Last night was great. Two big victories, including a major comeback. Lots of drama, plenty of excitement. Here’s the bottom line: Notwithstanding chilly conditions and determined opposition, my Arlington County softball team cemented its hold on first place by sweeping a doubleheader. And I was 4-6 with a pair of doubles, so I managed to contribute.
Oh, wait, a few of you are interested in something else that happened last night…that’s right, there was an election. Before contemplating what this means for the nation, let’s quickly check my predictions.
- Well, my presidential pick was fairly accurate. Even though people were scolding me for being too favorable to Obama, it turns out that I wasn’t favorable enough. He won all the states I thought he would, and he also carried Colorado and Florida. And if about 100,000 people changed their minds, my prediction would have been perfect.
- But I was way off in my predictions for the Senate. I actually thought Republicans would pick up a couple of seats. But they somehow managed to lose a few seats, even though Democrats had more than twice as many to defend.
- That being said, I did a semi-decent job with my guess for the House of Representatives. We don’t know all the details yet, but Republicans pretty much fought to a draw.
Now let’s think about the consequences for America.
Based on the conversations I’ve had and the emails I’ve received, many of you are very glum. I can understand the angst, so let me try to cheer you up by mentioning seven silver linings to this dark cloud.
1. There will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reform entitlements the next time a Republican wins the White House. But it has to be the right kind of reform, not means-testing, price controls, and other gimmicks designed to somehow prop up the current programs. Romney did select Paul Ryan as his running mate, so it’s possible he would have pushed for structural reforms. But I’m guessing that the guy who adopted Obamacare on the state level ultimately would have botched this issue. This means good reforms are still possible, perhaps in as little as four years.
2. One of the most worrisome things about Mitt Romney is that he repeatedly refused to rule out a value-added tax when asked by the editors of the Wall Street Journal. I don’t trust politicians when they say they’ll do the right thing. So when they refuse to even give rhetorical assurances, alarm bells definitely start ringing. My nightmare scenario is that Romney would have been elected, made some half-hearted attempt to restrain spending, and then would have decided that a new source of revenue was needed once Harry Reid said no to any fiscal restraint. And as we saw during the Bush years, Republicans in Congress generally are willing to do the wrong thing when a Republican President makes the request. With Obama in the White House, it is highly unlikely that House Republicans would agree to this dangerous new tax.
3. As a general rule, the party controlling the White House loses seats in the House and Senate during mid-term elections. This presumably means more Tea Party-oriented Representatives and Senators after 2014.
4. With Obama in the White House for four more years, there’s an opportunity for a genuine advocate of small government to run and win in 2016. I don’t know whether that person will be Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Rand Paul, Governor Bobby Jindal, Representative Paul Ryan, or someone who isn’t even on my radar screen, but all of those options seem far more appealing – both philosophically and politically – than the GOP candidates who ran this year.
5. A Romney victory may have paved the way for Andrew Cuomo or some other statist in 2016. There will be leftists running next time, of course, but I’m guessing it will be more difficult for such a candidate to win since voters often get antsy after one party is in power for too long.
6. The election was not a mandate for Obamacare or the faux stimulus. The President spent almost no time bragging about the two biggest “accomplishments” of his first term. Indeed, he was probably fortunate that he ran against a Republican who couldn’t really exploit Obamacare because he did something very similar when he was Governor of Massachusetts (as this cartoon humorously illustrates). And he certainly didn’t get any political benefit from having flushed $800 billion down the drain on a bunch of Keynesian gimmicks.
7. One very positive feature of the elections is that lawmakers did not measurably suffer because of their support for the Medicaid and Medicare reforms in the Ryan budget. Nancy Pelosi’s “Medi-scare” campaign was the dog that didn’t bark in the 2012 elections. This presumably bodes well if there’s ever a pro-reform President.
Now here are three reasons to be unhappy.
1. Obama is a bad President. His Keynesian stimulus was a flop. Obamacare made a bad healthcare system even worse. He keeps pushing for class-warfare tax policy. And he wants to increase the burden of government spending. I fully expect him to pursue the same misguided policies in a second term.
“Ha, ha, ha, I will haunt your dreams for the next four years!”
2. If there are any vacancies on the Supreme Court, they will be filled by doctrinaire leftists. So the great libertarian conspiracy to restore constitutional constraints on the federal government will be temporarily postponed.
3. We have to endure four more years of sanctimonious speeches.
But I doubt Romney would have pursued good policies, picked good Justices, or given uplifting speeches, so I would have been unhappy regardless.
So cheer up, my friends. Our Founding Fathers had to risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to create America. In the battle to restore/protect their vision, all we have to do is engage in some activism.
P.S. Since I’ve written that conservatives and libertarians share some common ground on the issue of abortion, I’m going to make a friendly suggestion to pro-life Republican candidates and their consultants. Spend a couple of days before each campaign developing a few on-the-shelf talking points so you’re less likely to say really stupid things about rape and abortion.
P.P.S. For my partisan Republican friends who are looking for someone to blame, allow me to suggest George Bush and Karl Rove. By deliberately choosing bad policy in hopes of gaining short-run political advantage, they created the medium-run conditions that enabled Obama to win the White House.
International Liberty 
[…] We’ll start with the fact that the House of Representatives already voted for Medicaid reform and Medicare reform as part of the Ryan budget in 2011 and 2012. We also know that Republicans retained the House in the most recent election and there seems to be a political consensus that voting to fix the healthcare entitlements was not a political liability. […]
[…] Seven Silver Linings in Yesterday’s Election Results […]
[…] Seven Silver Linings in Yesterday’s Election Results […]
[…] We’ll start with the fact that the House of Representatives already voted for Medicaid reform and Medicare reform as part of the Ryan budget in 2011 and 2012. We also know that Republicans retained the House in the most recent election and there seems to be a political consensus that voting to fix the healthcare entitlements was not a political liability. […]
The state you live in is going to make a big difference in your opportunities’ prosperity, and freedoms over the next four or more years. Think California, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan versus Texas and Oklahoma.
All those silver linings will come to naught as long as the education system is saturated with demigods that never lifted a finger to do a physical days work in their collectivist lives, yet profess to understand/know/educate/brainwash the young mush brains that we willingly send them.
We fool ourselves into believing that when we bustle them off to Kindergarten we are starting them off on a better life, while in reality we are sending them off for deprogramming and conditioning.
Simply, look at the exit polls the 18 to 29-year-olds went 24 points for Obama.
I homeschooled my son, and he is a 21 year old Conservative. He passed all the State Regents exams that he took with ease, while the public school kids were failing them and retaking them repeatedly.
[…] Dan Mitchell with Seven Silver Linings. […]
I admit up front that I am terribly despondent over the change in the attitude of the number of people who voted to re-elect that piece of anti-American, anti-Judeo-Christian, marxist, jihadist-loving piece of filth. It sickens me that i sacrificed 25 years of my life in service to this country, only to have lazy looters and parasites develop into a politically uneducated, historically uninformed and economically illiterate mob….one that now demands I hand over my wallet because I no longer “deserve” to keep what I have earned in our progressively mutating collective. I am disgusted that the Constitution that I defended for so long is now blithely regarded as irrelevant and uncouth, woefully inferior to the leftwing zeitgeist that now passes for erudite philosophy.
I will never have sympathy again for people whining that they cannot find a good doctor, or for $7.00/gallon gasoline, or complaining that it isn’t fair to expect them to repay their government student loans when they cannot find a job despite their master’s degree in “Sub Saharan Lesbian Enlightment in Pre-Modern Deconstructive Literature”. The people who voted for Obama and similar scumbag Senators can simply get used to the squishy foulness of their self-induced economic sharting. I, and those motivated hard workers will no longer change their oversized pampers.
On an off topic, now that the election is over, will Obama get around to telling us how he allowed our ambassador to be murdered in Libya? And with Hitlery leaving the State Dept, any idea what worthless anti-American jerkwad Obama will foist upon us as SecState?
I would be sick to my stomach, but I literally have not been hungry enough to eat anything today at all.
I will double down on my assessment that the point of no return for American prosperity has passed, and that the crucial entrance into the classic vicious cycle of mandatory collectivism and decline was actually cemented four years ago. That was the time when Americans having retreated from the cardinal American values of self-sufficiency and free enterprise (during the Bush years, and largely prompted by the Sep 11 attacks) decided to react to the very failures of a rising mandatory collectivism (Bush) by electing mandatory collectivism on steroids (Obama). That was the year two thousand and eight and it cemented American entrance into the vicious cycle of decline.
So here is my prediction:
In four years, Obama will leave an America that has slid to around number twenty seven in economic freedom of the world rankings, and an American electorate irreversibly deadlocked into a one to two percentage annual growth trendline to decline. There just isn’t prosperity in low growth rates. That is just the simple arithmetic of compounding. America will join Europe in the group of fast declining nations, drowned in a sea of humanity that is finally liberating itself from central planning and the flat effort-reward curves of mandatory compassion. America, under the flatter effort-reward curves and centralized planning that will exist by 2016, will still classify as a rather free economy but it will have lost its most valuable asset: It will no longer be the most competitive economy in the world. The dynamics of competitiveness and prosperity play out in very-very narrow margins. That is as true amongst corporations as it is amongst nations. Few like to hear this but, you cannot compete by taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from executives and giving them to janitors and facilities maintenance personnel. Employees would flock to such companies and they would propagate like mushrooms. But in a collectively managed corporation, the more numerous janitors and facilities maintenance individuals can force the executives to do so — and the company goes down. Someone somewhere else in the world manages to provide the same or better product at a lesser price by a adhering to a compensation structure that is better correlated to productivity and unique talent. So as America enters year 2016 it will be increasingly possible to produce/create most of the things that America now produces/creates and has traditionally produced/created, somewhere else in the world at better performance to price ratios – by foreign companies, employing foreign workers, using foreign capital. The process of cutting off Americans from this wealth creation will only accelerate if Mr. Obama follows up on his campaign promise to punish companies that seek greater efficiency overseas. Thus Mr. Obama’s vindictive and delusional promises will result in cutting off from wealth creation not only American workers but American capital as well.
In a nutshell, crossing this inevitable threshold of competitiveness will greatly accelerate American decline. The steep portion of the decline will have commenced and, in the predictably ensuing anxiety, people will desperately reach out for ever more “government help” ie. more mandatory collectivism, i.e. the same “change” that caused the decline in the first place by flattening the once unique in the world American effort-reward curves.
So while from a strategic point of view, Romney’s non-election may not be that bad (see Mr. Mitchell’s comments on VAT) Obama’s election cements a demonstrated change in the deeper American psyche. A change to the mandatory collectivism that plagues the rest of the world – or most of it that is. This “change”, and the decline it implies are irreversible. If you want a preview of the vicious cycle, look at California: After a brief resistance to more taxes, virtually every proposition promoting mandatory collectivism passed. California collects multiple times the taxes other states collect and it is STILL not enough. Still not fair enough, still “the people” want more. In the vicious cycle of decline, people become desperate. They will tap into anything (primarily other people’s work) trying to maintain their standard of living against fundamentals that they themselves unleashed in previous elections of free-lunch HopNChange and central planning regulations (like the ones that make California dwellings cost five times as much as in the rest of the nation). For America as a whole, loss of competitiveness will deepen, thus further deepening desperation and ever more bad choices at the polls. Perhaps unbeknownst to Americans, this is the classic cycle of decline. Welcome to European dynamics.
Hard to be optimistic when we know that by 2016, there will be another 4-6 trillion in debt. We’ll be lucky to not fall back into recession and have a total collapse of our financial system.
Those aren’t silver linings; they are tin linings. Sincerely, Richard D. Ross, Ph.D.
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Well, at least we get to blame George Bush for the mess we’re in. That’s change I can believe in!
The Republican and Democrat Parties are opposing support structures for a system that is corrupt and broken…perhaps beyond repair. In my lifetime Americans have elected 6 Republicans and 6 Democrats, and …here we are!!!
A pox on both their houses.
Our “issues” are Constitutional issues. Had we been operating under the Constitution, virtually all of our debt issues would have never come to be. As it is, the Constitution has been shredded at the alter of special interests, and Big Brother, but the “fixes” are nowhere else to be found.
The repubs will run Romney again in 4 years. And it doesn’t matter. When congress allowed all of the various agencies to enforce regulations as laws, with their own enforcement arms (really? The epa needs a swat team???), we lost representative government. No representation with regulations. How’s that for a battle cry. AND…with 50% of the population on the government payroll or dole…likely to be 55% or so in 4 years…I doubt we’ll ever get another chance at voting in someone to fix the gubernment…
Gloom, despair and agony, oh me! Whoaaahhhh…
First: Why are you so sure there will be an election in 2016?
Second: You do not mention that a traitor and anti-American Socialist is returned to the White House.
Three: Karl Rove and his gang must go; they have chosen McCain, weak and not Conservative, and Romney who has proven he can not even beat the biggest failure in the history of the Presidency.
Four: This election has proven to many, including myself, that our vote is a waste of effort and time. The Karl Roves’s and George Soros’s of the world control the world and until we can rid ourselves of these parasites there will be no honest elections.
Five: Until we stop the Lobbyist from having the freedom to roam all over D.C. spreading money like planting grass, “We the People” will never be represented by those we elect to manage our Nation.
Six; PAC (Political Action Committee) short for unaccounted for money. The PAC system has raised the cost of elections while allowing Soros and others to toss their money into the race in amounts not allowed the individual.
Seven; Nothing is ever going to change with only voting, “We the People” will have to make waves and I would advise between now and the 2014 Congressional election. Non violent protest is much more productive because , they can not call it a revolution if you are only walking carrying signs and not being violent. Violence tends to turn the people you need to help you off.
great, so all seven of your silver linings don’t apply to dictators… but, hey, thanks for being positive!
re: ” For my partisan Republican friends who are looking for someone to blame”
Aside from blaming themselves for not nominating a real small government type 🙂 they should blame themselves for not pointing out Obama’s constantly repeated lie which is confirmed by his own budget documents (i.e. the public didn’t need to believe partisans.. they won’t) that he would “pay down our debt”.. rather than add over $900 billion a year to it. Most lies are arguable, this one was contradicted by documents on his own white house site, which the GOP failed to point out when they did mention it in a radio address. If a CEO lied about his company’s finances to get people to buy stock, the public would cry fraud! and many would want him put in jail (regardless of the laws).. yet the GOP let him get away with this. He will likely continue to lie about even more budget related issues. See more (including why the debt is a concern, even if this blog tries to downplay debt vs. the more important spending issue):
http://www.politicsdebunked.com/article-list/obama-lied-about-paying-down-the-debt
Agree completely with George Bush and Karl Rove. Those two idiots ruining the free market message by cloaking their corporatist BS with free market rhetoric.
One question: is Andrew Cuomo really statist? I’ve only heard a few things since I left New York, but they were good–taking on public unions, trying to trim spending, etc. Am I hearing things?
This has brightened my day a bit but we should not just be concerned with the Supreme Court. Obama is also going to get to nominate a large group of federal circuit court judges which is going to hurt for a very long time.