It’s Wednesday, January 9th, 2013….and here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the mid-week edition, it’s the “Preaching to the Choir” segment, courtesy of Ramesh Ponnuru writing for Bloomberg.com, as he offers his thoughts regarding….

Watch what he did, not what he says. President Barack Obama says he won’t agree to spending cuts in return for Republicans’ raising the debt ceiling. Yet he did exactly that in 2011. And he should do it again.

The debt ceiling ought to be raised because nobody has a plan to eliminate the deficit immediately, and there is no popular support for doing what that would take. A congressman who isn’t presenting and supporting a zero-deficit-now plan has an obligation to give the federal government the additional borrowing authority that continued deficits make necessary.

For liberals, that’s the end of the matter. The debt ceiling should be raised without any spending cuts attached, and ideally it should be raised to infinity. One common argument goes like this: Since Congress sets spending and tax levels, no good purpose is served by holding a separate vote making it possible for the government to follow Congress’s original instructions.

That argument would have more force if the federal budget were the result of a deliberate policy. Instead, more and more of our spending rises on autopilot because of decisions made long ago, and nobody is forced to take responsibility for the gap between revenue and commitments. Bills to raise the debt ceiling are the only occasions when congressmen and the president come close to doing so. They are thus appropriate moments to attack the trends that are driving our rising debt.

Economic Risks

Raising the debt limit requires Republican cooperation, and there is no obvious reason why Republicans should refrain on principle from saying that they will go along so long as spending is cut. For Democrats to say that no conditions should be attached to the bill is to attach a condition.

There are, of course, risks to the economy from a protracted fight over what the conditions will be, and it would behoove the parties to come to terms quickly.

Four steps would reduce those risks. First, Republicans should make the conditions reasonable, rather than, say, trying to use the leverage the debt-ceiling bill gives them to transform the welfare state. Second, Democrats should accede to reasonable requests rather than attacking them as though they amounted to terrorism.

Third, the Federal Reserve should pledge to hold nominal- income growth steady, since that would counteract any shock to consumer confidence. Fourth, and most important, all parties should pass a law stipulating that if the debt ceiling is breached the Treasury will still be allowed to make debt-service payments in full. Painful spending cuts would result, but not default.

A reasonable deal would involve spending cuts that are acceptable to both parties — cuts, in other words, that Democrats can accept without violating their core convictions or their campaign promises. (Which would, in light of The Obamao’s statement to John Boehner….”We don’t have a spending problem!”….be….?!?)

Jerry Brown, the Democratic governor of California, is no conservative; he just prevailed in raising taxes in his state. But he also thinks that Medicaid spending per person ought to be capped, which could generate significant savings for the federal government. Tom Daschle, the former leader of the Senate Democrats and Obama’s first choice for secretary of Health and Human Services, also supports the idea.

John Cogan, an economist at Stanford University, argues that Medicare should raise its co-payments. The savings wouldn’t come from the higher fees that beneficiaries pay — that money could be sent back to them in the form of lower premiums so that seniors are held harmless — but in the reduced use of medical services. Higher co-pays, Cogan points out, haven’t been associated with worse health outcomes in studies.

Increasing the use of means testing in Medicare would also save money without undermining care for the neediest. The program should offer fewer benefits to those with the highest lifetime incomes.

No Precedent

Democrats insist that any future deficit reduction be “balanced,” with tax increases as well as spending cuts. They see last week’s fiscal-cliff deal, in which Republicans agreed to let some tax increases take effect, as a precedent. Around the world, though, most successful deficit-reduction efforts in the past three decades have been unbalanced, tilting toward spending cuts rather than tax increases.

Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania, voted for the fiscal-cliff deal but denies it’s a precedent for future tax increases. With taxes having just risen, he told me in an interview, Republicans aren’t going to accept any further increase. “Tax increases are off the table,” he said. Instead, significant spending cuts are necessary, he argued, and they need to begin immediately.

So raise the debt limit, sure. But start bringing the debt under control at the same time. That’s a sensible position, and one that Republicans should have no trouble defending to voters.

But a position, Ponnuru’s undeniable logic notwithstanding, to which the Professionally Unreasonable….

….will never agree.

In a related item, Byron York reports why he believes….

Republicans Bet on Stronger Hand in Spending Fight

 

During the “fiscal cliff” battle, I asked several Republican lawmakers why they didn’t push harder for spending cuts in exchange for their historic concession to vote for higher taxes. They invariably answered that they were waiting for the fight over raising the debt ceiling. Then, they promised, Republicans would demand serious cuts, especially in entitlement spending, from President Obama.

Their thinking was this: The GOP was on the wrong side of the polls in the battle over raising taxes on the highest earners. Surveys showed substantial public support for the president and Democrats on that issue. But Republicans are on the right side of the polls in the battle over fiscal responsibility. The GOP, the party trying to put sensible limits on Obama’s runaway spending, is better positioned to make the case for cuts.

“We’re making a hard pivot to spending,” says a senior GOP Senate aide. “Our view is that the revenue question has now been settled. It’s behind us. Now we fight on spending, and we’ve got two good opportunities to do so coming up — the debt limit and the continuing resolution.”

The Republican strategy is more than just positioning. It’s the right thing to do. Everybody knows Obama’s tax increases will do little to reduce deficits in coming years. They’ll add about $60 billion in revenue a year, turning a $1.2 trillion deficit into a $1.14 trillion deficit. And everybody knows (Define “everybody”) entitlement spending is on its way to eating the entire federal budget. It has to be reduced or disaster awaits.

Nevertheless, the mood on the political left since the election has become one of solid opposition to any and all cuts in entitlements. The president won the election, activists on the left say, so he should get the tax increases he wants and Republicans should not get the spending cuts they want. Obama, who has never shown any serious interest in cutting spending anyway, will be under pressure not to concede anything.

And the president is not through trying to raise taxes. In coming days, he will cite the Republican offer, made just after the election, to raise revenue by eliminating tax deductions and broadening the base. Now that he has won the fight to raise tax rates instead, Obama will demand that Republicans give in on deductions, too, as they had once offered.

The GOP hopes to stop that cold. “The president got his revenue,” Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell said Jan. 3 in his opening remarks to the new Senate. “Now it’s time to turn squarely to the real problem, which is spending.”

But Republicans know they will soon be cast as the villain again. During the fiscal cliff fight, they were accused of being the party ready to plunge the nation into financial disaster on behalf of their millionaire and billionaire friends. During the debt ceiling fight, they will be tagged as the party willing to take the nation to the very brink of default to balance the budget on the backs of the poor and the elderly.

That will make for a tough debate. In addition, given the federal government’s horrendous spending excesses, Republicans know the debt ceiling will have to go up eventually, probably with some GOP support.

Nevertheless, Republicans seem ready for the fight. (Yeah….like the Titanic seemed “unsinkable”.) And unlike the fiscal cliff battle, when it was obvious that taxes were going to go up, there’s no clear sense of how this one will end.

Oh….we have an idea; after all, we’ve seen this movie before.

Nobody knows, even the main players. To cite an example from the fiscal cliff fight, shortly before the deadline I talked to two senior senators, one from each party, and was struck by how little they knew about what was going on. Of course, they knew the issues and the moving parts, but when it came to the actual provisions of the bill that was being fashioned as we spoke, they were flying blind. What would the tax rate cutoffs be? What about the sequestration cuts? And the other issues, like estate taxes? The Senate leadership was making the decisions, and even senior lawmakers didn’t know what was happening. Expect a lot of that in the next few months.

So Republicans enter the debt ceiling fight, knowing there will be plenty of confusion, name calling and desperate maneuvering. But they know one other thing, too. They know they’re doing the right thing.

Unfortunately, the question, as well as the ulitmate outcome, isn’t about “doing the right thing”, but rather how you play the game.  And to date, the GOP leadership makes the Dimocrats….

….look like Tiger in his prime.

Next up, as regards The Obamao’s latest distractions, Balls Cotton offers us a little walk down Memory Lane:

Counterterror Adviser Defends Jihad as ‘Legitimate Tenet of Islam’

 

 

 John Brennan: either never smiles or should be in the Guiness Book for the longest continual case of hemorrhoids.

The president’s top counterterrorism adviser on Wednesday called jihad a “legitimate tenet of Islam,” arguing that the term “jihadists” should not be used to describe America’s enemies. During a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, John Brennan described violent extremists as victims of “political, economic and social forces,” but said that those plotting attacks on the United States should not be described in “religious terms.” 

Sorta like the Jihadist version of “I think….therefore I kill”!  He’ll fit right in with the rest of Team Tick-Tock:

And since we’re on the subject of The Dear Misleader’s latest attempts at distraction, we offer the latest from David Brooks, courtesy of the Old Grey Nag and Balls Cotton, describing….

Why Hagel Was Picked

 

Other than as a distraction….and my failure, like Gabby Giffords, to duck,….nothing whatsoever recommends me for this position.

Americans don’t particularly like government, but they do want government to subsidize their health care. They believe that health care spending improves their lives more than any other public good. In a Quinnipiac poll, typical of many others, Americans opposed any cuts to Medicare by a margin of 70 percent to 25 percent.

In a democracy, voters get what they want, so the line tracing federal health care spending looks like the slope of a jet taking off from LaGuardia. Medicare spending is set to nearly double over the next decade. This is the crucial element driving all federal spending over the next few decades and pushing federal debt to about 250 percent of G.D.P. in 30 years.

There are no conceivable tax increases that can keep up with this spending rise. (Fact!!!) The Democrats had their best chance in a generation to raise revenue just now, and all they got was a measly $600 billion over 10 years. This is barely a wiggle on the revenue line and does nothing to change the overall fiscal picture.

As a result, health care spending, which people really appreciate, is squeezing out all other spending, which they value far less. Spending on domestic programs — for education, science, infrastructure and poverty relief — has already faced the squeeze and will take a huge hit in the years ahead. President Obama excoriated Paul Ryan for offering a budget that would cut spending on domestic programs from its historical norm of 3 or 4 percent of G.D.P. all the way back to 1.8 percent. But the Obama budget is the Ryan budget. According to the Office of Management and Budget, Obama will cut domestic discretionary spending back to 1.8 percent of G.D.P. in six years.

It ain’t because I look good in a tux.

Advocates for children, education and the poor don’t even try to defend their programs by lobbying for cutbacks in Medicare. They know that given the choice, voters and politicians care more about middle-class seniors than about poor children.

So far, defense budgets have not been squeezed by the Medicare vise. But that is about to change. Oswald Spengler didn’t get much right, but he was certainly correct when he told European leaders that they could either be global military powers or pay for their welfare states, but they couldn’t do both.

Europeans, who are ahead of us in confronting that decision, have chosen welfare over global power. European nations can no longer perform many elemental tasks of moving troops and fighting. As late as the 1990s, Europeans were still spending 2.5 percent of G.D.P. on defense. Now that spending is closer to 1.5 percent, and, amid European malaise, it is bound to sink further.

The United States will undergo a similar process. The current budget calls for a steep but possibly appropriate decline in defense spending, from 4.3 percent of G.D.P. to 3 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

But defense planners are notoriously bad at estimating how fast postwar military cuts actually come. After Vietnam, the cold war and the 1991 gulf war, they vastly underestimated the size of the cuts that eventually materialized. And those cuts weren’t forced by the Medicare vise. The coming cuts are.

Maybe….just maybe….it’s because of my antipathy to Israel….coupled with my willingness to put personal profit above what’s best for my country.

As the federal government becomes a health care state, there will have to be a generation of defense cuts that overwhelm anything in recent history. Keep in mind how brutal the budget pressure is going to be. According to the Government Accountability Office, if we act on entitlements today, we will still have to cut federal spending by 32 percent and raise taxes by 46 percent over the next 75 years to meet current obligations. (OUCH!!!) If we postpone action for another decade, then we have to cut all non-interest federal spending by 37 percent and raise all taxes by 54 percent.

As this sort of crunch gradually tightens, Medicare will be the last to go. Spending on things like Head Start, scientific research and defense will go quicker. These spending cuts will transform America’s stature in the world, making us look a lot more like Europe today. This is why Adm. Mike Mullen called the national debt the country’s biggest security threat. (Yet he lacked the courage to call a spade a spade and take sides with his country against The Obamao.)

Chuck Hagel has been nominated to supervise the beginning of this generation-long process of defense cutbacks. If a Democratic president is going to slash defense, he probably wants a Republican at the Pentagon to give him political cover, and he probably wants a decorated war hero to boot. (A “decorated war hero” now being defined as someone, who like Gabby Giffords, neglected to duck.)

All the charges about Hagel’s views on Israel or Iran are secondary. The real question is, how will he begin this long cutting process? How will he balance modernizing the military and paying current personnel? How will he recalibrate American defense strategy with, say, 455,000 fewer service members?

How, in short, will Hagel supervise the beginning of America’s military decline? If members of Congress don’t want America to decline militarily, well, they have no one to blame but the voters and themselves.

No, this is like blaming the fans for the Mike Shanahan’s failure to replace RGIII with Kirk Cousins; both Congress….AND Shanahan….knew, or should have known, better!

Moving on, the WSJ‘s Allysia Finley, reports on how meaningful education reform in the Big Apple is being held hostage to….

Gotham’s Big Guns

 

And if you can’t, blame the Teachers’ Union!

The United Federation of Teachers took umbrage at New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s comparing the union to the National Rifle Association, whose president last month proposed arming school guards to protect students from intruders like Adam Lanza. If only the union’s maestros cared as much about the kids.

Gotham schools stand to lose $250 million in state aid if the district and teachers don’t reach an agreement on teacher evaluations by Jan. 17. In a bid for $700 million in federal Race to the Top grant money, the state passed a law in 2010 that requires 20% of teacher evaluations be based on standardized test scores, 20% on other local objective measures and 60% on criteria such as principal observations that are to be negotiated at the bargaining table.

Unions in all but a handful of the state’s 700 school districts have signed off on evaluations, but the United Federation of Teachers seems to believe it can get a better deal by bargaining in bad faith. The city has complained to the state Public Employment Relations Board that the union is seeking to extort wage increases in negotiations over evaluations, which isn’t allowed. Then again, the union doesn’t exactly have any incentive to ink a deal.

Consider that $250 million is a pittance in the city’s $25 billion school budget, and if the unions sign off on an agreement this year, the district could very well spend the cash on school reforms that the union opposes. In any case, the union probably figures that any program reductions resulting from diminished state aid will merely spur a public outcry and strengthen their hand in negotiations.

What’s more, there will be a new mayor in town come next January, who will likely be more amenable to the union’s concerns. All of the leading candidates for mayor have at one point backed raising taxes on the wealthy to fund schools, among other things. City leaders would need state approval to raise its income tax. However, Democrats hold a majority in the state Assembly and de facto majority in the Senate, so a tax hike wouldn’t be a heavy lift in Albany. The teachers union never comes to a fight without something in its back pocket.

After all, if one thing’s for certain, Dimocrats have never proved hesitant to support a special interest group which feathers their reelection beds against the interests of the country at large.

And in the Environmental Moment, another crushing blow to the Green Movement, as it loses yet another hypocritical hero:

Current TV staffers rip Al Gore for sale to Al Jazeera

 

Just call him Al Gorezeera. Monday morning, the still shell shocked staff at Current TV was called to an all hands staff meeting at its San Francisco headquarters, which was teleconferenced to their offices in LA and NYC, to meet their new bosses, The Post reports. That would be two of Al Jazeera’s top guys: Ehab Al Shihabi, executive director of international operations, and Muftah AlSuwaidan, general manager of the London bureau.

Ominously missing was the creator of Current, the self proclaimed inventor of the Internet and savior of clean energy, Al Gore, although his partner, Joel Hyatt, stood proudly with the Al Jazeera honchos.

“Of course Al didn’t show up,” said one high placed Current staffer. “He has no credibility. He’s supposed to be the face of clean energy and just sold [the channel] to very big oil, the emir of Qatar! Current never even took big oil advertising—and Al Gore, that bulls—ter sells to the emir?”

The displeasure with Gore among the staff was thick enough to cut with a scimitar. “We all know now that Al Gore is nothing but a bulls—ter,” said one staffer bluntly. “Al was always lecturing us about green. He kept his word about green all right—as in cold, hard cash!”

It’s not like the evidence wasn’t as obvious as the ears on The Obamao’s head.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this brilliant bit of analysis from Shannon Wood:

Speaking of the hottest Rancherette in the entire state of Texas, we present the “What Goes Around Comes Around” segment, courtesy again of Shannon Wood, as she schools us once again regarding the fairest of plays:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the “When Did Oprah Join The Priesthood?” segment, and news that….

Lance Armstrong Will Ask Oprah for Absolution, Forgiveness in Interview

 

Lance Armstrong has decided to come clean, so to speak. Since the big dope’s life is essentially ruined, he’s apparently going to admit it all and ask for forgiveness. And who better to give it to him that Oprah? She’s got him on January 17 from 9 to 10:30pm on the hard to find OWN channel. Good for her. It used to be that celebrities went to Larry King or Barbara Walters when they needed to eat crow publicly and return to the world.

But for this generation it’s Oprah. Lance will cry, his eyes will  well up when he talks about his kids, he’ll show Oprah his scars from various surgeries, and recommend a healing expert in Nepal which she’ll put on her next Best Things list.

Will she grant him absolution? I hope not. But Armstrong has nothing to lose–he’s lost everything. He deceived the world for years, and kept lying about it. He had plenty of chances to explain himself. I don’t care if he came from a broken home, was beaten with a bat, or made to wash the dishes. Maybe this will be the last time we’ll have to hear from him.

We can only hope.  No offense, Lance; but don’t let the same door that whacked Barry Bonds, Tony Mandarich, Mark Maguire, Brian Bosworth, Sammy Sosa and Roger Clemens whack you in the ass on your way out.

Magoo