The Best and Worst Policy Developments of 2013

One year ago, I looked at the worst policy developments of 2012.

I had some very good (or should I say bad?) options for that award, including the Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision, the IRS’s lawless decision to make American banks act as tax collectors for foreign governments, Japan’s higher VAT tax, the California vote for a class-warfare tax hike, and France’s 75 percent income tax rate.

I ultimately decided, perhaps for selfishly sentimental reasons, that the worst development was repeal of the flat tax in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

We’re going to do the same exercise this year, but the glass is going to be half full. Not only will we look at the worst policy developments of 2013, but we’ll also list the best policy developments of the year.

And because I try to be optimistic, we’ll start with the good news.

But remember the rules. We’re looking at policy rather than politics. I know, for instance, that one of my favorite posts in 2013 was the one about Reagan crushing Obama in a hypothetical matchup, but that’s obviously not a policy development.

So what are my choices?

Potential examples of good news include the fact that very little legislation was enacted during the year, the sequester (while it lasted), the overwhelming rejection of class-warfare tax policy in Colorado, and the government shutdown.

Those are all good options, but I think these three developments rank the highest.

1. Obamacare – You’re probably thinking I’m on drugs since Obamacare is listed as good news, but bear with me because I’m engaging in some one-step-backwards-two-steps-forward analysis. More specifically, I think the President’s signature “achievement” has done more than anything else in recent years to discredit big government. I also think the flop of Obamacare has rejuvenated interest in – and support for – the types of policies that would make health care system more affordable and efficient. I’ve always feared that undoing the damage of government intervention in the health sector was our most intractable challenge, but Obama may have given us a path forward and that is worth celebrating. By the way, the Detroit bankruptcy is good news for the same reason. Maybe, just maybe, some people will learn the right lessons when statist policies spectacularly fail.

2. The defeat of pro-gun control politicians in Colorado – I don’t think many people will argue when I say that nothing matters more to politicians than getting reelected. And that’s why I am so happy that two Colorado state senators were kicked out of office because of their votes to impose gun control. And that was then followed by the resignation of another state senator who wanted to avoid the same fate. There aren’t many certainties in life, but I can assure you that pro-gun control politicians all across the nation noticed what happened to these Colorado thugs and are now much less likely to push anti-second amendment initiatives. More broadly, we can feel somewhat optimistic that the right to keep and bear arms has never been in a stronger political position.

3. Spending restraint – This hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as it deserves, but the federal budget in 2013 was actually smaller than the federal budget in 2012. And I’m using honest math, not the Washington approach of calling an increase a cut because the budget might have grown even faster. Indeed, the nation actually has enjoyed a two-year spending slowdown that substantially reduced government spending as a share of GDP. In other words, my Golden Rule was in effect! If we could maintain this approach for a few more years, we’d quickly have a balanced budget and hopefully kill off any pressure for tax hikes.

Feel free, by the way, to offer your suggestions in the comment section. Maybe the best news of 2013 was something that I neglected to cover.

Now let’s look at the other side of the ledger.

Potential bad news stories might include the IMF coercing/bribing Albania to get rid of its flat tax, the easy-money policies of the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, the 100th anniversary of the income tax, the global shift to higher tax rates, the seemingly permanent drop in the employment-population ratio, and the fiscal cliff tax hike from last January 1.

Geesh, that’s a depressing list. But there are three options – in my humble opinion – that are even worse.

1. Obamacare – I realize I listed Obamacare as one of the best developments of 2013, but it also has to be one of the worst. The legislation is a toxic stew of spending, taxes, regulation, cronyism, and intervention, and it was based on the absurd theory that you solve government-caused problems by adding even more government. And even though Obamacare has discredited big government and opened the door to real reform, we can’t dismiss the possibility that the law will survive and created more dependency.

2. Erosion of the Rule of Law – One of the defining features of a civilized society is the rule of law. Heck, even if laws are bad, it’s still important for people to know that there are rules and that the government is constrained by those rules. That’s the basic difference between the developed world and the types of despotic rule you find in developing nations (with Argentina being a tragic example). Unfortunately, the Obama White House seems to think that it can arbitrarily change laws or ignore laws simply based on the President’s ideological whims or political needs. This has happened over and over again with Obamacare, but the problem extends to many other issues.

3. Murray-Ryan budget deal – Since I thought the sequester was one of the good things that happened in 2013, you won’t be surprised that a law designed to evade the sequester would make the list of bad policy developments. The budget pact between Paul Ryan and Patty Murray allowed more short-term spending, much of it financed by back-door tax hikes. I’m the first to admit that the spending hikes and tax increases were relatively small compared to the size of the federal Leviathan, but what’s really depressing about the Murray-Ryan deal is that it probably sets the stage for future bad agreements. And this Charlie Brown cartoon shows what frequently happens when Republicans and Democrats decide to negotiate on fiscal policy.

Once again, feel free to offer your suggestions for the worst development of 2013.

On a more personal note, I’m happy to report that I don’t think there were any noteworthy bad developments in my life. Other than getting another year older, which isn’t any fun.

I can,however, report a couple of good developments for the year, including the Princess of the Levant and some better performance on the softball field.

And in the I’m-not-sure-how-to-react category, my favorite daughter got engaged this year. I’m worried this may eventually lead to marriage. And then children.

Which would make me a grandfather, and I’d like to think that I’m much too young for anyone to call me Grandpa!

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You Be the Judge: When Should Government Be Allowed to Take Your Children?

As part of my “You Be the Judge” series, I periodically share stories that presumably create moral quandaries for libertarians and other advocates of limited government and individual liberty.

It’s not easy being libertarian!

Though I’ve been lax in this regard since my last iteration in the series was about drug legalization back in April.

Time to atone for this oversight. Today’s thorny topic deals with the reasons that government must provide before taking children from their parents.

We had an example of this type of quandary earlier in the year, which actually resulted in parents fleeing to Cuba.

Our new example comes from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Here are some details from a story in the UK-based Daily Express.

Britain’s obesity epidemic…sees NHS hospitals dealing with 1,000 cases every day… Increasingly social workers find youngsters being fed a high-fat, sugary diet, which can be just as bad for their health. The phenomenon is known as “killing with kindness” because the child craves the unhealthy food and a loving parent feels unable to say no. Professionals say they have to make complex decisions in care proceedings and a family’s gross over-eating can be one of the factors that leads to them losing their children. A Sunday Express survey of councils found that in the past year five children were taken from their families for that reason: two in Wake-field, West Yorkshire, one in Oxfordshire, one in Salford and one in Hounslow, London. The previous 12 months saw five similar cases in Sheffield, Portsmouth, Lincolnshire, Slough and Harrow, London. …Ex-Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson warned in 2006 that health chiefs would look at removing children from their families if they became super-sized, risking their health. The first reported case took place in 2007 when an eight-year-old girl from Cumbria, who had to wear size 16 clothes, was taken into care.

I confess that this story leaves me conflicted.

Since I surely would favor the government taking kids if they were being starved to death, shouldn’t I support taking kids if they’re being fed to death?

Even if they’re not being fed to death, they are probably being condemned to lives of obesity, which is associated with all sorts of bad outcomes. Don’t I want to save them from that fate?

On the other hand, do any of us think that kids generally are better off in a foster care system?

Moreover, do you trust the government to make wise decisions? That’s an especially relevant question in the case of the United Kingdom, where kids actually have been removed from a home because the parents didn’t believe in unlimited immigration.

And what’s the cut-off point? Maybe if the government starts with seizing grossly obese children, that eventually will lead to raiding homes with mildly chubby kids.

These slippery slope arguments are important because most examples of government abuse have relatively benign beginnings (today’s monstrous income tax, for example, began in 1913 as a very simple, two-page tax with a top rate of just 7 percent).

I don’t know the right answer, but I look forward to reading the comments.

P.S. If you want additional challenging examples of “you be the judge,” peruse this list.

• Is it appropriate to put politicians on trial for economic malfeasance?
• Is it excessive vigilante justice to set your daughter’s rapist on fire?
• Should prisoners with AIDS be segregated from other convicts?
• Which tax collection tactic is more brutal and unjust?
• When a wheelchair-bound guy uses a baseball bat to punish his granddaughter’s molester, what’s the right response?
• Should politicians set pay levels at government-owned firms?
• Is sharia law sometimes appropriate?
• Is the Netherlands right to segregate troublemakers from the general population?
• What do you do about self-destructive behavior in a government-run healthcare system?
• Should there be laws against incest among consenting adults?
• Should motorists be allowed to warn other drivers about speed traps?
• Is jury nullification the right approach for victimless crimes?
• Was this angry father wrong to take matters into his own hands?
• Should drunk-rafting be a crime?
• Should rich people pay higher speeding fines?

P.P.S. On a separate matter, I gave a speech earlier this year while visiting the Citadel in South Carolina. I gave it the grandiose title of “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Economic Policy.”

I don’t know if this is a positive sign, but that video has been translated and posted in China. Considering that my blog is blocked in China, I assume this is progress of some sort.

You won’t be surprised to learn, though, that I have no idea how to embed this type of video, but if you have a bizarre desire to watch me pontificate with Chinese subtitles, feel free to click on the image.

I have no idea whether I’ll change any minds in China, but I hope the country moves more in a free-market direction. As shown by Hong Kong and Singapore, Chinese people are very productive when freed from the shackles of big government.

Moreover, some Chinese bigwigs seem to understand. I was very impressed, for instance, when the head of China’s sovereign wealth fund made some very accurate observations about the failure of the European welfare state.

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Bipartisanship Is Generally a Good Thing…but for Politicians rather than Taxpayers

If you like to go along to get along, I suggest you don’t become a libertarian. At least not if you follow politics or work in Washington.

Otherwise, you’re doomed to a life of endlessly pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Here are three examples.

1. When almost every Republican and Democrat argued for a Keynesian-style stimulus in 2008, libertarians had the lonely job of explaining that you don’t get more growth by increasing the burden of government spending.

2. And when most Republicans and Democrats said we needed a TARP bailout that same year, it was libertarians who futilely argued that the “FDIC-resolution” approach was a far more sensible way of dealing with the government-created crisis.

3. More recently, there were a bunch of stories complaining that 2013 was a very unproductive year for Congress, and libertarians were among the few to state that we’re better off with fewer laws rather than more laws.

The same is true for “bipartisanship.” Almost every pundit, politician, and lobbyist in Washington will extol the virtues of bipartisanship. But what they really mean is that they want both Republicans and Democrats to join arms in a business-as-usual game.

Indeed, the standard libertarian joke is that you get bipartisanship when the Stupid Party and the Evil Party both agree on something. Needless to say, that often means laws that are both stupid and evil.

Which is a good description of Bush’s 2008 stimulus and the corrupt TARP legislation.

But since we’re at the end of the year, I don’t want to get overly depressed. So let’s share some cartoons that celebrate the Murray-Ryan budget, which is the most recent example of “bipartisanship.”

We’ll start with ones that have a Christmas theme.

The politicians were glad to escape the fiscal constraint of sequestration, but Lisa Benson is not overly impressed by their cooperative effort.

Gary Varvel isn’t very happy, either.

Varvel is very explicit in this cartoon about Democrats and Republicans being united against taxpayers.

The bag should have been labelled “spending,” but that’s a minor complaint.

Steve Breen points out that the budget deal achieved three out of four goals.

And Michael Ramirez astutely identifies too much spending as the problem and shows that the budget deal did nothing to address that issue.

Here’s another Lisa Benson cartoon, though this one focuses on establishment GOPers trying to hook the Tea Party on the demon rum of big government.

Sort of reminds me of this great Henry Payne cartoon about Obama and Greece. Or maybe this Nate Beeler cartoon about weak-willed GOPers.

I’ve saved the best for last.

This Glenn McCoy cartoon shows what bipartisanship really means inside the DC beltway.

McCoy had another cartoon last year with a similar theme, as did Michael Ramirez.

In closing, I want to say something vaguely optimistic. The Murray-Ryan budget deal was unfortunate, but it was a rather minor setback compared to the kinds of “bipartisan” big-government schemes we got during the Bush years.

It was sort of akin to the fiscal cliff deal at the beginning of the year. Government got a bit bigger and a bit more expensive, but it was peanuts compared to TARP, the prescription drug entitlement, and many of the other schemes that eroded economic liberty last decade.

P.S. Fairness requires that I point out that bipartisanship doesn’t automatically mean bad legislation. The bipartisan 1997 budget deal between the GOP Congress and Bill Clinton cut some taxes and reduced the growth of federal spending. And the successful sequester came about because of the bipartisan 2011 debt limit legislation.

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The Biggest Risk Factor Leading to Premature Death Is…?

Nope, the answer isn’t smoking. Or fatty food. Or 16 oz. sodas.

And it’s not alcohol, driving too fast, or standing between politicians and a TV camera.

Why is murder “chic” for some people?

In the past 100 years or so, the biggest cause of premature death has been government.

Back in 2011, while criticizing the Baltimore Symphony for using the Soviet hammer and sickle in a promotion, I linked to a website showing how many millions of people were murdered by the dictators who ruled the Soviet Union.

You’ll find similar data in this video, as well as some equally shocking numbers for other examples of democide (death by government).

I don’t know if all the numbers in the video are right. I don’t even know if the government bought 1.6 billion hollow point bullets. And I certainly hope our tax dollars didn’t help finance Pol Pot’s democide in Cambodia.

But I fully agree that government is the greatest killer of all time.

This doesn’t mean, by the way, that I think all governments are equally evil. I wouldn’t even make the claim that there’s a link between big government and democide (though that’s probably true given the track record of National Socialists in Germany and Soviet Socialists in China and the Soviet Union).

Instead, I’ll simply regurgitate some of what I wrote back in August.

…be thankful that there are some libertarians willing to raise a stink about government even if the rest of the world thinks we’re a bit odd. As we’ve seen dozens of times, most recently with the IRS and NSA, bureaucrats and politicians have a compulsive tendency to grab more power and make government more intrusive. …I’ll end today’s post by mentioning the fable of the frog that gets put in a pot of water and doesn’t jump out because the temperature feels comfortable. But then the heat is slowly raised and the frog no longer has the energy to escape when he finally figures out he’s being cooked. Well, libertarians are the ones who loudly complain when the government puts us into pots.

In other words, governments are less likely to do really awful things if there are some of us fighting when they do mildly bad things.

Don’t forget that when enough mildly bad things occur and you get economic stagnation, one result is the kind of social chaos and rioting that has occurred in some European nations.

And those are the conditions that sometimes lead to takeovers by the types of governments that do really awful things.

Let’s close with two bits of satire. First, here’s something I saw on Twitter. It’s for the statists who claim that communism is a good theory, but that it hasn’t been properly implemented.

Needless to say, I can’t see the appeal of a theory that says we are slaves to each other. But the point of this poster is that real-world communism is always about murder and oppression.

Second, this is a good opportunity to emphasize one of the messages from the end of the video.

A common trait of dictators is that they want the citizenry disarmed.

This poster is the fourth-most viewed post I’ve ever produced. But not because I said anything clever.

Instead, people like this poster and share it with their friends because it makes a very important point about the dangers of unlimited state power.

So what’s the moral of the story? I guess the message is that small government is tolerable. Medium-sized government is bad. And unlimited government is horrible.

Actually, George Washington said the same thing with much greater clarity: “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

P.S. I suppose this shouldn’t be a joking matter, but here’s an amusing look at communist efficiency from the Beijing Olympics.

P.P.S. And the fourth video at this link has some great examples of Reagan’s use of humor against communism.

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A Manifesto for Free Markets in Health Care

Not counting humor-oriented pieces such as this and this, it’s been nearly a month since I’ve written about Obamacare.

To make up for this oversight, today we’re going to look at a way out of the Obamacare mess.

But the goal isn’t simply to repeal the President’s bad policy. That merely gets us back to where we were in 2009. We need to figure out how to restore market forces to healthcare, and that means undoing decades of misguided government intervention.

Fortunately, we have a roadmap thanks to John Cochrane, a Cato adjunct scholar and Professor at the University of Chicago. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he explains how radical deregulation is the right approach.

He starts with an essential point that “settled law” doesn’t mean unchangeable law.

…proponents call it “settled law,” but as Prohibition taught us, not even a constitutional amendment is settled law—if it is dysfunctional enough, and if Americans can see a clear alternative.

And he points out that Obamacare will get worse over time.

This fall’s website fiasco and policy cancellations are only the beginning. Next spring the individual mandate is likely to unravel when we see how sick the people are who signed up on exchanges, and if our government really is going to penalize voters for not buying health insurance. The employer mandate and “accountable care organizations” will take their turns in the news. There will be scandals. There will be fraud. This will go on for years.

But the law won’t collapse on its own. Indeed, its failures will be used as excuses for even more government.

Yet opponents should not sit back and revel in dysfunction. …Without a clear alternative, we will simply patch more, subsidize more, and ignore frauds and scandals, as we do in Medicare and other programs.

So what should be done?

Professor Cochrane points out that the healthcare system isn’t a free market now and it wasn’t a free market when Obamacare was imposed.

Instead, it’s one of the most heavily government-controlled sectors of our economy.

The U.S. health-care market is dysfunctional. Obscure prices and $500 Band-Aids are legendary. The reason is simple: Health care and health insurance are strongly protected from competition. There are explicit barriers to entry, for example the laws in many states that require a “certificate of need” before one can build a new hospital. Regulatory compliance costs, approvals, nonprofit status, restrictions on foreign doctors and nurses, limits on medical residencies, and many more barriers keep prices up and competitors out. Hospitals whose main clients are uncompetitive insurers and the government cannot innovate and provide efficient cash service.

He then explains how a market could operate – if it was allowed.

A much freer market in health care and health insurance can work, can deliver high quality, technically innovative care at much lower cost, and solve the pathologies of the pre-existing system. …We’ll know we are there when prices are on hospital websites, cash customers get discounts, and new hospitals and insurers swamp your inbox with attractive offers and great service. …Only deregulation can unleash competition. And only disruptive competition, where new businesses drive out old ones, will bring efficiency, lower costs and innovation.

If this sounds familiar, it may be that you watched this video from Reason TV on market-based hospitalization. And if you haven’t, you should!

Cochrane writes that deregulation will enable the “creative destruction” that brings progress in other parts of the economy.

We need to permit the Southwest Airlines, Wal-Mart, Amazon.com and Apples of the world to bring to health care the same dramatic improvements in price, quality, variety, technology and efficiency that they brought to air travel, retail and electronics. …Health insurance should be individual, portable across jobs, states and providers; lifelong and guaranteed-renewable, meaning you have the right to continue with no unexpected increase in premiums if you get sick. Insurance should protect wealth against large, unforeseen, necessary expenses, rather than be a wildly inefficient payment plan for routine expenses. People want to buy this insurance, and companies want to sell it. It would be far cheaper, and would solve the pre-existing conditions problem. We do not have such health insurance only because it was regulated out of existence.

Needless to say, Obamacare is the opposite of a free market. It assumes that you solve government-created problems by adding additional layers of government.

The Affordable Care Act bets…that more regulation, price controls, effectiveness panels, and “accountable care” organizations will force efficiency, innovation, quality and service from the top down. Has this ever worked?

Cochrane has the right diagnosis and right cure, but that’s the easy part. The real challenge is implementing the policies that would restore a functioning market.

That requires reforms to Medicare and Medicaid, not only to save money for taxpayers, but also because those are some of the steps that are needed if we want market forces to bring down the cost of healthcare.

Health care liberalization also means a flat tax, not only for the pro-growth impact of lower tax rates, but also because it gets rid of the internal revenue code’s healthcare exclusion, thus ending the distortion that encourages over-insurance.

It means state-by-state battles to get rid of regulations, mandates, and other forms of intervention that hinder competition and markets.

They say that even long journeys begin with a single step. That’s true, but it’s also important to walk in the right direction.

That hasn’t happened in recent decades, so it’s time to scrub the slate clean. We need free markets, not more government. We need more consumer sovereignty, not more third-party payer.

Since I’m a sucker for good political humor, we’re going to close with a great Michael Ramirez cartoon. As you can see, there’s a reason why he won my political cartoonist contest. Indeed, if I ever do another contest, this could replace his award-winning “Julia” cartoon.

It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for Pajama Boy.

Maybe somebody should fix him up with Julia. I’m guessing they wouldn’t even know how to reproduce without intervention, handouts, and subsidies, so that would be an additional way of improving the gene pool.

And it would offset the reproductive advantage of the bureaucracy.

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From France to California, Holiday Gloom from the Tax Police

It’s time to extinguish any lingering Christmas cheer. Today’s topic is over-bearing and tyrannical tax administration.

To be more specific, we’re going to look at the extent to which taxpayers are mistreated during the process of collecting revenue.

Yes, the amount that governments steal from you also is important, but that’s a topic we’ve already discussed on many occasions.

Moreover, we’re not going to focus on the IRS. Yes, the internal revenue service is infamous for its brutal and intrusive tactics. And I’m embarrassed to note that the United States scored very poorly in a Tax Oppression Index prepared by Switzerland’s Institut Constant.

But I want to focus today on places other than Washington. And the good news (at least relatively speaking) is that some countries scored even lower than the United States. The very worst nation was Italy, and you probably won’t be surprised that Germany (the country that figured out a way to use parking meters to tax prostitutes) and France were among the jurisdictions that also ranked below America.

This story from Brittany provides a rather appropriate glimpse at what it’s like to be a taxpayer in France.

For customers at the Mamm-Kounifl concert-café in Locmiquélic, carrying drinks trays and used glasses back to the bar was a polite tradition. But for social security agency URSAFF, it was also an infringement of labour laws because customers were acting like waiters, French local newspaper Le Télégramme reported.

But what’s really amazing is the way in which France’s revenue-hungry bureaucrats “caught” the alleged scofflaws.

“Around half-past midnight, a customer returned a drinks tray. She passed by the bar to go to the toilets. That was when it all kicked off.   My husband was pinned against the glass by a man. A woman leapt on me, showing her ID card and that’s when I realised it was a URSSAF check. They told me I had been caught using undeclared labour,” owner Markya Le Floch told Le Télégramme. …The authorities initially fined the pub owners €7,900 and briefly placed them in police custody. …URSSAF are still pursuing a social case and are now seeking €9,000 due to non-payment of the original fine.

Wow. This may be even more Orwellian than the FDA raid against the Amish farm that was selling unpasteurized milk to consenting adults. Or more absurd than the DEA busting a grandmother for buying cold medicine.

Imagine if the IRS adopted this French policy. If you take your significant other on a fancy date to McDonald’s and then carry your trash to the garbage receptacles, you’ll be guilty of providing “undeclared labor” and the tax police can then decide to impose taxes and fines because there could have been a taxable employee fulfilling that role.

I’m not joking. That seems to be the premise of the case in France.

Let’s now look at how taxpayers are treated by the various states here in America. Using data from the Council on State Taxation, the Tax Foundation has put together a map with grades for each state based on “good government” principles of tax administration.

I’m surprised that Maine and Ohio rank so highly, particularly since neither state gets very good grades based on either Tax Freedom Day, aggregate tax burden, or the State Business Tax Climate.

But I’m not surprised that California ranks at the bottom. The state routinely gets bad grades on various measures of fiscal policy. No wonder so much income is moving out of the state. As for Louisiana, I can understand why Governor Jindal is so anxious to get rid of the state income tax.

Though the absence of a state income tax doesn’t guarantee good tax administration. Nevada, for instance, gets a poor grade in the COST survey.

P.S. If you like cartoons mocking California’s tax-and-spend politicians, click here, here, here, here, here, and here.

P.P.S. I’ve only shared one French-related cartoon, but you can seem my attempts at humorous captions here, here, and here.

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A Golden Rule Christmas

Jay Leno had the all-time best Christmas joke and the school bureaucrats in Haymarket, VA, win the prize for the all-time worst example of anti-Christmas lunacy.

But I must win the prize for being the biggest Christmas policy dork. I make this confession freely because there’s no other explanation for being very happy about this present from my girlfriend.

The Golden Rule, for those who have not endured my haranguing on the topic, is the common-sense notion that good fiscal policy is achieved when the burden of government spending shrinks compared to the size of the private sector.

And that occurs, needless to say (but I’ll say it anyhow), when government spending increases slower than the growth of private output.

Ideally, it would be even better to actually cut government spending – which actually did happen in the 2012 and 2013 fiscal years (thanks to the Tea Party and sequestration).

Unfortunately, I fear government will grow far too fast in 2014, in part because of the Murray-Ryan budget deal that replaced automatic spending cuts with back-door tax hikes.

Compared to the size of the federal budget, the additional spending isn’t that large, so my real concern is that the pact sets the stage for bigger moves in the wrong direction at some point in the near future.

But let’s not dwell on potential bad news at this time of year.

Instead, let’s close with a better way of selling Mitchell’s Golden Rule. Here’s the Princess of the Levant showcasing the gift she made.

Since she gave this gift to me, it’s now my job to implement the Golden Rule as a gift to the entire nation.

That should be a simple achievement. If we simply limit government spending so it grows at the rate of inflation (about 2 percent per year), the burden of government spending will fall as a share of gross domestic product.

And even though I’m much more interested in reducing the size of the public sector than I am in fiscal balance, it’s worth noting that you can balance the budget by 2018 with this amount of modest spending restraint.

But even though this should be simple, it definitely won’t be easy. Convincing politicians not to spend is very analogous to convincing ticks not to suck your blood.

Actually, I apologize. That’s a very unfair analogy. The only really bad thing we get from ticks is Lyme Disease.

With politicians, by contrast, we get taxes, spending, and red tape on good days and war, genocide, and totalitarianism on bad days.

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Merry Christmas Messages

Normal people aren’t thinking about public policy at this time of year, but I’m a libertarian who has decided to fight against big government in Washington, so I’m definitely not normal and I could be a masochist.

And since you’re reading this instead of daydreaming about Santa, you’re also not part of the herd. Which means you may enjoy some good laughs with a Christmas theme.

In prior years, I’ve shared IRS Christmas gifts, a video showing what would happen if Obama ran the North Pole, and presents from Ben Bernanke.

This year, let’s enjoy some cartoons. Given my disdain for big government, destructive redistribution, and high tax rates, you’ll understand why this Robert Gorrell cartoon is first on my list.

Next we have Henry Payne mocking the President’s desperate efforts to get people to climb on the sinking ship of Obamacare.

Speaking of which, here’s a gem from Michael Ramirez featuring the President in the role of Pajama Boy.

Since we’ve already enjoyed some Pajama Boy jokes, you might think there’s nothing new in this cartoon,

But I wanted to share it because of a minor disagreement. I wish Ramirez was right and Obama was “only” talking about changing health insurance.

Instead, the President has taken a health care system that already was a mess because of government intervention and imposed a law that will make a bad situation far worse.

Last but not least, I want to share some…um…feedback I received last night. Long-time readers may remember that I have a license plate that expresses my deep and sincere affection for Washington, DC.

Well, you’ll be shocked to learn that some people disagree with me.

And one of those people left a message on my windshield. I don’t know if this “fan” was an overpaid bureaucrat, an Obama drone, a corrupt lobbyist, or a 1960s refugee, but you can see that he (could be a she, I suppose, but the handwriting seems male) was irked.

A few thoughts about the message.

1. Why is my license plate offensive? Were the Founding Fathers also offensive because of their distrust of centralized power and authority? That certainly seems to be Obama’s view, so maybe my “fan” is an Obama drone.

2. Then again, the use of “bespeaks” suggests someone who spent too much time in college. So maybe this is a former grad student who became a Hill staffer and is now a sleazy lobbyist for some unethical group of moochers.  No wonder he’s angry about life.

3. Regarding the…er…challenge to my manhood, it was actually my girlfriend who found the message. And since she’s way too hot for me, I must have some redeeming quality. At least I hope.

4. I’m surprised that my new friend wrote “Merry Christmas.” Isn’t that politically incorrect?!? What if I was Jewish? Or Muslim? Or Buddhist? Or whatever? This makes me think the author was an overpaid bureaucrat who slept through his mandatory sensitivity training. European Union bureaucrats surely would never make this mistake.

5. Last but not least, I’m amused that  a statist would use “Peace” as a valediction. It is the left that believes in using the coercive power of government – ultimately enforced by threats and violence – to restrict the rights of others. So maybe my “fan” is a 1960s leftover. These are the nitwits, after all, who protest against government by demanding more government.

Maybe the guy who left the note is a reader and will reveal his identity, but I won’t hold my breath.

In the meantime, enjoy a politically incorrect Christmas story from Larry the Cable Guy.

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It’s a Very Merry Christmas for Washington’s Parasite Class

Last year, while writing about the sleazy and self-serving behavior at the IRS, I came up with a Theorem that explains day-to-day behavior in Washington.

It might not be as pithy as Mitchell’s Law, and it doesn’t contain an important policy prescription like Mitchell’s Golden Rule, but it could be the motto of the federal government.

Simply stated, government is a racket that benefits the DC political elite by taking money from average people in America

I realize this is an unhappy topic to be discussing during the Christmas season, but the American people need to realize that they are being raped and pillaged by the corrupt insiders that control Washington and live fat and easy lives at our expense.

If you don’t believe me, check out this map showing that 10 of the 15 richest counties in America are the ones surrounding our nation’s imperial capital.

Who would have guessed that the wages of sin are so high?

But even though the District of Columbia isn’t on the list, that doesn’t mean the people actually living in the capital are suffering.

Here are some interesting nuggets from a report in the Washington Business Journal.

D.C. residents are enjoying a personal income boom. The District’s total personal income in 2012 was $47.28 billion, or $74,733 for each of its 632,323 residents, according to the Office of the Chief Financial Officer’s Economic and Revenue Trends report for November. The U.S. average per capita personal income was $43,725.

Why is income so much higher? Well, the lobbyists, politicians, bureaucrats, interest groups, contractors, and other insiders who dominate DC get much higher wages than people elsewhere in the country.

And they get far higher fringe benefits.

In terms of pure wages, D.C., on a per capita basis, was 79 percent higher than the national average in 2012 — $36,974 to $20,656. …Employee benefits were 102 percent higher in D.C. than the U.S. average in 2012, $7,514 to $3,710. Proprietor’s income, 137 percent higher — $9,275 to $3,906. …The numbers suggest D.C. residents are living the high life.

Now let’s share a chart from Zero Hedge. It uses median household income rather than total personal income, so the numbers don’t match up, but what’s noteworthy is how DC income grew faster than the rest of the nation during the Bush years and then even more dramatically diverged from the rest of the country during the Obama years.

In other words, policies like TARP, the fake stimulus, and Obamacare have been very good for Washington’s ruling class.

Want some other concrete examples of profitable Washington sleaze? Well, here are some excerpts from Rich Tucker’s column for Real Clear Policy.

The real place to park your money is in Washington, D.C. That’s because the way to get ahead isn’t to work hard or make things; it’s to lobby Washington for special privileges. Look no further than the sweet deal the sugar industry gets. It’s spent about $50 million on federal campaign donations over the last five years. So that would average out to $10 million per year. Last year alone, the federal government spent $278 million on direct expenditures to sugar companies. That’s a great return on investment.

Big Corn may get an even better deal than Big Sugar.

Then there’s ethanol policy. Until 2012, the federal government provided generous tax credits to refiners that blended ethanol into gasoline. In 2011 alone, Washington spent $6 billion on this credit. The federal government also maintains tariffs (54 cents per gallon) to keep out foreign ethanol,and it mandates that tens of billions of gallons of ethanol be blended into the American gasoline supply. Nothing like a federal mandate to create demand for your product. How much would you pay for billions of dollars worth of largesse? Well, the ethanol industry got a steep discount. In 2012, opensecrets.org says, the American Coalition for Ethanol spent $212,216 on lobbying.

Rich warns that the United States is sliding in the wrong direction.

What makes Washington especially profitable is that its only products are the laws, rules, and regulations that it has the power to force everyone else to follow. …we seem to be sliding toward what the authors term “extractive” institutions. That means government using its power to benefit a handful of influential individuals at the expense of everyone else.

And let’s not forget that some people are getting very rich from Obamacare while the rest of us lose our insurance or pay higher prices.

This Reason TV interview with Andrew Ferguson explains that there is a huge shadow workforce of contractors, consultants, and lobbyists who have their snouts buried deeply in the public trough.

I particularly like his common sense explanation that Washington’s wealth comes at the expense of everyone else. The politicians seize our money at the point of a gun (or simply print more of it) to finance an opulent imperial city.

So if you’re having a hard time making ends meet, remember that you should blame the parasite class in Washington.

P.S. The insider corruption of Washington is a bipartisan problem. Indeed, some of the sleaziest people in DC are Republicans.

P.P.S. Though scandals such as Solyndra show that Obama certainly knows how to play the game.

P.P.P.S. Making government smaller is the only way to reduce the Washington problem of corrupt fat cats.

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A Victory for the IMF…and a Defeat for Good Fiscal Policy

It’s not easy being a libertarian, particularly if you follow public policy.

Thomas Jefferson almost certainly was right when he wrote that “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”

Heck, just look at how small government used to be in the developed world compared to where it is now. Public sectors used to consume only about 10 percent of economic output during the 1800s when nations became rich, but now the burden of government spending averages more than 40 percent of GDP.

And if you really want to get depressed, then look at the long-run fiscal forecasts for the United States and other industrialized countries. Things are going to get worse. Much worse.

Most nations are heading toward a Greek-style fiscal crisis. And while the United States is in better shape than many European welfare states today, our long-run outlook is actually worse according to the International Monetary Fund.

Even the Bank for International Settlements and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development agree with the IMF’s grim prognosis.

Speaking of the IMF, let’s discuss some very bad news. It’s about Albania, so it may not seem very important, but it’s quite symbolic of the destructive impact of international bureaucracies.

As you can see from this Reuters report, the IMF basically bribed Albania to get rid of its flat tax.

“The IMF staff and the authorities reached an agreement on the IMF supporting their economic programme with financial assistance which could be delivered over a period of three years under an extended fund facility with access of about 300 million euros,” the IMF’s mission chief, Nadeem Ilahi, told reporters. …The three-month-old Socialist government will scrap a flat tax of 10 percent in the next fiscal year in January and raise the corporate tax to 15 percent from 10 percent. Also, the income tax for high-earners will rise to rates of 13 percent and 23 percent from 10 percent currently. …”The package of economic policies … supported by the IMF programme should make Albania an economy that is reforming, is open to foreign investors. … A lot of the reforms the authorities are planning are consistent with what the European Union has been asking for,” Ilahi said.

So think about what this means. The IMF is hurting global growth by distorting the allocation of capital. It’s hurting Albanian growth by enabling more government spending. And it’s hurting Albanian growth by forcing higher tax rates.

And then the IMF bureaucrat in charge, Mr. Ilahi, actually has the nerve to assert that all this bad policy will make Albania “open to foreign investors.” Yeah, sure. Investors are always flocking to nations that are actively increasing the burden of government. I guess that’s why France is such an economic dynamo and Hong Kong is suffering from stagnation…at least according to the IMF model anyway.

Keep in mind, by the way, that Mr. Ilahi (like all international bureaucrats) gets a tax-free salary! So I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised that he is completely clueless about the real-world impact on the destructive policies he has foisted upon Albania.

By the way, Albanian politicians are not exactly blameless. They doubled government spending over the past 10 years, with outlays climbing from less than 200 million leks in 2003 to more than 400 million leks this year.

And then these profligate politicians decided to throw their taxpayers under the bus in exchange for a pile of additional loot from the IMF.

The real victims are the people of Albania. They suffered decades of communist enslavement. But even after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, they’ve never enjoyed a free-market, small-government economy. But with the flat tax, they had at least one pro-growth policy.

Now they don’t even have that.

P.S. The IMF is an equal-opportunity proponent of bad policy. The tax-free bureaucrats have advocated lots of tax hikes on Americans, including a value-added tax, a financial transactions tax, and class-warfare tax rate increases. Oh, and let’s not forget they urged a giant energy tax on American consumers. It’s nice to know that the bureaucrats are so industrious at developing policies to hurt the United States when American taxpayers underwrite the biggest share of the IMF budget.

P.P.S. But I don’t want to be unfair. The IMF did provide – albeit by accident – very powerful evidence showing why the United States should not have a value-added tax. So I guess that was one useful thing the bureaucrats did, even if it wasn’t their intention. And the bureaucracy has published some good studies about the economic benefits of reducing government spending and others warning that tax increases can be self defeating.

P.P.P.S. Since this has been a depressing post, let’s close by noting that the IMF doesn’t always succeed. The bureaucrats unsuccessfully tried to pressure Latvia into abandoning the flat tax.

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The Amazing Adventures of Super Bureaucrat!

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane…no it’s Super Bureaucrat!

Actually, look to New Jersey, because you’re going to see a taxpayer ripoff that will get your blood boiling. Depending on your perspective, this may be worse that the toll collector on the New Jersey Turnpike who pocketed more than $300,000 in a single year.

Because today’s super bureaucrat isn’t getting overpaid for one job. He’s getting overpaid for six jobs!

Here are some excerpts from a local news report in New Jersey (h/t: Reason).

Patrick DeBlasio was hired Wednesday as Highlands’ chief financial officer — his sixth concurrent public job and ranking him among the highest-paid public employees in New Jersey. Highlands will pay DeBlasio a $40,000 annual salary on a part-time basis… DeBlasio will not have to work a minimum number of hours, said Administrator Tim Hill, or be required to go into the office.

Maybe one day I can get one of these $40,000 no-show jobs that don’t require any work. But I don’t know if I could juggle several of them, and this is what makes DeBlasio special.

DeBlasio has a full-time job as Carteret’s CFO and part-time gigs in Keansburg, North Plainfield and the Carteret School District, the report said. He is also currently Highland’s tax collector.

It’s rather convenient that he also serves as a tax collector since it takes a lot of money to finance all his government salaries.

In 2012, DeBlasio’s annual compensation totaled $244,606, more than Gov. Chris Christie or state Treasurer Andrew P. Sidamon-Eristoff, who earn $175,000 and $141,000, respectively.

As the old saying goes, nice work if you can get it.

Maybe it’s time to start a Bureaucrat Hall of Fame, sort of like our Moocher Hall of Fame. In addition to Mr. DeBlasio (and the toll collector mentioned above), charter members could include the following.

• A transit bureaucrat from California who got $330,000 without doing a day of work.
• Cops in Oakland getting average compensation of $188,000.
• A school superintendent in New York raking in more than $500 thousand of annual compensation.
• A California government official raking in $822,000 of taxpayer-financed loot in just one year.
• A Philadelphia bureaucrat, after working only 2-1/2 years, nailing down a guaranteed pension of $50,000 per year.
• A New York school bureaucrat simultaneously getting a $225,000 salary and $300,000 pension.
• California taxpayers being forced to pay a fired bureaucrat $550,000 for unused vacation time.

When you read these stories, it’s easy to understand why so many states are in fiscal trouble.

And it also makes sense that state and local bureaucrats are far less likely to quit their jobs than folks in the productive sector of the economy. After all, how many people leave positions when they’re being overpaid?

But don’t forget that federal bureaucrats enjoy an even bigger pay advantage over private sector workers. Indeed, my Cato colleague Chris Edwards reports that they get twice as much average compensation as the serfs in the productive sector of the economy who pay their bills.

This video has the unhappy details.

P.S. Super Bureaucrat joins a list of other “super heroes,” including Government Man, and also two caped crusaders inspired by President Obama. Thanks to Michael Ramirez, we have “Stupor Man.” And there’s also Super-President-Constitutional-Law-Professor.

P.P.S. Is there some hidden strand of DNA that causes people named de Blasio to be burdens to taxpayers?

P.P.P.S. Shifting gears, remember our story about ten days ago featuring the little kid who was suspended from school for firing an imaginary bow and arrow? Well, we have another example showing that government schools could be considered a form of child abuse.

A 5-year-old boy was reportedly suspended from school after making a gun gesture with his hand on the playground. His father, David Hendrix, was furious when he found out his son was issued a suspension for the gesture. “He was playing army on the playground,” Hendrix told WBTV.

Yet another argument for school choice.

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Instead of a Government-Guaranteed Income, How About a Practical Plan to End the Washington Welfare State?

The welfare state is a nightmare.

Programs such as Medicaid are fiscal catastrophes. The food stamp program is riddled with waste. The EITC is easily defrauded, even sending checks to prisoners. And housing subsidies are a recipe for the worst forms of social engineering.

The entire system should be tossed in the trash.

But what’s the alternative? Some libertarians argue that we should eliminate the dozens of Washington programs and replace them with a government-guaranteed minimum income. I address this issue in an essay for Libertarianism.org.

Some libertarians argue that the state should provide a minimum basic income, mainly because this approach would be preferable to the costly and bureaucratic amalgamation of redistribution programs that currently exist. It’s hard to disagree with the notion that the current system is a failure. The Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner has produced a searing indictment of the modern welfare state, pointing out that more than $1 trillion is spent every year on redistribution programs for the ostensible purpose of alleviating economic hardship, yet (or more likely as a result) the poverty rate is at an all-time high. Perhaps one reason poverty remains high is that such programs make leisure more attractive than work, as painstakingly illustrated in a study produced by Tanner and Charles Hughes. Moreover, welfare programs create very high implicit marginal tax rates, making it very difficult for poor people to improve their living standards by engaging in additional productive behavior. It’s almost as if the system was designed to create permanent dependency.

In other words, it seems that nothing could be worse than the current system. And if you want more evidence, here’s a very powerful video on the failure of the modern welfare state.

But what about the idea of trashing what we have today and instead offering everyone some sort of basic income? As I noted in my essay, there are “…some very iconic libertarian figures who support at least some version of their approach, including Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Charles Murray.”

I agree, but only sort of. I like the idea of radical reform, but I think there’s a better road to Rome. It’s called federalism.

The bottom line for advocates is that anything would be better than the current system, so why not try something new? They’re right, but there’s actually a better way of approaching the issue. Why not take all income-redistribution programs, put them into a single block grant, and then transfer the money – and responsibility – to state governments?

Here’s my argument for decentralization and federalism.

In an ideal world, the block grant would gradually diminish so that states would be responsible for both the collection and disbursement of all monies related to welfare. But that’s a secondary issue. The main benefit of this federalist approach is that you stop the Washington-driven expansion of the welfare state and you trigger the creation of 50 separate experiments on how best to provide a safety net. Some states might choose a basic income. Others might retain something very similar to the current system. Others might try a workfare-based approach, while some could dream up new ideas that wouldn’t stand a chance in a one-size-fits-all system run out of Washington, DC. And as states adopted different systems, they could learn from each other about what works and what doesn’t work. And since it’s easier to influence decisions that are closer to home, taxpayers at the state level almost certainly would have more ability to impact what happens with their money.

And here’s the bottom line on why a federalist approach is the libertarian solution to the welfare state.

It also will satisfy the libertarian desire to get Washington out of the business of income distribution, while presumably producing a system that actually does a better job of helping the less fortunate escape government dependency. In other words, all the advantages of the basic income plan without the potential system-wide downsides.

By the way, I explain in the article that the 1996 welfare reform legislation was a test case for the decentralization model. The analogy isn’t perfect, I admit, but there’s a very strong case to be made that replacing the federal welfare entitlement with a block grant was good for taxpayers and good for the poor…and that it shows why states do a better job of dealing with redistribution than Washington.

Last but not least, I’m just a policy wonk, but I think the federalism strategy also has political appeal. As just noted, it worked with welfare reform. And I suspect a lot of non-libertarians and non-conservatives will intuitively understand that you’ll get better results if you allow diversity and experimentation at the state level.

P.S. There would be some bad news if we decentralized the welfare state. It could mean an end to the Moocher Hall of Fame.

P.P.S. Replacing the welfare state with a (hopefully shrinking) block grant only addresses the problem of “means-tested” programs. If you also want to solve the problem of old-age entitlements, that requires Medicare reform and Social Security reform.

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President Obama’s Most Amazing Accomplishment

After nearly five years in office, what’s President Obama’s most significant accomplishment?

This is a serious question, so no jokes about the Nobel Prize he received for not being Bush. And no partisan GOP answers about the 2010 election, either.

Put yourself in the position of a future historian and think about what you would put in a book to describe Obama’s biggest accomplishment.

I don’t think anyone, regardless of ideology, would pick the so-called stimulus. Advocates of small government say it was a waste of money based on deeply flawed Keynesian theory.

Proponents of big government, by contrast, also aren’t big fans of the stimulus, though they’re dissatisfied because they think Obama should have wasted even more money.

Another potential answer is Obamacare. Libertarians and conservatives, needless to say, would say it was a significant accomplishment in the same sense that the Titanic had a significant maiden voyage.

Leftists, by contrast, obviously can’t be pleased by the way Obamacare is imploding  in the short run, but they nonetheless may think that it will be worth it in the medium run because more people will be dependent on government (though they may regret their choice in the long run).

Killing Osama bin Laden is probably a good answer, but if terrorism and conflict with the Islamic world are still big issues in the future, then I suspect the achievements of Seal Team Six won’t be seen as making that much of a difference.

For what it’s worth, I think the change in public opinion may be the President’s most long-lasting and significant accomplishment. Take a look at these remarkable results just published by Gallup. A record share of the population now say that big government is the biggest threat to the nation’s future.

Wow. I’m tempted to say that this is strong evidence of the effectiveness of the Cato Institute (and there is independent data to support that position), but I feel compelled to admit that Obama also deserves a good bit of the credit.

Even more amazing, President Obama has done something that is probably beyond even the ability of Cato. He’s convinced partisan Democrats that big government is a serious threat. Look at how the numbers have dramatically changed since 2008.

What’s particularly amazing about the shift among Democrats isn’t that 56 percent now view big government as the major threat today, compared to 32 percent about five years ago. What’s shocking is that this change happened with a Democrat in the White House.

This is newsworthy because partisan Republicans and Democrats have a tendency to say things are good or bad depending on whether “their team” is in charge.

While these numbers are remarkable, I suppose it’s too early to say the growing concern about big government is the most significant accomplishment of the Obama presidency.

That being said, anxiety about big government may lead to big political changes in 2014 and 2016, and those political changes may then lead to big policy changes such as entitlement reform and tax reform.

And if that happens, then the shift in public opinion during the Obama years may turn out to be profoundly important. In other words, Obama may turn out to be another Herbert Hoover – a politician whose statist policies set the stage for dramatic changes in public policy.

And if that happens, Obama truly will deserve to be named “libertarian of the year.”

P.S. While big government is the biggest threat to the country’s future, big business and big labor can be very dangerous to liberty when they get in bed with big government.

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…and even More Obamacare Humor

I’m beginning to think the Obama White House has a sinister and devious plot to undermine the productivity of people who believe in small government.

Yes, I know I’ve written that it doesn’t make sense to believe in conspiracy theories, but every time I think about writing a long and serious article on some important economic issue, I get distracted by some new jokes, cartoons, and mockery of the slow-motion, long-lasting train wreck of Obamacare.

Consider, for instance, the White House’s new effort to trick young people into buying over-priced health insurance policies (humorously depicted here). It features this dorky guy in pajamas.

Well, as you can imagine, people are having lots of fun mocking this image. And that’s time they could spend discussing free markets and small government instead!

And I’m guilty as well.

But let’s at least enjoy the moment. Here’s my favorite bit of satire, which mixes Obamacare with the President’s “selfie” at Mandela’s funeral.

Obama probably has unhappy memories of that moment, by the way.

Our next example is downright weird, but is it any stranger than the image the White House put together?

Our final selection in the “Pajama Boy” series adds the entitlement mentality to the mix.

I’m guessing this is because Pajama Boy is still living at home thanks to the weak Obama economy and the dismal job market.

Our last example of new Obamacare humor deals with the fact that the White House has hired someone from Microsoft to work on the website. I don’t know whether that means healthcare.gov will be as clunky and useless as Internet Explorer, but some clever person has put together this image.

If you like website-related humor about Obamacare, this Hitler parody is definitely worth watching.

And if you like Obamacare humor videos, here’s a very unsettling one about the government having a database about our sex lives.

P.S. If you really want to let the Obama White House succeed in undermining your productivity, you can easily spend about 30 minutes enjoying more Obamacare  cartoons, videos, and jokes by clicking here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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More Good News in the Battle to Preserve Second Amendment Freedoms

Like all advocates of freedom, I normally despair about the future. Whether we’re measuring the ever-growing burden of government or the erosion of key forms of social capital such as self-reliance and the work ethic, it seems that the world is heading in the wrong direction.

But, at least for today, I want to be optimistic. At least on the issue of guns.

Mexico isn’t a tax haven, but Cabo is still much better than DC

My good cheer may simply be a function of the holiday season. Or maybe my optimism is merely an illogical side-effect of having just enjoyed a couple of days of warm sunshine.

But I don’t think so. I actually think we’re winning the battle to preserve the Second Amendment.

And Colorado is Ground Zero in this battle. In an unprecedented move, two state senators – including the Senate President – were kicked out of office earlier this year because voters were upset that they voted to undermine the right to keep and bear arms.

Then, more recently, another state senator in Colorado resigned her seat rather than face a similar recall election.

Those political results were impressive, but it’s even more surprising that we’re now we’re seeing some very admirable forms of civil disobedience. But what’s amazing isn’t that citizens are refusing to obey tyrannical and unjust law.

That’s inspiring, of course, but we’ve now reached the point where even law enforcement is refusing to comply.

Here are some encouraging excerpts from a report in the New York Times about how Colorado sheriffs are openly stating that they have no intention of carrying out the misguided dictates of the political class.

When Sheriff John Cooke of Weld County explains in speeches why he is not enforcing the state’s new gun laws, he holds up two 30-round magazines. One, he says, he had before July 1, when the law banning the possession, sale or transfer of the large-capacity magazines went into effect. The other, he “maybe” obtained afterward. He shuffles the magazines, which look identical, and then challenges the audience to tell the difference. “How is a deputy or an officer supposed to know which is which?” he asks.

It’s not just Sheriff Cooke.

…if Sheriff Cooke and a majority of the other county sheriffs in Colorado offer any indication, the new laws — which mandate background checks for private gun transfers and outlaw magazines over 15 rounds — may prove nearly irrelevant across much of the state’s rural regions. Some sheriffs, like Sheriff Cooke, are refusing to enforce the laws, saying that they are too vague and violate Second Amendment rights. Many more say that enforcement will be “a very low priority,” as several sheriffs put it. All but seven of the 62 elected sheriffs in Colorado signed on in May to a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the statutes.

Even the Sheriffs on the wrong side of the lawsuit aren’t necessarily on the wrong side of the issue.

Even Sheriff W. Pete Palmer of Chaffee County, one of the seven sheriffs who declined to join the federal lawsuit because he felt duty-bound to carry out the laws, said he was unlikely to aggressively enforce them. He said enforcement poses “huge practical difficulties,” and besides, he has neither the resources nor the pressure from his constituents to make active enforcement a high priority. Violations of the laws are misdemeanors. “All law enforcement agencies consider the community standards — what is it that our community wishes us to focus on — and I can tell you our community is not worried one whit about background checks or high-capacity magazines,” he said.

We’re seeing healthy resistance in other states as well.

The resistance of sheriffs in Colorado is playing out in other states. …In New York State, where Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed one of the toughest gun law packages in the nation last January, two sheriffs have said publicly they would not enforce the laws — inaction that Mr. Cuomo said would set “a dangerous and frightening precedent.” …In Liberty County, Fla., a jury in October acquitted a sheriff who had been suspended and charged with misconduct after he released a man arrested by a deputy on charges of carrying a concealed firearm. The sheriff, who was immediately reinstated by the governor, said he was protecting the man’s Second Amendment rights. …“Our way of life means nothing to these politicians, and our interests are not being promoted in the legislative halls of Sacramento or Washington, D.C.,” said Jon E. Lopey, the sheriff of Siskiyou County, Calif.

By the way, Governor Cuomo is half-right about “a dangerous and frightening precedent.” He’s just oblivious to the fact that this phrase applies to his policies, not to the Sheriffs who are obeying the Constitution and common sense.

For more information on the Second Amendment and the folly of gun control, here are some great videos.

• Ted Nugent talking about gun ownership and the right of self defense.
• A look at Switzerland’s strong gun culture and the importance of self defense as a protection against oppression.
• And some very powerful testimony to some weasels on Capitol Hill (make sure to pay attention around the 5:00 mark).
• Ice-T talking about the real reason to defend and support the 2nd Amendment.
• A Reason TV video with five facts for Vice President Biden’s task force.
• A look at how a young woman can defend herself.
• Debunking the left’s “black NRA” parody.
• A 15-year old speaking truth to power.

P.S. Andrew Cuomo was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton years when the so-called affordable lending requirements were dramatically expanded, thus helping to pave the way for the housing and financial crisis.

P.P.S. Another way of protecting the Second Amendment is for juries to engage in nullification and to refuse to convict people for peaceably owning and bearing arms.

P.P.P.S. My fourth, sixth, and ninth most viewed posts are about gun control and the Second Amendment, so this obviously is an issue people care about.

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Some Unusual Obama Humor

Political humor doesn’t always require a policy message.

That’s clearly the message of this first image, one that will probably strike a familiar chord for most guys.

Indeed, some of you may sympathize with the President for the first time in your lives.

This is vaguely reminiscent of something that actually happened to me. Years ago, I was with a significant other and noticed a rather attractive woman walking in our direction. To avoid any accusation that I was ogling this other woman, I deliberately looked in a different direction as we walked past. Showing that no good deed goes unpunished, my charming companion then snapped, “I saw you not looking at that woman!”

I’m not joking. If you’re a guy, just accept the fact that you’re always wrong.

But let’s revert to our typical style and share some humor with a policy angle.

Here’s the President hard at work promoting international stability.

Needless to say, we’ve already had lots of fun because of the Obamacare screw-up, and I expect we’ll still be laughing about it well into the future.

And this next image is appropriate when you consider the way the White House has cavalierly disregarded the law as it picks and chooses when parts of Obamacare to implement.

And even though I’ve explained that Obama technically isn’t a socialist, this next image is quite amusing.

To close up today, let’s share another example of non-policy humor. It has nothing to do with Obama. Indeed it’s more akin to the politically incorrect terror alerts I shared a couple of years ago.

Most of the stereotypes make perfect sense, but I confess that I have no idea what the last two mean. Are Brazilians big pizza eaters? And are Argentinians famous for making things much worse? Actually, that may be true since politicians have crippled a country that used to be one of the world’s 10-richest nations.

P.S. I just self-censored myself. The original title of this post was “Obama in the Crosshairs,” which was a way of avoiding yet another derivation of “More Obama Humor.” But then I realized some statist – filled with faux outrage – might attack me for making a threat against the President. Sigh.

P.P.S. If you want more Obama humor, check out this t-shirt, this Pennsylvania joke, this Reagan-Obama comparison, this Wyoming joke, this Bush-Obama comparison, this video satire, and this bumper sticker.

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To Deal with the Problem of Incompetent Government, David Brooks Wants to…Make the Executive Branch More Powerful?!?

I sometimes get irked when I read columns by David Brooks. He’s sort of the token Republican at the New York Times, so he has a very important perch that could be used to educate an important audience about the harmful impact of excessive government.

And Brooks often does a good job of highlighting important and worrisome social trends, but what rubs me the wrong way is that he frequently thinks the right answer is to give government even more power.

He wrote a column back in 2011, for instance, that nailed the problem of growing dependency and declining workforce participation. But then he proposed more government intervention.

And he correctly worried about the social costs of family instability in 2012, but then bizarrely decided that the right response was subsidies to make men more marriageable.

So it won’t come as much of a surprise that I’m perplexed by his reasoning in a new column on executive branch power. He starts with an observation that is true.

We’re in a period of reform stagnation. It’s possible that years will go by without the passage of a major piece of legislation.

But he thinks this is unfortunate, while I view government inaction as a positive development. Simply stated, most new laws lead to bigger government and less freedom.

I don’t want activist government – like we had during Obama’s first two years – if it means faux stimulus and government-run healthcare.

Anyhow, Brooks is unhappy and he thinks the problem is too many interest groups.

…there is the profusion of interest groups. In 1971, there were 175 registered lobbying firms. By 2009, there were 13,700 lobbyists spending more than $3.5 billion annually, and this doesn’t even count the much larger cloud of activist groups and ideological enforcers.

He’s right that there has been an explosion in the number of lobbyists and interest groups, but his analysis is backwards.

We have lots of influence peddlers because we have a big, sclerotic government, not the other way around.

If Brooks really wants to clean out the stables in Washington, he should support a radical reduction in the size and scope of the federal government.

But you won’t be surprised that he comes to a different conclusion.

Things would be better…if we had a more unified parliamentary system, with more administrative discretion. But we don’t. “So we have a problem.” …there is a way out: Make the executive branch more powerful.

The comment about a parliamentary system is rather strange. If evidence mattered in this discussion, shouldn’t there be some explanation of why a parliamentary system was better than America’s separation-of-powers approach?

My guess, based on the mess in Europe, is that the evidence is in the other direction.

But that’s a side issue. The main point Brooks is making is that the Presidency should have more discretionary power.

Amazingly, he even cites the pervasive problems with Obamacare as a reason to augment the power of the White House!

This is a good moment to advocate greater executive branch power because we’ve just seen a monumental example of executive branch incompetence: the botched Obamacare rollout. … it is possible to mobilize the executive branch to come to policy conclusion on something like immigration reform. It’s nearly impossible for Congress to lead us to a conclusion about anything. …So how do you energize the executive? It’s a good idea to be tolerant of executive branch power grabs and to give agencies flexibility. …We need more unified authority. …Allow people in those authorities to exercise discretion.

Wow, those are some rather incredible assertions. Brooks is basically arguing against democracy and against the system of separation of powers created by the Founders.

And the corrupt use of discretion as part of Obamacare is hardly what I would call a positive argument for his position.

And what’s really ironic is that Brooks had a very good column on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back in 2011 that showed how unchecked discretionary power led to an economic crisis.

Mark Steyn has a much more logical analysis on this topic, writing that you’re much more likely to have competent government when you limit the power of Washington.

But since Brooks actually tried to equate Reagan’s small-government conservatism with Bush’s so-called compassionate conservatism, we shouldn’t be surprised he errs in other ways as well.

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Block Granting and Decentralization: The Sensible Way of Reducing Rampant Medicaid Fraud

When you work in Washington (and assuming you haven’t been corrupted), you run the risk of being endlessly outraged about all the waste.

But not all waste is created equal. Some examples are so absurd that they deserve special attention.

• Forcing taxpayers to pay millions of dollars for pro-Obamacare and pro-IRS propaganda.
• Doing interviews – at a per-person cost of $6,000 – about erectile dysfunction and sticking the tab on us.
• Hiring bureaucrats to monitor school lunches and replace healthy turkey sandwiches with processed chicken nuggets.
• Giving disability benefits to a grown man who wants to wear diapers and live as an “adult baby.”
• Squandering $400K on experimental underwear that detect cigarette smoke.
• Paying 35 times the market price for some Kindles.
• Throwing $100 million in the garbage by subsidizing a leftist bureaucracy in Paris that advocates for higher taxes in the United States.

We now have another example to add to the list. Russian diplomats have been busted for bilking the Medicaid program of more than $1 million.

This is so outrageous that it may actually be the impetus for some desperately needed reform, as I suggest in this interview with Neil Cavuto.

But is fraud really a problem? Defenders of the Medicaid entitlement presumably would like us to think that this latest story is just an anomaly.

That would be nice, but the experts who have looked at the issue have come to a much different conclusion.

While food stamp fraud is significant, especially with a record-high 47 million Americans now on food stamps, it pales in comparison to what is stolen from Medicare and Medicaid. …It is widely accepted across the political spectrum that upwards of $100 billion of that amount is fraud and abuse. Recently, a report from the Oversight and Government Reform Committee in the US House of Representatives outlined many billions of dollars being wasted every year just in New York’s Medicaid program. Grossly inflated payments to intermediate care facilities and excessive salaries were just the tip of the iceberg in a $53 billion program that easily bleeds  more than $10 billion annually to criminals.

So what’s the best way of dealing with the Medicaid mess? Fortunately, we have a simple answer. As I mentioned in the interview, the entire program should be block granted and turned over to the states.

That doesn’t automatically eliminate fraud, but it does create much better incentives for sound governance since state taxpayers would be the ones picking up the tab if a state program is riddled with fraud. Under the current system, by contrast, the cost of waste and malfeasance is spread among taxpayers from all 50 states.

This video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity explains how block grants would work.

One final point to emphasize is that fraud reduction is really just a fringe benefit if we reform Medicaid.

The main reasons to decentralize the program are fiscal sanity and better health care policy.

But the one common thread is that third-party payer facilitates problems, whether we’re looking at excessive costs, health inefficiency, or rampant fraud.

P.S. Don’t forget the other two big entitlements that need reform, Social Security and Medicare. Like Medicaid, Medicare has major challenges with fraud. From what I understand, the retirement portion of Social Security doesn’t have major fraud issues, but the disability program is a huge problem.

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The Most Pro-Capitalism Place to Live in North America Is…

Back in February, I said Australia probably was the country most likely to survive and prosper as much of the world suffered fiscal collapse and social chaos.

In hindsight, I probably should have mentioned Canada as an option, in part because of pro-growth reforms in the past two decades that have significantly reduced the burden of government spending.

And I’ve already acknowledged that Canada has passed the United States in the Economic Freedom of the World rankings.

So I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised to learn that the most economically free state in North America isn’t a state. It’s a Canadian province. Here’s a map from a new report showing how sub-national jurisdictions rate for economic freedom.

And here’s the ranking for economic freedom in states and provinces. As you can see, Alberta and Saskatchewan are in the top two spots, followed by the American states of Delaware, Texas, and Nevada.

Interestingly, Canadian provinces also held the bottom two slots, with Prince Edward Island being last and Nova Scotia second to last. The worst American states are New Mexico, West Virginia, and Mississippi.

But the previous table looks at the combined impact of national and sub-national government policies.

If you look at the policies that sub-national governments actually control, the rankings change a bit. Alberta still comes in first place, but Saskatchewan plummets.

Meanwhile, the best American state is South Dakota, followed by Tennessee, Delaware, and Texas.

Canadian provinces dominate the bottom of the rankings, with Quebec coming in last place (too many language police?).

The worst American state is New York, which isn’t a big surprise. And since Vermont was the top state in the Moocher Index, it’s also hardly a shock that it’s the next worst state.

One pattern you may have noticed is that American states without income taxes tend to be near the top of the list.

So does this mean that I’ve changed my mind and I’ll escape to Alberta when a future President Elizabeth Warren destroys America? Mehh….it’s still too cold for my tastes. Freedom is important, but I want someplace where I can play softball more than two months per year.

P.S. As this joke indicates, American leftists used to think about escaping to Canada. Times sure have changed.

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Pot Legalization: A Common-Sense Way of Fighting Organized Crime

I have some bad news and some good news.

The bad news is that politicians have come up with another proposal for an additional tax.

Some people like prohibition

The good news is that they can only impose this new tax if they ease up on the silly Drug War.

That creates a bit of a quandary if you believe in freedom and small government.

But, on net, it’s a move in the right direction.

We have two examples to share. The first is from South America, where the government of Uruguay seems poised to legalize marijuana. Here are some blurbs from an AP report.

Uruguay is pushing ahead to create a legal marijuana market… The Senate planned to debate the pot plan Tuesday, with approval by the ruling coalition widely expected before the night is over. Because senators turned away all requests for amendments after it passed the lower chamber, their vote will be final.

One reason for this proposed reform is to fight organized crime.

President Jose Mujica says the point is not to promote marijuana use, but to push out organized crime. The government hopes that when licensed growers, providers and users can openly trade in the drug, illegal traffickers will be denied their profits and go away.

Let’s give President Mujica an A+ for economics. He recognizes that criminalization creates a black market.

But Uruguay politicians are not exactly dreamy-headed libertarians. Big government would be involved.

Socialist Deputy Julio Bango, who co-authored the proposal, told The Associated Press that “this is not a law to liberalize marijuana consumption, but rather to regulate it. Today there is a market dominated by drug traffickers. We want the state to dominate it.”

And the article also mentions that legalization would be accompanied by heavy taxes. I don’t like that part, but there’s no question this would be a net plus for liberty and crime reduction.

Some lawmakers in New York also seem to understand that prohibition is illogical. Here are some excerpts from a local news report.

State Sen. Liz Krueger’s measure — the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act — would legalize, regulate and tax marijuana under state law. “It will take the market in marijuana away from the criminal enterprises, just as happened when alcohol prohibition was ended,” she said at a City Hall press conference.

Kudos to Krueger for her grasp of incentives. The Drug War is just as foolish – and just as good for criminals – as prohibition.

Though I wonder whether Sen. Krueger is being too greedy.

“It would establish an excise tax of $50 an ounce of marijuana and authorize localities to charge a sales tax on retail sales if they wish to,” Krueger said. …Liu estimates that a pot tax would generate $431 million in New York City alone.

I’ve never done drugs, so I’m not familiar with the market, but I do know that if the tax is too high on a legal product, you create a black market.

That happens with cigarettes, for instance, and we examples of excessive taxation causing less revenue from Bulgaria, Romania, and Ireland. And we’ve even seen this Laffer Curve effect in Washington, DC.

Last but not least, we should never forget that the Drug War is a horrifying example of Mitchell’s Law, with one bad policy leading to another bad policy.

The War on Drugs, for example, is the reason why politicians imposed costly and ineffective anti-money laundering laws. As well as disgusting and reprehensible asset forfeiture laws.

P.S. Libertarians are not the only ones to think the drug war is foolish. Yes, you find libertarians such as John Stossel and Gary Johnson on the list of those who want to end prohibition. But you also find John McCain,  Mona Charen, Pat Robertson, Cory Booker, and Richard Branson.

But maybe you disagree with all those people and would rather be on the same side as Hillary Clinton.

P.P.S. This is not an issue of whether you approve of pot use. You can be strongly against drugs, like me, but also realize that it makes no sense for government to get involved. Particularly since criminals are the ones who benefit.

P.P.P.S. The Drug War gives the government immense powers to engage in bad policy.

• The DEA trying to confiscate a commercial building because a tenant sold some marijuana.
• The government seeking to steal a hotel because some guests sold some marijuana.
• The feds grabbing cash from innocent bystanders in legal cases.
• The government arresting a grandmother for buying cold medicine.

Or sometimes the Drug War merely exposes government stupidity.

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Ryan-Murray Budget Deal Replaces Real Spending Restraint of Sequester with Budget Gimmicks and Back-Door Tax Hikes

How Disappointing, but how predictable.

Politicians approved legislation in 2011 that was supposed to impose a modest bit of spending restraint over the next 10 years.

It wasn’t much. The enforcement mechanism, known as sequestration, merely was supposed to guarantee that spending climbed by $2.3 trillion rather than $2.4 trillion over the 10-year period.

But something is better than nothing, and the sequester that took place this year was a bitter defeat for President Obama and other advocates of bigger government.

And it also provided comic relief as the White House engaged in hysterical rhetoric in an attempt to scare people about sequestration.

But now there’s a deal to weaken the sequester and allow more government spending over the next two years. Hatched by Paul Ryan, the Republican Chairman of the House Budget Committee, and Patty Murray, the Democrat Chairwoman of the Senate Budget Committee, the most important takeaway is that the agreement will increase spending caps by $63 billion over the next two years.

This chart shows what will happen.

The second most important thing to understand is that the Murray-Ryan deal contains several tax hikes. But since politicians can’t resist prevaricating, these provisions are being referred to as “user fees” and “offsetting receipts.”

The most outrageous tax hike is the added levy on airline travel. Honest people call this an increase in the ticket tax. The folks in Washington call it an “Aviation security service fee.”

There’s also a tax hike on private pension plans, as well as additional taxes (oops, I mean “user fees”) on trade.

You also won’t be surprised to learn that the so-called spending cuts in the agreement are mostly fluff and gimmicks.

The Treasury Department and Justice Department have been told not to spend “unobligated balances” in their forfeiture funds, but that was money they presumably weren’t going to spend anyway.

States, meanwhile, have been told they have to pay part of the cost of managing mineral leases on federal lands within their borders. Maybe someone can explain to me why payments from state governments to Washington count as a budget cuts.

And the agreement also assumes that Washington will do a better job of policing fraud in areas such as unemployment insurance and illegal utilization of handouts by prisoners. Those would be positive developments, to be sure, but one has to wonder why they weren’t enforcing those laws already.

By the way, the aforementioned tax hikes and make-believe spending cuts are supposed to generate “savings” over 10 years that will “offset” the higher spending that will occur in 2014 and 2015.

Needless to say, it’s goes without saying that all the new spending will take place in 2014 and 2015. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for alleged savings that are supposed to take effect in the following years.

Simply stated, the ink won’t even be dry on this agreement before the lobbyists, politicians, bureaucrats, and interest groups that control Washington start maneuvering to bust the spending caps and weaken the sequester next year. And the following year. And the year after that. And…well, you can fill in the blanks.

So what’s the bottom line?

Well, it’s clearly a big disappointment that Congressman Paul Ryan engineered this turkey of a deal rather than fighting for the sequester. Heck, this was the guy who put together very good entitlement reforms, yet now he’s helping Obama escape the sequester?

To be fair, folks on the Hill have told me that Ryan didn’t have much leverage because several Republicans indicated that they wouldn’t vote to comply with the sequester spending levels.

But if that’s the case, he should have at least forced a vote so the American people could see which GOP politicians are wobbly on the critical issue of restraining Leviathan.

To close on a somewhat optimistic note, it does appear that all the new spending is confined to 2014 and 2015. So if the spending caps are preserved for subsequent years, then it’s possible that the long-run trend line of government spending is unaffected.

That would be a good outcome. Not because the long-run trends are positive (if you look at the long-run data, we’re screwed), but because at least they wouldn’t have made a bad situation even worse.

If you want to damn the Murray-Ryan plan with faint praise, you could say it’s not nearly as bad as the read-my-lips deal of George H.W. Bush. That’s certainly true, but the sequester would be a much better outcome.

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More Great Moments in Government Schooling

The government’s monopoly education system is a travesty mostly because taxpayers spend record amounts of money and we get very poor results.

But I’m also irked at the way government schools engage in absurd displays of political correctness, particularly when it comes to make-believe weapons.

Terrorist!!

A little boy was suspended for throwing an imaginary grenade while playing by himself in Colorado.

A school wanted to force a deaf child to change his name because, when using sign language to say who he is, his fingers looked like a gun.

Speaking of which, a six-year old in Maryland was suspended for saying “pow” while having his fingers shaped like a gun.

All this sounds crazy, but at least school bureaucrats are consistent in their nuttiness. Not only are they against non-existent grenades and imaginary guns, they all have a zero-tolerance approach for bows and arrows that don’t exist.

Here are some of the details about what happened at a Pennsylvania school.

A ten-year-old boy has reportedly been suspended from school after he ‘fired’ an imaginary bow and arrow at another pupil. Johnny Jones, a fifth grader at South Eastern Middle School in Fawn Grove, Pennsylvania, is said to have been suspended for one day after making the gesture and now faces expulsion. According to the Rutherford Institute, which is defending the youngster, Johnny was accused of breaching the school’s regulations on using weapons, even though the bow and arrow were not real. He was reprimanded after the girl he ‘fired’ the bow at notified a teacher.

It’s ridiculous that the little boy was suspended, but you also have to wonder about the mental stability of the little girls who ratted him out. Is she just a run-of-the-mill tattle tale? Or is she in training to become a tax bureaucrat in Chicago? Or maybe she went through training on how to be a snitch in the United Kingdom?

But we also have another story of political correctness run amok in government schools. Bureaucrats in Colorado have nabbed a sexual predator.

Are we talking about a 17-year old gang member who was raping and sexually assaulting other students.

Well…not quite. Here’s what Fox News is reporting.

A 6-year-old boy has been suspended from a Colorado school for kissing a girl on the cheek. School officials in Canon City are accusing the boy of sexual harassment and they want it on his school record. The boy’s mother tells KRDO-TV…the girl did not object to being kissed. She told the station that the two children like each other.

To be fair, maybe the boy is genuinely pestering the girl and – notwithstanding what his mother says – the attention is unwelcome. In that case, some punishment is warranted, particularly since it happened twice.

Though I’m not sure I would categorize it as sexual harassment. This is what makes this story worth sharing. It illustrates the lack of common sense that seems inevitable when bureaucrats are in charge of anything.

And since we’re talking about a lack of common sense, here are previous examples of school bureaucrats going overboard for political correctness.

• Bureaucrats suspended a little boy for taking bites out of a pop tart in such a way that it was shaped like a gun.
• 

  Lockdown!!

  Bureaucrats busted a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.

• A teacher in Rhode Island caught an 8-year old boy with some plastic toy army men.
• Bureaucrats evacuated a school because an 11-year old boy made a motion detector for his science experiment.
• Bureaucrats in Florida kicked an 8-year old boy out of school for a year because he had a plastic gun in his backpack.
• A dual award in Virginia, with half the prize for the bureaucrats who suspended a 10-year old boy for a toy gun and half the prize for the cops who then arrested the kid.
• A third-grader got in trouble for having toy army men on his birthday cupcakes.
• Two second-graders got suspended for holding pencils like they were guns.
• Bureaucrats suspended a kindergartener for having a lego-sized toy gun.
• Bureaucrats suspended two boys for playing with toy guns while off school property.

You’ll notice that all these examples involved non-imaginary objects. Real toy guns. Real army men. Real pencils. Real motion detectors. Real Lego pieces.

Aren’t we lucky that government is there to protect us! Sort of the same way they protect us with regulations, as Dave Barry has explained.

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Massive Double Taxation Is a Self-Inflicted Tax Injury that Undermines American Competitiveness and Job Creation

Back in the 1960s, Clint Eastwood starred in a movie entitled The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

I was thinking that might be a good title for today’s post about some new research by Michelle Harding, a tax economist for the OECD. But then I realized that her study on “Taxation of Dividend, Interest, and Capital Gain Income” doesn’t contain any “good” news.

At least not if you want the United States to be more competitive and create more jobs. This is because the numbers show that the internal revenue code results in punitive double taxation of income that is saved and invested.

But it’s not newsworthy that there’s a lot of double taxation in America. What is shocking and discouraging, however, is finding out that our tax code is more punitive than just about every European welfare state.

This is the “bad” part of today’s discussion. Indeed, the tax burden on dividends, interest, and capital gains in America is far above the average for other industrialized nations.

Let’s look at some charts from the study, starting with the one comparing the tax burden on dividends.

As you can see, the United States has the dubious honor of having the sixth-highest overall tax rate (combined burden of corporate and personal taxes) among developed nations.

Though maybe we should feel lucky we’re not in France or Denmark.

The next chart looks at the tax burden on capital gains.

Once again, the United States has one of the most onerous tax systems among OECD countries, with only four other nations imposing a higher combined tax rate on capital gains.

By the way, if you want to know why this is a very bad idea, click here.

Last but not least, let’s look at the tax burden on interest.

I’m sure you’ve already detected the pattern, but I’ll state the obvious that this is another example of the United States being on the wrong side of the graph.

So the next time you hear somebody bloviating about Americans being too short-sighted and not saving enough, you may want to inform them that there’s not much incentive to save when the IRS gets a big share of any interest we earn.

Not that any of us are getting much interest since the Fed’s easy-money policy has created an atmosphere of artificially low interest rates, but that’s a topic for another day.

Let’s now move to the “ugly” part of the analysis.

Some of you may have noticed that the charts replicated above are based on tax laws on July 1, 2012.

Well, thanks to Obamacare and the fiscal cliff deal, the IRS began imposing higher tax rates on dividends, capital gains, and interest on January 1, 2013.

And because of the new surtax on investments and the higher tax rates on dividends and capital gains, the United States will move even further in the wrong direction on the three charts.

I don’t know if that means we’ll overtake France in the contest to have the most anti-competitive tax treatment of dividends and capital gains, but it’s definitely bad news.

Oh, and let’s add another bit of “ugly” news to the discussion.

The OECD study didn’t look at death tax rates, but a study by the American Council for Capital Formation shows that the United States also has one of the world’s most punitive death taxes.

Even worse than France, Greece, and Venezuela, which is nothing to brag about.

I don’t want to be the bearer of nothing but bad news, so let’s close with some “good” news. At least relatively speaking.

It’s not part of the study, but it’s worth pointing out that the overall burden of taxation – measured as a share of GDP – is higher in most other nations. The absence of a value-added tax is probably the most important reason why the United States retains an advantage in this category.

Needless to say, this is why we should fight to our last breath to make sure this European version of a national sales tax is never imposed in America.

P.S. One of the big accounting firms, Ernst and Young, published some research last year that is very similar to the OECD’s data.

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The You-Can-Keep-It Obamacare Farce

On Thanksgiving, I shared a bunch of cartoons mocking the national turkey known as Obamacare.

One of those cartoons, by Robert Ariail, mocked the President for repeatedly lying when he said we could keep our health insurance plans if we liked them.

Well, we have more humor using that theme.

And if you like these images and cartoons, you can keep them!

Our first example (which arrived in my inbox, so I don’t know who deserves the credit) will be familiar to fans of the original Star Wars trilogy.

Next we have a Lisa Benson cartoon, which would have been a good addition to a Thanksgiving cartoon collection.

Here’s a cartoon from Gary Varvel and it shows a group that is now terrified because of Obama’s deceit.

As a matter of fact, there already is evidence that many politicians did lose their jobs back in 2010 because of Obamacare.

It would be nice if more of them were punished next year.

Last but not least, we have some doggies that are a bit troubled by a version of Obama’s big lie.

If you need more Obamacare humor, you can enjoy various cartoons, videos, and jokes by clicking here, here, here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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Progress on the Laffer Curve*

The title of this piece has an asterisk because, unfortunately, we’re not talking about progress on the Laffer Curve in the United States.

Instead, we’re discussing today how lawmakers in other nations are beginning to recognize that it’s absurdly inaccurate to predict the revenue impact of changes in tax rates without also trying to measure what happens to taxable income (if you want a short tutorial on the Laffer Curve, click here).

But I’m a firm believer that policies in other nations (for better or worse) are a very persuasive form of real-world evidence. Simply stated, if you’re trying to convince a politician that a certain policy is worth pursuing, you’ll have a much greater chance of success if you can point to tangible examples of how it has been successful.

That’s why I cite Hong Kong and Singapore as examples of why free markets and small government are the best recipe for prosperity. It’s also why I use nations such as New Zealand, Canada, and Estonia when arguing for a lower burden of government spending.

And it’s why I’m quite encouraged that even the squishy Tory-Liberal coalition government in the United Kingdom has begun to acknowledge that the Laffer Curve should be part of the analysis when making major changes in taxation.

I don’t know whether that’s because they learned a lesson from the disastrous failure of Gordon Brown’s class-warfare tax hike, or whether they feel they should do something good to compensate for bad tax policies they’re pursuing in other areas, but I’m not going to quibble when politicians finally begin to move in the right direction.

The Wall Street Journal opines that this is a very worthwhile development.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has cut Britain’s corporate tax rate to 22% from 28% since taking office in 2010, with a further cut to 20% due in 2015. On paper, these tax cuts were predicted to “cost” Her Majesty’s Treasury some £7.8 billion a year when fully phased in. But Mr. Osborne asked his department to figure out how much additional revenue would be generated by the higher investment, wages and productivity made possible by leaving that money in private hands.

By the way, I can’t resist a bit of nit-picking at this point. The increases in investment, wages, and productivity all occur because the marginal corporate tax rate is reduced, not because more money is in private hands.

I’m all in favor of leaving more money in private hands, but you get more growth when you change relative prices to make productive behavior more rewarding. And this happens when you reduce the tax code’s penalty on work compared to leisure and when you lower the tax on saving and investment compared to consumption.

The Wall Street Journal obviously understands this and was simply trying to avoid wordiness, so this is a friendly amendment rather than a criticism.

Anyhow, back to the editorial. The WSJ notes that the lower corporate tax rate in the United Kingdom is expected to lose far less revenue than was predicted by static estimates.

The Treasury’s answer in a report this week is that extra growth and changed business behavior will likely recoup 45%-60% of that revenue. The report says that even that amount is almost certainly understated, since Treasury didn’t attempt to model the effects of the lower rate on increased foreign investment or other “spillover benefits.”

And maybe this more sensible approach eventually will spread to the United States.

…the results are especially notable because the U.K. Treasury gnomes are typically as bound by static-revenue accounting as are the American tax scorers at Congress’s Joint Tax Committee. While the British rate cut is sizable, the U.S. has even more room to climb down the Laffer Curve because the top corporate rate is 35%, plus what the states add—9.x% in benighted Illinois, for example. This means the revenue feedback effects from a rate cut would be even more substantial.

The WSJ says America’s corporate tax rate should be lowered, and there’s no question that should be a priority since the United States now has the least competitive corporate tax system in the developed world (and we rank a lowly 94 out of the world’s top 100 nations).

But the logic of the Laffer Curve also explains why we should lower personal tax rates. But it’s not just curmudgeonly libertarians who are making this argument.

Writing in London’s City AM, Allister Heath points out that even John Maynard Keynes very clearly recognized a Laffer Curve constraint on excessive taxation.

Supply-side economist?!?

Even Keynes himself accepted this. Like many other economists throughout the ages, he understood and agreed with the principles that underpinned what eventually came to be known as the Laffer curve: that above a certain rate, hiking taxes further can actually lead to a fall in income, and cutting tax rates can actually lead to increased revenues.Writing in 1933, Keynes said that under certain circumstances “taxation may be so high as to defeat its object… given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget. For to take the opposite view today is to resemble a manufacturer who, running at a loss, decides to raise his price, and when his declining sales increase the loss, wrapping himself in the rectitude of plain arithmetic, decides that prudence requires him to raise the price still more—and who, when at last his account is balanced with nought on both sides, is still found righteously declaring that it would have been the act of a gambler to reduce the price when you were already making a loss.”

For what it’s worth, Keynes also thought that it would be a mistake to let government get too large, having written that “25 percent [of GDP] as the maximum tolerable proportion of taxation.”

But let’s stay on message and re-focus our attention on the Laffer Curve. Amazingly, it appears that even a few of our French friends are coming around on this issue.

Here are some passages from a report from the Paris-based Institute for Research in Economic and Fiscal Issues.

In an interview given to the newspaper Les Echos on November 18th, French Prime Minister Jean -Marc Ayrault finally understood that “the French tax system has become very complex, almost unreadable, and the French often do not understand its logic or are not convinced that what they are paying is fair and that this system is efficient.” …The Government was seriously disappointed when knowing that a shortfall of over 10 billion euros is expected in late 2013 according to calculations by the National Assembly. …In fact, we have probably reached a threshold where taxation no longer brings in enough money to the Government because taxes weigh too much on production and growth.

This is a point that has also been acknowledged by France’s state auditor. And even a member of the traditionally statist European Commission felt compelled to warn that French taxes had reached the point whether they “destroy growth and handicap the creation of jobs.”

But don’t hold your breath waiting for good reforms in France. I fear the current French government is too ideologically fixated on punishing the rich to make a shift toward more sensible tax policy.

P.S. The strongest single piece of evidence for the Laffer Curve is what happened to tax collections from the rich in the 1980s. The top tax rate dropped from 70 percent to 28 percent, leading many statists to complain that the wealthy wouldn’t pay enough and that the government would be starved of revenue. To put it mildly, they were wildly wrong.

I cite that example, as well as other pieces of evidence, in this video.

P.P.S. And if you want to understand specifically why class-warfare tax policy is so likely to fail, this post explains why it’s a fool’s game to target upper-income taxpayers since they have considerable control over the timing, level, and composition of their income.

P.P.P.S. Above all else, never forget that the goal should be to maximize growth rather than revenues. That’s because we want small government. But even for those that don’t want small government, you don’t want to be near the revenue-maximizing point of the Laffer Curve since that implies significant economic damage per every dollar collected.

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The “Stupid Party” Strikes Again: Congressional Republicans Poised to Give Up Sequester Victory

There’s a saying in the sports world about how last-minute comebacks are examples of “snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.”

I don’t like that phrase because it reminds me of the painful way my beloved Georgia Bulldogs were defeated a couple of weeks ago by Auburn.

But I also don’t like the saying because it describes what Obama and other advocates of big government must be thinking now that Republicans apparently are about to do the opposite and “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”

More specifically, the GOP appears willing to give away the sequester’s real and meaningful spending restraint and replace that fiscal discipline with a package of gimmicks and new revenues.

I warned last month that something bad might happen to the sequester, but even a pessimist like me didn’t envision such a big defeat for fiscal responsibility.

You may be thinking to yourself that even the “stupid party” couldn’t be foolish enough to save Obama from his biggest defeat, but check out these excerpts from a Wall Street Journal report.

Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), chief negotiators for their parties, are closing in on a deal… At issue are efforts to craft a compromise that would ease across-the-board spending cuts due to take effect in January, known as the sequester, and replace them with a mix of increased fees and cuts in mandatory spending programs.

But the supposed cuts wouldn’t include any genuine entitlement reform. And there would be back-door tax hikes.

Officials familiar with the talks say negotiators are stitching together a package of offsets to the planned sequester cuts that would include none of the major cuts in Medicare or other entitlement programs that Mr. Ryan has wanted… Instead, it would include more targeted and arcane measures, such as increased fees for airport-security and federal guarantees of private pensions.

But the package may get even worse before the ink is dry.

Democrats on Thursday stepped up their demands in advance of the closing days of negotiations between Ms. Murray and Mr. Ryan. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) brought a fresh demand to the table by saying she wouldn’t support any budget deal unless in included or was accompanied by an agreement to renew expanded unemployment benefits that expire before the end of the year—which would be a major threat to any deal.

Gee, wouldn’t that be wonderful. Not only may GOPers surrender the sequester and acquiesce to some tax hikes, but they might also condemn unemployed people to further joblessness and despair.

That’s even worse than the part of the plan that would increase taxes on airline travel to further subsidize the Keystone Cops of the TSA.

But look at the bright side…at least for DC insiders. If the sequester is gutted, that will be a big victory for lobbyists. That means they’ll get larger bonuses, which means their kids will have even more presents under the Christmas tree.

As for the rest of the nation? Well, you can’t make an omelet without scrambling a few eggs.

P.S. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that this looming agreement isn’t as bad as some past budget deals, such as the read-my-lips fiasco of 1990.

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Another Misguided Plan to Burden America with a Value-Added Tax

It’s no secret that I dislike the value-added tax.

But this isn’t because of its design. The VAT, after all, would be (presumably) a single-rate, consumption-based system, just like the flat tax and national sales tax. And that’s a much less destructive way of raising revenue compared to America’s corrupt and punitive internal revenue code.

But not all roads lead to Rome. Proponents of the flat tax and sales tax want to replace the income tax. That would be a very positive step.

Advocates of the VAT, by contrast, want to keep the income tax and give politicians another big source of revenue. That’s a catastrophically bad idea.

To understand what I mean, let’s look at a Bloomberg column by Al Hunt. He starts with a look at the political appetite for reform.

There is broad consensus that the U.S. tax system is inefficient, inequitable and hopelessly complex. …a 1986-style tax reform — broadening the base and lowering the rates — isn’t politically achievable today. …the conservative dream of starving government by slashing taxes and the liberal idea of paying for new initiatives by closing loopholes for the rich are nonstarters.

I agree with everything in those excerpts.

So does this mean Al Hunt and I are on the same wavelength?

Not exactly. I think we have to wait until 2017 to have any hope of tax reform (even then, only if we’re very lucky), whereas Hunt thinks the current logjam can be broken by adopting a VAT and modifying the income tax. More specifically, he’s talking about a proposal from a Columbia University Law Professor that would impose a 12.9 percent VAT while simultaneously creating a much bigger family allowance (sometimes referred to as the zero-bracket amount) so that millions of additional Americans no longer have to pay income tax.

Hunt likes this idea.

The Graetz initiative offers something for both sides. It starts, he suggests, with countering the observation once offered by former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers that liberals fear a value-added tax because it’s regressive and conservatives fear it because it’s a money machine. Graetz’s measure overcomes both objections.

Regarding the final sentence of that excerpt, he’s half right. Folks on the left will be happy to know that there will be a lot more redistribution through the tax code.

Graetz addresses the regressivity of most sales taxes, not by exempting food, drugs and other necessities as most of the older European systems do, but with a system of credits and offsets… He provides a payroll tax cut and expanded child-care credits focused on low- and moderate-income workers.

But what do advocates of small government get out of the deal?

Well, they do get something in the short run. Graetz wants to use the VAT money to reduce the burden of the income tax. Rates for households are lowered, with the top rate falling to 31 percent. And the best part of the plan may be that it reduces America’s uncompetitive corporate tax rate to 15 percent.

But I’m more worried about the long run, particularly after looking at evidence from Europe and Japan.

What’s in the plan, for instance, that would prevent the VAT from becoming a “money machine”? Or what guarantees would be put in place to prevent politicians from re-expanding the income tax?

Unfortunately, there don’t appear to be any safeguards. Professor Graetz has expressed some support for supermajority rules to protect against tax hikes, but he’s quoted in the article explicitly stating that a VAT could be used to generate more money to prop up the welfare state.

The Tax Policy Center found that his proposal succeeds in raising the same amount of revenue as current law. If revenue is to be part of any longer-term deficit reduction, Graetz observes, the value-added tax or the income taxes could be tweaked. “Actually, this would put us in a better situation to address the fiscal crunch down the road,” he says.

That statement scares the heck out of me. We desperately need the right kind of entitlement reform to save America from becoming another doomed welfare state. But what are the odds of getting good changes if politicians think they can continuously kick the can down the road by raising the VAT every couple of years.

Before you know it, we’re Greece!

If you don’t believe me about the VAT being a money machine, perhaps you’ll be more trusting of analysis from the International Monetary Fund. That bureaucracy actually supports the VAT, but the IMF inadvertently revealed in some research last year that the VAT is far more effective at generating new revenue than the income tax.

And that’s true for poor nations and rich nations.

This video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, narrated by yours truly, explains why the VAT would finance the road to serfdom.

Last but not least, it’s worth pointing out that Professor Graetz’s proposal has become more punitive over time. Check out this portion of a Tax Policy Center study showing that the VAT rate has been increased and that a new class-warfare tax rate has been added to the proposal.

So if the proposal has become more onerous on paper, imagine how much worse it will get once politicians get their hands on it.

P.S. If you want short explanations of the flat tax, sales tax, VAT, and current system, check out these Heartland Institute videos.

P.P.S. To be fair, there’s very little indication that Prof. Graetz wants bigger and more expensive government. He’s proposing a VAT for the same reason Cong. Paul Ryan has proposed a VAT. They think the revenue can be used to reduce the burden of the income tax. They’re not wrong in theory. They just don’t appreciate the danger of giving politicians a new source of revenue.

P.P.P.S. George Will correctly warns that the VAT should be off the table until and unless the 16th Amendment is repealed. And Robert Samuelson gives several reasons why this levy should be rejected.

P.P.P.P.S. Some advocates say the VAT is needed to forestall higher income tax rates, but that certainly hasn’t been the case in Europe.

P.P.P.P.P.S. You can enjoy some amusing VAT cartoons by clicking here, here, and here.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Al Hunt has always been a nice guy on the few occasions I’ve interacted with him, but it didn’t help my reputation when he wrote in the Wall Street Journal back in 1994 that I was a “responsible economic expert on the right.” That sounds like praise, but folks on the left generally only say nice things about their opponents when they’re being incompetent or selling out.

P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. I’ll close with some good news. The U.S. Senate overwhelming rejected the concept of a VAT back in 2010, though I think the 85-13 vote overstates the level of opposition. Many left-wing Senators only voted no because it was a non-binding measure. But we don’t get many victories in Washington, so I’ll take it.

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Be Thankful for “Diminished Productivity” in Washington

Let’s do a simple thought experiment and answer the following question: Do you think that additional laws from Washington will give you more freedom and more prosperity?

I don’t know how you will answer, but I strongly suspect most Americans will say “no.” Indeed, they’ll probably augment their “no” answers with a few words that wouldn’t be appropriate to repeat in polite company.

That’s because taxpayers instinctively understand that more activity in Washington usually translates into bigger and more expensive government. Or, to be more colloquial, this image summarizes how they view Washington. And the last thing you want is more “action” when you’re on the lower floor.

Sort of like living downwind from the sewage treatment plant.

So what’s the purpose of our thought experiment? Well, new numbers have been released showing that the current Congress is going to set a modern-era record for imposing the fewest new laws.

But while most of us think this is probably good news, Washington insiders are whining and complaining about “diminished productivity” in Congress. The Washington Post, which is the voice of DC’s parasite class, is very disappointed that lawmakers aren’t enacting more taxes, more spending, and more regulation.

…this Congress — which is set to adjourn for the year later this month — has enacted 52 public laws. By comparison, …90 laws were encated during the first year of the 113th Congress and 137 were put in place during the first year of the 111th Congress.

Just in case you don’t have a beltway mindset, another Washington Post report also tells you that fewer laws is a bad thing.

…whatever gets done in December will still be part of a year with record-low congressional accomplishment. …According to congressional records, there have been fewer than 60 public laws enacted in the first 11 months of this year, so below the previous low in legislative output that officials have already declared this first session of the 113th Congress the least productive ever.

Let’s actually look at some evidence. The first session of the current Congress may have been the “least productive” in history when it comes to imposing new laws, but what’s the actual result?

Well, there are probably many ways this could be measured, but one of the most obvious benchmarks is the federal budget.

And it appears that “record-low congressional accomplishment” translates into a smaller burden of government spending.

Indeed, government spending actually has declined for two consecutive years. That hasn’t happened since the 1950s.

And it’s worth reminding people that you begin to solve the symptom of red ink when you address the underlying disease of too much spending. That’s why the deficit has fallen by almost 50 percent in the past two years.

Interestingly, the Washington Post accidentally confirms that you get better policy when you have fewer news laws.

In 1995, when the newly empowered GOP congressional majority confronted the Clinton administration, 88 laws were enacted, the record low in the post-World War II era.

Needless to say, the author isn’t saying that we got good policy because there were a “record low” number of laws in 1995. But if we look at fiscal policy during that period, that’s when we began a multi-year period of spending restraint that led to budget surpluses.

In other words, we should be very grateful for “unproductive” politicians.

Now for some caveats.

It’s obviously a gross over-simplification to assert that the number of laws is correlated with good policy or bad policy. Sometimes politicians impose laws that increase the burden of government (with Obamacare being an obvious example).

But sometimes they enact laws that increase economic liberty and reduce government (with the sequester being a good example, even though very few politicians actually wanted that result).

To conclude, the message of this post is that we shouldn’t worry about “diminished productivity” in Washington if it means fewer bad laws.

That being said, we’ll never fix a corrupt tax code or reform bankrupt entitlement programs unless there are new laws to replace old laws that created bad policy.

P.S. Since we’re talking about low productivity in Washington, there’s good evidence that bureaucrats don’t work very hard compared to workers in the economy’s productive sector. But that’s probably a good thing. After all, do we want bureaucrats (like this one) being more diligent? That’s why we should focus on reducing their excessive compensation rather than encouraging them to put in a full day’s work.

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Thanks to Obamacare and the IRS, You’re at Risk of Having Your Identity Stolen and Your Bank Account Emptied

There are many reason I don’t like Obamacare, including its punitive impact on taxpayers and the way it takes our healthcare system even further from a market-based approach.

But now I’m increasingly worried Obamacare also is creating a playground for hackers and identity thieves – and the rest of us will be the victims.

Simply stated, the results probably won’t be very pretty when you mix together these two items.

1) Typical government incompetence.

2) Massive data collection by government.

I pontificate on these issues in an interview with Neil Cavuto.

To elaborate, the internal revenue code is filled with double taxation of income that is saved and invested. As such the IRS insists on knowing extensive details on our income-producing assets, as well as any capital gains we earn.

And, if you’re subject to the death tax, they’ll want to know about everything you own. None of that would be necessary if we had a flat tax or a national sales tax.

Heck, they wouldn’t even need to know about your bank account since there’s no double taxation of interest with real tax reform.

But we’re on the other side of the pendulum, with the government wanting to know just about everything about our financial affairs. That’s good news for statists who want more redistribution…and it’s good news for other thieves who also want to take our money (but without using government as a middleman).

If you think I’m needlessly worried, check out this CNBC report. Here are some key excerpts.

Serious security weaknesses in the Internal Revenue Service’s data system have left millions of taxpayers’ sensitive financial information vulnerable to hackers. The agency claims it has fixed the problem, but its auditors beg to differ. A new report released by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) found that although the IRS claimed it had implemented 19 fixes to secure the system recommended by the auditor in previous years, at least eight (or 42 percent) of them “had not been fully implemented,” and should not have been checked off as completed. The auditors said the IRS never tracked its progress on the repairs, and in many cases, it closed cases without submitting documentation to prove the fix was complete. …The report also found that the agency didn’t properly scan servers—which contain taxpayer information—for “major vulnerabilities,” or properly lock user accounts, and it did not update software on databases. “When the right degree of security diligence is not applied to systems, disgruntled insiders or malicious outsiders can exploit security weaknesses and may gain unauthorized access,” Treasury Inspector General J. Russell George said.

That’s not exactly reassuring.

But it gets worse. Obamacare exchanges are a disaster waiting to happen, as explained in a USA Today column by the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Every day, personal information is the subject of hundreds of thousands of hacking attempts from all over the world. …On October 1, a major component of Obamacare made you even more vulnerable to devastating attacks on your personal information and the administration is doing too little about it. The Federal Data Services Hub (Hub), a component of the health insurance exchanges created by Obamacare, connects seven different government agencies and establish new access points to the sensitive personal information of the American public. Social Security numbers, employment information, birth dates, health records and tax returns are among the personal data that will be transmitted to this hub, consolidating an unprecedented amount of information. Every shred of data one would need to steal your identity or access your confidential credit information would be available at the fingertips of a skilled hacker, producing a staggering security threat. …These potential vulnerabilities are a dream of faceless international hackers and hostile foreign intelligence services.

Heck, you may as well put all your credit card info on your Facebook page.

More seriously, any sensible person will stay far away from Obamacare. Though if you don’t sign up on an Obamacare exchange, the White House wants you to get fined. So you lose no matter what.

Gee, isn’t big government wonderful?

P.S. I should have mentioned the huge privacy risks that will be created if politicians succeed in imposing an Internet sales tax cartel. Such a system will require a database of every online purchase and it will be accessible by bureaucrats from state and local governments.

P.P.S. I also failed to mention how high-tax governments such as France and Germany (with assistance from the Obama Administration) are pushing to create a global network of tax police that would collect and share information among governments – regardless of their level of corruption or pattern of human rights abuses!

P.P.P.S. Last but not least, we can’t have a discussion of privacy without mentioning our inquisitive friends at the NSA. Some of you may think it’s a non-story that the NSA is spying on just about all communications. The government, we are told, is merely trying to fight terrorism. Sounds okay in theory, but I’m not that sanguine for the simple reason that I don’t trust government. Indeed, all of us should worry that the NSA was just busted for spying on the web-surfing habits of its critics. Moreover, it doesn’t take much imagination to think the Obama White House would misuse that power to spy on political enemies. If you think I’m being paranoid, just consider how the IRS has been used as a partisan political tool in recent years.

P.P.P.P.S. I’ve been asked whether I’m worried that the NSA will snoop through my web history. As a matter of principle, I would object, but I’m not overly concerned because I’m a relatively boring person. That’s true even when I search for “libertarian porn” and “libertarian sex fantasies.”

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Lesson from the Birth Control Mandate: When You Mix Big Government and Big Business, You Get Big Corruption

Remember Sandra Fluke, the 30-year old student who got her 15 minutes of fame last year by becoming the poster child for subsidized birth control?

She’s fortunately faded away, but the issue is still with us because the courts are being asked to decide whether government has the right to coerce people into decisions that violate their religious values.

But you won’t be surprised that this feature of Obamacare also has important economic and policy lessons.

Statists have tried to scare young people that there’s a fight over whether people have the right to access birth control. They’ll privately admit that this is just empty rhetoric (after all, there were no barriers to birth control in the pre-Obamacare era), but they nonetheless still argue that the mandate is needed for affordability reasons.

But this is utter bunk, as Megan McArdle explains in her Bloomberg column.

Regular, predictable expenses such as birth-control pills cannot be defrayed by insurance; they can only be prepaid, with a markup for the insurer’s administrative costs. The extra cost is passed on by the insurers to your employer, and from your employer to you and your fellow workers, either by raising your contribution or lowering the wage they are willing to offer.

I would take this one step farther. Costs will rise not only because of administrative costs, but also because we’ll have more third-party payer and that will make it much easier for the providers of birth control pills to raise prices.

And that is a perfect segue into the meat of today’s post, which is about the sleazy and corrupt interaction of big business and big government. And the Obamacare birth control mandate is a perfect example.

Tim Carney exposes this issue in his Washington Examiner column. He starts with a hypothesis that corporate cronyism is the real story.

Look at the contraception mandate from almost any angle, and you see the corporatism. Sometimes it’s on the surface, and sometimes it’s implicit in the arguments. The contraception mandate is nakedly a huge subsidy to the industry that most firmly supported Obamacare: the drugmakers. The drug industry has spent more on lobbying under Obama than any other industry.

Tim provides some of the sordid details.

Top Obama bundler Sally Susman oversees the lobbying shop at drug giant Pfizer, which sells $7.6 million a year in name-brand birth control pills, while also selling contraceptive injections and generic drugs. Pfizer’s CEO during the Obamacare debate was Obama donor Jeffrey Kindler. In a corporate filing, the company justified his salary increase by pointing to his Obamacare lobbying. …Merck, which also makes birth control pills, deployed top lobbyist, former Democratic congressional staffer and major Democratic donor Mark Raabe to Capitol Hill and the White House to lobby on “efforts to gain coverage of preventive services,” according to company lobbying filings. The administration uses the “preventive services” provision of Obamacare to justify the contraception mandate. Merck sells implants and other contraceptives — if “sells” is the right word for products that many customers now get for “free,” sticking colleagues and taxpayers with the bill. Conceptus, a company that sells a sterilization procedure, lobbied Congress and the Department of Health and Human Services on “implementation of the preventive services provisions of the Affordable Care Act,” according to lobbying filings. The mandate covers this patented procedure.

Needless to say, drug companies have spent all this money on lobbying and campaign contributions in the expectation that they can artificially increase their revenue as a result of government favoritism.

Obama’s contraception mandate requires all employer-sponsored health care plans to cover 100 percent of the cost of all FDA-approved contraception. That gives customers incentives to choose…name-brand pills, because the entire cost is passed onto employers and thus onto customers and colleagues.

It’s a different topic, but Tim also has some wise words about the Obama Administration’s arguments against the First Amendment.

…liberals argue that the owners of the privately held store Hobby Lobby are not protected by the First Amendment from intrusions of the “free exercise” of religion — and so it must cover the morning-after pill, which can cause a very early-term miscarriage. …It’s not a novel claim, but it’s still a scary one: A person gives up his First Amendment rights when he is acting as a businessman.

And his summary paragraph hits the nail on the head.

Sometimes people think politics is about the collective versus the individual. Most of the time, though, it’s about the state versus civil society. It’s coercion versus voluntary association.

By the way, the drug companies are just the tip of the iceberg. Companies like General Motors and General Electric also are experts at using government to tilt the playing field.

And don’t forget that companies like Boeing and Exxon Mobil use the Export-Import Bank to line their pockets at our expense.

Or what about H&R Block, which lobbies to protect its ability to profit from a corruption-riddled tax system.

The entire ethanol industry, meanwhile, is dependent on favors from Washington, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created by the government!

And Pizza Hut, joined by other fast food joints, lobbies for food stamps.

The TARP bailout was the epitome of Washington sleaze, which may help explain the revolving door between Wall Street in Washington.

We should also be upset that big corporations sometimes support higher tax rates on their competitors from the small business sector.

Gee, it’s almost enough to make one think Washington is a rat’s nest of corruption. Speaking of which, here’s my video on the link between big government and big corruption. I think you’ll agree that I understated the case.

P.S. Since we started this post by mentioning Sandra Fluke, we may as well close with some jokes at her expense. You can enjoy some laughs with this great Reason video, this funny cartoon, and four more jokes here.

P.P.S. But Sandra Fluke may have the last laugh since the clowns at the United Nations have declared that birth control (almost surely financed by taxpayers) is a human right.

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