13 April 2010
Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Support for Repeal Climbs to
58% [The Club for Growth]
APR 12, 2010 04:48P.M.
Opposition to ObamaCare continues to grow. From Rasmussen Reports:
Three weeks after Congress passed its new national health care plan,
support for repeal of the measure has risen four points to 58%. That
includes 50% of U.S. voters who strongly favor repeal. The latest
Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters nationwide finds
38% still oppose repeal, including 32% who strongly oppose it. For the
previous two weeks following passage of the controversial plan, 54% of
voters have favored repeal and 42% have opposed it.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Terrorism Is Not an Existential
Threat, But Fear Doesn’t Care
About That [Cato at Liberty]
APR 12, 2010 04:14P.M.
By Jim Harper
Last week, coincidence brought together a pair of worthy articles
attacking the political adage that terrorism is an “existential” threat.
Gene Healy debunked “existential” in his Examiner column.
“Conservatives understand that exaggerated fears of environmental
threats make government grow and liberty shrink,” he writes. “They’d do
well to recognize that the same dynamic applies to homeland security.”
John Mueller and Mark Stewart, meanwhile, have an article on Foreign
Affairs’ web site titled: “Hardly Existential: Thinking Rationally About
Terrorism.” They show that conventional assessment methods place
terrorism so low on the scale of risks that additional spending to further
reduce its likelihood or consequences is probably not justified.
But some readers literally can’t absorb what appears in the two
paragraphs above. You might be one of them.
Exquisitely rational arguments like these are “cognitively invisible” in the
face of fear, as Priscilla Lewis puts it in the forthcoming Cato book
1
Terrorizing Ourselves. I assume the arguments of Healy, Mueller, and
Stewart will be dismissed out of hand by people who view terrorism
through their personal lens of fear.
Mueller and Stewart touch on this problem briefly:
Because they are so blatantly intentional, deaths resulting
from terrorism do, of course, arouse special emotions. And
they often have wide political ramifications, as citizens
demand that politicians “do something.” Many people
therefore consider them more significant and more painful to
endure than deaths by other causes. But quite a few dangers,
particularly ones concerning pollution and nuclear power
plants, also stir considerable political and emotional feelings,
and these have been taken into account by regulators when
devising their assessments of risk acceptability.
We know enough to be confident of our security. The questions
remaining include: How do we convince others to join the ranks of the
indomitable Americans? How do we undercut the political advantage
taken of terror fears? And how do we rein in the massive government
growth produced by terror politics?
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Government Run Healthcare
Continued [Americans for Tax
Reform]
APR 12, 2010 03:11P.M.
Two more stories about government run healthcare in practice: A dying
mother last night became the human face of an election battle over the
NHS. Nikki Phelps, 37, who has a rare glandu...
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 13 April 2010

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

Did the IMF Deliberately Justin Amash becomes First

Exaggerate the 2008 Financial Pledge Signer in Michigan’s 3rd
Crisis? [Cato at Liberty] District [Americans for Tax
APR 12, 2010 02:50P.M.
Reform]
By Marian L. Tupy APR 12, 2010 02:29P.M.

This month, two vice-presidents of the Czech National Bank (CNB) have State Representative and congressional candidate Justin Amash recently
made very serious allegations against the International Monetary Fund. signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge in his bid for the Michigan’s 3rd
Below is the summary of their claims so far: district. Amash becomes the first pledge signer in ...

1. Speaking to the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard on April 2,

Mojmir Hampl, the vice-president of the CNB, said that the IMF
under Dominique Strauss-Kahn “wanted to expand its role in FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Eastern Europe and obtain new financial resources.” Hampl
claimed that the IMF exaggerated problems with the financial Give Us Liberty, or Give Us
systems in Eastern Europe. “We have always emphasized that the
instability of the financial system [in 2008] was a Western ‘Gamesmanship’! [Cato at
European problem. That proved correct… According to a recent EU
report, only nine out of 27 EU member states did not have to Liberty‘Gamesmanship’!]
introduce any financial stabilization measures [during the crisis]. APR 12, 2010 02:25P.M.
All nine were new [mostly Eastern European] member states.”
By Neal McCluskey
2. Hampl’s claim was echoed by his colleague, CNB vice-president
Miroslav Singer, in today’s edition of the Czech daily Hospodarske
Noviny. According to Singer, “I cannot say nice things about the
IMF’s role in the 2008 crisis.” The Financial Times, Singer
continued, carried a lot of nonsensical stories about the state of the
Czech financial sector prior to the crisis. Instead of dispelling those
stories, the IMF produced a study about the Czech Republic based
on incorrect data and then leaked it to the Financial Times. “It is
difficult to be certain… that the IMF wanted to harm the Czechs,
Slovaks or Poles on purpose… More likely it was a combination of
panic, lack of expertise and a desire to see problems everywhere.”

If true, these claims raise troubling questions about the incentives

behind the largest increase of resources in the Fund’s history.

There may be no area of public policy more dominated by platitudes and

pie-in-the-sky pronouncements than education. Case in point: The oft-
repeated declaration that we must put aside our differences about what
kids should be taught — whole language or phonics, old math or new
math, creationism or evolution — so that we can just get down to
teaching.

USA Today is currently offering an editorial providing just such

trenchant advice. Using the social studies brouhaha in Texas as their
jumping off point, the editorialists lament standards that are skewed to
either the left or right in states around the country:

2
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 13 April 2010

[T]his sort of agenda-driven revisionism isn’t narrow and
isn’t confined to Texas. Nearly half the states have a
centralized curriculum system, often dominated by a
politically elected or appointed board.
Kansas has been tied in knots for a decade over teaching
evolution. At the other end of the politically correct spectrum,
California regulates the portrayal of genders, minority
groups, the elderly and the disabled. According to the Los
Angeles Times, publishers have even been discouraged from
labeling the residents of poor countries as, well, poor.
Negative stereotyping, you know.
Members of the Texas board and their backers say they’re just
trying to restore balance to an academic system they view as
skewed to the left. But that misses the point. Standards
should be set by professionals in their fields. They should not
be a vehicle for scoring points in the culture wars….
[W]hy should students in Texas, or anywhere, have their
education warped by political and ideological
gamesmanship?
Sayeth USA Today, ideologues and politicians, with their nettlesome
opinions, should just butt out of curriculum setting and let the
“professionals” set the standards.
There are numerous major problems with this.
First, what if the professionals are not a monolithic group and there’s
disagreement among them? Who among them should dictate the
curriculum? The vaunted “consensus?” But what if the
consensus is wrong? It has happened, you know.
Then there’s this: What if the “professionals” are every bit as political
and ideological as everyone else? Hard to believe, but there is actually a
mammoth left-wing bias among academics in many fields, and those are
often the “professionals” we’re supposed to let unilaterally decide what
our kids will learn.
Wait. No one said it had to be a unilateral decision. Except if it isn’t, you
are right back to gamesmanship square-one. Why? Because if non-
professionals get a say, all of those diverse Americans with
their infuriatingly varied opinions, values, and educational desires will
be right back to having input into what the system of schools they all
must support will teach! And many of those people – shockingly! —
will go right back to fighting to get the schools to teach what they want
their kids to learn, not what the liberal, or conservative, or atheist, or
whatever down the street wants their own children taught.
end the fighting: universal school choice, which lets every family choose
what they want their kids taught as long as there’s an educator willing
to teach it. Nothing is forced, so no one must fight.
Ultimately, this is what it comes down to: Either give us liberty, or give
us “gamesmanship”!
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Cutting Government Spending
in a Recession [Cato at Liberty]
APR 12, 2010 02:23P.M.
By Tad DeHaven
One of the topics Chris Edwards will be discussing with Glenn Beck this
evening (5:00 EST, Fox) is the “Not-So-Great Depression” of 1920-21.
Cato Senior Fellow Jim Powell notes that President Warren G. Harding
inherited from his predecessor Woodrow Wilson “a post–World War I
depression that was almost as severe, from peak to trough, as the Great
Contraction from 1929 to 1933 that FDR would later inherit.”
However, instead of calling for bigger government to right the economy,
as President Obama did upon inheriting George Bush’s mess, Harding
pushed for spending and tax cuts.
The result?
With Harding’s tax and spending cuts and relatively non-
interventionist economic policy, GNP rebounded to $74.1
billion in 1922. The number of unemployed fell to 2.8
million— a reported 6.7 percent of the labor force— in 1922.
So, just a year and a half after Harding became president, the
Roaring Twenties were underway. The unemployment rate
continued to decline, reaching an extraordinary low of 1.8
percent in 1926. Since then, the unemployment rate has been
lower only once in wartime (1944), and never in peacetime.
The following chart shows federal spending from 1920 to 1940:

Frankly, this is not hard to figure out, and once one thinks it through a
bit it becomes obvious that just saying that things should be different
without changing the one-size-must-fit-all system will never work.
Indeed, short of eliminating all diversity in the nation, or forcing all
schools under the boot of a dictator, only one system of education can

3
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
You Want It All, But You Can’t
Have It [Cato at Liberty]
APR 12, 2010 01:18P.M.
By Julian Sanchez
It certainly seems like there are an awful lot of folks on the American
political scene willing to pay at least lip service to smaller government, so
you’d think at least we might see a trend over time of wax alternating
with wane, following “the zig-zag of politics,” as Robert Nozick called it.
Instead, it seems to just keep on growing. (Though as David Boaz
recently noted, that’s not the same as saying we’ve gotten steadily less
free on net over the centuries.) Various cogent explanations for this have
been floated, but John Sides and Annie Lowery both point out that
there’s an enormous contributing factor that fits neatly into a single pair
of graphs:
4
13 April 2010
In short, the things people are willing to consider cutting to balance the
budget already make up an infinitesimal portion of the whole. Of the real
bank-breakers—Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and Defense—only
Defense finds even a fifth of respondents prepared to countenance cuts.
The only area where a majority support cuts is foreign aid—about 1
percent of the budget. And as The Economist notes, the same problem
probably recurs even within the foreign aid category. Are people ready to
cut aid to Israel, Iraq, or Afghanistan? Because those three represent 39
percent of our foreign aid outlays.
You can, I suppose, see this as confirmation that the democratic process
works—for some values of “works”: At least we’re spending ourselves
into penury for programs people are fairly attached to. But it also means
there’s not much low-hanging fruit worth plucking. It’s fun to take
potshots at the earmarks for research on manatee appreciation of
dubstep, but any serious effort to control the budget requires tackling
programs that are actually popular. One approach to this, of course, is to
try and make the popular programs less popular—or at least to convince
people that their growth can be constrained without some sort of
catastrophe ensuing. Another is to try to insulate political actors against
backlash, and attempt to bundle cuts so that the public can be presented
with a binary up-or-down choice about a deficit reduction package. That
doesn’t make the individual cuts any more popular, of course, but it at
least makes it harder to dodge reality by pretending one just opposes
cutting this vital program, while remaining strongly committed to fiscal
responsibility by other, unspecified means.
Hence the appeal of expert commissions, or the suggestion in a recent
David Brooks column that we take “a dozen handpicked senators and
House members and stick them in a room three times a week for six
months.” Stuff like this is easy to mock—and it invariably is mocked—as
a water-headed attempt to wish away deep substantive disagreements
and intransigent conflicting interests. But I think at least part of the
appeal of such schemes comes from the perception that polarized
popular political rhetoric actually masks substantial agreement among
policy experts across the spectrum. I’m no entitlements wonk, of course,
but my sense is that just about everyone who seriously studies the
situation agrees that the growth trajectory of these programs is
unsustainable, and that some mix of benefit reductions and tax increases
will be required to address the problem. The exact proportions are
obviously contested, but surely it would be a vast improvement if pundits
and elected officials would admit event this much—that there is no
serious question of “whether” but only “how much of each.” It would
scarcely end debate, but it might be a precondition for productive
debate.
The glimmer of hope in that graph is that—perhaps because most deficit
hawks tend to be hawk-hawks as well—we don’t see a whole lot of
arguments for the one path to greater fiscal responsibility that’s both
realistic and palatable to at least a substantial minority: Cutting military
spending. I’m proud to note that my Cato colleagues are an exception
here. Could this be one of the few proverbial $5-bills-on-the-sidewalk in
American politics?
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 13 April 2010

- Scott Hodge, Tax Foundation President

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS - Mark Walsh, “Left Jab” Host (Sirius show); Fmr. Sr. Vice President at
America Online; Fmr. Vertical Net CEO; Founding CEO at Air America
On Tonight’s Kudlow Report
Please join us. The Kudlow Report. 7pm ET. CNBC.
[Larry Kudlow’s Money
Politic$]
APR 12, 2010 12:59P.M. FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

Cowboy Monetarism [Larry

Kudlow’s Money Politic$]
APR 12, 2010 12:56P.M.

This evening at 7pm ET:

KUDLOW 101: THE RECESSION IS OVER

MORE “Vs” IN THE V-SHAPED RECOVERY...
DOW 11,000
Where do we go from here?
- James Altucher, Managing Director Formula Capital
- Michael Panzner, Financial Armageddon Author/Blogger
Thomas Hoenig, head of the Kansas City Reserve Bank, is truly a new
Fed superstar. I encourage all of you to read his recent speech in Santa
Fe, New Mexico, where he calls for an immediate tightening of the
federal funds target rate to 1 percent in order to prevent the build-up of
financial imbalances that could create another credit-bubble boom that
in turn will wind up as another credit-and-financial bust.

In other words, get ahead of the curve, instead of staying behind it. Slam
FRAUDULENT LENDING AT WAMU down the threat of future inflation. To use Mr. Hoenig’s words, put the
-PAPER LOANS TO PAPER PEOPLE market on notice that it must again manage its risk, and be accountable
-BOMBSHELL TO DROP AT CARL LEVIN HEARING for its actions. Stop relying on the Fed’s easy money. What great advice.
TOMORROW
I’d like to go a couple steps further. First, the biggest problem with the
CNBC’s Mary Thompson reports. Fed’s easy money in the 2002-05 period — which set the stage for the
boom-and-bust cycle — was that rates were held too low for too long. In
TIME FOR SOME COWBOY MONETARISM… those days, Alan Greenspan called it a “considerable period.” Today it’s
- Peter Navarro, “The Coming China Wars” Author; University Of called an “extended period.”
California - Irvine Business Professor
Second, the Fed back then had something called a slow, measured pace.
WILL SOARING TAXES KILL ECONOMIC GROWTH? Remember that? That meant the Fed was telegraphing to Wall Street
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) these small, teensy-weensy, incremental, quarter-percent increases in
the fed funds rate. That, of course, meant it took the Fed several years to
WHY DO SO MANY AMERICANS PAY NO FEDERAL INCOME get back to normalcy. And it promoted excessive leverage and risk-
TAXES? taking.

5
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
I want a different regime. I’m calling it cowboy monetarism. What do I
mean by that? I want Wall Street to be scared to death of the Federal
Reserve. I don’t want them lying around in bed with the Fed — I want
them running scared.
Let me give you an example: Back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was often
referred to as a cowboy in his tough dealings with the Soviet Union. Well,
guess what? As we learned later, the Soviets were in fact very scared of
Reagan’s toughness in the Cold War fight against communism. So I want
Wall Street to be just as afraid of the Fed as the Soviets were of Ronald
Reagan.
And when the Fed does finally move — and it ought to move soon, as Mr.
Hoenig says — it shouldn’t do so in a teensy-weensy, quarter-point
manner. It shouldn’t tell Wall Street what it’s doing every minute of
every hour. It should surprise the Street with large, unexpected rate
hikes like 75-basis points, or even 1 percent changes.
This would force curb Wall Street’s propensity for large risky bets. It
would keep traders honest. And it would put the kibosh on a new credit
boom and bust cycle.
Look, I want the Fed to be thought of as a cowboy; you never know what
it’s going to do. Think John Wayne. I want both guns drawn, pulling the
interest-rate triggers. If the Fed does that, then it’s possible we can stop
another credit bubble.
Volcker did this in the 1980s. He was right. It worked.
Sometimes being tough and unpredictable is the best monetary
medicine. Cowboy monetarism. That’s my take.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
The Massachusetts Mandate
Fail, & What It Means For
Obamacare [Americans for Tax
Reform]
APR 12, 2010 12:21P.M.
A new report has come out on the healthcare mandate in Massachusetts,
the model which Obamacare was founded upon: Thousands of
consumers are gaming Massachusetts’ 2006 health insurance law by...
6
13 April 2010
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Can Romney Lead the Fight
against ObamaCare? [Cato at
Liberty]
APR 12, 2010 12:17P.M.
By David Boaz
Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have just run
major stories on presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s difficulties in
getting people to understand the difference between his Massachusetts
universal-health-care plan, which featured an individual mandate,
subsidies, and forbidding insurance companies to deny coverage for
preexisting conditions, and the Obama-Reid-Pelosi plan, which features
an individual mandate, subsidies, and forbidding insurance companies
to deny coverage for preexisting conditions.
President Obama is putting Romney on the spot by telling Matt Lauer
that his bill is similar to Romney’s. Daniel Gross of
Newsweek recommends that Obama hire Romney — someone who has
management experience, no current job, and “relevant experience in
implementing a large-scale health-care reform program, ideally one that
involved using an individual mandate and the private insurance system
to attain near-universal health insurance” — to run ObamaCare.
As Romney attacks the Obama bill as an unconstitutional “government
takeover,” he makes two basic arguments in defending his own plan:
First, that the Massachusetts law was passed on a bipartisan basis,
hardly a substantive defense. Second, that his was a state plan, not a
federal intrusion on state authority. He also offered a “conservative”
defense of the individual mandate:
But he did so by adopting a more GOP-friendly vocabulary,
declaring it a matter of “personal responsibility” for all people
to buy into insurance pools so that “free riders” without
insurance can’t stick taxpayers with their hospital bills.
“We are a party and a movement of personal responsibility,”
he said at a book signing in Manchester. He invoked the same
idea at the college, calling it a “conservative bedrock
principle.”
That’s a point that Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation made as far
back as 1992, but most conservatives didn’t embrace the argument. And
they’ve strongly opposed the mandate in the Obama bill.
Conservatives have campaigned for more than a year against the Obama
health care bill, with its mandate, subsidies, and insurance regulations.
Now they are backing “Repeal It!” efforts and lawsuits to have it declared
unconstitutional. Yet such conservative leaders as Rush Limbaugh and
the editors of National Review endorsed Mitt Romney, the man
who wrote the prototype for ObamaCare, in 2008. Romney is leading
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
Republican polls for the 2012 nomination. Romney just won the straw
poll at the Southern Republican Leadership Council (with only 24
percent, to be sure, and just 1 vote ahead of Rep. Ron Paul). Can the
Republican effort to defeat President Obama and repeal ObamaCare
really be led by the first American political leader to impose a health care
mandate on citizens?
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Will Reductions in the Size of
the Nuclear Arsenal Make the
U.S. More Vulnerable? [Cato at
Liberty]
APR 12, 2010 11:50A.M.
By Christopher Preble
Over at the National Journal’s Security Experts Blog, Paul Starobin asks
“Is An Obama ‘No Nukes’ World Likely To Be A Safer One?”:
Is President Obama on the right track with his new
commitment to unilaterally scale back America’s threat to use
nuclear weapons to deter attacks on the U.S. and its allies?
And as world leaders assemble in Washington on April 12 to
discuss matters of global nuclear security, is Obama’s
cherished goal of ridding the world of nukes ever likely to be a
reality? Would a nukes-free world in fact be a safer, more
peaceful one? Even if Obama is right that he is not likely to
see a nuclear-free world in his lifetime, will a trend toward
declining global nuclear arsenals make America more or less
safe?
My response:
It was inevitable that Republicans would knock President Obama for
being soft on national security, and it is likely to be an issue in this year’s
mid-term elections, and in the 2012 campaign. This has been the
standard mantra from the GOP playbook for over a generation, and the
party’s leaders show no sign of backing away from it. But the Democrats
shouldn’t be too worried. They easily turned aside such criticisms in
2006 and 2008 by pointing out that policies promoted by a Republican
president, and supported by a Republican Congress — especially the
ruinous Iraq war — had significantly undermined U.S. security.
With respect to nuclear weapons, the president and his allies have more
than enough ammunition to refute the charges that reductions in the size
of the U.S. arsenal make the U.S. more vulnerable to attack. Leaders in
Washington and Moscow figured out long ago that a stable, secure and
credible deterrent need not include many thousands of nuclear
warheads. A Republican president, Richard Nixon, initiated the very first
7
13 April 2010
round of reductions in the early 1970s, and another Republican, George
H.W. Bush, made even deeper cuts at the end of the Cold War. George
W. Bush tacked on additional reductions under the Moscow Treaty
signed with Vladimir Putin. The modest cuts envisioned by New START
and implied in the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) are consistent with
this bipartisan trend.
But what of President Obama’s goal of a world free of nuclear weapons?
He concedes that this is unlikely to occur in his lifetime, and that is
almost surely the case. He is not the first U.S. leader to pledge to reduce
the importance of nuclear weapons in U.S. security policy; this is a
commitment the United States made under the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty. What will take the place of nuclear weapons if they
were to be abolished? We can glean the answer from the NPR. The
United States first shifted to nuclear weapons in the 1950s because they
presented a far more cost effective deterrent than conventional military
assets. Not surprisingly, the NPR envisions that conventional weapons —
namely a forward U.S. troop presence and ballistic missile defenses —
will take on greater importance as nuclear weapons recede.
This is a costly proposition at a time when U.S. military spending is
already at a post-World War II high. The Obama administration does not
dwell on the costs, I suspect, because many Americans are not enamored
with extending an indefinite and costly security umbrella over other
countries who can — and should be encouraged to — defend themselves.
In short, President Obama’s determination to reduce and eventually
eliminate nuclear weapons will accelerate this costly trend unless he is
also willing to revisit the purpose of U.S. military power and our global
posture.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
New Video Exposes Nightmare
of IRS Complexity [Cato at
Liberty]
APR 12, 2010 10:16A.M.
By Daniel J. Mitchell
My former intern, Hiwa Alaghebandian, has just narrated a new
Economics 101 video about the cost of the tax code. I won’t spoil the
surprise by giving the details, but you if you’re not angry now, you will be
after watching.
In the video, Ms. Alaghebandian notes that a study from 1996 (back
when the tax code was not nearly as complex) estimated that a flat tax
would reduce the compliance burden of the income tax by 94 percent. In
my video on the flat tax, I mostly focused on how a single-rate,
consumption-base system would boost growth and competitiveness, but
simplicity also would be a remarkable achievement. Not only would real
tax reform reduce compliance costs by hundreds of billions of dollars, it
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
would also put a big dent in the corrupt practice of distorting economic
choices with deductions, exemptions, credits, preferences, shelters, and
other loopholes. That’s a profitable game for politicians and lobbyists,
but the rest of us pay the price because the tax code is even more of a
nightmare.
There is also an under-appreciated connection between simplicity and
fairness. My colleague Will Wilkinson sagely observed that “…the more
power the government has to pick winners and losers, the more power
rich people will have relative to poor people.” The tax code is a good
example. Many leftists want the tax system to penalize success with high
tax rates. I’ve explained why this is economically misguided in a video on
class-warfare tax policy, but it’s also worth pointing out that a simple and
fair tax system like the flat tax makes it much more difficult for the well-
connected to take advantage of complexity. Simply stated, the tax system
should not punish the rich with high rates (notwithstanding the neurotic
views of self-loathing trust-fund heirs), and it shouldn’t reward them
with special deals.
The good news is that we know the policies that will fix the current
system. The bad news is that politicians keep making the system worse.
Putting the IRS in charge of enforcing key parts of Obamacare is just the
latest example of why America needs a tax revolt.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Exiled Iranian Journalist
Awarded $500,000 Milton
Friedman Prize for Advancing
Liberty [Cato at Liberty]
APR 12, 2010 09:01A.M.
By Cato Editors
8
13 April 2010
Akbar Ganji, an Iranian writer and journalist who spent six years in a
Tehran prison for advocating a secular democracy and exposing
government involvement in the assassination of individuals who
opposed Iran’s theocratic regime, has been named the 2010 winner of
the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.
Ganji may be best known for a 1999 series of articles investigating the
Chain Murders of Iran, which left five dissident intellectuals dead. Later
published in the book, The Dungeon of Ghosts, his articles tied the
killings to senior clerics and other officials in the Iran government,
including former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Ganji was
arrested for spreading propaganda against the Islamic system and
“damaging national security.” He was eventually sentenced to six years
in prison, much of it spent in solitary confinement.
Ganji was released from prison in March of 2006 and left Iran shortly
thereafter. Many countries around the world offered him honorary
citizenship, and he traveled extensively, giving talks promoting
democracy in Iran and exposing major human rights abuses by the
Iranian government. Despite his battle with Iran’s theocracy, Ganji
remains steadfastly opposed to military action by the United States in
both Iran and Iraq, saying “you cannot bring democracy to a country by
attacking it.”
Established in 2002 and presented every two years, the Milton Friedman
Prize for Advancing Liberty is the leading international award for
significant contributions to advancing individual liberty.
The Friedman Prize biennial dinner and award presentation will be held
at the Hilton Washington Hotel in Washington, D.C, on May 13, 2010.
Reserve your table now to attend.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Bush Was a Statist, Not a
Conservative [Cato at Liberty]
APR 12, 2010 08:39A.M.
By Daniel J. Mitchell
A former White House speechwriter, Mark Thiessen, has jumped to the
defense of his former boss, writing for the Washington Post that George
W. Bush “established a conservative record without parallel.” Even by
the loose standards of Washington, that is a jaw-dropping assertion. I’ve
been explaining for years that Bush was a big-government advocate, even
writing a column back in 2007 for the Washington Examiner pointing
out that Clinton had a much better economic record from a free-market
perspective. I also groused to the Wall Street Journal the following year
about Bush’s dismal performance.
“Bush doesn’t have a conservative legacy” on the economy,
said Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
Institute. “Tax-rate reductions are the only positive
achievement, and those are temporary … Everything else that
has happened has been permanent, and a step toward more
statism.” He cited big increases in the federal budget, along
with continuing subsidies in agriculture and transportation,
new Medicare drug benefits, and increased federal
intervention in education and housing.
Let’s review the economic claims in Mr. Thiessen’s column. He writes:
The thrust of their argument is that Bush expanded the size
of government dramatically — and they are absolutely right.
Federal spending grew significantly on Bush’s watch, and this
is without question a black mark on his record. (Federal
spending also grew dramatically under Ronald Reagan,
though he was dealt a Democratic Congress, whereas Bush
had six years of Republican leadership on Capitol Hill.)
Since federal spending almost doubled in Bush’s eight years, it’s
tempting to summarily dismiss this assertion, but let’s cite a few
additional facts just in case someone is under the illusion that Bush was
on the side of taxpayers. And let’s specifically compare Bush to Reagan
since Mr. Thiessen seems to think they belong in the same ball park. This
article by Veronique de Rugy is probably a good place to begin since it
compares all Presidents and shows that Bush was a big spender
compared to Reagan…and to Clinton. Chris Edwards has similar data,
capturing all eight years of Bush’s tenure. But the most damning
evidence comes from the OMB’s Historical Tables, which show that
Reagan reduced both entitlements and domestic discretionary spending
as a share of GDP during his two terms. Bush (and I hope nobody is
surprised) increased the burden of spending in both of these
categories.That’s the spending side of the ledger. Let’s now turn to tax
policy, where Thiessen writes:
Bush enacted the largest tax cuts in history — and unlike my
personal hero, Ronald Reagan, he never signed a major tax
increase into law.
Using the most relevant measures, such as changes in marginal tax rates
or comparing the impact of each President’s tax changes on revenues as
a share of GDP, Bush’s tax cuts are far less significant than the Reagan
tax cuts. But there presumably is some measure, perhaps nominal
revenues over some period of years, showing the Bush tax cuts are larger,
so we’ll let that claim slide. The more relevant issue to address is the
legacy of each President. Reagan did sign several tax increases after his
1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act, but the cumulative effect of those
unfortunate compromises was relatively modest compared to the
positive changes in his first year. When he left office, he bequeathed to
the nation a tax code with meaningful and permanent tax rate
reductions. The Bush tax cuts, by contrast, expire at the end of this year,
and virtually all of the pro-growth provisions will disappear. This doesn’t
mean Bush’s record on taxes was bad, but it certainly does not compare
to the Gipper’s. But what about other issue, such as trade? Thiessen
writes:
9
13 April 2010
Bush enacted free-trade agreements with 17 nations, more
than any president in history.
Those are some positive steps, to be sure, but they are offset by the
protectionist moves on steel and lumber. I’m not a trade expert, so I
don’t know if Bush was a net negative or a net positive, but at best it’s a
muddled picture and Thiessen certainly did not present the full story.
And speaking of sins of omission, his section on health care notes:
Bush created Health Savings Accounts – the most important
free-market health-care reform in a generation. And he
courageously stood up to Congressional Democrats when
they sought to use the State Children’s Health Insurance
Program (SCHIP) to nationalize health care — and defeated
their efforts.
Conveniently missing from this analysis, though, is any mention of the
utterly irresponsible prescription drug entitlement. There is no doubt
that Bush’s net impact on health care was to saddle America with more
statism. Indeed, I’d be curious to see some long-run numbers on the
impact of Bush’s prescription drug entitlement and the terrible plan
Obama just imposed on America. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that
the negative fiscal impact of both plans was comparable. Shifting gears,
let’s now turn to education policy, where Thiessen writes:
Bush won a Supreme Court ruling declaring school vouchers
constitutional and enacted the nation’s first school-choice
program in the District of Columbia.
Bush deserves some credit on school choice, but his overall education
record is characterized by more spending and centralization. Thanks in
part to his no-bureaucrat-left-behind plan, the budget for the
Department of Education grew significantly and federal spending on
elementary, secondary, and vocational education more than doubled.
Equally worrisome, federal bureaucrats gained more control over
education policy. Finally, Thiessen brags about Bush’s record on Social
Security reform:
Bush fought valiantly for a conservative priority no American
president had ever dared to touch: Social Security reform,
with private accounts that would have given millions of our
citizens a stake in the free market system. His effort failed,
but he deserves credit from conservatives for staking his
second term in office on this effort.
This is an area where the former President does deserve some credit. So
even though the White House’s failure to ever put forth a specific
proposal was rather frustrating, at least Bush did talk about real reform
and the country would be better off today if something had been enacted.
This addresses all the economic claims in Thiessen’s article, but we can’t
give Bush a complete grade until we examine some of the other issues
that were missing from the column. On regulatory issues, the biggest
change implemented during the Bush year was probably Sarbanes-Oxley
— a clear example of regulatory overkill. Another regulatory change,
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 13 April 2010

which turned out to be a ticking time bomb, was the expansion of the confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of
“affordable-lending” requirements for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. law. I respectfully dissent.

And speaking of Fannie and Freddie, no analysis of Bush’s record would
be complete without a discussion of bailouts. Without getting too deep in
the issue, the most galling part of what Bush did was not necessarily
recapitalizing the banking system (a good chunk of which was required
by government deposit insurance anyhow), but rather the way it
happened. During the savings & loan bailout 20 years ago, at least
incompetent executives and negligent shareholders were wiped out.
Government money was used, but only to pay off depositors and/or to
pay healthy firms to absorb bankrupt institutions. Bush and Paulson, by
contrast, exacerbated all the moral hazard issues by rescuing the
executives and shareholders who helped create the mess. Last but not
least, let’s not forget that Bush got the ball rolling on auto-industry
bailouts.
If all of this means Bush is a “conservative record without parallel,” then
Barack Obama must be the second coming of Ronald Reagan.
The second is from Baze v. Rees (2008):
[The death penalty is] becoming more and more
anachronisitic… I have relied on my own experience in
reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death
penalty “represents the pointless and needless extinction of
life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social
or public purposes.”
And finally, from Citizens United v. FEC (2010):
While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the
majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a
dearth of corporate money in politics.
The first excerpt decries judges who decide cases based on their personal
preferences, rather than what the law says. The other two excerpts show
Stevens incorporating his personal preferences into his rulings.

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS So we must consider the possibility that someone at The Washington
Post subtly wanted to poke fun at Justice Stevens. Unless it was
Is The Washington Post inadvertent, which would make it even more amusing.

Mocking Justice Stevens? [Cato

at Liberty]
APR 12, 2010 08:30A.M.

By Michael F. Cannon

Justice John Paul Stevens has announced that he will retire from the
Supreme Court this summer.

My Cato colleagues are weighing in on his “checkered” tenure. Tim Lee

writes, “if you enjoy your iPod and your uncensored Internet access, you
have Justice Stevens to thank.” I certainly appreciate Stevens’
contributions in that area.

On the other hand, Ilya Shapiro laments “the errant jurisprudential path
that Justice Stevens blazed so honorably,” and charges that “Stevens
admittedly and unabashedly asserted his own policy preferences instead
of following the law.”

When I picked up Saturday’s Washington Post, I wondered if its staff

was trying to make the same point. The front page contains excerpts
from three opinions Stevens wrote while on the Court. (I could not find
them on the Post’s web site, so I can’t furnish a link.) The first is
from Bush v. Gore (2000):

Although we may never know with complete certainty the

identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the
identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s

10