Halloween Political Humor…and Updated House and Senate Election Predictions

It’s time to extend the tradition of sharing politics-related Halloween humor on October 31.

Though this is only my fourth year, so maybe it’s not quite a tradition yet.

Nonetheless, we’ve had some good material.

There were two Halloween posts in 2011, including a cartoon about what happens when kids trick-or-treat at a statist’s house, as well as a comic’s very clever and amusing analysis of taxes and Halloween.

In 2012, I shared several Halloween-themed cartoons, mostly about Obama’s spendaholic tendencies.

Last year, Obamacare was the unifying theme in the cartoons I shared.

This year, we have six more political cartoons.

The first bunch focuses on scary political figures.

We’ll start with a cartoon from Henry Payne, who suggests that Democrats are the ones who are most fearful of Obama.

Larry Wright, meanwhile, warns children that some costumes won’t produce much candy.

But Obama isn’t the only hobgoblin scaring people. Here’s Hillary Clinton, courtesy of Ken Catalino.

The following Halloween cartoons all share a common theme, which is that Obamacare is generating much higher prices for health insurance.

Here’s Steve Breen’s contribution. Democrats are scared, to be sure, but consumers are the real victims.

Lisa Benson weighs in. I particularly like the candy bar in the cartoon.

Last but not least, Gary Varvel has a similarly amusing perspective.

Thought there is a serious point to make about this last cartoon.

The White House appears to be hiding some of the negative effects of Obamacare until after the election. Here’s some of what the U.K.-based Daily Mail has reported.

The open enrollment period for federal Obamacare plans will begin more than a month later than it did last year, with this year’s start date coming after the midterm elections. …the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services have said politics aren’t at play. …Still, the move has the added convenience of allowing insurers to keep next year’s rates a secret until voters have already cast their ballots for or against Democrats who voted for or support the health care law.

Gee, that’s convenient…if you’re a Democratic political operative.

Not surprisingly, some folks are skeptical.

In a statement released last Friday Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips claimed, ‘the President sold ObamaCare to the American people on the false promise that it would make health care more accessible and more affordable for those who needed it most. ‘Sadly, ObamaCare has actually put affordable health care even further out of reach for millions of Americans,’ the conservative non-profit head claimed.The administration’s decision to withhold the costs of this law until after Election Day is just more proof that ObamaCare is a bad deal for Americans.’

For what it’s worth, I share these concerns. By arbitrarily deciding what parts of Obamacare to enforce and when to enforce them, the White House already has made a mockery of the rule of law.

So what’s another politically motivated change in the rules, a la Argentina?

P.S. Now let’s shift to the elections. A few days ago, I made my initial projections for the House and Senate elections that will take place on Tuesday.

I predicted that Republicans would control the Senate 52-48 and the House 246-189.

Having looked over some of the polling data, I’m going to stick with my Senate prediction.

Though I’ve made a change. I still think the GOP will win the same 8 seats that I projected last time, but now I’m predicting that Republicans will hold on to their seat in Georgia while losing a seat they hold in Kansas.

So still a net gain of 7 seats for the GOP.

Here are the Senate seats that will change hands.

I also admitted last time that I’m not overly confident in my predictions and that the final outcome could be anywhere between 52-48 Democrat control and 55-45 Republican control.

In other words, I thought there were a bunch of races that could go in either direction.

For what it’s worth, I think the trend is against the Democrats, so I’ll now predict that the final results will be somewhere between a 50-50 split (in which case Biden casts the tie-breaking vote) and 56-44 GOP control.

In the House of Representatives, the pro-Republican trend leads me to predict the GOP ultimately will have 248-187 control, which would be the most Republicans since 1930.

P.P.S. Just as I warned last time, don’t hold your breath waiting for big changes in policy if the GOP winds up in control of both chambers of Congress.

Even assuming they want to do the right thing, Republicans won’t have the votes to override presidential vetoes. So there won’t be any tax reform and there won’t be any entitlement reform.

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Does Jeb Bush’s Support for Higher Taxes Make Him more Fiscally Conservative than Paul Ryan?

Since I criticized Paul Ryan’s Roadmap budget plan yesterday as part of my column against the value-added tax, I now feel obliged to defend the proposal in one important respect.

But first, some background.

In a recent piece for the American Enterprise Institute, James Pethokoukis applauded former Florida Governor Jeb Bush for being willing to accept a tax increase deal.

…whatever the real-time political impact of what Bush said, the fiscal analysis supporting it is sound. …Would a GOP president really not accept an entitlement reform deal somehow that kept spending at 20% but only raised revenue to 18.4% of GDP from its postwar average of 17.4%?

I actually would accept such a deal as well, at least in theory. After all, the burden of federal government spending – if left on autopilot – is expected to grow to about 40 percent of economic output by 2050.

Heck, if I knew I could restrain federal spending so it only consumed 20 percent of GDP in 2050, I’d even accept tax revenues of 20 percent of GDP.

So does this mean I’m a Jeb Bush-style squish on taxes?

Not at all. Simply stated, the deal that Pethokoukis proposes doesn’t exist. Anywhere.

So saying I’d accept such a deal is about as relevant as me saying I’m willing to play quarterback next year for the Georgia Bulldogs.

And even if such a deal did exist, I strongly suspect the other side wouldn’t fulfill its side of the bargain. That’s certainly been the track record of previous tax-hiking budget deals. The tax hike gets imposed, but promised spending “cuts” quickly evaporate.

So Pethokoukis (and Jeb Bush) are simply being impractical when they put tax hikes on the table.

You’re probably wondering at this point how this connects to Congressman Paul Ryan’s Roadmap proposal.

Time to reward your patience. Pethokoukis tries to defend Jeb Bush by asserting that Ryan’s Roadmap plan assumes higher levels of taxes and spending.

Look at Paul Ryan’s much-celebrated — at least in conservative circles — Roadmap for America. According to its budget plan, government spending in 2039 would be 23.7% of GDP with revenue of 19.0%. Now according to CBO’s alternate budget forecast, 2039 spending is currently on path to be 25.9%. So the Ryan plan would increase historical tax revenue by just less than two percentage points while reducing projected spending by just more than two percentage points. That is nowhere close to 10-to-1. It’s not even 2-to-1.

So does this mean Jeb Bush is more philosophically sound than Paul Ryan?

Hardly. Pethokoukis is mixing apples and oranges. Or, to be more accurate, he’s mixing apples and rocks.

The Ryan Roadmap, like all budget proposals on Capitol Hill, is measured against a “baseline” estimate of what happens if government is left on autopilot.

And that baseline assumes huge increases in the burden of government spending (because of entitlements and demographic changes) and a big increase in the overall tax burden (since even modest growth over time pushes households into higher tax brackets).

Compared to that baseline, Ryan’s Roadmap would significantly reduce the upward trajectory of spending, and also mitigate the increased tax burden.

Here are a pair of charts from the House Budget Committee, showing the long-run impact of the plan on taxes and spending.

So while I don’t like the fact that the plan includes a VAT, I very much applaud what Congressman Ryan is trying to achieve.

Jeb Bush’s theoretical budget deal, by contrast, would involve adding even more tax revenue on top of all the additional tax revenue that CBO projects. And Bush’s supposed spending cuts would be based on Washington’s funny budget math and measured against the CBO baseline as well, so I feel very safe in asserting that government would be much bigger under a risky tax-hike deal than it would be with Ryan’s Roadmap.

This is why the no-tax hike pledge is a valuable way of weeding out politicians who aren’t serious about dealing with the problem of big government.

P.S. It’s worth noting that the New York Times accidentally admitted that the only successful budget deal was the one that cut taxes.

P.P.S. The first President Bush was a disaster for advocates of limited government, as was the second President Bush, and there’s a very big reason at this point to be skeptical about version 3.0.

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Are Well-Meaning but Misguided Conservatives Being Seduced by the Value-Added Tax?

Libertarians are sometimes accused of being unrealistic and impractical because we occasionally talk about unconventional ideas such as competitive currencies and privatized roads.

But having a vision of a free society doesn’t mean we’re incapable of common-sense political calculations.

For example, my long-run goal is to dramatically shrink the size and scope of the federal government, both because that’s how the Founding Fathers wanted our system to operate and because our economy will grow much faster if labor and capital are allocated by economic forces rather than political calculations. But in the short run, I’m advocating for incremental progress in the form of modest spending restraint.

Why? Because that’s the best that we can hope for at the moment.

Another example of common-sense libertarianism is my approach to tax reform. One of the reasons I prefer the flat tax over the national sales tax is that I don’t trust that politicians will get rid of the income tax if they decide to adopt the Fair Tax. And if the politicians suddenly have two big sources of tax revenue, you better believe they’ll want to increase the burden of government spending.

Which is what happened (and is still happening) in Europe when value-added taxes were adopted.

And that’s a good segue to today’s topic, which deals with a common-sense analysis of the value-added tax.

Here’s the issue: I’m getting increasingly antsy because some very sound people are expressing support for the VAT.

I don’t object to their theoretical analysis. They say they don’t want the VAT in order to finance bigger government. Instead, they argue the VAT should be used only to replace the corporate income tax, which is a far more destructive way of generating revenue.

And if that was the final – and permanent – outcome of the legislative process, I would accept that deal in a heartbeat. But notice I added the requirement about a “permanent” outcome. That’s because I have two requirements for such a deal.

1. The corporate income tax could never be re-instated.

2. The VAT could never be increased.

And this shows why theoretical analysis can be dangerous without real-world considerations. Simply stated, there is no way to guarantee those two requirements without amending the Constitution, and that obviously isn’t part of the discussion.

So my fear is that some good people will help implement a VAT, based on the theory that it will replace a worse form of taxation. But in the near future, when the dust settles, the bad people will somehow control the outcome and the VAT will be used to finance bigger government.

Here are examples to show why I am concerned.

Here’s some of what Tom Donlan wrote for Barron’s.

…the U.S. imposes the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. Make no mistake, corporations pay no tax. That is a tax on American consumers, American workers, and American shareholders.  Don’t think that the corporate income tax eases your personal tax burden. Add your share of the corporate income tax to the other taxes you pay.  Better yet, create a business tax we can all understand. A value-added tax is a tax on consumption. We would pay it according to the amount of the economic resources we choose to enjoy, and we would not pay it when we choose to save and invest in making the economy bigger and more productive. We would pay it on imported goods as much as on those domestically produced. The makers of goods for export would receive a rebate on their value-added tax.  Trading the corporate income tax for the value-added tax is one of the best fiscal deals the U.S. could make.

I agree in theory.

America’s corporate tax system is a nightmare.

But I think giving Washington a new source of tax revenue is an even bigger nightmare.

Professor Greg Mankiw at Harvard, writing for the New York Times, also thinks a VAT is better than the corporate income tax.

…here’s a proposal: Let’s repeal the corporate income tax entirely, and scale back the personal income tax as well. We can replace them with a broad-based tax on consumption. The consumption tax could take the form of a value-added tax, which in other countries has proved to be a remarkably efficient way to raise government revenue.

Once again, I can’t argue with the theory.

But in reality, I simply don’t trust that politicians won’t reinstate the corporate tax. And I don’t trust that they’ll keep the VAT rate reasonable.

At this point, some of you may be thinking I’m needlessly worried. After all, journalists and academic economists aren’t the ones who enact laws.

I think that’s a mistaken attitude. You don’t have to be on Capitol Hill to have an impact on the debate.

Besides, there are elected officials who already are pushing for a value-added tax! Congressman Paul Ryan, the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, actually has a “Roadmap” plan that would replace the corporate income tax with a VAT, which is exactly what Donlan and Mankiw are proposing.

…this plan does away with the corporate income tax, which discourages investment and job creation, distorts business activity, and puts American businesses at a competitive disadvantage against foreign competitors. In its place, the proposal establishes a simple and efficient business consumption tax [BCT].

At the risk of being repetitive, Paul Ryan’s plan to replace the corporate income tax with a VAT is theoretically very good. Moreover, the Roadmap not only has good tax reform, but it also includes genuine entitlement reform.

But I’m nonetheless very uneasy about the overall plan because of very practical concerns about the actions of future politicians.

In the absence of (impossible to achieve) changes to the Constitution, how do you ensure that the corporate income tax doesn’t get re-imposed and that the VAT doesn’t become a revenue machine for big government?

By the way, this susceptibility to the VAT is not limited to Tom Dolan, Greg Mankiw, and Paul Ryan. I’ve previously expressed discomfort about the pro-VAT sympathies of Kevin Williamson, Josh Barro, and Andrew Stuttaford.

And I’ve written that Mitch Daniels, Herman Cain, and Mitt Romney were not overly attractive presidential candidates because they’ve expressed openness to the VAT.

This video sums up why a value-added tax is wrong for America.

Last but not least, let me preemptively address those who will say that corporate tax reform is so important that we have to roll the dice and take a chance with the VAT.

I fully agree that the corporate income tax is a self-inflicted wound to American prosperity, but allow me to point out that incremental reform is a far simpler – and far safer – way of dealing with the biggest warts plaguing the current system.

Lower the corporate tax rate.

Replace depreciation with expensing.

Replace worldwide taxation with territorial taxation.

So here’s the bottom line. If there’s enough support in Congress to get rid of the corporate income tax and impose a VAT, that means there’s also enough support to implement these incremental reforms.

There’s a risk, to be sure, that future politicians will undo these reforms. But the adverse consequences of that outcome are far lower than the catastrophic consequences of future politicians using a VAT to turn America into France.

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

P.P.S. I also very much recommend what George Will wrote about the value-added tax.

P.P.P.S. I’m also quite amused that the IMF accidentally provided key evidence against the VAT.

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Another Edition of “I Can’t Believe Hillary Clinton Actually Said That”

I wouldn’t be too upset about Hillary Clinton winning the White House in 2016, but only if I somehow could be assured that we would get the kind of policies we got when her husband was President.

After all, economic freedom increased during the 1990s, largely because of a smaller burden of government spending and less intervention.

Unfortunately, I suspect Hillary isn’t a “Clinton Democrat.”

Indeed, it’s worth noting that she was a doctrinaire statist when she was in the Senate. Here’s what the National Taxpayers Union revealed about her performance in her last year in office.

Sen. Hillary Clinton…received a score of 4 percent and the title of “Big Spender” in 2008 — a slight increase from her 2007 rating of 3 percent.

The good news, if you have the ability to detect very small silver linings, is that her score did increase in her final year.

And it doesn’t appear that she’s learned anything since she left the Senate. Consider some of the bizarre statements she has made in the past few years.

• Mrs. Clinton said we can’t end the War on Drugs because “there is just too much money in it,” apparently oblivious to the fact that high profits for the cartels only exist because of criminalization.
• In 2010, while speaking in Latin America, she asserted that, “the wealthy across the Americas to pay their ‘fair share’ of taxes in order to eliminate poverty and promote economic opportunity for all.”
• While testifying before Congress, she repeated her argument that more revenue improves economic development, claiming that, “well-off Pakistani’s do not pay their fair share for the services that are needed.”
• And showing that her understanding of geography is just as weak as her understanding of public finance economics, Hillary claimed, “Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere and guess what — they’re growing like crazy.”
• Mrs. Clinton even asserted that, “rich people…do not contribute to their growth of their own countries.”
• And she bragged about paying above-average taxes, apparently thinking that the inability to manage her personal finances makes her an attractive choice to control the nation’s finances.

Now she’s added to the list. Here’s what she said the other day about job creation.

Wow. I’m not even sure what to say, other than I wish somebody would ask her where jobs do come from, the Tooth Fairy? Santa Claus?

I’m pretty sure, if pressed, she would use the same argument as her potential 2016 rival, Elizabeth Warren, and claim that government enables all the jobs by providing infrastructure and other public goods.

But there are roads and police in places such as Cuba and North Korea, yet we don’t see jobs there.

Or, to use more reasonable examples, France, Italy, and Greece have lots of roads and cops, yet all of those countries have very weak labor markets.

Maybe, just maybe, you also need some breathing room for private enterprise if you want robust job creation.

An editorial in the Washington Examiner correctly observed that Hillary Clinton’s comments demonstrate ignorance of basic economic principles.

…the private sector accounts for 84 percent of American jobs. But one must remember that the private sector also accounts for 100 percent of the wealth America creates. Meanwhile, government is funded exclusively through various taxes on private production and accumulation of this wealth — and that includes any taxes that fall upon the portion of privately created wealth that government collects and then uses to pay its own employees. This insight should be brought to Clinton’s attention, because Americans cannot afford to have one of their two major political parties reject basic economic principles.

I also like that the editorial explains that even public goods wouldn’t be possible if the private sector wasn’t creating the wealth to finance them.

P.S. Yes, I realize that many of the good policies America enjoyed in the 1990s were driven by Congress. I’m not saying the Bill Clinton deserves credit for those policies. Instead, I am merely pointing out that they were implemented during his presidency.

P.P.S. That being said, it’s worth noting that Bill Clinton seems much more rational than either his wife or the current President.

P.P.P.S. Since I mentioned statist heroine Elizabeth Warren, this is a good opportunity to recycle some humor. Here’s some mockery of her make-believe Indian ancestry, and here’s a clever application of her philosophy to dating choices for attractive women.

P.P.P.P.S. Here are some additional Hillary quotes as part of an amusing quiz.

P.P.P.P.P.S. One final point. I’m not sure who deserves the credit, but somebody in the Clinton household believes in proper (albeit hypocritical) tax planning.

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Has Italy Passed the Point of No Return for Statism and Big Government?

The world is a laboratory, with lots of experiments to see if a nation can prosper with big government and pervasive intervention.

The results are not encouraging. I’ve written about France being a basket case, over and over again.

And I am equally pessimistic about Greece because the moochers and looters outnumber productive people in that country.

Heck, much of Europe is a mess because of widespread statism.

But the rest of the world is filled with bad examples as well. Japan has attracted my critical attention, and I have very little reason to think that nation has a bright future.

I’ve also dinged bad policy in Mexico and South Africa, so nobody can accuse me of being parsimonious when it comes to criticizing politicians that promote big government.

But the country that may be in the deepest trouble is Italy.

To understand the depth of the problem, you should read a recent article in the U.K.-based Spectator.

Here are some excerpts, starting with an anecdote about the government-funded opera house in Rome.

Financed and managed by the state, and therefore crippled by debt, the opera house — like so much else in Italy — had been a jobs-for-life trade union fiefdom. Its honorary director, Riccardo Muti, became so fed up after dealing with six years of work-to-rule surrealism that he resigned. It’s hard to blame him. The musicians at the opera house — the ‘professori’ — work a 28-hour week (nearly half taken up with ‘study’) and get paid 16 months’ salary a year, plus absurd perks such as double pay for performing in the open air because it is humid and therefore a health risk. Even so, in the summer, Muti was compelled to conduct a performance of La Bohème with only a pianist because the rest of the orchestra had gone on strike.

The story says all the staff eventually were fired.

Is that a sign that policy makers in Italy are sobering up? Or is it too little, too late?

The author of the column, Nicholas Farrell, is not optimistic.

Italy’s irreversible demise is a foregone conclusion. The country is just too much of a basket case even to think about. …The youth unemployment rate here is 43 per cent — the highest on record. That figure doesn’t factor in the black market, which is so big that the Italian government now wants to include certain parts of it — prostitution, drug dealing and assorted smuggling — into its official GDP figures.  …Just 58 per cent of working-age Italians are employed, compared with an average 65 per cent in the developed world. …Italy’s economy has been stagnant since 2000. Indeed, over the past five years it has shrunk by 9.1 per cent. …Italy’s sovereign debt, meanwhile, continues to grow exponentially. It is now €2.2 trillion, which is the equivalent of 135 per cent of GDP — the third highest in the world after Japan and Greece. …In Italy, as in France, a dirigiste philosophy has predominated since the second world war. The government is run like a protection racket… Even newspapers are publicly subsidised, which is why there are so many of them.

But high debt in Italy isn’t because of low taxes.

Anyone who works in the real private sector — the family businesses that have made Italy’s name around the world — is in a bad place. Italy has the heaviest ‘total tax’ burden on businesses in the world at 68 per cent… To start a business in Italy is to enter a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare, and to keep it going is even worse. It also means handing the state at least 50 cents for every euro paid to staff.

So where do all this tax money go?

Not surprisingly, there’s a parasitic public sector that is very well compensated. Starting with the politicians.

Italian MPs are the highest paid in the civilised world, earning almost twice the salary of a British MP. Barbers in the Italian Parliament get up to €136,120 a year gross. All state employees get a fabulous near-final–salary pension. It is not difficult to appreciate the fury of the average Italian private sector worker, whose gross annual pay is €18,000. The phrase ‘you could not make it up’ fits the gold-plated world of the Italian state employee to a tee — especially in the Mezzo-giorno, Italy’s hopeless south. Sicily, for instance, employs 28,000 forestry police — more than Canada — and has 950 ambulance drivers who have no ambulances to drive.

I gather Sicily is like the Illinois of Italy, so those horrifying numbers don’t surprise me.

And don’t forget that Italy’s representative in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame is from Sicily as well.

So what’s the solution to this mess?

Simple, adopt a policy of small government and free markets.

An Italian government that really meant business would make urgent and drastic cuts not just to the bloated, parasitical and corrupt state sector, but also to taxes, labour costs and red tape.

And the current Prime Minister, to be fair, is proposing baby steps in the right direction. Unfortunately, he’s being far too timid.

To get an idea of the magnitude of the problem, the Wall Street Journal opined on Italian labor markets, explaining that “pro-worker” interventions by government impose very high costs.

Led by the country’s largest union, the Italian General Confederation of Labor, or CGIL, the activists want to preserve Italy’s job guarantees as they are. Call it Italy’s economic suicide movement. …there is the Cassa Integrazione Guadagni. Under this income-assistance scheme, businesses that need to downsize can put some workers on “standby,” and the government will cover a significant share of the normal salary until the company can hire back the worker. The program strains the state’s budget, discourages workers from seeking other jobs, and prevents struggling companies from downsizing to stay competitive. Need to fire a worker for poor job performance? To do so, businesses must persuade a judge that no alternative short of termination was available—a process of administrative hearings and litigation that can take months and drain company resources. The World Economic Forum in its 2014-15 assessment of labor-market efficiency ranked Italy 141 out of 144 countries for hiring and firing practices, just above Zimbabwe.

And the biggest victim of the “pro-worker” interventions are…you guessed it…workers.

Italy has the largest number of small businesses in the European Union not because companies don’t want to grow, but because they fear growth will mean having to negotiate with the militant national unions like CGIL. The unsurprising result of all these barriers to firing and efficiency is that businesses are reluctant to hire. The official unemployment rate stands at 12%, and half of Italy’s young people are unemployed.

If you want more info about Italy’s dysfunctional labor markets, I also shared some good analysis from the WSJ back in 2012.

Let’s now circle back to a question asked above. Can Italy be saved?

Like Mr. Farrell, I’m not optimistic. There’s no pro-market political party in Italy. And the so-called technocrats have demonstrated amazing levels of incompetence, so they’re obviously not the solution.

P.S. There is one tiny bit of semi-good news from Italy. Over the past 8 years, government spending has increased, on average, by just 1.6 percent per year. The bad news, though, is that the private sector has grown at an even slower rate, so the actual burden of government spending has increased.

Between 1996-2000, by contrast, government spending grew by 1.1 percent per year. But since the private sector was growing, the burden of government spending fell as a share of GDP.

In other words, when you satisfy Mitchell’s Golden Rule, good things happen.

P.P.S. Even though Italy is a complete mess (or perhaps because it is a complete mess), you won’t be surprised to learn that a New York Times columnist thinks America should adopt Italian-style government policies.

P.P.P.S. Then again, American statists have been urging European-type statism in the United States for decades. To see where that leads, check out these cartoons from Michael Ramirez, Glenn Foden, Eric Allie and Chip Bok.

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Another Example of Government Thuggery – and another Reason Why Decent and Moral People Are Libertarians

I don’t particularly care how people vote, but I do care whether they believe in freedom.

That’s why I periodically share stories that should convince everyone to believe in the libertarian philosophy of small government, individual liberty, and personal responsibility.

The stories that get me most agitated are the ones that involve innocent people being robbed by bureaucrats.

And when I say robbed, I use that word deliberately.

Such as the case of an elderly couple who had their hotel stolen by government.

Such as the case of the family grocer who had his bank account stolen by government.

Such as when the government wanted to steal someone’s truck because a different person was arrested for drunk driving.

Such as when the government tried to steal the bond money a family collected to bail out a relative.

Such as when the government seized nearly $400,000 of a business owner’s money because it was in the possession of an armored car company suspected of wrongdoing.

Such as when the government sought to confiscate an office building from the owner because a tenant was legally selling medical marijuana.

Such as when the government killed a man as part of an anti-gambling investigation undertaken in hopes of using asset forfeiture to steal other people’s cash.

With all this background, you can probably guess I’m going to add to that list.

And you’re right. We have a report from the New York Times that has me frothing at the mouth. I can’t imagine any decent person not being outraged by this example of big government run amok.

For almost 40 years, Carole Hinders has dished out Mexican specialties at her modest cash-only restaurant. For just as long, she deposited the earnings at a small bank branch a block away — until last year, when two tax agents knocked on her door and informed her that they had seized her checking account, almost $33,000. The Internal Revenue Service agents did not accuse Ms. Hinders of money laundering or cheating on her taxes — in fact, she has not been charged with any crime. Instead, the money was seized solely because she had deposited less than $10,000 at a time, which they viewed as an attempt to avoid triggering a required government report.

In other words, this is an example of two evil policies – asset forfeiture laws and money laundering laws – coming together in a vortex of we’ll-screw-you-over-even-if-you’re-law-abiding statism.

And you can forget about the Constitution’s presumption of innocence.

Ms. Hinders said in a recent interview. “Who takes your money before they prove that you’ve done anything wrong with it?” The federal government does. Using a law designed to catch drug traffickers, racketeers and terrorists by tracking their cash, the government has gone after run-of-the-mill business owners and wage earners without so much as an allegation that they have committed serious crimes. The government can take the money without ever filing a criminal complaint, and the owners are left to prove they are innocent. Many give up.

Of course, much of tax code enforcement is based on the upside-down premise that taxpayers are guilty and have to prove themselves innocent.

But that still doesn’t make it right. And the IRS is just the tip of the iceberg. Stealing is now a common practice by all sorts of bureaucracies at all levels of government.

The practice has swept up dairy farmers in Maryland, an Army sergeant in Virginia saving for his children’s college education and Ms. Hinders, 67, who has borrowed money, strained her credit cards and taken out a second mortgage to keep her restaurant going. Their money was seized under an increasingly controversial area of law known as civil asset forfeiture, which allows law enforcement agents to take property they suspect of being tied to crime even if no criminal charges are filed. Law enforcement agencies get to keep a share of whatever is forfeited. Critics say this incentive has led to the creation of a law enforcement dragnet, with more than 100 multiagency task forces combing through bank reports, looking for accounts to seize.

Here’s just one horrifying example of how this process works.

 In one Long Island case, the police submitted almost a year’s worth of daily deposits by a business, ranging from $5,550 to $9,910. The officer wrote in his warrant affidavit that based on his training and experience, the pattern “is consistent with structuring.” The government seized $447,000 from the business, a cash-intensive candy and cigarette distributor that has been run by one family for 27 years. …the government seized $447,000, and the brothers have been unable to retrieve it. …Mr. Potashnik said he had spent that time trying, to no avail, to show that the brothers were innocent. They even paid a forensic accounting firm $25,000 to check the books. “I don’t think they’re really interested in anything,” Mr. Potashnik said of the prosecutors. “They just want the money.” …“We’re just hanging on as a family here,” Mr. Hirsch said. “We weren’t going to take a settlement, because I was not guilty.”

Still not convinced about the venality of big government? Here’s another nauseating example.

Army Sgt. Jeff Cortazzo of Arlington, Va., began saving for his daughters’ college costs during the financial crisis, when many banks were failing. He stored cash first in his basement and then in a safe-deposit box. All of the money came from paychecks, he said, but he worried that when he deposited it in a bank, he would be forced to pay taxes on the money again. So he asked the bank teller what to do. “She said: ‘Oh, that’s easy. You just have to deposit less than $10,000.’” The government seized $66,000; settling cost Sergeant Cortazzo $21,000. As a result, the eldest of his three daughters had to delay college by a year. “Why didn’t the teller tell me that was illegal?” he said. “I would have just plopped the whole thing in the account and been done with it.”

By the way, some of you may be thinking that these terrible examples are somehow justifiable because the government is stopping crime in other instances.

But that’s not true. Experts who have looking at money laundering laws have found that there’s no impact on genuine criminal activity. But lots of costs imposed on innocent people.

Which probably explains why the first two directors of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Office now say the laws should be repealed.

If you want more information, here’s my video on the government’s costly and failed war on money laundering.

Sigh.

By the way, the government also abuses people in ways that have nothing to do with money laundering or asset forfeiture.

• The federal government threatened to imprison a woman for whistling at a whale.
• A must-be-read-to-be-believed story of vicious IRS persecution.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.
• Bureaucrats in Indiana conducting a spite-motivated legal attack against a family that saved a baby deer.
• A local government in Virginia unfairly trying to destroy an organic farmer.
• Statists must dislike organic farms because Texas bureaucrats conducted a paramilitary raid on one of them
• Park Service bureaucrats threatening a business if it allowed tourists to use bathroom facilities.

And there are more examples where those came from.

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Washington’s Nauseatingly Corrupt Culture…and 2014 Election Predictions for the House and Senate

I sometimes think that working at the Cato Institute and trying to change Washington must be akin to working at a church in the middle of Amsterdam’s red light district.

In both cases, you’re wildly outnumbered by people with a different outlook on life. And it’s not that easy to save misguided souls.

The crowd in Washington, for instance, benefits enormously from a complicated tax system, a Byzantine regulatory regime, and a bloated budget.

All of these factors create big opportunities for unearned income for bureaucrats, cronies, politicians, contractors, lobbyists, and other insiders.

Telling those people they should back away from the public trough is not exactly a way to make friends in DC.

To cite just one example, look at how the Washington establishment is trying to defend the Export-Import Bank, a grotesque example of corporate welfare that is opposed by honest people on the right and left of the political spectrum.

Or, if you want to be partisan, what about the Democratic insiders who are getting rich from Obamacare?

Conversely, what about the Republican insiders who also get rich from big government?

But maybe all these examples are too indirect. So today’s column will give specific examples of people who get undeserved wealth thanks to influence peddling in Washington.

Here are some passages from a brutal expose written by Michelle Malkin for the Washington Examiner. She starts by looking at how Vice President Biden’s son got special treatment, first when he was handed a plum spot as a public relations hack in the Navy Reserve and then after he got tossed out after failing a drug test.

Everything you need to know about Beltway nepotism, corporate cronyism and corruption can be found in the biography of Robert Hunter Biden. …The youngest son of Vice President Joe Biden made news last week after the Wall Street Journal revealed he had been booted from the Navy Reserve for cocaine use. …Papa Biden loves to tout his middle-class, “Average Joe” credentials. But rest assured, if his son had been “Hunter Smith” or “Hunter Jones” or “Hunter Brown,” the Navy’s extraordinary dispensations would be all but unattainable. …Despite the disgraceful ejection from our military, Hunter’s Connecticut law license won’t be subject to automatic review. Because, well, Biden.

But special treatment apparently is nothing new for Biden’s son. And a lifetime of insider deals has been greased by the favor factory of big government.

Skating by, flouting rules and extracting favors are the story of Hunter’s life. Hunter’s first job, acquired after Joe Biden won his 1996 Senate re-election bid in Delaware, was with MBNA. …Hunter zoomed up to senior vice president by early 1998 and then scored a plum position in the Clinton administration’s Commerce Department, specializing in “electronic commerce” before returning to MBNA three years later as a high-priced “consultant.” While he collected those “consulting” (translation: nepotistic access-trading) fees, Hunter became a “founding partner” in the lobbying firm of Oldaker, Biden and Belair in 2002. …Hunter lobbied for drug companies, universities and other deep-pocketed clients to the tune of nearly $4 million billed to the company by 2007. …Continually failing upward, Hunter snagged a seat on the board of directors of taxpayer-subsidized, stimulus-inflated Amtrak, where he pretended not to be a lobbyist, but rather an “effective advocate” for the government railroad system serving the 1 percenters’ D.C.-NYC corridor. …Hunter joined Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings — owned by a powerful Russian government sympathizer who fled to Russia in February — this spring. The hypocritical lobbyist-bashers at the White House deny he will be lobbying and deny any conflict of interest.

At this point, some readers may be thinking that Democrats are the party of big-government corruption.

I’ll agree, but then I’ll add a very important caveat. It’s possible that this description applies to more than one political party.

Let’s look at the sordid details of a story about GOP lobbyists and political hacks taking dirty money to push for big government.

First, some background. For those of you who haven’t heard about “Obamaphones,” you’ll be delighted to learn that our bloated federal government has an entitlement program for cell phones.

The Federal Communications Commission program…charges a dollar or two per line on every American’s phone bill. The revenue generated by the “Universal Service Fund fee” is then used to pay select phone companies $9.25 per month for each poor person they sign up for a free phone. …its cost doubled in five years to $1.75 billion in 2011, and in some states, the number of phones given out exceeded the total eligible population. …The company that has received the most income from the Lifeline program is TracFone, whose CEO, F.J. Pollak, was an Obama campaign fundraiser. The company spent nearly $1 million on lobbying last year.

While an Obama donor is making big bucks off this federal handout, there also are a number of Republicans who are willing to agitate for wasteful spending so long as they get their pieces of silver as well.

Mary Cheney and prominent Republican consultants linked to Karl Rove, Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee are working to expand or protect the Obamaphone entitlement program, apparently on behalf of the telecom companies that make millions on it. …The strategy is aimed at convincing congressional Republicans…to back off of their opposition to the Obamaphone program, which has no connection to veteran status and is more commonly associated with welfare. …The FCC paperwork also lists the names Patti Heck, who is president of Crossroads Media, and Main Street Media Group, a Crossroads affiliate. Crossroads Media has ties to Rove’s American Crossroads…and shared an office used by several political shops employed by Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.

And you won’t be surprised to learn that these Republican influence peddlers are willing to engage in loathsome demagoguery.

The ad’s voiceover says “some in Congress want to take away his phone,” implying that not having it would endanger him because of his cancer. …Bennett unabashedly defended the Obamaphone and other entitlement programs. “Of course I support these programs, because I don’t hate poor people,” he told the Examiner.

Yup, if you don’t support a federal cell-phone entitlement program, you want veterans to die of cancer and you hate poor people. How do these people sleep at night?!?

Ugh, I want to take a shower after having read both of these stories. Now you see why I always say that Washington is a racket for insiders to get rich at our expense.

Fortunately, the article does quote some other people who are disturbed by this philosophical corruption.

Bill Allison, a lobbying expert at the Sunlight Foundation, said the fact that major Republican consultants are promoting an entitlement program shows that “in Washington’s mercenary culture, there are few principles that stand in the way of a payday.” …“Wow. Just wow. Big government money ensnares a lot of people,” said David Williams, president of the taxpayers group, when told of Jansen’s new client.

By the way, this doesn’t mean everybody in Washington is sleazy. And even the ones that are corrupt on some issues may be principled on others.

But the incentives to “play the game” are enormous. As I explain in this video, big government is inherently corrupting.

P.S. Folks are emailing me to ask me predictions for the 2014 mid-term elections.

I’m not sure why anyone should care. Yes, I did a good job in 2010, but my 2012 predictions were not very impressive.

That being said, I’m happy to oblige. We’re 10 days from the election, so I’ll make a set of predictions today, then another set of predictions with five days to go, then a final set of predictions the day before the election.

For the House of Representatives, I can say with near-100 percent certainty that Republicans will maintain control. Indeed, I suspect they’ll pick up some seats and have a bigger majority.

How big? Let’s go with 246-189, the biggest GOP margin since the late 1940s.

But what about the Senate? The race for partisan control on the upper chamber is getting all the attention.

In the for-what-it’s-worth department, I think Republicans will take control by a 52-48 margin, meaning a net gain of seven seats. Here’s a map showing the seats that will change hands, though I confess Iowa, Colorado, and Georgia could go either way.

 

It’s also possible that Republicans could lose Kansas, while the Democrats could lose North Carolina and New Hampshire.

In other words, the final results could be anywhere between 55-45 Republican control or 52-48 Democratic control.

P.P.S. If Republicans take control, don’t hold your breath waiting for big changes in policy. Even if they don’t get corrupted (like the Obamaphone-loving GOPers described above), the White House will still be controlled by Democrats.

So there won’t be any tax reform and there won’t be any entitlement reform.

Though there may be some fights in the next two years that help determine whether those things can happen after the 2016 election.

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Canada Shows How to Eliminate the Tax Bias against Saving

Since all economic theories – even Marxism and socialism – recognize that capital formation is a key to long-run growth, higher wages, and improved living standards, it obviously doesn’t make sense to penalize saving and investment.

Yet that’s exactly what happens because of double taxation in the United States, as can be seen by this rather sobering flowchart.

So how can we fix the problem? The best answer, particularly in the long run, is to shrink the burden of government spending so that there’s no pressure for punitive tax policies.

Good reform is also possible in the medium run. Policy makers could implement a big bang version of tax reform, replacing the corrupt internal revenue code with a simple and fair flat tax. That automatically would eliminate the tax bias against saving and investment since one of the key principles of the flat tax is that income gets taxed only one time.

That being said, there’s no chance of sweeping tax reform for the next few years (and maybe ever), so let’s look at some pro-growth incremental reforms that would reduce or eliminate the extra tax penalties on income that is saved and invested.

On the investment side of the ledger, any policies that lower or end the capital gains tax and the double tax on dividends would be desirable.

But let’s focus today on the saving side. And let’s start by explaining how a fair and neutral system would operate. Here’s what I wrote back in 2012 and I think it’s reasonably succinct and accurate.

…all saving and investment should be treated the way we currently treat individual retirement accounts. If you have a traditional IRA (or “front-ended” IRA), you get a deduction for any money you put in a retirement account, but then you pay tax on the money – including any earnings – when the money is withdrawn. If you have a Roth IRA (or “back-ended” IRA), you pay tax on your income in the year that it is earned, but if you put the money in a retirement account, there is no additional tax on withdrawals or the subsequent earnings. From an economic perspective, front-ended IRAs and back-ended IRAs generate the same result. Income that is saved and invested is treated the same as income that is immediately consumed. From a present-value perspective, front-ended IRAs and back-ended IRAs produce the same outcome. All that changes is the point at which the government imposes the single layer of tax.

The key takeaways are in the first and last sentences. All savings should be protected from double taxation, not just what you set aside for retirement. And that means government can tax you one time, either when you first earn the income or when you consume the income.

Our friends to the north can teach us some lessons on this issue.

Here are some excerpts from a column in the Wall Street Journal, authored by my colleague Chris Edwards and Amity Shlaes of the Calvin Coolidge Foundation.

Some Republicans are advocating a giant child tax credit, but there are more effective means for helping the middle class. One is a tax program already road-tested in the country whose populace most resembles our own, Canada. It’s called the Tax-Free Savings Account and TFSA, as most Canadians refer to it, is a roaring success. …what is this Canadian savings account? The nearest U.S. equivalent would be Roth Individual Retirement Accounts. With a Roth, workers pay taxes on earnings before they put their cash into the account. The money then grows tax-protected, and people pay no tax when they withdraw it.

But these accounts are much better than Roth IRAs.

Though these savings accounts were introduced only five years ago, 48% of Canadians have already signed up. That compares with only 38% of U.S. households owning any type of IRA—though IRAs have been around for decades….Roth accounts have numerous restrictions. You can’t open a Roth easily if your earnings are above certain limits: $191,000, for example, for a married couple filing jointly. You can’t withdraw cash whenever you feel like it, at least not without daunting penalties. …Canada’s TFSAs are like Roth IRAs—but supercharged. Citizens may deposit up to $5,500 after-tax each year, and all account earnings and withdrawals are tax-free. However, unlike Roth IRAs, funds can be withdrawn at any time for any reason with no penalties or taxes. Another feature: The annual limit on a contribution carries over from year to year if a citizen doesn’t reach it. So if a Canadian contributes $2,000 this year, he can put away up to $9,000 next year ($3,500 plus $5,500). There are other attractive features: Unlike in a Roth, there are no income limits for individuals contributing to a TFSA, and there are no withdrawal requirements at retirement.

In other words, the Canadian accounts are like unlimited or unrestricted Roth IRAs.

And because the government isn’t trying to micro-manage how people save, Canadians are very receptive. Chris adds some additional information in a post for Cato at Liberty.

…released new data confirming the popularity of TFSAs. In just the past year, TFSA account assets increased 34 percent, and the number of accounts increased 16 percent. In June 2014, 13 million Canadians held $132 billion in TFSA assets. Given that the U.S. population is about 10 times that of Canada, it would be like 130 million Americans pouring $1.3 trillion into a new personal savings vehicle. …In just five years, TFSAs have become the most popular savings vehicle in Canada, outstripping the Canadian version of 401(k)s.

Here’s a chart Chris included in his blog post.

And he adds some more analysis on the importance of simple vehicles to protect against double taxation.

Everyone agrees that Americans don’t save enough, so why don’t we kick-start a home-grown savings revolution with a U.S. version of TFSAs? …Canada has now run the real-world experiment on such accounts, and it has succeeded brilliantly. TFSAs, or USAs, are a better way to handle savings in the tax code. Currently, many people are scared off by the complexity of U.S. savings vehicles and by the lack of liquidity in retirement accounts. TFSAs solve these problems.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see whether American policy makers pay attention and follow Chris’ sage advice.

P.S. I realize I’m being picky, but I wish the Canadians didn’t use the term “tax-free savings accounts.” After the all, the income is taxed before it gets put into the accounts. Though even a nit-picker like me realizes that it might be a bit awkward to call them “no-double-taxation savings accounts.”

P.P.S. I do like that Chris and Amity argued that the accounts would be better than big child tax credits, particularly since I also argued in the Wall Street Journal that there were better ways to help the middle class.

P.P.P.S. Canada also can teach us important lessons on other issues, such as spending restraint, corporate tax reform, bank bailouts, and privatization of air traffic control. Heck, Canada even has one of the lowest levels of welfare spending among developed nations.

P.P.P.P.S. No wonder the two most capitalistic places in North America are in Canada. And Canada ranks above the United States in the Economic Freedom of the World Index.

P.P.P.P.P.S. Though there are still plenty of statists north of the border, so I’m not sure it’s the best escape option for advocates of small government. Though I doubt leftists no longer see it as an escape option, which was the premise of this joke that circulated after the 2010 election.

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Wasting Money Is Washington’s Favorite Activity

It’s unfortunate that Senator Tom Coburn is retiring. He hasn’t been perfect, but nobody can question is commitment to limited government. He’s been a rare voice in Washington against wasteful spending.

And he’s going out with a bang, having just released the 2014 edition of the Wastebook.

It’s a grisly collection of boondoggles and pork-barrel spending, highlights (though lowlights might be a better term) of which can be seen in this video.

The good news is that the American people increasingly recognize that Washington is a cesspool of waste, fraud, and abuse.

A Gallup Poll from last month, for instance, finds that folks are quite aware that a huge chunk of the federal budget is squandered.

There are two interesting takeaways from this polling data.

First, it’s good to see that there’s been a steady increase in the perception of waste in Washington. That shows people are paying more attention over time. In other words, more and more Americans recognize that the public sector is a sleazy racket for the benefit of bureaucrats, lobbyists, contractors, politicians, cronies, interest groups, and other insiders.

Second, it’s also worth noting that there’s less waste at the state level and even less waste at the local level. These are just perceptions, to be sure, but I suspect people are right. Money is less likely to be squandered when people have a greater opportunity to see how it’s being spent. Which is why federalism is good policy and good politics.

Now let me add my two cents. Government waste doesn’t just occur when money goes to silly projects. From an economic perspective, money is wasted whenever there is a misallocation of potentially productive resources.

And that’s a pretty accurate description of most of the federal budget. Not just discretionary programs, but also entitlement programs.

Here’s my video providing the theoretical arguments against excessive government spending.

And here’s the companion video that reviews the evidence showing that big government undermines prosperity.

And if you want another video, but one that shows horrific government waste presented in an amusing manner, click here.

And if you instead want to get heartburn by reading about disgusting examples of waste, click here, here, or here.

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The U.S. vs U.K. Wimpiness Contest

It’s time for an updated version of the U.S. vs U.K. government stupidity contest.

This ongoing series has featured amazing feats of inane government, including the world’s most pointless road markings, photo-ID requirements for drain cleaner purchases, and a government so incompetent that it couldn’t give money away.

Today’s contest, though, is going to focus on examples of wimpiness from both sides of the Atlantic.

Here’s an excerpt from a story out of the United Kingdom. Apparently, one neurotic mother thinks her son is some sort of incompetent misfit.

OMG, he’s going to become a serial killer!!

A mother was left horrified after her 10-year-old son returned form Tesco’s supermarket with a pumpkin carving kit which included a sharp serrated blade. Natalie Greaves from Sheffield in South Yorkshire described her reaction to Shay returning home with the one pound kit: ‘I went berserk when he came home with it. ‘I couldn’t believe that he could pick that sort of thing up as a child – there should have been an age restriction on it.’

“Horrified”? “Beserk”? You must be kidding. If there’s someone in that family who shouldn’t be allowed around sharp objects, it’s the mother.

It’s almost enough to make me think the kid would be better off in foster care, notwithstanding my libertarian instincts that even bad homes are oftentimes better than state control.

But I also wonder what this says about the entire nation. Back in 2012, I shared some laughably pathetic examples of anti-gun political correctness from the United Kingdom and wondered how such inane behavior could exist in a country that “once ruled half the world.”

Needless to say, this story doesn’t reflect well on our cousins across the ocean.

But Americans are in no position to make fun of others since there are plenty of examples of brain-dead political correctness in the United States.

After all, you don’t want to throw stones if you live in a glass house. And when it comes to absurd anti-gun hysteria, government schools make Americans look like infantile idiots.

Here are parts of a story from a local news outlet in Alabama.

A Mobile mother is not happy about a controversial Mobile County School contract her daughter signed without her consent. The contract promises that her daughter will not kill or injure herself and others. …She said E R Dickson school officials crossed the line when they had her daughter sign a Mobile County Public Safety Contract without her being present.

This sounds serious. Are we talking about a 16-yr old gang member? A 17-yr old with psychiatric issues? A 15-yr old with a history of violence.

Ummm…not exactly.

The student, a 5-yr old girl named Elizabeth, was playing like a normal kid. Here are some of the details.

School officials told Rebecca they had to send Elizabeth home after an incident in class.  “They told me she drew something that resembled a gun,” said Rebecca. “According to them she pointed a crayon at another student and said, ‘pew pew,” said Rebecca. She said her child was given a questionnaire to evaluate her for suicidal thoughts. “[They] Asked her if she was depressed now,” said Rebecca. Without her permission, Rebecca said her child was given the Mobile County Public School Safety Contract to sign stating she wouldn’t kill herself or others. “While I was in the lobby waiting they had my 5-year-old sign a contract about suicide and homicide,” said Rebecca. …Rebecca is pushing to have the incident removed from her child’s record. She said school officials have requested Elizabeth see a psychiatrist.

As I’ve argued before, in cases like this it’s the school bureaucrats who need counseling.

So which nation wins the prize for the worst example of P.C. wimpiness?

I’m ashamed to say that the United States probably deserves that dubious honor. After all, the story from the U.K. involves one weird parent while the U.S. story involves a deliberate decision by an arm of government.

Though I will point out that it’s not just one screwy parent in the United Kingdom. Wimpiness appears to be pervasive.

The mum-of-three checked online and found similar carving kits with restrictions allowing only people over-18 to buy it. A Tesco spokesperson responded to this mother’s anger… ‘We were concerned by this incident and acted immediately to ensure all pumpkin carving knives will trigger an age restriction till prompt.’

So maybe the U.K. story belongs in the U.K. vs. U.S. private sector political correctness contest.

P.S. Let’s shift to a different topic. I recently wrote that the jihad against tobacco at the U.N.’s World Health Organization was a classic (and tragic) case of resources being diverted from something that genuinely matters, such as fighting deadly infectious disease.

A column in the Wall Street Journal makes the same point, only it identifies the silly crusade against sugar as the main example of mission creep.

The WHO’s record of handling epidemics over 30 years reveals a health system that is getting worse, not better. On at least four occasions the U.N. organization has failed to deal with major outbreaks of communicable disease. …The list of internal problems that cause the WHO to fumble when faced with an epidemic is no secret. …an array of disparate programs within the WHO—such as the current crusade against processed sugar and sugar beverages—have diverted time, attention and money from higher priorities, such as tracking and responding to epidemic diseases.

And the Washington Examiner has opined on the same issue.

Years of dramatically overstaffed city agencies, over-generous retirement promises to public employee unions, and white-elephant development projects had left the city unable to police its streets, keep street lamps on, maintain parks, or provide other basic government services, no matter how much the city government raised taxes. The lesson of Detroit is one that governments everywhere can learn: In a world with finite resources, governments that try to do too much end up neglecting even the essential. Detroit’s case is a microcosm of what Americans are now experiencing nationwide in several different areas — the evident inability of public health officials to manage the Ebola scare competently is just one of them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency that instructed a mildly symptomatic patient with known exposure to Ebola to board a commercial flight this week, spends millions annually on bonuses for top employees, bicycle paths, farmers markets, and other luxuries. …Even if they enjoy using the money the nation has for disease control and vaccine research to fund instead research on origami condoms and to appease politically active bicyclists, public health bureaucrats might do better in the future putting their massive budgets toward basic preparedness for precisely the kind of emergency the CDC was created to address.

I realize I’m being repetitive, but the moral of the story is that big government is incompetent government. As Mark Steyn has humorously explained, “our government is more expensive than any government in history – and we have nothing to show for it.“

The link between small government and effective government is something Calvin Coolidge understood. Needless to say, that’s not the attitude of the current occupant of the White House, which is why this bit of humor is worth sharing.

I think the unintentional video on Obama’s new Ebola Czar is even funnier, but whoever put this together gets high marks for cleverness.

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The Real-World Impact of Higher Tax Rates on Upper-Income Households

In my writings on the Laffer Curve, I probably sound like a broken record because I keep warning that a nation should never be at the revenue-maximizing point.

That’s because there’s lots of good research showing that there are ever-increasing costs to the economy as tax rates approach that level.

So the question that policy makers should ask themselves is whether they’re willing to impose $10 or $20 of damage to the private sector in order to collect $1 of additional revenue.

New we have further evidence. Let’s take a look at a new study by economists from Spain, Arizona, and California. Here’s the issue they decided to study.

As top earners account for a disproportionate share of tax revenues and face the highest marginal tax rates, such proposals lead to a natural tradeoff regarding tax revenue. On the one hand, increases in tax revenue are potentially non-trivial given the income generated by high-income households. On the other hand, the implementation of such proposals would increase marginal tax rates precisely where they are at their highest levels, and thus where the individual responses are expected to be larger. Therefore, revenue increases might not materialise.

And here’s what they found.

…the increase in overall tax collections – including tax collections at the local and state level and from corporate income taxes – is much smaller: 1.6%. Figure 2 shows why. As τ increases there is a substantial decline in labour supply, the capital stock, and aggregate output across steady states. Aggregate output, for example, declines by almost 12% when τ = 0.13. Hence, the government collects taxes from a smaller economy… The message from these findings is clear. There is not much available revenue from revenue-maximising shifts in the burden of taxation towards high earners…and that these changes have non-trivial implications for economic aggregates.

The key takeaways from that passage are the findings about “a smaller economy” and the fact that there are “non-trivial implications for economic aggregates.”

That means less prosperity.

And the authors even acknowledge that the damage to the productive sector is presumably larger than what they found in this research.

…it is important to reflect on the absence of features in our model that would make our conclusions even stronger. First, we have abstracted away from human capital decisions that would be negatively affected by increasing progressivity. Since investments in individual skills are not invariant to changes in tax progressivity, larger effects on output and effective labour supply – relative to a case with exogenous skills – are to be expected. Second, we have not modelled individual entrepreneurship decisions and their interplay with the tax system. Finally, we have not modelled a bequest motive, or considered a dynastic framework more broadly. In these circumstances, it is natural to conjecture that the sensitivity of asset accumulation decisions to changes in progressivity would be larger than in a life-cycle economy. Hence, even smaller effects on revenues would follow.

Richard Rahn’s latest column in the Washington Times also looks at this issue, reviewing the work of James Mirrlees, an economist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1996.

Back in 1971, a Scottish economist by the name of James A. Mirrlees wrote a groundbreaking paper, in which he attempted to answer the question of what an optimum income-tax regime would look like… Mr. Mirrlees had been an adviser to the British Labor Party, which supported the high tax rates in effect at that time. He did a careful analysis of the variation of people’s skills and the effect tax rates had on their incentives to earn. Much to his surprise, he found the optimum tax rate on high earners was about 20 percent… In his 1971 paper, Mr. Mirrlees concluded, “I must confess that I had expected the rigorous analysis of income taxation in the utilitarian manner to provide an argument for high tax rates. It has not done so.”

In other words, tax rates above 20 percent ultimately are self-defeating – even if you’re a statist and you want to maximize the size of the welfare state.

And there’s plenty of data from around the world on specific case studies that show the negative impact of class-warfare taxation, including research from the United States, Denmark, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom.

And here’s Part II of my video series on the Laffer Curve, which provides additional evidence.

P.S. If you want some good data showing why Krugman and other class warriors are wrong about tax rates, Alan Reynolds did a very good job of skewering their analysis.

P.P.S. The right tax rate is the one that finances the legitimate functions of government, and not one penny more.

P.P.P.S. Since we’re discussing the Laffer Curve and class-warfare taxation, it’s appropriate to share this very encouraging survey of economists. They were asked whether they agreed with the fundamental premise of Thomas Piketty’s work on inequality and taxation.

Wow. This is about as close as you can get to unanimous rejection as you can get.

By the way, even if 2-3 percent of economists are right, that still doesn’t justify Piketty’s policy prescriptions.

P.P.P.P.S. In addition to writing about taxation, Richard is the creator of the famous Rahn Curve.

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The Irish Tax Policy Debate: Bono 1 – Irish Union Bosses 0

I wrote last year about the remarkable acknowledgement by Bono that free markets were the best way to lift people out of poverty. The leader of the U2 band and long-time anti-poverty activist specifically stated that, “capitalism has been the most effective ideology we have known in taking people out of extreme poverty.”

As the old saying goes, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Too many politicians and interest groups want us to believe that foreign aid and bigger government are the answer, but nations that have jumped from poverty to prosperity invariably have followed a path of free markets and small government.

But today’s topic isn’t foreign aid.

Instead, I want to come to Bono’s aid. He recently defended his home country’s favorable corporate tax regime. Here are some excerpts from a report earlier this month in the Irish Times.

U2 singer Bono has said Ireland’s tax regime, used to attract multinational companies such as Apple, Facebook and Google to Irish shores, has brought Ireland “the only prosperity we’ve known”. Speaking in an interview in today’s Observer newspaper, Bono said Ireland’s tax policy had given the country “more hospitals and firemen and teachers”. “We are a tiny country, we don’t have scale, and our version of scale is to be innovative and to be clever, and tax competitiveness has brought our country the only prosperity we’re known,” he said. …“As a person who’s spent nearly 30 years fighting to get people out of poverty, it was somewhat humbling to realise that commerce played a bigger job than development,” said Bono. “I’d say that’s my biggest transformation in 10 years: understanding the power of commerce to make or break lives, and that it cannot be given into as the dominating force in our lives.”

So why does Bono need defending?

Because bosses from the leading Irish labor union apparently think he said something very bad. Here are some excerpts from a story published by the U.K-based Guardian.

Unite, which represents 100,000 workers on the island of Ireland, launched a blistering attack on the U2 singer for remarks…defending the 12.5% tax rate on corporations enjoyed by multinational companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. …Unite pointed out that one in four Irish people have to endure social deprivation, according the state’s own official Central Statistics Office. Mike Taft, Unite’s researcher and an economist, told the Guardian: “The one in four who suffer deprivation as well as the tens of thousands of others having to put up with six years of austerity will regard Bono’s remarks with total derision, it is the only word anyone could use to describe what he has said. “…for six years we have seen public services smashed apart due to austerity cuts, and here we have Bono talking about low corporation tax bringing us prosperity.”

I have three reactions.

First, I wonder whether the union is comprised mostly of private-sector workers or government bureaucrats. This may be relevant because I hope that private-sector union workers at least have a vague understanding that their jobs are tied to the overall prosperity of the economy. But if Unite is dominated by government bureaucrats, then it’s no surprise that it favors class-warfare policies that would cripple the private sector.

Second, the union bosses are right that Ireland has been suffering in the past six years, but they apparently don’t realize that the nation’s economy stumbled because government was getting bigger and intervening too much.

Third, maybe it’s true that “one in four” in Ireland currently suffer from “deprivation,” but that number has to be far smaller than it was thirty years ago. Here’s a chart, based on IMF data, showing per-capita economic output in Ireland. As you can see, per-capita GDP has jumped from $15,000 to more than $37,500. And these numbers are adjusted for inflation!

I gave some details back in 2011 when I had the opportunity to criticize another Irish leftist who was blithely ignorant of Ireland’s big improvements in living standards once it entered into its pro-market reform phase.

I don’t know how the folks at Unite define progress, but I assume it’s good news that the Irish people now have more car, more phones, more doctors, more central heating, and fewer infant deaths.

Last but not least, none of this should be interpreted as approval of Ireland’s current government or overall Irish policy. There’s too much cronyism in Ireland and the overall fiscal burden (other than the corporate income tax) is onerous.

I’m simply saying that Bono is right. Pro-growth corporate tax policy has made a big – and positive – difference for Ireland. The folks at Unite should learn a lesson from the former President of Brazil, who was a leftist but at least understood that you need people in the private sector producing if you want anything to redistribute.

P.S. Bono isn’t the only rock star who understands economics.  Gene Simmons, the lead singer for Kiss, stated that “Capitalism is the best thing that ever happened to human beings. The welfare state sounds wonderful but it doesn’t work.”

P.P.S. Irish politicians may understand the importance of keeping a low corporate tax rate, but they certainly aren’t philosophically consistent when it comes to other taxes.

P.P.P.S. Some statists have tried to blame Ireland’s recent woes on the low corporate tax rate. More sober analysis shows that imprudent spending hikes and misguided bailouts deserve the blame (Ireland’s spending is particularly unfortunate since the nation’s period of prosperity began with spending restraint in the late 1980s).

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The Unsavory History of Gun Control

I’ve written extensively about gun control, but mostly because of practical and moral objections to the notion that government should have the power to disarm law-abiding people.

But I hadn’t realized that some of the earliest gun control initiatives were designed to oppress blacks.

As Dave Kopel explains in Reason, the white power structure in many post-Civil War states was very anxious to disarm former slaves.

After the Civil War, the defeated Southern states aimed to preserve slavery in fact if not in law. The states enacted Black Codes which barred the black freedmen from exercising basic civil rights, including the right to bear arms. Mississippi’s provision was typical: No freedman “shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition.” …The Klansmen, unlike the freedmen, had horses, and thus the tactical advantages of mobility. In a few months, the Klan triumph was complete. One freedman recalled that the night riders, after reasserting white control, “took the weapons from might near all the colored people in the neighborhood.” …Sometimes militias consisting of freedmen or Unionists were able to resist the Klan or other white forces. In places like the South Carolina back-country, where the blacks were a numerical majority, the black militias kept white terrorists at bay for long periods. …In areas where the black militias lost and the Klan or other white groups took control, “almost universally the first thing done was to disarm the negroes and leave them defenseless,” wrote Albion Tourgeé in his 1880 book The Invisible Empire. …As Jim Crow intensified, other Southern states enacted gun registration and handgun permit laws. Registration came to Mississippi (1906), Georgia (1913), and North Carolina (1917). Handgun permits were passed in North Carolina (1917), Missouri (1919), and Arkansas (1923). As one Florida judge explained, the licensing laws were “passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers… [and] never intended to be applied to the white population.”

With this historical knowledge, this poster now makes a lot of sense.

It quotes the infamous Dred Scott decision, which also was predicated on the state-sanctioned oppression of African-Americans.

While I wasn’t aware of the racist history of gun control, I did have some familiarity with the fact that totalitarian governments traditionally have wanted to disarm citizens.

I wrote, for instance, about gun control initiatives by the Venezuelan dictatorship.

And this superb poster from Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership is the 4th-most viewed post in the history of my blog.

So this image is in that tradition.

Now let me make an important point.

I don’t think advocates of gun control in the United States are racists or fascists. I assume that 99 percent of them are guilty instead of being naive.

Which is why I’m always delighted to share admissions from honest leftists that gun control simply doesn’t make sense.

P.S. Switching to a different topic, a French economist (no, that’s not a contradiction in terms) was awarded the Nobel Prize about a week ago.

He’s apparently considered to be on the left of the philosophical spectrum, yet it’s worthwhile that even he thinks there’s too much statism in his home nation.

Hours after he won the economics Nobel Prize, Tirole said he felt “sad” the French economy was experiencing difficulties despite having “a lot of assets”. “We haven’t succeeded in France to undertake the labour market reforms that are similar to those in Germany, Scandinavia and so on,” he said in telephone interview from the French city of Toulouse, where he teaches. France is plagued by record unemployment and Tirole described the French job market as “catastrophic” earlier on Monday, arguing that the excessive protection for employees had frozen the country’s job market. “We haven’t succeeded also in downsizing the state, which is an issue because we have a social model that I approve of – I’m very much in favour of this social model – but it won’t be sustainable if the state is too big,” he added. Tirole remarked that northern European countries, as well as Canada and Australia, had proven you could keep a welfare social model with smaller government. In contrast, he said France’s “big state” threatened its social policies because there will not be “enough money to pay for it in the long run”.

He’s exactly right. I’m a libertarian, so I don’t want the government involved in areas such as housing, healthcare and income redistribution.

But even if you favor larger government, there’s a giant difference between having the public sector consume 57 percent of economic output (as in France) or a more reasonable amount, such as what’s found in Canada or Australia (as Professor Tirole mentioned).

By the way, I made the same point as Tirole when I spoke last year in Paris. I asked my audience whether they thought they got better and/or more services than the citizens of Switzerland, where the burden of government spending is far less onerous.

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Who You Going to Believe on Infrastructure Spending: The IMF in August or the IMF in October?

The International Monetary Fund isn’t my least-favorite international bureaucracy. That special honor belongs to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, largely because of its efforts to undermine tax competition and protect the interests of the political class (it also tried to have me arrested, but I don’t hold that against them).

But the IMF deserves its share of disdain. It’s the Doctor Kevorkian of global economic policy, regularly advocating higher taxes and easy money even though that’s never been a recipe for national prosperity.

And it turns out that the IMF also is schizophrenic. The international bureaucracy’s latest big idea, garnering an entire chapter in the October World Economic Outlook, is that governments should spend more on infrastructure.

Barack Obama’s former chief economist supports the IMF scheme. Here some of what he wrote for the Washington Post.

…the IMF advocates substantially increased public infrastructure investment, and not just in the United States but in much of the world. It further asserts that under circumstances of high unemployment, like those prevailing in much of the industrialized world, the stimulative impact will be greater if this investment is paid for by borrowing… Why does the IMF reach these conclusions? …the infrastructure investment actually makes it possible to reduce burdens on future generations. …the IMF finds that a dollar of investment increases output by nearly $3. …in a time of economic shortfall and inadequate public investment, there is a free lunch to be had — a way that government can strengthen the economy and its own financial position.

Wow, That’s a rather aggressive claim. Governments spend $1 and the economy grows by $3.

Is Summers being accurate? What does the IMF study actually say?

It makes two big points.

The first point, which is reflected in the Summers oped, is that infrastructure spending can boost growth.

The study finds that increased public infrastructure investment raises output in the short term by boosting demand and in the long term by raising the economy’s productive capacity. In a sample of advanced economies, an increase of 1 percentage point of GDP in investment spending raises the level of output by about 0.4 percent in the same year and by 1.5 percent four years after the increase… In addition, the boost to GDP a country gets from increasing public infrastructure investment offsets the rise in debt, so that the public debt-to-GDP ratio does not rise… In other words, public infrastructure investment could pay for itself if done correctly.

But Summers neglected to give much attention to the caveats in the IMF study.

…the report cautions against just increasing infrastructure investment on any project. …The output effects are also bigger in countries with a high degree of public investment efficiency, where additional public investment spending is not wasted and is allocated to projects with high rates of return. …a key priority in economies with relatively low efficiency of public investment should be to raise the quality of infrastructure investment by improving the public investment process through, among others, better project appraisal, selection, execution, and rigorous cost-benefit analysis.

Perhaps the most important caveat, though, is that the study uses a “novel empirical strategy” to generate its results. That should raise a few alarm bells.

So is this why the IMF is schizophrenic?

Nope. Not even close.

If you want evidence of IMF schizophrenia, compare what you read above with the results from a study released by the IMF in August.

And this study focused on low-income countries, where you might expect to find the best results when looking at the impact of infrastructure spending.

So what did the author find?

On average the evidence shows only a weak positive association between investment spending and growth and only in the same year, as lagged impacts are not significant. Furthermore, there is little evidence of long term positive impacts. …The fact that the positive association is largely instantaneous argues for the importance of either reverse causality, as capital spending tends to be cut in slumps and increased in booms… In fact a slump in growth rather than a boom has followed many public capital drives of the past. Case studies indicate that public investment drives tend eventually to be financed by borrowing and have been plagued by poor analytics at the time investment projects were chosen, incentive problems and interest-group-infested investment choices. These observations suggest that the current public investment drives will be more likely to succeed if governments do not behave as in the past.

Wow. Not only is the short-run effect a mirage based on causality, but the long-run impact is negative.

But the real clincher is the conclusion that “public investment” is productive only “if governments do not behave as in the past.”

In other words, we have to assume that politicians, interest groups, and bureaucrats will suddenly stop acting like politicians, interest groups, and bureaucrats.

Yeah, good luck with that.

But it’s not just a cranky libertarian like me who thinks it is foolish to expect good behavior from government.

Charles Lane, an editorial writer who focuses on economic issues for the left-leaning Washington Post, is similarly skeptical.

Writing about the IMF’s October pro-infrastructure study, he thinks it relies on sketchy assumptions.

The story is told of three professors — a chemist, a physicist and an economist — who find themselves shipwrecked with a large supply of canned food but no way to open the cans. The chemist proposes a solvent made from native plant oils. The physicist suggests climbing a tree to just the right height, then dropping the cans on some rocks below. “Guys, you’re making this too hard,” the economist interjects. “Assume we have a can opener.” Keep that old chestnut in mind as you evaluate the International Monetary Fund’s latest recommendation… A careful reading of the IMF report, however, reveals that this happy scenario hinges on at least two big “ifs.”

The first “if” deals with the Keynesian argument that government spending “stimulates” growth, which I don’t think merits serious consideration.

But feel free to click here, here, here, and here if you want to learn more about that issues.

So let’s instead focus on the second “if.”

The second, and more crucial, “if” is the IMF report’s acknowledgment that stimulative effects of infrastructure investment vary according to the efficiency with which borrowed dollars are spent: “If the efficiency of the public investment process is relatively low — so that project selection and execution are poor and only a fraction of the amount invested is converted into productive public capital stock — increased public investment leads to more limited long-term output gains.” That’s a huge caveat. Long-term costs and benefits of major infrastructure projects are devilishly difficult to measure precisely and always have been. …Today we have “bridges to nowhere,” as well as major projects plagued by cost overruns and delays all over the world — and not necessarily in places you think of as corrupt. Germany’s still unfinished Berlin Brandenburg airport is five years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, to name one example. Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford’s Said Business School studied 258 major projects in 20 nations over 70 years and found average cost overruns of 44.7 percent for rail, 33.8 percent for bridges and tunnels and 20.4 percent for roads.

Amen. Governments are notorious for cost overruns and boondoggle spending.

It happens in the United States and it happens overseas.

It’s an inherent part of government, as Lane acknowledges.

In short, an essential condition for the IMF concept’s success — optimally efficient investment — is both difficult to define and, to the extent it can be defined, highly unrealistic. As Flyvbjerg explains, cost overruns and delays are normal, not exceptional, because of perverse incentives — specifically, project promoters have an interest in overstating benefits and understating risks. The better they can make the project look on paper, the more likely their plans are to get approved; yet, once approved, economic and logistical realities kick in, and costs start to mount. Flyvbjerg calls this tendency “survival of the unfittest.” …Governments that invest in infrastructure on the assumption it will pay for itself may find out that they’ve gone a bridge too far.

Or bridge to nowhere, for those who remember the infamous GOP earmark from last decade that would have spent millions of dollars to connect a sparsely inhabited Alaska island with the mainland – even though it already had a very satisfactory ferry service.

Let’s close with two observations.

First, why did the IMF flip-flop in such a short period of time? It does seem bizarre for a bureaucracy to publish an anti-infrastructure spending study in August and then put out a pro-infrastructure spending study two months later.

I don’t know the inside story on this schizophrenic behavior, but I assume that the August study was the result of a long-standing research project by one of the IMF’s professional economists (the IMF publishes dozens of such studies every year). By contrast, I’m guessing the October study was pushed by the political bosses at the IMF, who in turn were responding to pressure from member governments that wanted some sort of justification for more boondoggle spending.

In other words, the first study was apolitical and the second study wasn’t.

Not that this is unusual. I suspect many of the economists working at international bureaucracies are very competent. So when they’re allowed to do honest research, they produce results that pour cold water on big government. Indeed, that even happens at the OECD.

But when the political appointees get involved, they put their thumbs on the scale in order to generate results that will please the governments that underwrite their budgets.

My second observation is that there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the IMF’s theoretical assertions in the August study. Infrastructure spending can be useful and productive.

It’s an empirical question to decide whether a new road will be a net plus or a net minus. Or a new airport runway. Or subway system. Or port facilities.

My view, for what it’s worth, is that we’re far more likely to get the right answers to these empirical questions if infrastructure spending is handled by state and local governments. Or even the private sector.

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Washington’s Action Plan for Ebola: Squalid Waste and Pork-Barrel Spending by the CDC and NIH, Seasoned with Corruption at HHS

Years ago, I shared a very funny poster that suggests that more government is hardly ever the right answer to any question.

Yet in Washington, the standard response to any screwup by government is to make government even bigger. Sort of Mitchell’s Law on steroids.

And that’s exactly what’s happening with the Ebola crisis. The bureaucracies that have received tens of billions of dollars over the years to preclude a crisis are now expecting to get rewarded with more cash.

Governor Jindal of Louisiana debunks the notion that more money for the bureaucracy is some sort of elixir. Here’s some of what he wrote for Politico.

In a paid speech last week, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempted to link spending restraints enacted by Congress—and signed into law by President Obama—to the fight against Ebola. Secretary Clinton claimed that the spending reductions mandated under sequestration “are really beginning to hurt,” citing the fight against Ebola: “The CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] is another example on the response to Ebola—they’re working heroically, but they don’t have the resources they used to have.” …In recent years, the CDC has received significant amounts of funding. Unfortunately, however, many of those funds have been diverted away from programs that can fight infectious diseases, and toward programs far afield from the CDC’s original purpose. Consider the Prevention and Public Health Fund, a new series of annual mandatory appropriations created by Obamacare. Over the past five years, the CDC has received just under $3 billion in transfers from the fund. Yet only 6 percent—$180 million—of that $3 billion went toward building epidemiology and laboratory capacity. …While protecting Americans from infectious diseases received only $180 million from the Prevention Fund, the community transformation grant program received nearly three times as much money—$517.3 million over the same five-year period. …Our Constitution states that the federal government “shall protect each of [the States] against Invasion”—a statement that should apply as much to infectious disease as to foreign powers. So when that same government prioritizes funding for jungle gyms and bike paths over steps to protect our nation from possible pandemics, citizens have every right to question the decisions that got us to this point.

What Governor Jindal is describing is the standard mix of incompetence and mission creep that you get with government.

Bureaucracies fail to achieve their stated goals, but also divert lots of resources to new areas.

After all, that’s a great way of justifying more staff and more money.

Especially since they can then argue that they need those additional resources because they never addressed the problems that they were supposed to solve in the first place!

Here are some excerpts from a story in the Washington Free Beacon, starting with some whining from the head bureaucrat at the National Institutes of Health, who wants us to be believe that supposed budget cuts have prevented a vaccine for Ebola.

“Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready,” said NIH Director Francis Collins, blaming budget cuts for his agency’s failure to develop a vaccine for the deadly virus.

Yet take a look at how the NIH has been squandering money.

However, the Washington Free Beacon has uncovered $39,643,352 worth of NIH studies within the past several years that have gone to questionable research. For instance, the agency has spent $2,873,440 trying to figure out why lesbians are obese, and $466,642 on why fat girls have a tough time getting dates. Another $2,075,611 was spent encouraging old people to join choirs. Millions have gone to “text message interventions,” including a study where researchers sent texts to drunks at the bar to try to get them to stop drinking. The project received an additional grant this year, for a total of $674,590. …The NIH’s research on obesity has led to spending $2,101,064 on wearable insoles and buttons that can track a person’s weight, and $374,670 to put on fruit and vegetable puppet shows for preschoolers. A restaurant intervention to develop new children’s menus cost $275,227, and the NIH spent $430,608 for mother-daughter dancing outreach to fight obesity. …Millions went to develop “origami condoms,” in male, female, and anal versions. The inventor Danny Resnic, who received $2,466,482 from the NIH, has been accused of massive fraud for using grant money for full-body plastic surgery in Costa Rica and parties at the Playboy mansion.

Origami condoms?!? I’m almost tempted to do a web search to see what that even means, particularly since there are male, female, and anal versions.

But even without searching online, I know that origami condoms have nothing to do with stopping Ebola.

The Centers for Disease Control also have a long track record of wasting money. Here are some odious details from a Townhall column.

So now the federal health bureaucrats in charge of controlling diseases and pandemics want more money to do their jobs.

Gee, what a surprise.

Maybe if they hadn’t been so busy squandering their massive government subsidies on everything buttheir core mission, we taxpayers might actually feel a twinge of sympathy. At $7 billion, the Centers for Disease Control 2014 budget is nearly 200 percent bigger now than it was in 2000. …Yet, while Ebola and enterovirus D68 wreak havoc on our health system, the CDC has been busying itself with an ever-widening array of non-disease control campaigns, like these recent crusades: Mandatory motorcycle helmet laws. …Video games and TV violence. …Playground equipment. …”Social norming” in the schools. …After every public health disaster, CDC bureaucrats play the money card while expanding their regulatory and research reach into anti-gun screeds, anti-smoking propaganda, anti-bullying lessons, gender inequity studies and unlimited behavior modification programs that treat individual vices — personal lifestyle choices — as germs to be eradicated. …In 2000, the agency essentially lied to Congress about how it spent up to $7.5 million earmarked each year since 1993 for research on the deadly hantavirus. …The diversions were impossible to trace because of shoddy CDC bookkeeping practices. The CDC also misspent $22.7 million appropriated for chronic fatigue syndrome and was investigated in 2001 for squandering $13 million on hepatitis C research.

By the way, you may be wondering why we have both the National Institutes of Health as well as the Centers for Disease Control.

Is this just typical bureaucratic duplication?

No, it’s typical bureaucratic triplication, because we also have the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the Department of Health and Human Services.

And as Mollie Hemingway explains in The Federalist, this additional layer of bureaucracy has been MIA on Ebola, perhaps because the head bureaucrats diverted funds to a political crony.

…nobody has even discussed the fact that the federal government not ten years ago created and funded a brand new office in the Health and Human Services Department specifically to coordinate preparation for and response to public health threats like Ebola. The woman who heads that office, and reports directly to the HHS secretary, has been mysteriously invisible from the public handling of this threat. And she’s still on the job even though three years ago she was embroiled in a huge scandal of funneling a major stream of funding to a company with ties to a Democratic donor—and away from a company that was developing a treatment now being used on Ebola patients.

Here are some additional details.

…one of HHS’ eight assistant secretaries is the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, whose job it is to “lead the nation in preventing, responding to and recovering from the adverse health effects of public health emergencies and disasters, ranging from hurricanes to bioterrorism.” …“Lurie’s job is to plan for the unthinkable. A global flu pandemic? She has a plan. A bioterror attack? She’s on it. Massive earthquake? Yep. Her responsibilities as assistant secretary span public health, global health, and homeland security.” …you might be wondering why the person in charge of all this is a name you’re not familiar with. …why has the top official for public health threats been sidelined in the midst of the Ebola crisis?

Perhaps because of the scandal.

You can—and should—read all about it in the Los Angeles Times‘ excellent front-page expose from November 2011, headlined: “Cost, need questioned in $433-million smallpox drug deal: A company controlled by a longtime political donor gets a no-bid contract to supply an experimental remedy for a threat that may not exist.”…The donor is billionaire Ron Perelman, who was controlling shareholder of Siga. He’s a huge Democratic donor… The award was controversial from almost every angle—including disputes about need, efficacy, and extremely high costs.

So what’s the bottom line?

The Progressive belief that a powerful government can stop all calamity is misguided. In the last 10 years we passed multiple pieces of legislation to create funding streams, offices, and management authorities precisely for this moment. That we have nothing to show for it is not good reason to put even more faith in government without learning anything from our repeated mistakes.

And that’s the most important lesson, though a secondary lesson is that big government means big corruption.

Big government is incompetent government.

Writing for The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson puts everything in context, explaining that big, bureaucratic states don’t do a good job.

The government’s response to the outbreak has exposed the weakness of the modern administrative state in general, and the incompetence of the White House in particular. …The second nurse to contract Ebola, Amber Vinson, traveled from Cleveland to Dallas on a commercial flight Monday and checked herself into the hospital Tuesday with Ebola symptoms. She called the CDC before she boarded the flight and reported she had a temperature of 99.5—yet CDC officials didn’t stop her from boarding the plane. …Thus continues a pattern of crippling naiveté and ineptitude from the White House on…the Ebola outbreak. On the press call, Frieden explained that you can’t get Ebola from sitting on a bus next to someone who’s infected, but if you have Ebola then don’t use public transportation because you might infect someone. …whether it’s funding or regulation, it’s becoming clear that government “everywhere putting its hands to new undertakings” isn’t working out all that well. …In a hundred years, when Americans read about the U.S. Ebola outbreak of 2014 and antiquated government agencies like the FDA that hampered the development of a vaccine, they’ll laugh at us. …Likewise, future Americans will probably scoff at us for thinking our FDA, in its current form, was somehow necessary or helpful, or for how the Department of Health and Human Services could spend almost a trillion dollars a year and yet fail to prevent or adequately respond to the Ebola outbreak.

And if you want a humorous look at the link between bloated government and incompetent government, Mark Steyn nails it.

Since we’ve shifted to humor, somebody on Twitter suggested that this guy is probably in line to become Obama’s new Ebola Czar.

Last but not least, here’s the icing on the cake.

I mentioned above that we have bureaucratic triplication thanks to NIH, CDC, and HHS. And I joked that the guy in the Holiday Inn might become the President’s new Czar, creating bureaucratic quadruplication (if that’s even a word).

Well, that joke has now become reality. The Washington Examiner is reporting that Obama has named an Ebola Czar. But the guy in the video will be sad to know he didn’t make the cut.

President Obama has chosen Ron Klain, former chief of staff for two Democratic vice presidents, as his Ebola czar, the White House said Friday. …In choosing Klain, Obama is selecting a D.C. insider and veteran of numerous political battles to spearhead a campaign with major implications on his own legacy and how Democrats fare in the November midterms.

Great. I’m sure a lobbyist and former political operative will have just the skills we need to solve this crisis.

I’m going out on a limb and predicting that he’ll say the solution is more money and bigger government. And we know how that turns out.

Yup, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s government man to the rescue!

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The New York Times Accidentally Admits Superiority of Privatized Social Security

I confess that I get a bit of perverse pleasure when a left-leaning media outlet screws up and inadvertently shares information that helps the cause of limited government.

A New York Times columnist, for instance, pushed for a tax-hiking fiscal agreement back in 2011 based on a chart showing that the only successful budget deal was the one that cut taxes.

The following year, another New York Times columnist accidentally demonstrated that politicians are trying to curtail tax competition because they want to increase overall tax burdens.

Now it’s happened again.

In a major story on the pension system in the Netherlands, the New York Times inadvertently acknowledged that genuine private savings is the best route to obtain a secure retirement.

Let’s look at a few excerpts, starting with some very strong praise for the Netherlands in the article.

Imagine a place where pensions were not an ever-deepening quagmire, where the numbers told the whole story and where workers could count on a decent retirement. …That place might just be the Netherlands. And it could provide an example for America… “The rest of the world sort of laughs at the United States — how can a great country like the United States get so many things wrong?” said Keith Ambachtsheer, a Dutch pension specialist who works at the University of Toronto… The Dutch system rests on the idea that each generation should pay its own costs — and that the costs must be measured accurately if that is to happen. …The Dutch approach bears little resemblance to the American practice of shielding the current generation of workers, retirees and taxpayers while pushing costs and risks into the future, where they can metastasize unseen.

Interestingly, the article doesn’t explain what makes the Dutch system so superior to its American counterpart, but the phrase “each generation should pay its own costs” is a big hint.

That basically means that the system is not based on inter-generational redistribution, which is a core feature of pay-as-you-go schemes such as America’s bankrupt Social Security system.

That’s important, but what’s really key is that the Dutch system is based on private savings and private investment. It’s not a pure libertarian system, to be sure, since there are government mandates (such as high mandatory savings to finance generous old-age payments), but it is definitely a far more market-based system than what we have in America.

Here are some details.

About 90 percent of Dutch workers earn real pensions at their jobs. Their benefits are intended to amount to about 70 percent of their lifetime average pay… For this and other reasons, the Netherlands has for years been at or near the top of global pension rankings compiled by Mercer, the consulting firm, and the Australian Center for Financial Studies, among others. Accomplishing this feat — solid workplace pensions for most citizens — isn’t easy. For one thing, it’s expensive. Dutch workers typically sock away nearly 18 percent of their pay, most of it in diversified, professionally run pension funds. That compares with 16.4 percent for American workers, but most of that is for Social Security, which is intended to provide just 40 percent of a middle-class worker’s income in retirement.

And it’s worth noting that a system based on private savings also means that there is lots of money that can be invested.

And “lots of money” isn’t just a throwaway line. The Netherlands leads the OECD in private pension assets, measured as a share of economic output.

It’s worth pointing out, by the way, that the leading nations in this chart (Chile, Iceland, Australia, Switzerland, and Denmark) generally have systems based at least in part on private mandatory savings.

And given that big piles of money are very tempting targets for greedy governments, it’s also worth noting that the Dutch haven’t allowed the system to get politicized.

There’s not the slightest whisper of a rumor, for instance, that the government will grab the money.

Moreover, unlike the United States (particularly when discussing the pension systems operated by state and local governments), pension funds actually have to maintain adequate assets to pay promised benefits.

And no using funky math!

Imagine a place where regulators existed to make sure everyone followed the rules. …standing guard over it is a decidedly capitalist watchdog, the Dutch central bank. …the central bank in 2002 began to require pension funds to keep at least $1.05 on hand for every dollar they would have to pay in future benefits. If a fund fell below the line, it had just three years to recover. …The Dutch central bank also imposed a rigorous method for measuring the current value of all pensions due in the future. …Notably, the Dutch central bank prohibited the measurement method that virtually all American states and cities use, which is based on the hope that strong market gains on pension investments will make the benefits cheaper. …He explained that in the Netherlands, regulators believe that basing the cost of benefits today on possible investment gains tomorrow is the same as robbing tomorrow’s workers to pay for today’s excesses.

No wonder the Netherlands ranks so much higher than the United States in the rule of law index.

Now that I’ve said what’s good about the system, I’ll be the first to admit that it could be improved.

First and foremost, the Dutch system is basically a near-universal defined-benefits regime, which means that workers get a guaranteed amount of money and it is up to the fund administrator to make sure there is enough money.

This type of system has been very unstable in the United States because of chronic underfunding. The Dutch so far seem to have avoided that problem, but I still prefer the defined-contribution systems, which means that workers get back exactly what they paid in, plus all the earnings.

And the good news, from this perspective, is that the Dutch are moving in this direction according to a British service that monitors global pension developments.

Occupational pension schemes in the Netherlands are still mostly defined benefit (DB) schemes. But as companies are seeking to control costs and risk, a massive shift from final salary career average plans is taking place. Also, the popularity of defined contribution (DC) and hybrid schemes is growing.

One thing I wouldn’t change about the Dutch system is the tax treatment. The Dutch have what is sometimes called an exempt-exempt-tax (EET) system, which is sort of like a traditional IRA (i.e., no double taxation).

The Dutch government explains that the income is taxed only one time.

No tax is levied on pension contributions. And the growth of pension rights via the pension fund’s investment performance remains untaxed. Pension benefit is only taxed when it is received.

And let’s hope it stays that way, though the welfare state in the Netherlands is so large that the nation does have some significant long-run fiscal challenges. And that could lead future politicians to sacrifice the stability of the private pension system in order to prop up big government.

That being said, I would gladly trade the U.S. Social Security system for the Dutch mandatory pension system. An imperfect system based on private savings is always a better bet than a perfectly terrible tax-and-transfer scheme.

For more information, here’s the video I narrated explaining why personal retirement accounts are far superior to government-run schemes such as Social Security.

By the way, since I began this column by making fun of the New York Times, I may as well close it by sharing examples of biased and/or sloppy reporting by that outlet.

• Asserting that government schools are “starved of funding” when taxpayer subsidies actually have skyrocketed.
• Claiming that budget-cutting austerity nations are doing worse than “stimulus” nations, but getting the numbers backwards.
• Writing that the sequester will mean “deep automatic spending cuts” when the budget actually will climb by $2.4 trillion.
• Claiming that Italy is more prosperous than the United States and that there is less poverty.
• Asserting that U.S. multinationals pay little tax on foreign-source income, but forgetting to include the taxes paid to foreign governments.

And none of this counts Paul Krugman’s mistakes, which are in a special category (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for a few examples).

P.S. I shouldn’t be too critical of the New York Times. After all, they ran a great piece by Pierre Bessard dealing with tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy. Heck, they once even let me pontificate on those issues.

P.P.S. While the Dutch system is far better than the American system, I think Australia is the best role model. Chile also is a big success.

P.P.P.S. You can enjoy some Social Security cartoons here, here, and here. And here’s a Social Security joke, though it’s too close to being true to be funny.

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Excessive Government Spending in Europe: Sowing the Seeds for another Fiscal Crisis

Europe is in deep trouble.

That’s an oversimplification, of course, since there are a handful of nations that seem to be moving in the right direction (or at least not moving rapidly in the wrong direction).

But notwithstanding those exceptions, Europe in general is suffering from economic stagnation caused by a bloated public sector. Barring dramatic change, another fiscal crisis is a virtual certainty.

A key problem is that Europe’s politicians suffer from fiscal incontinency. They can’t resist spending other people’s money, regardless of all the evidence that excessive government spending is suffocating the productive sector of the economy.

Yet some of them cling to the discredited Keynesian notion that government spending “stimulates” economic performance. Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Brian Wesbury explains why European politicians are wrong.

We need less government, not more, and yet governments are engaged in deficit spending like they did in the 1970s. It didn’t work then to boost growth, and it isn’t working now. Euro area government spending was 49.8% of GDP in 2013 versus 46.7% in 2006. In other words, euro area governments have co-opted an additional 3.1% of GDP (roughly €300 billion) compared with before the crisis—about the size of the Austrian economy. France spent 57.1% of GDP in 2013 versus 56.7% in 2009, at the peak of the crisis. This is the opposite of austerity—but the French economy hasn’t grown in more than six months. It is no wonder S&P downgraded its debt rating. Italy, at 50.6% of GDP, is spending more than the euro area average but is contracting faster.

Brian isn’t the first person to make this observation.

Constantin Gurdgiev, Fredrik Erixon, and Leonid Bershidsky also have pointed out the ever-increasing burden of government in Europe.

And I can’t count how many times I’ve also explained that Europe’s problem is too much government.

The problem with all this government spending, as Brian points out, is that politicians don’t allocate resources very intelligently. So the net result is that labor and capital are misallocated and we get less economic output.

Every economy can be divided into two parts: private and public sectors. The larger the slice taken by the government, the smaller the slice left over for the private sector, which means fewer jobs and a lower standard of living. If government were more productive than private business this wouldn’t be true, but government is not.

Let’s be thankful, by the way, that the United States isn’t as far down the wrong road as Europe.

And this is why America’s economy is doing better.

The U.S. is growing faster than Europe not because…our government is relatively smaller. Federal, state and local expenditures in the U.S. were 36.5% of GDP in 2013. This is too high, but because it is less than Europe, the U.S. has a larger and more vibrant private sector.

Ironically, even President Obama agrees that the U.S. economy is superior, though he (predictably) is incapable of putting 2 and 2 together and reaching the right conclusion.

My Cato colleague Steve Hanke (using the correct definition of austerity) also has weighed in on the topic of European fiscal policy.

Here’s some of what he wrote for the Huffington Post.

The leading political lights in Europe — Messrs. Hollande, Valls and Macron in France and Mr. Renzi in Italy — are raising a big stink about fiscal austerity. They don’t like it. And now Greece has jumped on the anti-austerity bandwagon. …But, with Greece’s public expenditures at 58.5 percent of GDP, and Italy’s and France’s at 50.6 percent and 57.1 percent of GDP, respectively — one can only wonder where all the austerity is (see the accompanying table). Government expenditures cut to the bone? You must be kidding.

Here’s Professor Hanke’s table. As you can see, the burden of government spending is far above growth-maximizing levels.

That’s a very depressing table, particularly when you realize that government used to be very small in Europe. Indeed, the welfare state basically didn’t exist prior to World War II.

P.S. Shifting to another issue, it’s not exactly a secret that I have little respect for politicians.

But some of our “leaders” are worse than others. Maryland’s outgoing governor is largely known for making his state inhospitable for investors, entrepreneurs, and small business owners.

Notwithstanding his miserable record, he thinks of himself as a potential presidential candidate. And one of his ideas is that wireless access to the Internet is a human right.

I’m not joking. Here’s what Charles Cooke wrote for National Review.

Maryland’s governor Martin O’Malley — a man so lacking in redeeming qualities that a majority in his own state hopes he doesn’t run for president – is attempting to carve out a new constituency: young people with no understanding of political philosophy. …“WiFi is a human right”? Hey, why not? Sure, Anglo-American societies have traditionally regarded “rights” as checks on the power of the state. But if we’re going to invert the most successful philosophy in American history to appease a few terminally stupid millennials in Starbucks, let’s think big

This definitely belongs in my great-moments-in-human-rights collection.

Here are previous winners of that booby prize.

• Academics in both America and Europe, as well as a committee from the Council of Europe, claim there is a right to other people’s money.
• Across Europe, a satellite dish is now a human right.
• The Department of Housing and Urban Development asserts there is a right to “emotional support animals” in college dorms.
• In Finland, broadband access is a basic right.
• In France, it is against the law to say your husband is under-endowed or that your wife is fat.
• There’s now an entitlement for free soccer broadcasts in Europe.
• In Italy, you have the right to…um…your testicles.
• Both the United Nations and the Obama Administration think there’s a right to taxpayer-financed birth control.
• There’s now a right, according to the federal government, to taxpayer-financed sex-change operations for the elderly.

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Hong Kong’s Remarkable Fiscal Policy

I’ve had ample reason to praise Hong Kong’s economic policy.

Most recently, it was ranked (once again) as the world’s freest economy.

And I’ve shown that this makes a difference by comparing Hong Kong’s economic performance to the comparatively lackluster (or weak) performance of economies in the United States, Argentina, and France.

But perhaps the most encouraging thing about Hong Kong is that the nation’s top officials genuinely seem to understand the importance of small government.

Here are some excerpts from a recent speech delivered by Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary. He brags about small government and low tax rates!

Hong Kong has a simple tax system built on low tax rates. Our maximum salaries tax rate is 15 per cent and the profits tax rate a flat 16.5 per cent. Few companies and individuals would find it worth the risk to evade taxes at this low level. And that helps keep our compliance and enforcement costs low. Keeping our government small is at the heart of our fiscal principles. Leaving most of the community’s income and wealth in the hands of individuals and businesses gives the private sector greater flexibility and efficiency in making investment decisions and optimises the returns for the community. This helps to foster a business environment conducive to growth and competitiveness. It also encourages productivity and labour participation. Our annual recurrent government expenditure has remained steady over the past five years, at 13 per cent of GDP. …we have not responded irresponsibly to…populist calls by introducing social policies that increase government spending disproportionally. …The fact that our total government expenditure on social welfare has remained at less than 3 per cent of our GDP over the past five years speaks volumes about the precision, as well as the effectiveness, of these measures.

And he specifically mentions the importance of controlling the growth of government, which is the core message of Mitchell’s Golden Rule.

Our commitment to small government demands strong fiscal discipline….It is my responsibility to keep expenditure growth commensurate with growth in our GDP.

Is that just empty rhetoric?

Hardly. Here’s Article 107 from the Basic Law, which is “the constitutional document” for Hong Kong

The most important part of Article 107, needless to say, is that part of keeping budgetary growth “commensurate with the growth rate of its gross domestic product.”

The folks in Hong Kong don’t want to wind up like Europe.

Last year, I set up a Working Group on Long-term Fiscal Planning to conduct a fiscal sustainability health check. We did it because we are keenly aware of Hong Kong’s low fertility rate and ageing population, not unlike many advanced economies. And that can pose challenges to public finance in the longer term. A series of expenditure-control measures, including a 2 per cent efficiency enhancement over the next three financial years, has been rolled out.

And, speaking of Europe, he says the statist governments from that continent should clean up their own messes before criticizing Hong Kong for being responsible.

I would hope that some of those governments in Europe, those that have accused Hong Kong of being a tax haven, would look at the way they conduct their own fiscal policies. I believe they could learn a lesson from us about the virtues of small government.

Just in case you think this speech is somehow an anomaly, let’s now look at some slides from a separate presentation by different Hong Kong officials.

Here’s one that warmed my heart. The Hong Kong official is bragging about the low-tax regime, which features a flat tax of 15 percent!

But what’s even more impressive is that Hong Kong has a very small burden of government spending.

And government officials brag about small government.

By the way, you’ll also notice that there’s virtually no red ink in Hong Kong, largely because the government focuses on controlling the disease of excessive spending.

Why is government small?

In large part, as you see from the next slide, because there is almost no redistribution spending.

Indeed, officials actually brag that fewer and fewer people are riding in the wagon of dependency.

Can you imagine American lawmakers with this kind of good sense?

None of this means that Hong Kong doesn’t have any challenges.

There are protests about a lack of democracy. There’s an aging population. And there’s the uncertainty of China.

But at least for now, Hong Kong is a tribute to the success of free markets and small government.

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Faced with Ebola Crisis, World Health Organization Decides to…Have a Moscow Conference to Push Global Tax Rules for Tobacco

The United Nations is not nearly as bad as other international bureaucracies such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development or the International Monetary Fund.

But that’s because the U.N. tends to be completely ineffective. So even when the bureaucrats push for bad policy, they don’t have much ability to move the ball in the wrong direction.

But just like a blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn, the United Nations periodically does something that genuinely would expand the power and burden of government.

And that’s what happening this week in Moscow. Under the “leadership” of the U.N.’s World Health Organization, hundreds of bureaucrats have descended on the city for the “Conference of the Parties (COP6) to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC).”

But this isn’t the usual junket. The bureaucrats are pushing to create “guidelines” for tobacco taxation. Most notably, they want excise taxes to be at least 70 percent of the cost of a pack of cigarettes.

I’m not a smoker and never have been, but this is offensive for several reasons.

1. Enabling bigger government.

If there were five gas stations in your town and the owners all met behind closed doors to discuss pricing, would the result be higher prices or lower prices? Needless to say, the owners would want higher prices. After all, the consumer benefits when there is competition but the owners of the gas stations benefit if there’s a cartel. The same is true with government officials. They don’t like tax competition and would prefer that a tax cartel instead. And when tax rates get harmonized, they always go up and never go down. Which is what you might expect when you create an “OPEC for politicians.”   In their minds, if all governments agree that excise taxes must be 70 percent of the cost of cigarettes, they think they’ll got a lot more tax revenue that can be used to buy votes and expand government.

2. Promoting criminal activity.

In the previous paragraph, I deliberately wrote that politicians “think they’ll get” rather than “will get” a lot more tax revenue. That’s because, in the real world, there’s a Laffer Curve. We have lots of evidence that higher tobacco taxes don’t generate revenue and instead are a boon for smugglers, criminal gangs, and others that are willing to go underground and provide cigarettes in the black market. We saw this in Bulgaria and Romania.  We saw in in Quebec and Michigan. And we saw it in Ireland and Washington, DC. As I explained a couple of years ago, “In many countries, a substantial share of cigarettes are black market or counterfeit. They put it in a Marlboro packet, but it’s not a Marlboro cigarette. Obviously it’s a big thing for organized crime.” And if the WHO succeeds, the problem will get far worse.

3. Eroding national sovereignty.

 Or maybe this section should be called eroding democratic accountability and control. In any event, the issue is that international bureaucracies should not be in the position of seeking to impose one-size-fits-all policies on the world. Particularly when you get perverse results, such as bureaucrats from health ministries and departments supplanting the role of finance ministries and treasury departments. Or when the result is earmarked taxes, which even the IMF warns is problematical since, “Earmarking creates pots of money that can invite corruption and, unchecked, it can lead to a plethora of small nuisance taxes.” And keep in mind the WHO operates in a non-transparent and corrupt fashion.

For more information, Brian Garst of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity has a thorough analysis of the dangers of global taxation.

By the way, the health community will argue that globally coerced tobacco tax hikes are a good idea since the money can be used to fund programs that discourage tobacco use.

Yet we have some experience in this area. Many years ago, state politicians bullied tobacco companies into a giant cash settlement, accompanied by promises that much of the money would be used to fight tobacco use.

But, as NPR reports, politicians couldn’t resist squandering the money in other areas.

So far tobacco companies have paid more than $100 billion to state governments as part of the 25-year, $246 billion settlement. …all across the country hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to states, and the states have made choices not to spend the money on public health and tobacco prevention. …Myron Levin covered the tobacco industry for the Los Angeles Times for many years and is also the founder of the health and safety news site Fair Warning. He says talking states into spending settlement money on tobacco prevention is a tough sell.

Even when the politicians are asked to spend only a tiny fraction of the money on anti-smoking programs.

To help guide state governments, in 2007 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that states reinvest 14 percent of the money from the settlement and tobacco taxes in anti-smoking programs. But most state governments have decided to prioritize other things.

Needless to say, governments around the world will behave like state governments in America. Any additional tax revenue will be used to expand the burden of government spending.

Let’s close with some big-picture analysis. Bureaucracies inevitably seem drawn to mission creep, which occurs when agencies and departments get involved in more and more areas in order to get more staffing and bigger budgets.

But when that happens, the core mission tends to get less attention. For many bureaucracies, that probably doesn’t matter since the core mission probably doesn’t have any value (HUD, anyone?).

But presumably there is a legitimate government role in preventing something like infectious diseases. So why isn’t WHO focused solely on things such as Ebola and SARS rather than engaging in ideological campaigns to expand the size and scope of government?

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What Happens When Too Many Voters Support Redistribution?

Back in 2010, I shared some wise words from Walter Williams and Theodore Dalrymple about how society can become unstable when people figure they can “vote themselves money.”

On a related note, I shared the famous “riding in the wagon” cartoons in 2011 and the “Danish party boat” image in 2014. Both of these posts highlighted the danger that exists when societies reach a tipping point, which occurs when too many people vote themselves into dependency and expect (and vote) for never-ending handouts.

Indeed, this is why I’m very pessimistic about the future of welfare states such as Greece.

And, depending what happens in an upcoming run-off election, I probably won’t be very optimistic about Brazil.

Investor’s Business Daily has shared some fascinating – and disturbing – data from that country’s recent election.

A Brazilian economist has shown a near-exact correlation between last Sunday’s presidential election voting choices and each state’s welfare ratios. Sure enough, handouts are the lifeblood of the left. …Neves won 34% of the vote, Rousseff took 42% and green party candidate Marina Silva took about 20% — and on Thursday, Silva endorsed Neves, making it a contest of free-market ideas vs. big-government statism. But what’s even more telling is an old story — shown in an infographic by popular Brazilian economist Ricardo Amorim. …Amorim showed a near-exact correlation among Brazil’s states’ welfare dependency and their votes for leftist Workers Party incumbent Rousseff. Virtually every state that went for Rousseff has at least 25% of the population dependent on Brazil’s Bolsa Familia welfare program of cash for single mothers… States with less than 25% of the population on Bolsa Familia overwhelmingly went for Neves and his policies of growth. …Fact is, the left cannot survive without a vast class of dependents. And once in, dependents have difficulty getting out.So Brazil’s election may come down to a question of whether it wants to be a an economic powerhouse — or a handout republic.

Here’s the map from IBD showing the close link between votes for the left-wing candidate and the extent of welfare dependency.

It’s not a 100 percent overlap, but the relationship is very strong.

Sort of like the maps I shared on language and voting in Ukraine.

That being said, I’m a policy wonk who wants economic liberty, not a political hack with partisan motives. So let’s look at the implications of growing dependency.

As IBD explains, the greatest risk is that people get trapped in dependency. We see that in advanced nations like the United States and United Kingdom (and the Nordic nations) so is it any surprise that it’s also a problem in a developing country like Brazil (or South Africa)?

Problem is, “some experts warn that a wide majority cannot get out of this dependence relationship with the government,” as the U.K. Guardian put it. And whether it’s best for a country that aspires to become a global economic powerhouse to have a quarter of the population — 50 million people — dependent on welfare and producing nothing is questionable.

I especially appreciate the last part of this excerpt. Economic output is a function of how capital and labor are productively utilized.

In other words, a welfare state imposes a human cost and an economic cost.

Now let’s consider possible implications for the United States. A few years ago, I put together a “Moocher Index” to show which states had the highest percentage of non-poor households receiving some form of redistribution.

Do the moocher states vote for leftists? Well, it we use the 2012 presidential election as a guidepost, 7 of the top 10 moocher states voted for Obama.  That suggests that there is a relationship.

But if you look at the states with the lowest levels of dependency, they were evenly split, with 5 for Obama and 5 for Romney. So perhaps there aren’t any big lessons for America, though Obama’s margins in Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada were relatively small.

For what it’s worth, I’m far more worried about these economic numbers, not the aforementioned political numbers.

P.S. I probably shouldn’t assume that a leftist victory automatically means more statism in Brazil. After all, keep in mind that we got more economic freedom during the Clinton years and bigger government during the Bush years. Moreover, it was a left-leaning Brazilian president who had the wisdom to acknowledge that you can’t redistribute unless someone first produces.

P.P.S. At least one honest leftist admits there is a heavy cost to government dependency.

P.P.P.S. If you live in a nation that already has passed the tipping point of too much dependency and you want to live more freely, you can always escape. As reported by the U.K.-based Independent.

Up to 2.5 million French people now live abroad, and more are bidding “au revoir” each year. …the “lifeblood” of France are leaving because of “the impression that it’s impossible to succeed”… There is “an anti-work mentality, absurd fiscal pressure, a lack of promotion prospects, and the burden of debt hanging over future generations,” he told Le Figaro. …while the figure of 2.5 million expatriates is “not enormous”, what is more troubling is the increase of about 2 per cent each year. “Young people feel stuck, and they want interesting jobs. Businessmen say the labour code is complex and they’re taxed even before they start working. Pensioners can also pay less tax abroad,” she says. France’s unemployment rate is hovering around 10 per cent. As for high-earners, almost 600 people subject to a wealth tax on assets of more than €800,000 (£630,000) left France in 2012, 20 per cent more than the previous year.

The good news is that some people escape. The bad news is that the political environment becomes even worse for those remaining.

P.P.P.P.S. And don’t forget that the Obama campaign celebrated dependency during the 2012 campaign.

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Believe It or Not: A Communist Nation Is the World’s Most Pro-Capitalist Country

Every so often, I share polling data from other nations that is either encouraging or puzzling. Looking through the archives, here are some memorable examples.

*Americans are more libertarian than Europeans.

*On the other hand, the French support spending cuts by a 4-1 margin.

*More than 90 percent of Greeks and Italians see government as an obstacle to business.

*Nearly 70 percent of Labor voters in the United Kingdom would favor class-warfare tax policy even if tax revenues didn’t increase.

*People in 20 out of 21 nations preferred Obama over Romney.

*Italians supposedly are more fiscally conservative than Americans. As are Germans.

*But Americans are more likely than anybody else to think there is too much red tape.

Some of those results make sense, while others were a big surprise.

But nothing was as surprising as the results we’re looking at today.

First, some background. According to Wikipedia, Vietnam “is one of the world’s four remaining single-party socialist states officially espousing communism.”

Yet according to a global public opinion survey from Pew Research, citizens of that communist nation are the world’s most pro-capitalist people. Asked to agree or disagree with the statement that people are better off in a free market economy, 95 percent of them chose capitalism.

And the nation with the third-highest level of support for capitalism is…drum roll please…China. So another communist-run nation has pro-capitalist citizens (as well as a few secretly capitalist officials).

Here’s a table with more amazing polling data showing the degree to which people in other countries support free markets.

The worst country, if you’re looking at overt support for free markets is Argentina. Only 33 percent of respondents agreed that a free market economy was best (gee, I’m shocked).

And Japan, Spain, and Jordan are the most anti-capitalist nations based on the share of respondents who disagreed with that notion.

Now let’s look at some more numbers. Here’s an equally fascinating table of polling data on which policies are seen as being most effective in lowering the gap between the rich and poor.

Who would have guessed that the Italians, Brazilians, and Ugandans would be most supportive of low taxes? Or that the Germans, Jordanians, and Salvadorans would be most in favor of high taxes?

The German results are particularly odd. They have very high support for free markets, while also supporting class-warfare taxation.

By the way, the people of the United States also are confused. They support free markets, yet they also give a plurality to class-warfare tax policy. We’re not as mixed up as the Germans, but it still doesn’t make sense.

But Americans kicked you-know-what in one part of the Pew Survey. In questions designed to measure the role of individual achievement, respondents from the United States were far more likely than most to demonstrate a belief in the work ethic and the spirit of upward mobility.

Though there are some anomalies in this data. The Venezuelans (62 percent) surpassed America on the top chart, for instance, and the Colombians and Argentinians (78 percent) beat America on the bottom chart.

For what it’s worth, I suspect the Swiss actually are the most sensible people.

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The United States Improves to #12 in New Rankings of Global Economic Freedom

Divided government is good for America’s economy.

Or, to be more specific, divided government is a net plus if the alternative is to have statists fully in charge of economic policy.

I made this point back in 2012 when I pointed out that the unemployment rate started falling after Republicans captured the House of Representatives, and we got further good results when gridlock led to an end to extended unemployment benefits, first in North Carolina and then the entire country.

We also see positive evidence in the new rankings from the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World, which was published this week.

As you can see from this chart, the United States fell in 2010 to #18 in this global ranking of economic liberty, but now America has improved to #12.

That’s still far below our #3 ranking when Bill Clinton left office, so we’re still paying a high price for the statist policies of both Bush and Obama, but at least we’re finally moving back in the right direction.

If you look at the underlying data, you can see why America’s score has increased since 2010.

There was a slight improvement in the scores for trade and regulation, but that was offset by declines in the scores for monetary policy and property rights.

Fiscal policy is the area where there was a significant improvement for the United States, which matches with my data showing that sequestration and the Tea Party made a big difference by significantly slowing the growth of government spending.

But the improvement over the past two years, as noted above, is small compared to the decline in the previous 10 years.

Here’s how Economic Freedom of the World describes America’s fall.

The 7.81 chain-linked rating of the United States in 2012 is more than 8/10 of a point lower than the 2000 rating. What accounts for the US decline? While US ratings and rankings have fallen in all five areas of the EFW index, the reductions have been largest in the Legal System and Protection of Property Rights (Area 2)… The plunge in Area 2 has been huge. In 2000, the 9.23 rating of the United States was the 9th highest in the world. But by 2012, the area rating had plummeted to 6.99, placing it 36th worldwide. …the increased use of eminent domain to transfer property to powerful political interests, the ramifications of the wars on terrorism and drugs, and the violation of the property rights of bondholders in the auto-bailout case have weakened the tradition of strong adherence to the rule of law in United States. …To a large degree, the United States has experienced a significant move away from rule of law and toward a highly regulated, politicized, and heavily policed state.

Geesh, we’re becoming another Argentina.

Looking at the big picture, a falling score is not a trivial issue.

The decline in the summary rating between 2000 and 2012 on the 10-point scale of the index may not sound like much, but scholarly work on this topic indicates that a one-point decline in the EFW rating is associated with a reduction in the long-term growth of GDP of between 1.0 and 1.5 percentage points annually (Gwartney, Holcombe, and Lawson, 2006). This implies that, unless policies undermining economic freedom are reversed, the future annual growth of the US economy will be only about half its historic average of 3%.

Amen. This is why I worry so much about the corrosive impact of big government.

Now let’s look at the overall ratings for all nations. The chart is too large to show all nations, so here are the nations with the most economic freedom.

You shouldn’t be surprised to see that Hong Kong and Singapore own the top two spots.

Other nations with very high scores include New Zealand, Switzerland, Mauritius, UAE, Canada, Australia, Jordon and Chile.

Getting a good score today, however, is no guarantee of getting a good score in the future.

I’ve already expressed concern about Australia moving in the wrong direction, but I’m even more worried about Chile. That nation’s socialist President is making very bad moves on fiscal policy, and also is trying to undermine her country’s very successful system of school choice.

But it would take a lot of bad policy for Chile to drop down to the level of Venezuela, which has the dubious honor of being in last place.

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The Failure of Banning So-Called Assault Weapons

Whenever I’m asked about gun control and “assault weapons,” my first instinct is to steer people to the scholarly work of John Lott or the practical analysis of Larry Correia.

Unfortunately, some politicians in Washington haven’t gotten the message.

Here are excerpts from an article in the Pacific Standard, starting with a claim from Senator Feinstein that gun control works.

In the 10 years since the federal assault weapons ban expired, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) has kept trying to renew the law, which she authored. In a press release this month honoring the 20th anniversary of the ban, she wrote, “The evidence is clear: the ban worked.”

So let’s look at what the experts say.

…gun violence experts say the exact opposite. “There is no compelling evidence that it saved lives,” Duke University public policy experts Philip Cook and Kristin Goss wrote in their book The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know. A definitive study of the 1994 law—which prohibited the manufacture and sale of semiautomatic guns with “military-style features” such pistol grips or bayonet mounts as well as magazines holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition—found no evidence that it had reduced overall gun crime or made shootings less lethal. “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence,” the Department of Justice-funded study concluded in 2004.

It turns out that Senator Feinstein based her argument on a discredited study. Indeed, the findings of that study have been repudiated by one of the authors!

The key statistic that Feinstein cited in her recent press release—that the ban “was responsible for a 6.7 percent decrease in total gun murders, holding all other factors equal”—was rejected by researchers a decade ago. …one of the authors of that study, Dr. Christopher Koper, a criminologist from George Mason University, told ProPublica that number was just a “tentative conclusion.” Koper was also the principal investigator on the 2004 study that, as he put it, “kind of overruled, based on new evidence, what the preliminary report had been in 1997.”

In other words, Senator Feinstein’s demagoguery-to-truth ratio on guns is akin the Obama’s demagoguery-to-truth ratio on tax havens.

Let’s close with some gun control humor. Back in March of last year I shared a satirical look at left-wing social science research involving Chicago.

Since Chicago is a case study of gun control, here are two additional images worth sharing. I don’t know if this is a real street sign, but it’s amusing.

And, technically, the people doing the shooting presumably were outside the city limits, so no laws were broken!

Here’s another one, highlighting the great success of gun control in Chicago.

If you want more gun control humor, you can find some good links by clicking here.

P.S. I’m very proud of the folks in Connecticut who are engaging in civil disobedience and defying the new gun control laws in the Nutmeg State.

P.P.S. Massachusetts passed Feinstein-type gun control policies. Needless to say, the results were not positive. No wonder front-line cops overwhelmingly reject gun control.

P.P.P.S. There are some sensible leftists on the issue of gun control, as you can see by clicking here and here.

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Myths about Capitalism

In addition to his side job as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Economics Department at Harvard University, Jeff Miron is Director of Economic Studies at the Cato Institute.

He’s also the narrator of this video from Learn Liberty that discusses three myths about capitalism.

Unsurprisingly, I think Jeff is right on the mark. Here are some of my thoughts on the three myths, but I’ll take a different approach. I’ll state the truth and then add my two cents to Jeff’s debunking.

1. Capitalism is pro-consumer, not pro-business.

I think the myth about a link between capitalism and big business arises because defenders of free markets often are in the position of opposing taxes, regulations, and mandates that also are opposed by the business community. But for some reason, many people overlook the fact that those same advocates of free markets also oppose cronyist policies that are widely supported by big business, such as Export-Import Bank, the so-called stimulus, TARP, and Obamacare. Part of the problem may be that far too many Republicans actually are pro-business instead of pro-free market.

2. Capitalism rewards those who best serve others.

In a genuine free market, you can only become rich by providing goods and services that are valued by others. But I think the myth that capitalism leads to unfair distribution of wealth exists for two reasons. First, a non-trivial number of people actually think the economy is a fixed pie, so they assume a rich person’s wealth came at the expense of the rest of us. This is obviously wrong. The second reason is that some people do get rich because of government intervention and coercion. This is true, of course, but as discussed in the video and in my remarks above, cronyism, handouts, bailouts, and subsidies are the opposite of capitalism.

3. Capitalism can’t work without failure and bankruptcy.

Regarding the myth that capitalism caused the financial crisis, I’ve already explained that bad monetary policy and corrupt subsidies from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac deserve the lion’s share of the blame. So I want to focus on the bailouts that occurred once the economy soured. There’s a semi-famous saying that “capitalism without bankruptcy is like religion without hell.” Unfortunately, politicians feel a compulsion to shield people (especially if they’re politically powerful) from the consequences of bad decisions. That’s not capitalism. And I’m not just making an ideological point. For those who think that the financial system needed to be recapitalized, the “FDIC resolution” approach would have achieved everything we got with TARP, but without rewarding people who made bad decisions.

My only complaint about the video is that it was too short and didn’t address some of the other viewpoints that undermine support for capitalism.

I don’t know if these are myths, per se, but they certainly are mental roadblocks we need to overcome to build more support for a free society.

4. Some people crave security.

Capitalism is all about opportunity, but that also means uncertainty. And for those who crave predictability and security, that makes them uncomfortable. And I suspect they would be uncomfortable even if you showed them all the evidence that capitalism leads to far more wealth in the long run. Simply stated, they worry about falling through the cracks. When trying to convince these people, I point to the collapsing welfare state in Europe and argue that there’s far less long-run security in a society where everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.

5. Some rich people are jerks.

Whether it’s being obnoxious or ostentatious, people with a lot of money sometimes give capitalism a bad name. And that’s true even if they are genuine capitalists rather than cronyists. It doesn’t help that a lot of what comes out of Hollywood routinely paints rich people and big business as bad guys. By the way, it could very well be the case that there are fewer bad people, per capita, among the rich when compared to the rest of us. But the ones that are jerks get a disproportionate share of attention. And since I mentioned Hollywood, it is a bit of a mystery that becoming uber-rich by acting (or singing or in sports) doesn’t seem to arouse as much envy. Yet I strongly suspect those people are far more likely to engage in unseemly behavior. Go figure.

6. Some businesses try to rip off consumers.

While free markets in the long run reward honesty and punish bad behavior, that doesn’t mean much to a person who has been ripped off, whether by a local contractor or a big multinational. The fact that there are bad people, though, isn’t an argument against capitalism. After all, bad people are quite likely to obtain power in a big-government society. And backed by the coercive power of the state, they’ll have much greater ability to do bad things.

P.S. If you want to know the practical difference between capitalism and socialism, check out this image.

P.P.S. The most free-market place in North America is not in the United States.

P.P.P.S. We live in a strange world when Bono is more pro-market than the Pope.

P.P.P.P.S. Statists like to criticize free markets, but they sure seem to enjoy the fruits of capitalism.

P.P.P.P.P.S. I also suspect statists think free markets are bad because they equate capitalism with rich people and the wealthy folks they know are more likely to have obtained their money dishonestly.

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A Very Bad Year for Obamacare…and a Worse Year for the Victims of Obamacare

In the last few months of 2013, Obamacare suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks dealing with everything from a clunky website to plan cancellations to the White House feeling compelled to arbitrarily ignore the law.

Since that time, though, people seem to have adapted to this new burden.

But adaptation doesn’t mean approval. There are still serious problems with Obamacare, as evidenced by the fact that the Obama Administration has postponed implementation of various provisions 38 times!

However, the White House wants us to believe the law is a success, even if that requires statistical contortions.

So let’s look at the record.

My Cato colleague Mike Tanner argues that Obamacare has been a disaster, writing for Townhall that “…in the last year we’ve also seen plenty of bad news for consumers, providers, employers and taxpayers.”

In his column, he looks at various groups and assesses whether Obamacare has succeeded or failed.

What about universal coverage?

…the best estimates suggest that roughly 8 million people gained insurance under ObamaCare, but roughly half of those were enrolled in Medicaid (outside of the exchanges), which isn’t really health-care reform so much as adding people to government welfare. And it still leaves 41 million American adults uninsured.

That doesn’t sound too impressive, particularly when you consider all the damage that Obamacare has imposed.

What about keeping your health plan?

…roughly 6 million Americans were kicked off their insurance because their plans failed to offer a lengthy-enough maternity stay, didn’t provide sufficient drug and alcohol rehabilitation benefits or otherwise fell short of the insurance that federal bureaucrats thought that they should have. …on average, ObamaCare plans were worse than the plans they replaced, in terms of both providers covered and cost-sharing. A new wave of cancellations is about to begin as well.  …In several states, insurers have dropped plans that they offered on the exchanges or even withdrawn from the market altogether. And if that was not bad enough, Americans with employer-based insurance may find out their insurance has to be changed starting next year.

So we pay more and get less, while also dealing with lots of uncertainty.

What about consumers?

If judged against President Obama’s promise that health-care reform would save us all at least $2,500 through lower premiums, ObamaCare deserves an F. …In states where the individual market was not already dysfunctional, there were significant premium increases.

So the President was lying? I’m shocked, shocked.

What about taxpayers?

This summer the Congressional Budget Office announced that it had given up trying to score the cost of ObamaCare, given the frequency with which the administration was making unilateral changes to the law. …roughly 85 percent of those enrolled through exchanges are receiving subsidies, higher than predicted. Overall, the best estimates suggest the law will cost $2.63 trillion over the next 10 years. That will be paid for by $1.38 trillion in new taxes and at least $1.25 trillion in additional debt.

Imagine that. A new entitlement is going to be a fiscal boondoggle. Who could have predicted that outcome?

What about jobs?

…surveys from Federal Reserve Banks in New York, Philadelphia and Atlanta confirmed that businesses are cutting employment and shifting workers to part-time positions because of ObamaCare. According to the New York Fed, 21 percent of manufacturers and 17 percent of service companies have reduced the size of their workforce because of the law. In addition, roughly 20 percent of both manufacturers and service companies said that they have shifted workers from full- to part-time jobs.

The overall impact on employment could be as high as two million workers.

But there is a tiny sliver of good news. Or, to be more accurate, there’s a tiny sliver of not-as-bad-as-we-thought news.

…some costs are lower because so many states have chosen not to expand Medicaid.

In other words, the Obama White House thought it could bribe states to expand the welfare program that provides health care.

And some statist governors, such as John Kasich, rolled over for Obama.

But many states realized it would be a long-term fiscal disaster to expand Medicaid, notwithstanding promises that Washington would pick up the tab in the short run.

Let’s close with a video on one of the more bizarre aspects of Obamacare. Apparently, people are getting screwed out of their healthcare plans because of strange rules that all plans have to fit within certain bands.

I can’t imagine why the politicians wanted the law to work this way, other than the statist instinct to micro-manage other people’s lives. You have to watch the video to grasp the inanity of the policy.

And if all this isn’t sufficiently depressing, keep in mind that the White House wants to use your tax dollars to bail out the big health insurance companies.

P.S. I’ve written several times about the horrifying practice of “civil asset forfeiture,” which happens when the government decides to seize the property of people without bothering to convict them of any crime.

Well, now we have a humorous – yet still outrageous – look at the practice from John Oliver.

If you want some additional (and more substantive) analysis of asset forfeiture, watch videos here, here, and here.

And if you want to increase your blood pressure, read horror stories about government theft here, here, here, here, and here.

No wonder even the people who first developed the program now want to shut it down. And it is encouraging that there finally is a backlash against this odious practice.

P.P.S. If you like Oliver’s humor, here’s his very funny analysis of how Obamacare is working in Oregon.

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The Ebola Virus and the Case for Limited – and Competent – Government

Does big government necessarily and automatically imply incompetent government?

Unfortunately, that seems to be the case. Robert Samuelson, for instance, has written that the federal government is so large that it breeds failure and disappointment.  I added my two cents, writing that:

…government is far more likely to have a “reverse Midas touch” when it is too big to manage.

I also posed a rhetorical question in another post from 2013.

I suppose a more interesting program would be to identify things that the government does intelligently and effectively. Any suggestions?

That wasn’t a throwaway line. There are some legitimate functions of government and I want those to be handled efficiently.

But I worry that effective government is increasingly unlikely because politicians are so busy intervening in areas that should be left to families, civil society, and the private sector.

The response to the Ebola Virus is a sobering example.

Writing for The Federalist, David Harsanyi explains that the bureaucrats at the Centers for Disease Control are whining about not having enough money to contain and fight Ebola, yet there wouldn’t be any problem if the CDC wasn’t distracted by things that are irrelevant to its core mission.

CDC’s budget and purview have swollen over the past few decades as it has seen an infusion of funding due to temporary health scares and  trendy crusades that often go well beyond any mission it should be pursuing. …the CDC needs to rethink it’s scope. The CDC can’t afford to keep a aerial ‘bio-containment unit’ on retainer, but it does have museum, a massive staff and a lots of waste and fraud. In 2007, Senator Coburn’s office authored a 115-page report detailing things like the CDC budget gimmicks, the agency’s hundreds of millions of dollars of waste on junkets and elaborate digs and its institutional failures to actual ‘control diseases’ – and this includes AIDs prevention. …The CDC, an agency whose primary mission was to prevent malaria and then other dangerous communicable diseases, is now spending a lot of time, energy and money worrying about how much salt you put on your steaks, how often you inhale second-hand smoke and how often you do calisthenics.

To be fair, some of the blame should be shared with the politicians who divert resources away from disease fighting.

Though keep in mind that bureaucrats and politicians generally work hand-in-hand when budgets get approved and government power gets expanded.

With lobbyists and interests groups greasing the way, of course.

But today’s post isn’t about the corrupt machinations of Washington, so let’s get back to our main point.

Professor Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee is similarly worried that mission creep undermines the government’s ability to accomplish important things.

While we’d be better off if the CDC only had one job — you know, controlling disease— the CDC has taken on all sorts of jobs unrelated to that task. …These other tasks may or may not be important, but they’re certainly a distraction from what’s supposed to be the CDC’s “one job” — protecting America from a deadly epidemic. And to the extent that the CDC’s leadership has allowed itself to be distracted, it has paid less attention to the core mission. In an era where new disease threats look to be growing, the CDC needs to drop the side jobs and focus on its real reason for existence. But, alas, the problem isn’t just the CDC. It’s everywhere. It seems that as government has gotten bigger, and accumulated more and more of its own ancillary responsibilities, it has gotten worse at its primary tasks. It can supervise snacks at elementary schools, but not defend the borders; it can tax people to subsidize others’ health-care plans but not build roads or bridges; and it can go after football team names but can’t seem to deal with the Islamic State terror group. Multitasking results in poorer performance for individuals. It also hurts the performance of government agencies, and of government itself. You have one job. Try doing it.

Amen.

For an amusing, yet insightful, look at the connection between government size and government competence, Mark Steyn nails it.

On the other hand, some columnists argue that more power for government is the way to deal with government incompetence.

Amazing.

P.S. I wrote a couple of days ago that Obama was right about the relative weakness of European economies, but then asked why on earth he wants to make America more like Europe with bigger government.

On a related note, here’s a blurb from an article in the Daily Caller.

Don’t allow big government to take over free market system, Italian journalist Matteo Borghi warns in his new e-book, “Italy, Where Dems’ Dreams Die: How Big Government Pauperized A Prosperous Country.” He outlines the “Italian situation” he says has resulted from government growth — soaring debt, high unemployment rates, burdensome tax rates and a corrupt and nearly bankrupt pension system. His goal is to convince Americans not to follow suit. “You are already better off, but if you will go on increasing big government and cracking down on entrepreneurs you could soon become like Italy,” Borghi told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “That’s why, in my book, I say: ‘You shouldn’t give up American Dream to follow Italian nightmare.’”

Or the French nightmare. Or the Greek nightmare. Or the Swedish nightmare. Or the German nightmare.  I could continue, but you get the point.

P.P.S. Though there is one deluded New York Times columnist who thinks we should emulate Italy.

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Bureaucrats at the United Nations Endorse Sweeping New Tax Powers for Politicians

I’m not a big fan of international bureaucracies.

Regular readers know that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is the worst institution from my perspective, followed by the International Monetary Fund.

Some folks ask why the United Nations isn’t higher on the list?

My answer is simple. The UN has a very statist orientation and it routinely advocates bad policy, but it is too incompetent to do much damage.

The OECD and IMF, by contrast, have some capacity to undermine global growth by encouraging more statism.

That being said, the UN occasionally does something that is so obnoxious that I can’t resist commenting. Especially since my tax dollars pay a big share of that bureaucracy’s bloated budget.

What has me irked is that the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development just released its annual Trade and Development Report.

You would think an institution that focuses on trade and development would be advocating free markets and small government.

But UNCTAD takes the opposite approach.

Here’s how the bureaucrats frame the issue in the report. Keep in mind that “market liberalism” is their term for free markets (in other words, classical liberalism).

Back in 1964, the international community recognized that “If privilege, extremes of wealth and poverty, and social injustice persist, then the goal of development is lost”. Yet, almost everywhere in recent years, the spread of market liberalism has coincided with highly unequal patterns of income and wealth distribution. A world where its 85 wealthiest citizens own more than its bottom three and a half billion was not the one envisaged 50 years ago. …the past three decades have demonstrated that delivery is unlikely with a one-size-fits-all approach to economic policy that cedes more and more space to the profitable ambitions of global firms and market forces. …the moment is right to propose another international “New Deal” that can realize the promise of “prosperity for all”.

But not only does UNCTAD utilize class-warfare rhetoric, they also try to support their ideological agenda with historical illiteracy.

I’ve pointed out that the western world became rich when government was very small and markets were liberated.

But the statists at the UN want us to think that big government deserves the credit.

None of today’s developed countries depended on market forces for their structural transformation and its attendant higher levels of employment, productivity and per capita incomes. Rather, they adopted country-specific measures to manage those forces, harnessing their creative side to build productive capacities and provide opportunities for dynamic firms and entrepreneurs, while guiding them in a more socially desired direction. They also used different forms of government action to mitigate the destructive tendencies of those same market forces. This approach of managing the market, not idolizing it, was repeated by the most rapidly growing emerging market economies − from the small social democratic economies of Northern Europe to the giant economies of East Asia − in the decades following the end of the Second World War.

Wow. They even want us to think big government deserves the credit for prosperity in Hong Kong and Singapore.

So you know the bureaucrats are either very stupid or very dishonest. I suspect the latter, but it doesn’t matter. All we need to know is that they are willing to make very preposterous claims to advance their agenda.

And what is their agenda? Well, a major theme is that politicians in developing nations need “policy space” to enable bigger government.

For instance, UNCTAD doesn’t like free trade but does like industrial policy (aka, crony capitalism).

Policy space is…reduced by free trade agreements… Along with the proliferation of trade agreements and their expansion into trade-related areas, there has been a global revival of interest in industrial policy.

But a big focus of the report is that tax competition is a threat to the “policy space” of politicians.

Fiscal space goes hand in hand with policy space. …strengthening government revenues is key. …This…allows for higher growth-enhancing public spending… The need for reclaiming and expanding fiscal space faces particular challenges in an increasingly globalizing economy. …A major problem is that globalization has affected the ability of governments to mobilize domestic revenues. …the increased mobility of capital and its greater use of fiscal havens have considerably altered the conditions for taxing income − both personal and corporate − and wealth. The dominant agenda of market liberalism has led to a globalized economy that encourages tax competition among countries, at times pushing them to a “race to the bottom”.

Gasp, how horrible! Politicians don’t have as much “policy space” to impose punitive taxes.

That’s the best advertisement for tax competition I’ve ever read, even if it is unintentional.

So what do the UN bureaucrats want to solve this supposed problem? Simple, just destroy financial privacy and fiscal sovereignty so that politicians have carte blanche to expand taxes.

…a number of developments aimed at improving transparency and exchange of information for tax purposes have taken place. They include a declaration by G20 leaders to promote information sharing… an OECD Action Plan on base erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS), increased monitoring by several national tax authorities…and numerous bilateral tax treaties (BTTs) and tax information exchange agreements (TIEAs). …these initiatives are steps in the right direction.

With BEPS, indiscriminate information sharing, and more power for national tax police, UNCTAD has put together a trifecta of bad policies.

And to add insult to injury, all the bureaucrats at the UN get tax-free salaries while they concoct schemes to enable higher taxes on the rest of us.

Geesh, no wonder I sometimes have perverse fantasies about them.

And I’m very grateful that Senator Rand Paul is leading the fight against their evil ideas.

P.S. On a more pleasant topic, the “Beltway Bandits” just played in the softball world series in Las Vegas. We competed in the 55+ grouping and finished with three wins and two losses.

Not bad, but not good enough to win any trophies. But we got to play in replica Major League stadiums, which was a fun experience.

I can now say I’ve hit home runs in Dodger Stadium and Wrigley Field, and also doubled off the Green Monster at Fenway. Sounds impressive so long as nobody asks any follow-up questions!

P.P.S. Here’s something else that I found amusing.

Bill Clinton not only understands the inversion issue, but he’s also willing to publicly explain why Obama is wrong.

During an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, former President Bill Clinton called to cut corporate taxes and give companies a break on money stashed overseas, dinging President Barack Obama’s latest effort to combat corporate tax-dodging. When asked what should be done about corporate inversion transactions, Clinton responded with a host of GOP talking points about the tax burden on big business. “America has to face the fact that we have not reformed our corporate tax laws,” Clinton told CNBC, according to a transcript. “We have the highest overall corporate tax rates in the world. And we are now the only OECD country that also taxes overseas earnings on the difference between what the companies pay overseas and what they pay in America.”

But I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. This isn’t the first time he’s had sensible things to say on the issue of corporate taxation.

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Obama Is Right about the European Economy…But Doesn’t Grasp the Implications

I’m not a big fan of Obamanomics.

I don’t like the President’s class-warfare mentality on taxes. I don’t like his support for Keynesian spending policy. And I don’t like his costly expansions of government such as Obamacare.

Indeed, I even like mocking his reflexive statism.

That being said, I fully agree (albeit with some important caveats) with his observation that the United States generally is doing better than other nations.

Here are some blurbs from a Bloomberg report about the President’s remarks on that issue.

A month before congressional elections, President Barack Obama is making an appeal to American pride in promoting his economic policies, arguing that the U.S. is outpacing the recovery in other nations. …“The United States has put more people back to work than Europe, Japan, and every other advanced economy combined.” Obama said. …economies in Europe and Japan are sluggish. The recovery for the euro area — including France and Italy — stalled, with gross domestic product unchanged, from the first quarter to the second, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics office in Luxembourg. Japan contracted by the most in more than five years, with GDP shrinking an annualized 7.1 percent, data from the government Cabinet Office in Tokyo show. …Jason Furman, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers…called Obama’s emphasis on the relative strength of the U.S. economy “useful context to compare to other countries that are facing similar challenges.”

I don’t know if the White House is correct on every specific claim, but it’s definitely true that the United States is out-pacing Europe.

Here are a couple of charts I found with a quick search. We’ll start with one comparing GDP performance. It’s not as up-to-date as the one I shared back in June, but it does a good job of showing how our cousins across the ocean are falling behind.

And here’s another chart I found showing how Europe also is lagging on employment.

And I can also say from personal experience, based on my trips to various conferences, that Europeans look at the American economy with envy. Heck, they even think 1 percent growth is a reason for celebration!

Which should give you an idea of how bad the outlook is in Europe.

After all, the United States is experiencing the weakest economic expansion since the Great Depression. Yet compared to European nations like France and Italy, we’re a powerhouse.

And this isn’t even a new development. After World War II, the European economies were converging with the United States. In other words, they were growing faster, which is what conventional economic theory predicts should happen over time.

But then, thanks the Europe’s shift to more statism in the 1960s and America’s shift to more freedom in the 1980s, the convergence stopped and America began to enjoy better performance. The data from recent years is just the latest bit of evidence.

Let’s now return to the central thesis of today’s post. As I said above, Obama is right that America is doing much better than most other nations.

But here’s the catch….and it’s a big one.

The President wants America to copy the policies that have caused economic stagnation in Europe!

Does he want higher tax rates? Yup.

Does he want more spending? You bet.

Does he want additional regulation? Yes.

Does he want increased intervention? Of course.

Does he want expanded welfare programs? Naturally.

In other words, when I read the article in Bloomberg, it was a very surreal experience. Is the President clueless? Or does he think we’re clueless? How could he brag about America out-performing Europe without realizing that he was attacking Obamanomics?

It was like getting a lecture on the merits of exercise from a guy who wants you to buy a big-screen TV and a lifetime supply of fast food. Or, better yet, check out these cartoons from Michael Ramirez, Glenn Foden, Eric Allie and Chip Bok.

By the way, I feel guilty about saying so many bad things about Europe, so let’s close with some reasonably clever anti-American humor from our European friends.

Here’s an image regarding culture.

And here’s one regarding…um…style.

P.S. Okay, maybe the Europeans have more culture and style, but Americans are more genuinely compassionate.

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Nation’s Leader Rejects Keynesian Economics, Acknowledges that Real Jobs Are Created by the Private Sector

You’re probably surprised by the title of this post. You may even be wondering if President Obama had an epiphany on the road to Greece?

I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but the leader we’re talking about isn’t the President of the United States.

Instead, we’re talking about the Prime Minister of Finland and he deserves praise and recognition for providing one of the most insightful and profound statements ever uttered by a politician.

He explained that the emperor of Keynesian economics has no clothes.

As reported by Le Monde (and translated by Open Europe), here’s what Alexander Stubb said when asked whether European governments should try to “stimulate” their economies with more spending.

We need to put an end to illusions: it’s not the public sector that creates jobs. To believe that injecting billions of euros [into the economy] is the key to growth is an idea of the past.

Amen.

You don’t make a nation richer by taking money from one pocket and putting it in another pocket.

Particularly when the net effect is to redistribute funds from the productive sector to the government.

I’m glad Mr. Stubb has figured this out. I just with some American politicians would look at the evidence and reach similarly wise conclusions.

The Obama Administration, for instance, still wants us to believe the faux stimulus was a success.

And speaking of our President’s views, this Gary Varvel cartoon isn’t new, but it’s right on the mark.

Any “job” created by government spending necessarily comes at the expense of the private sector.

And since I’m sharing old cartoons, here’s one that also is a nice summary of what happens when government gets bigger.

This cartoon definitely belongs in my collection (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) of government as a blundering, often-malicious, overweight nitwit.

P.S. Other European policy makers have admitted that Keynesian economics is a farce.

P.P.S. Finland has the world’s 7th-freest economy, significantly better than the United States.

P.P.P.S. If you want some humor about Keynesian economics, click here.

P.P.P.P.S. If you prefer tragedy instead of humor, here are some horrifying quotes by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

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Led by North Carolina and Kansas, a Look at States Moving in the Right Direction

My colleagues Chris Edwards and Nicole Kaeding have just released the biennual Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors from the Cato Institute.

The Report Card is one of the Cato Institute’s most impressive publications since developments on the state level help illustrate the relationship between good fiscal policy and economic performance.

The top scores were earned by Pat McCrory of North Carolina and Sam Brownback of Kansas. Both have taken steps to significantly reduce marginal tax rates and restrain the burden of state government spending in their states.

Here are all the scores. Paul LePage of Maine and Mike Pence of Indiana also earned high marks, while the governors of Minnesota, Oregon, Delaware, Washington, Illinois, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Calfornia all received failing grades.

Here some of what Chris and Nicole wrote for National Review about the results of their research .

Let’s start with the good news.

Pat McCrory of North Carolina signed a bill replacing individual-income-tax rates of 6.0, 7.0, and 7.75 percent with a single rate of 5.75 percent. He also cut the corporate-tax rate from 6.9 to 5.0 percent and repealed the estate tax. Sam Brownback of Kansas approved a plan in 2012 replacing three individual-income-tax rates with two and cutting the top rate from 6.45 to 4.9 percent. The reform also increased the standard deduction and reduced taxes on small businesses. Brownback cut income-tax rates further in 2013.

Now for the not-so-good news.

…all eight governors earning an “F” were Democrats. …Jerry Brown of California and Pat Quinn of Illinois, for example, earned “F” grades for their large tax hikes.

If you look at the data on state spending, Governor Brownback of Kansas and Governor Bentley of Alabama both got high scores of 85, largely because per-capita spending fell during their tenure.

Governor Kasich of Ohio did the worst job on spending (why am I not surprised), getting a low score of 16 (Governor Abercrombie of Hawaii and Governor Hickenlooper of Colorado were the next lowest, both “earning” a score of 22).

Interestingly, the left is very anxious to undermine the achievements of America’s best governors.

I’ve previously defended the pro-growth reforms to unemployment insurance adopted by Governor McCrory of North Carolina.

And now let me take this opportunity to defend Governor Brownback of Kansas.

The New York Times is desperately hoping he loses his reelection bid since that might dissuade other state policy makers from enacting good reforms.

Mr. Brownback’s proudly conservative policies have turned out to be so divisive and his tax cuts have generated such a drop in state revenue that they have caused even many Republicans to revolt. …it is unsurprising that many Kansas Republicans have turned on Mr. Brownback. This is a state that once had a tradition of centrist Republicans, like former Senator Bob Dole… More than 100 current and former Republican elected officials have endorsed Mr. Davis.

The Wall Street Journal, however, points out that the anti-Brownback GOPers are largely sore losers.

…many of the “Republicans” on the list are in fact independents who long ago defected from the GOP. …six state Senators whom tea-party groups ousted in 2012 for obstructing tax and government reforms are supporting Mr. Davis.

What really matters, though, is that Governor Brownback’s reforms are designed to rejuvenate a state economy that has lagged its neighbors.

Here are some details from another WSJ editorial.

By liberal accounts Kansas is experiencing a major fiscal and economic meltdown like well, you know, Illinois. …But some early economic indicators suggest they may be producing modest positive effects. The danger is that a coalition of Democrats and big-spending Republicans will pull out the rug before the benefits fully materialize.

What are those benefits?

Well, it’s still early, but the preliminary results are positive.

Kansas has long trailed its neighbors in private job and economic growth. …All of Kansas’s surrounding states save Nebraska had lower top tax rates, and most also had lower unemployment. …Since the tax cuts took effect, the gap in job creation between Kansas and neighboring states has shrunk. Kansas’s rate of private job growth between January 2013 and June 2014 averaged 167% of that in Nebraska, 105% of Iowa and 61% in Oklahoma. That compares to 61%, 85% and 42%, respectively, between 2004 and 2012. While Kansas added jobs at a slower pace than Missouri this year, its private economy grew more than twice as fast as its eastern neighbor last year.

Statists are grousing about lower-than-expected revenues, but their command of the facts leaves something to be desired.

Tax-reform critics complain that revenues (as expected) declined this year and that receipts were $235 million—or about 4%—below the state’s estimate last year. However, predicting revenues was particularly challenging this year because federal tax changes encouraged investors to shift income to 2012 from 2013. Revenues missed the mark in numerous states including Iowa ($185 million; 3%), Missouri ($308 million; 4%) and Oklahoma ($283 million; 5%).

And here’s some analysis from Reason.

While The New York Times denounces as “ruinous” the Kansas tax cut, it is sitting in a state, New York, with a top rate of 8.82 percent. If all the government spending paid for by those high taxes were the panacea that the Times claims it is, you might expect New York to have a lower unemployment than Kansas. But check the numbers, and Kansas’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for June was a low 4.9 percent, while New York’s was 6.6 percent. “Ruinous,” indeed.

Given the high stakes, it will be very interesting to see whether Brownback is reelected next month.

Same with Scott Walker of Wisconsin (who, by the way, earned a B), who got national attention for his efforts to rein in the privileged position of state bureaucrats and Pat Quinn of Illinois (who got an F), who attracted a lot of attention for his destructive tax hikes.

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