it is. Thus, the AARP has a multi-billion dollar
financial interest that is separate from, and arguably contrary to,
the interests of its members.

Indeed, earlier this year the House Ways and Means Health
Subcommittee held a
hearing on whether the overlap between AARP’s
insurance business and its lobbying and advocacy efforts is
appropriate: “there is good reason to question whether AARP is
primarily looking out for seniors or just its own bottom line.” A
report by Republican congressmen Wally Herger (CA) and Dave
Reichert (WA) entitled “Behind
the Veil: The AARP America Doesn’t Know” is a damning
indictment of the organization’s inherent conflicts of interest,
including:

• “AARP is in fact a large, complex and sophisticated
organization with over $2.2 billion in total assets and had
revenues in excess of $1.4 billion in 2009 alone.”

• “AARP is one of the nation’s largest insurance companies
and by far the largest provider of Medicare plans to
seniors.”

• “AARP is also one of the most powerful and active
lobbying groups (in terms of dollars spent) in the
country.”

• “The missions of AARP’s subsidiaries appear in direct
conflict with one another and, as such, it is very difficult to
determine which interests are being represented — those of the
‘non-profit’ or the ‘for-profit’ arm of AARP.”

• “The Democrats’ health care law, which AARP strongly
endorsed, could result in a windfall for AARP that exceeds over $1
billion during the next 10 years.”

It’s not the first time the AARP has run such an ad.
A similar one, with the same
actor, came out in July also emphasizing the group’s 50 million
members as an unveiled threat against members of
Congress.

AARP spokesperson Tiffany Lundquist spent some time
discussing the issue with me, including saying that the ad “was
designed to bring attention to the discussions now taking place in
Washington on proposals which may include cuts to Social Security
and Medicare benefits.”

When asked whether the release of this ad was timed to
influence the discussions of the “Super Committee” that is
attempting to negotiate deficit- and debt-reduction policies to
bring before Congress, Ms. Lundquist responded
“definitely.”

I suggested to Ms. Lundquist that I was unaware of any
plan that would cut benefits for current retirees or even
near-retirees, to which she replied that the AARP has members as
young as fifty and that the organization “works for the interests
of our younger members as well.” Further, she named a particular
idea that the AARP is against: a change in the formula to calculate
Social Security’s annual cost of living adjustment
(“COLA”).

In particular, there has been discussion for many years of
changing which version of the Consumer Price Index is used to
calculate annual benefit increases. It has been suggested that
changing to a “chained
CPI” which
more accurately reflects how people actually spend
money, in part by assuming that people will substitute out of items
which are increasing in price if they can, will slow the growth of
entitlements’ cost.

Going back many years, some of the most credible
economists in America have argued that the current CPI calculations
overstate inflation and thus increase Social Security payments more
than they should, putting tremendous pressure on the federal budget
– not least because each over-generous increase is compounded by
the next. In 1997, Federal Reserve Chairman
Alan Greenspan stated that “We know with near
certainty that the current CPI is off. There’s a very high
probability that the bias ranges from half a percentage point to 1
1/2 percentage points per year.” And Alice Rivlin, a Democrat and
then Vice Chairwoman of the Fed, said that “The way we measure
inflation, the way we measure productivity are flawed,” repeating
in a
2004 book that “Research has shown that the consumer price
index overstates inflation somewhat.”

THE AARP’s POSITION mirrors those of redistributionists
everywhere who argue that slowing the growth of a government
program is the same as cutting it. If your employer gave you a
three percent pay raise this year and then a two percent pay raise
next year, the AARP and almost every Democrat on Capitol Hill would
argue that you got a pay cut in that second year because you were
expecting a bigger raise. At least they should argue that to be
consistent with their sky-is-falling claims about controlling the
growth of entitlement spending.

Ms. Lundquist also repeated the ad’s rhetoric that AARP
members have “earned” their benefits. But what exactly have they
earned? Is any current or future recipient of entitlement payments
due a particular COLA formula? At least two courts have recently
said “no.” In June, judges in Denver and St. Paul, Minnesota, ruled
that beneficiaries of public pensions do not have a right to a
particular cost of living calculation.

In the
Minnesota case, the plaintiffs (beneficiaries of
various Minnesota public retirement systems) claimed that the
state’s move to adjust the formula for post-retirement benefit
calculations were an unconstitutional taking of property. In his
ruling, Judge Gregg Johnson stated that a claimed “expectation that
future adjustments would be made pursuant to a particular formula…
has neither a contractual basis, nor a reasonable basis enforceable
by estoppel principles.”

And in a similar Colorado
case, plaintiffs sued after the state capped COLA
increases (as well as increasing retirement age and other
qualifying requirements) for PERA, the state’s public employee
pension plan, arguing that the changes violated “Contract, Takings,
and Substantive Due Process Clauses of the United States
Constitution.” In his opinion, District Court Judge Robert Hyatt
concluded that “there is no contract right to a specific COLA
formula frozen at retirement for life.” Furthermore, both judges
agreed, as Judge Hyatt put it, that there is a “legitimate
governmental interest of… preserving the solvency of
PERA.”

Responding for this article, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said,
“There is no plan I have seen or supported that would cut benefits
for current retirees. But, the reality is that without reforming
our entitlement programs for future beneficiaries our economy will
collapse. We have an obligation to prevent that from happening.”
Senator Lee, along with Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Lindsey
Graham (R-SC) have introduced legislation
to begin to deal with the cost of Social Security benefits — but
they explicitly exclude those of or fewer than five years from
retirement age from any impact of the changes, and they phase in
those changes for those more than five years from Social Security
eligibility. The trio explained their rationale in a press conference
in April.

Indeed we do have a responsibility to keep from
bankrupting the nation. But the AARP sees no such responsibility as
part of its mission, at least not if it means its current or
future members giving up even one cent of entitlement
increases based on the way those increases are calculated
today.

Ms. Lundquist says that the AARP “wants to see the
entitlement-related budget issues addressed now or later.” But
when asked if the AARP would support plugging our gaping budget
hole in part by reductions in benefit growth for future
retirees, her answer was a resounding no: “Don’t cut
benefits.”

Of course, this came mere moments after she professed the
organization’s desire to see Social Security “strengthened.” When I
suggested that a refusal to accept any benefit cuts (including
slower growth in benefits) ever means that the group can
only be supporting tax increases, the AARP’s spokeswoman responded
coyly, “We haven’t said that.”

And she was equally adamant against Social Security reform
that would include personal accounts, making the usual anti-liberty
econo-nonsense claim that “recent stock market volatility shows
that’s the wrong way to go.”

A cursory look at major mutual fund companies’ offerings
shows a range of funds investing in a range from government bonds
to corporate bonds to blends of bonds and stocks that despite the
wild volatility in the last few months and years have long-term
returns at least double that which Social Security will provide. At
least as importantly, many of them have a “beta” (correlation to a
stock market average, a common measure of risk) much less than one,
meaning an investor in such funds doesn’t have to lie awake at
night worrying about what the market will do tomorrow.

Furthermore, the large fund companies have products
specifically tailored to a person’s expected retirement age, moving
the asset allocation gradually out of stocks and into bonds as a
person nears retirement. Almost any of these funds would be better
than Social Security if your goal is actually to retire with a nest
egg.

Helping create solid nest eggs and self-reliant
retirements for its members is apparently not on the AARP’s “to do”
list.

So what is the AARP afraid of? They’re afraid, as all
liberal interest groups are, of several things:

• Less money flowing through the sticky hands of
government, reducing the ability of government to create programs
which benefit the AARP’s bottom line.

• More personal responsibility being taken by individuals
for their own retirements, reducing the need for retirees to be
dependent on AARP for advice, financial services, or
lobbying.

• More Americans having incentive to be economically
well-educated and to care about the impact of government policy,
including taxation and spending, on the value of their retirement
savings, and most of all they’re afraid of.

• Better financial results for their members, reducing the
need for the members to buy AARP-branded insurance
policies.

MAY 1, 2011 REPRESENTED the 30th anniversary of reforms of
Chile’s Social Security-like system that turned it from a defined
benefit plan with a defined contribution system. A National Center
for Policy Analysis study from
last year lays out the tremendous benefits of the reforms on labor
participation, by its removing the incentive from people to retire
in their early 60s when they would still have many productive years
ahead of them, should they choose to work. People contribute more
and begin withdrawing later, an obvious recipe for retirement plan
success.

The Chilean system isn’t perfect, but has been gradually
made better over time. As a report by our own Social
Security Agency notes, “The International Monetary Fund
supports these changes because they strive to retain the basic
features of the individual account system and, at the same time,
address its major shortcomings…. Since the 1990s, 10 other Latin
American countries have adopted some form of an individual account
system either to replace or supplement their PAYG
systems.”

It’s not just Social Security, either, which in economic
terms is small in comparison with the problems we face with
Medicare. If the nation were to try to fix Medicare’s fiscal woes
without slowing the growth in costs… well, it simply cannot be
done.

The leading Republican voice for Medicare reform — one of
the few men with the courage to take on the issue — is House
Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who contributed a few
thoughts for this article:

We can no longer let politicians in Washington deny the
danger to Medicare — the danger is all too real, and the health of
our nation’s seniors is far too important. We have to save Medicare
to avoid disruptions in benefits for current seniors and to
preserve the program for future generations. House Republicans
showed in the Path to Prosperity that we can fix this program for
future generations while making no changes for those who are in and
near retirement.

The facts are this: the President’s healthcare law takes
half a trillion dollars from Medicare and puts it towards a new
health care entitlement; then charges the Independent Payment
Advisory Board (IPAB) with putting price controls on Medicare,
limiting care for current seniors. House Republicans passed a
budget this spring which stands in stark contrast to this approach.
We stop the raid on Medicare, we repeal the President’s board, and
we preserve the Medicare benefit keeping it intact for everyone
above the age of 55 and reforming the program for future
generations.

But the AARP will have none of Paul Ryan’s reforms, nor anybody
else’s, if it means reducing the growth in health care expenditures
(even if that growth would be accompanied by productivity gains
which would give better health care overall for fewer dollars).

After all, with the AARP, it’s not really about better
results for the nation or even for its members, most of whom I
assume care deeply about the future of our nation. It’s about
selling insurance. And that means working to perpetuate a system in
which America’s future senior citizens will not have either the
wherewithal or the economic education to be responsible for their
own autumn years’ finances and health.

The AARP poses the situation as if the status quo in terms
of entitlement spending is somehow an option. A Republican
congressional aide put it to me this way: “From my view, it’s fine
for AARP to say, ‘We’ll be watching and remembering your votes on
entitlements because we’re senior/retirees and we have been
promised these benefits.’ It’s quite another for them to be
completely silent about the fact that their members will be facing
drastic across the board cuts to Medicare (in 2021) and Social
Security (in 2037) unless reforms occur. The Democrats plan is to
bleed these entitlements dry until they’re insolvent while
Republicans are offering what AARP constituencies should want: NO
CHANGES for anyone over 55 with respect to Medicare, while
acknowledging that reforms must be made for future
generations.”

The Republican House budget — the only budget that has
passed either chamber of Congress in a couple of years –
strengthened the solvency of our entitlements without making
changes for those in or near retirement. Unfortunately, AARP’s
entitlement reform plan is the same as President Obama’s. What is
that plan, you ask? Again, the House aide: “The answer can be found
both in the President’s health care law and in his budget (no
reforms of Social Security and Medicare, literally it’s status
quo). Pretending a problem doesn’t exist, doesn’t mean you’ve
solved it — and in the case of entitlements, with 10,000 baby
boomers retiring each day with fewer workers to replace them,
you’re simply exacerbating the problem and leaving us less
preferable options.”

The AARP’s dual loyalties — to its members and to its own
bottom line — make it a difficult organization to trust. The
Herger-Reichert report notes that “Since 2002, income generated
from AARP membership dues has increased 32%, or $60 million.
However, during this same period, income derived from AARP’s
business relationships, primarily with insurance companies, nearly
tripled, increasing by $417 million. Royalty payments from
for-profit companies comprised nearly 46% of AARP’s revenue in
2009, while membership dues totaled just 17% of total revenues.”
With insurance revenues roughly triple the level of dues revenues,
it is hard to see the members’ interests — not to mention the
nation’s interests — winning out should they come in conflict with
the AARP’s bottom line.

Yet that is precisely the conflict we face today with
yawning budget deficits threatening to swallow our financial future
but the AARP screaming “we want every penny, even if it bankrupts
our members’ grandchildren.” The AARP’s ad explicitly threatens
politicians who do anything other than raise taxes to address
entitlement programs’ financial woes.

It’s time to fight back. It’s time for the rest of the
nation to say to the AARP that “We’re not pushovers, either. We’re
three hundred million people whose futures you are risking so you
can collect insurance premiums. And we’re going to stand up for
every politician who calls you out for what you are.”

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Going North

Admin — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 17:09:00 +0000

From The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog:

AFTER THE STANDARD & POOR’S downgrade in early August, it
didn’t take long for the blame game to begin. Predictably, the
mainstream media blamed the Republicans. The problem began with the
November 2010 election, when a group of Tea Party “terrorists” were
elected to Congress. Those who take a longer view blamed it on
George W. Bush (who else?).

I go back even earlier. To September 6, 1787, to be precise.
That’s when the Founders in Philadelphia abandoned their plans for
parliamentary governance in favor of a presidential system.

The presidential system, with its separation of powers between
the different branches of government, is at the core of the
Constitution, and questioning its worth seems almost unpatriotic.
And yet we very nearly adopted a system not unlike the
parliamentary regimes of Great Britain and Canada, which lack a
separation of powers.

It was a near-run thing, decided only on day 105 of a 116-day
Convention. Pennsylvania’s James Wilson remarked, “This subject has
greatly divided the House, and will also divide people out of
doors. It is in truth the most difficult of all on which we had to
decide.”

The Convention had begun with a discussion of James Madison’s
“Virginia Plan,” which featured a president appointed by Congress.
That’s how governors were appointed in all but two of the states at
the time, and it wasn’t thought particularly exceptional. It
also had the great advantage of appealing to the strong
anti-democratic sentiments of the delegates.

Under the Virginia Plan, the House of Representatives would have
been our House of Commons, as George Mason noted. The members of
the Senate would have been appointed by the lower house, and the
presidential veto would have been greatly circumscribed. Before
reversing themselves, the delegates also voted for a broad
impeachment standard, where a president might be removed for
“malpractice or neglect of duty.” On that standard, Andrew Johnson
might plausibly have been removed in 1868, and Bill Clinton in
1999. And, just maybe, Barack Obama this year.

The president would have a fixed term but in other respects he’d
resemble a prime minister who is chosen by his supporters in the
House of Commons.

So how would that have prevented the loss of our AAA credit
rating?

In announcing the downgrade, Standard & Poor’s said that the
budget deal to which Republicans and Democrats had agreed wasn’t
sufficient to resolve the public debt problem. The two political
parties had agreed to raise the debt ceiling, but that simply
didn’t do the job. In addition, the rating agency didn’t hold up
much hope for future cures, given the gridlock in government which
the negotiations revealed. The problem was the separation of powers
between branches of government in the U.S. Constitution.

Had the delegates to the Philadelphia Conventionadhered to their
initial plans for a parliamentary system, without a separation of
powers, we wouldn’t have seen the gridlock, and very likely would
have had a budget that satisfied all of the rating agencies.

CANADA’S RECENT EXPERIENCE in solving a debt crisis offers an
illustrative example of how a parliamentary system can more easily
reverse course. In 1994, Canada’s debt crisis was as bad as that of
America today, and prompted the Wall Street Journal to
label it an honorary member of the Third World. However, the
country quickly turned itself around. Prime Minister Chrétien and
his minister of finance forced spending cuts that Paul Ryan could
only dream of on a reluctant Liberal Party. Over the next 16 years,
Canada’s federal debt fell 67 percent to 29 percent of GDP, and in
every year between 1997 and 2008 the federal government had a
budget surplus. The Canadian government didn’t just cut the growth
rate of spending, a budgetary trick employed in the U.S. budget
deal last August. It also cut absolute spending on many programs in
dollar terms.

What made the turnaround easier was the difference between the
structure of political parties in parliamentary and presidential
systems. Under the latter, where power is divided between different
branches of government, a national party is weaker than in a
parliamentary system. A Speaker of the House such as Nancy Pelosi
is politically independent of President Obama. By contrast, a
member of parliament is dependent on his national party, which
generally is run out of the prime minister’s office. In Canada,
Prime Minister Trudeau famously described his backbench MPs as
“nobodies.” When Prime Minister Chrétien decided to cut the budget,
then, there was no one to oppose him.

That’s not the American way. After the debt deal was signed (and
before the downgrade), Senator Harry Reid offered a moving account
of American constitutional government. The Founders didn’t adopt
the separation of powers to make things easier for politicians.
Just the opposite. They wanted to make it harder because they
thought this was a way to prevent bad laws from being enacted.

Reversing course is always harder than staring afresh. It’s
easier to start a new program than close an existing one; it’s
easier to hire a public servant than fire him. Every time a new
program is begun, interest groups coalesce around it. Businesses
and groups that profit from it will fight tooth and nail to prevent
its repeal. This will happen in both presidential and parliamentary
systems, but there are special reasons why reversibility is
particularly difficult in the former case.

The Constitution’s separation of powers was designed to produce
deadlock. Passing a bill is like waiting for three cherries to line
up in a Las Vegas slot machine. Unless the president and both
houses of Congress sign on, nothing gets enacted. In a
parliamentary system, it’s just one cherry, which the prime
minister can produce whenever he wants.

Was that the separation of powers has prevented more bad than
good laws from being enacted. That’s an empirical point, however,
and not a few bad laws have been passed in recent years, such as
Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. The list of bad ideas enacted in other
countries that we have avoided has become vanishingly small.
Moreover, not a few good laws have been blocked, such as the
serious attempts to reduce the debt crisis proposed by Republicans
this year.

WHETHER ONE SEES GRIDLOCK as good or bad will often turn on
who’s on top for the moment. For much of the last century
progressives saw their side as politically dominant and the
separation of powers as an obstacle to their legislative agenda. As
for conservatives, I recall someone telling me “Pray for Gridlock!”
in 1992.

That’s not a principled reason to prefer one system over
another. Quite apart from the passions of the day, however, there
is a reason to prefer parliamentary to presidential systems. What a
parliamentary system offers is reversibility, a greater ability to
change course and undo a bad law. What a presidential system offers
is pre-enactment screening, the greater scrutiny given to
legislation when passage is delayed by gridlock. And what I should
like to argue is that reversibility trumps pre-enactment
screening.

What reversibility has going for it is that it is easier to
identify bad laws with the benefit of hindsight. Think of
Obamacare, for example, which grows more unpopular as people learn
more about it, or the bailouts, which are now seen to have done
nothing except balloon out the public debt. What gridlock gives us
is a one-way ratchet in which bad ideas are adopted and then turned
into the laws of the Medes and the Persians.

Nor is it the case that we get much pre-enactment screening in
the U.S. Major amendments are quietly inserted at the last moment,
escaping the scrutiny of regulators charged with overseeing the
bill. At the extreme, a statute might be so lengthy as to greatly
reduce any possibility of meaningful preenactment screening. One
might have expected the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee
to have had something to say about Obamacare, whose
constitutionality is now before the courts. John Conyers’
difficulty was that it’s a little hard to have an opinion about a
bill one has not read. One can’t be unsympathetic, however. “What
good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages,” said Conyers,
“and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it
means after you’ve read the bill?”

Reversibility is particularly valuable in the current economic
crisis. Had one to choose between a presidential and a
parliamentary system without knowing what year or country one was
in, the choice might perhaps not be easy. Between 1960 and 1998,
presidential systems with their separation of powers were
associated with smaller governments and smaller deficits. That
period was the high tide of Keynesianism, an illness to which
parliamentary systems succumbed more quickly than presidential
ones. In recent years, however, the United States has caught the
same disease, and parliamentary systems are in recovery.

Against this, it might be thought that presidential systems are
more likely to preserve liberty. That’s not what Madison thought in
drafting the Virginia Plan. When he wrote Federalist
10 a year later, however, he had done a volte-face, and noted
that “The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and
judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and
whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be
pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Once again, however,
that’s a prediction history hasn’t borne out. When one looks at
other countries, there are a good many more presidents-for-life
than prime ministers-forlife. America was spared tyranny because it
is American, with an inherited tradition of liberty, and not
because of a Constitution that wasn’t made for export.

IN SUM, it’s time to question whether the separation of powers
was such a good idea after all. Not that we’re about to adopt a
parliamentary regime, but there are features of American politics
that can readily be changed and that have been kept in place
because they seem to bolster the gridlock produced by the
separation of powers. Think ahead to November 2012. There’s a good
chance that Republicans will win the presidency and the House. In
the Senate they have a good shot at 55 members. They’ll ride into
town and try to repeal Obamacare. And that’s when they’ll run into
the Senate filibuster.

Those who defend the filibuster tend to pick out some instances
where it cut their way. It hurt us when our side was on top, they
tell us, but go back a bit further and you’ll find an example where
it cut our way. If I’m correct, however, it systematically hurts
the country. In particular, conservatives who want to undo the
legislative mess of the last few years will want to put their
finger on the nuclear option to blow up the filibuster.

The liberals of yesterday have become the conservatives of
today, as they try to resist the changes that must be enacted to
restore America to economic health. Think of how Nancy Pelosi
crowed in the last budget deal about how she had prevented changes
to Medicare and Social Security. They are the old guard, the
ancien régime, the Bourbons who have remembered nothing
and forgotten nothing, while the radicals, the agents of change,
are conservatives. In enacting the reforms that America needs, it
is the liberals who will cling to any device to preserve the status
quo, and the Filibuster will be their strongest weapon. That is
why, if the 2012 election turns out as I expect, the first order of
business for then-Senate Majority Leader McConnell should be a
return to simple majoritarian rule and the elimination of the
filibuster.

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The Book on Obama

Admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:08:00 +0000

From The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog:

WASHINGTON — Supposedly this White House has just made a
furious attempt to sink a book,
Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a
President, by Ron Suskind, which came out September 20. Jay
Carney, the White House spinmeister, spoke ill of it. Numerous
former White House staffers spoke ill of it. Carney said, “one
passage seems to be lifted almost entirely from Wikipedia.” Why
would a respected writer want to do that? I suspect that the White
House is going to be as effective in sinking Suskind as it has been
in keeping President Barack Obama’s polling numbers lofty.

The book tells us what we Obama critics have all been
saying since early on. This President is the most incompetent and
ideologically rigid president in American history. For my part I
began the refrain in July of 2009 with a comparison to Andrew
Johnson, who at least had the excuse that he was drunk most of the
time that he was in the White House. I continued it in August of
2010 when I complimented Jimmy Carter by saying he is no longer the
worst president of modern times (a compliment that has as yet gone
unacknowledged, I might add). And I have continued with monotonous
regularity, hazarding the prospect of becoming a bore. Yet I
suppose one is never a bore when one calls a Liberal hansdoodle a
hansdoodle even when he sits in the White House and has been called
all manner of genius by our Liberal elites. Remember when the
“historian” Michael Beschloss said Obama’s “IQ is off the charts”?
There will come a day when Michael explains that he was saying
Obama registered “off the charts” at the opposite end of
genius.

How are all the Liberal sages going to get out of their
absurd exaggerations of Obama’s modest gifts? Increasingly they
admit that Obama has chosen the wrong policies, but he speaks so
beautifully — using a teleprompter for the most measly address.
Ah, but he is so forceful. So is his former chief of staff, Rahm
Emanuel, when he dons his tutu. But he is curious, adventurous, a
sponge for new ideas. Actually he has been a hopeless socialist,
lost in Fabian abstractions.

Most of this becomes clear as you lug yourself through
Suskind. Skip the first 150 pages. The author needs an editor.
Settle with Suskind’s discussion of the fights between the boys and
the girls on the White House staff, and Obama’s utterly insensitive
meeting with the aggrieved ladies at a dinner he held to placate
them. One, a notably dumpy economist with all the sex appeal of
Paul Krugman, complains that “I felt like a piece of meat.” She has
the catchphrase wrong, of course, unless she was wearing a bikini.
Yet it tells you how confused the Democratic feminists have become,
even the economists.

Move on to Suskind’s first quote from economist Larry
Summers complaining to economist Peter Orszag that “We’re home
alone. There’s no adult in charge.” Settle on page 365 where the
speculations of us Obama critics are pretty much vindicated. There
is Obama’s inability to make a decision, his “drift,” his “loss of
interest,” and Summers once again. Orszag is quoted as telling
Suskind, “Larry would say to Obama, ‘I’ll make my argument first;
you can go after me.’” Orszag then recalls to Suskind something
Suskind was to hear from countless others, “I’m thinking, ‘I can’t
believe he’s talking to the president that way.’ I just don’t know
why Obama didn’t say, ‘I made that decision a week ago. Just do
what I say.’” Well, Obama probably did not make that decision a
week ago. In another meeting, after “a dozen arguments,” Suskind
writes, “Obama, in a voice that was softly dispirited, said, ‘Well,
if you guys can’t agree, I mean, we don’t have to do it.’” As I
say, this is from one page. The book continues, and makes very
painful reading even for me in all my vindication.

Suskind contains his narrative to Obama’s economic policy
and, to a lesser degree, healthcare. There is nothing in the book
about foreign policy or the way this President has conducted two
foreign wars and a worldwide effort against terrorism. My agents
tell me Obama’s conduct of foreign affairs and of the war on terror
are even more appalling.

Somewhere in the deadly proceedings Suskind calls in one
of the President’s still happy servitors, David Axelrod, who still
can sing of Obama’s “broad intellectual curiosity. He just fluidly
moves from one thing to another.” Ah, note those fluid moves, and
Axelrod assures us that “Obama will be one of history’s seminal
presidents.” I suppose that is true if our history is to include
national decline. I, however, see a better future.

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Democracy’s New Discontents

Admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 11:00:01 +0000

From NRO Articles:

Once upon a time, loud dissent, filibustering in the Senate, and gridlock in the House were as democratic as apple pie.

A Senator Obama once defended his attempts to block confirmation votes on judicial appointments by alleging, “The Founding Fathers established the filibuster as a means of protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority.”

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