It’s Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011….and here’s The Gouge!
Leading off the Tuesday edition, three items that summarize our thoughts on the impotence of the not-so-super-committee. First up, as the WSJ so accurately asserts, America’s not facing a budget crisis because taxes are too low….
Thank You, Grover Norquist
The super committee’s failure is rooted in a clash of visions.
So it’s all Grover Norquist’s fault. Democrats and the media are singing in unison that the reason Congress’s antideficit super committee has failed is because of the conservative activist’s magical antitax spell over Republicans.
Not to enhance this Beltway fable, but thank you, Mr. Norquist. By reminding Republicans of their antitax promises, he has helped to expose the real reason for the super committee’s failure: the two parties disagree profoundly on a vision of government.
Democrats don’t believe they need to do more than tinker around the edges of the entitlement state while raising taxes on the rich. Republicans think the growth of government is unsustainable and can’t be financed no matter how much taxes are raised.
Sounds like we need an election.
Of course it would have been preferable if the two sides had come together now to cut spending, reform the tax code and remake Medicare. Preferable, but implausible. That would have required President Obama to have shown more respect for the will of the voters when they revoked his credit card by giving Republicans control of the House in 2010. Or for the President to have honored the findings of his own Bowles-Simpson deficit commission by using it as a basis for negotiation. Instead, he ignored them.
The abiding reality of American politics is that substantial change in Washington is impossible without Presidential leadership. And Mr. Obama does not want to lead on reforming entitlements or reducing the deficit. He is making clear he is running for re-election on a platform of consolidating the expansion of government of his first two years and raising taxes to finance it.
Thus it’s no surprise that he did more than anyone to poison the well of the super committee with his October remarks promising a veto unless the deal included $1 trillion in tax increases. Mr. Obama knew that Republicans couldn’t agree to this a year after winning election on a promise not to raise taxes. But $1 trillion became the marker that Democrats on the super committee insisted was the price of admission for all but token spending cuts. This is after Mr. Obama also insisted that ObamaCare and its tax increases (that start in 2013) couldn’t be touched.
As for the alleged tyranny of Grover, Republicans on the committee explicitly risked his wrath by putting tax revenue increases on the table. (A decidedly inconvenient truth every MSM outlet other than FOX News has refused to report.) Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey offered $500 billion in revenues—$300 billion in the statically scored tax increases that Democrats demanded—by cutting deductions mainly for the wealthy. Democrats rejected the offer because it wasn’t $1 trillion and because in return Mr. Toomey also wanted to lock in lower tax rates. Never mind that nearly all economists agree that lower rates and a more efficient tax code would increase economic growth and lead to more revenues over time.
The entitlement reforms being considered were hardly worth the effort in any case. As everyone knows and the nearby chart shows, federal health-care spending is the real driver of future deficits. On its current trajectory, Medicare is expected to grow to 6.7% of GDP in 20 years from 3.7% today. But the reforms that Democrats would contemplate would have cut that merely to 6.2%.
The Paul Ryan-Alice Rivlin premium-support reform for Medicare—the only reform that won’t require harsh government price controls or care restrictions—was deemed unacceptable. Democrats say they favor spending cuts, but they have yet to put a serious cut on the table, or even to pass a Senate budget in three years. (One more pertinent but inconvenient truth the MSM deems undeserving of airtime.)
In the end Republicans had to choose between a $1 trillion tax hike that would hurt a sputtering economy while splintering the GOP less than a year before a huge election, or let an automatic spending cut of $1.2 trillion over 10 years begin in 2013. The sequester is the better option.
Defense would be hurt disproportionately, as Mr. Obama’s Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has been saying. But in the interim perhaps House Republicans can work with Senate Democrats and Mr. Panetta to restore some of that defense spending. Mr. Obama said late yesterday he’d veto any such bill, but Republicans should still press the issue as part of the election campaign. As for the 7.8% across-the-board sequester in domestic programs, this may be the only way to begin cutting a government that has grown by $600 billion in three years.
Much of the world, and especially the press corps, will look at this failure and wail about the “dysfunction” in Washington. And it is pathetic that Congress couldn’t agree to cut even a single dime from the projected $45 trillion in spending over 10 years. But this is the product of divided government and a clash of political visions. Unlike Bill Clinton in 1996, President Obama is unbowed by his party’s defeat in 2010 and is determined to reclaim his mandate to expand government next year.
Democrats are confident they can blame Republicans for the failure and ride their president’s class war campaign to victory. Republicans have to counter with a message of economic growth and sensible reforms of our government institutions so the U.S. doesn’t end up like Europe.
This is for voters to decide. Let’s have it out.
….but because spending’s so uncontrollably HIGH!
Next, Phil Kerpen, vice president for policy at Americans for Prosperity, tells us….
Why the Super Committee Deadlock Is a Victory, Not a Failure
It now appears the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (the “Super Committee”) will deadlock, resulting in automatic spending cuts of $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. Some are decrying this as a failure; I’m celebrating it as a victory. (As are we.) Clearly, much more must be done to cut federal spending and avert a fiscal crisis. But real spending cuts were never on the table. What was on the table was a disastrous tax hike that would have undermined our economic recovery and given Washington politicians even more money to spend, undermining the goal of cutting spending. (Raise your hand if you think any increase in revenue, whatever the source, will not be more than offset by increased spending.)
Republican House Leadership reportedly offered as much as $640B in tax hikes in the negotiations, contrary to political posturing from Democrats that Republicans were anti-tax absolutists (which they should have been). Even Senator Pat Toomey and Representative Jeb Hensarling, the most conservative members of the panel, offered $300 billion in net tax hikes, offering to do much more than “pay for” an extension of the Bush tax cuts with an itemized deduction phase-out that would have, among other things, limited the deductibility of charitable contributions and home mortgage interest.
The only thing that protected the American people from a large and extremely poorly-timed tax hike was Democrats’ unending hunger for more of our money. They rejected the big tax hikes the Republicans offered because they wanted even bigger tax hikes. (And as we all know, pigs get fat….hogs get slaughtered!)
Democrats never intended to do anything about the spending problem. In fact, they insisted on tax hikes of more than the $1.2 trillion deficit reduction mandate so they could increase spending by funding the president’s latest stimulus proposal.
Considering what the offer was on the table, news out of the Super Committee that they won’t report a package is a huge success.
Although it is not nearly enough to solve the impending fiscal disaster, the sequester mechanism is a Washington spending cut, or more precisely a reduction in expected spending increases. It is not the doomsday scenario some on the left (and even some on the right) claim. As economist Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute has explained, spending will still increase every year under the sequester (although more slowly), including increases in defense spending.
In the end, Democratic intransigence made clear that the only option to even modestly reduce the runaway growth of federal spending was to deadlock and trigger sequestration. Under the circumstances, we should celebrate the outcome. But not for very long, because there is much more work to do to cut federal spending and we need to keep the pressure on.
Then there’s this bit of perspicacious prognostication from AEI‘s Marc Thiessen:
Our super-pathetic debt super committee
For weeks, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction heard exhortations to “go big” and come up with a $4 trillion to $5 trillion debt reduction package. But committee members apparently couldn’t even agree on their mandated $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction — and it seems increasingly likely that they will now throw in the towel with no agreement at all.
This is, quite simply, pathetic.
The fact that both sides are deadlocked on entitlements and taxes is no excuse for failing to agree on any spending cuts whatsoever. If the supercommittee couldn’t find a way to “go big,” the very least it could do was “go small.” There are hundreds of billions in cuts that Democrats and Republicans could pocket without cutting entitlements or raising taxes. Failure to do so will make this one of the saddest displays of incompetence ever witnessed in Washington.
On Friday, Republicans offered a “go small” plan that would reduce the deficit by $640 billion — including a pay freeze and bigger pension contributions for federal workers, cuts in farm subsidies and other spending reductions. According to one GOP aide, this is “the lowest of the low-hanging fruit, stuff that everyone agrees on.” Republicans even gave in to one of the Democrats’ long-held demands, eliminating the special tax break for corporate jets, which would raise $3 billion in new taxes over 10 years.
The Democrats rejected the GOP offer. Sen. Patty Murray, Democratic co-chairman of the supercommittee, declared “it does not meet, even close to coming to meet, the issues that we set out from the beginning: fair and balanced.” Translation: Democrats won’t sign on to any spending cuts, no matter how modest, if Republicans do not agree to massive tax increases.
This makes no sense at all. The $1.2 billion sequester, which will go into effect if the supercommittee fails, is made up entirely of spending cuts, with no tax increases. Refusing to substitute some mutually agreed upon targeted cuts for the automatic, across-the-board cuts is ridiculous. (Again, an obvious byproduct of Dimocratic intransigence that the MSM hypocritically refuses to highlight.)
If the $640 billion in spending cuts Republicans proposed are unacceptable to the Democrats, why don’t they cut $400 billion? Or $200 billion? Or $100 billion? Something? Anything? Democrats seem intent on letting the supercommittee crash and burn rather than making a less-than-optimal emergency landing.
If the supercommittee fails, Republicans will rightly point out that they put two serious proposals on the table only to have Democrats reject both offers without ever putting forward a unified counter-proposal. They will note that, not only did Democrats reject the GOP’s “Plan B” offer last week, they also dismissed a proposal by Sen. Pat Toomey that included some $300 billion in tax increases. In making this offer, Toomey and his fellow Republicans crossed a line in the sand their party had drawn — risking a major backlash from the GOP rank-and-file and the conservative grassroots. But instead of accepting this concession in good faith and putting forward a serious counteroffer, Democrats immediately attacked it and demanded $1 trillion in tax increases — something to which they knew full well Republicans could never agree.
The result of this obstinacy is now clear: The supercommittee appears to be headed (In fact, always WAS!) toward failure. And this may be precisely what the Democrats want. With President Obama’s approval ratings in the tank, and their party poised to lose control of the Senate in 2012, Democrats know their only hope to stave off electoral disaster is to run a negative campaign that paints Republicans as intransigent extremists. They may have concluded that a bipartisan agreement on debt reduction — especially one in which the GOP agreed to hundreds of billions in tax increases — would undermine that narrative.
The problem is if the supercommittee fails to reach agreement on any spending cuts, the Democrats will not be able to blame Republican intransigence. It is the Democrats who have rejected every offer and every compromise Republicans put forward. If Democrats take time to reflect on this, perhaps they’ll discover at the last minute the virtue of “going small” — especially when the alternative may be “going home” courtesy of the voters next November.
Instead, the Dims went all in….with nary a pair in their hands….or in their shorts! And since the MSM appears to have forgotten, we’ll remind our audience it’s been some 937 days since the Dimocratic-controlled Senate passed a budget.
Meanwhile, Virginia Dimocrats, apparently unaware the jig is up, continue to employ the politics of the past:
Tie Goes to Loser? Virginia Democrats Lean Towards Yes
Virginia Democrats are preparing to file a lawsuit challenging the right of Republicans to seize a majority in an evenly divided Senate unless they agree to share power. (Where have we heard this before?)
Senate Democratic Leader Dick Saslaw and Sen. Don McEachin said Monday they will ask a court to decide whether Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling can cast the deciding vote in organizing the new Senate that takes office Jan. 11. Bolling and Senate GOP leaders said they will use Bolling to take over a majority, including the right to hold committee majorities and have Republicans head them.
McEachin says it’s unclear whether the lieutenant governor, who presides over the Senate, can vote on Senate organizational matters because he’s not a senator. The Democrats declined to discuss specifics about their proposed litigation.
Thankfully, at least for Virginia voters, John McCain is a U.S. senator from Arizona, and thus won’t be able to intercede on behalf of Dimocrats….yet again.
Speaking of those whose egos refuse to recognize when they’re not wanted….
Michelle Obama and Jill Biden Get Mixed Welcome at NASCAR Season Finale
I’m a Marxist, hear me roar!
First Lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden received a mixed welcome to NASCAR’s season-ending Ford 400 Sunday, where they served as grand marshals to help raise awareness for their “Joining Forces” initiative, which supports military families.
Scattered boos could be heard from the crowd as Obama and Biden were introduced and invited to give the traditional command, “Gentlemen, start your engines.”
According to the AP, “The White House says it was a chaotic event. It was not clear, perhaps, what the boos were specifically for.” Yeah….
In a related item, as Tim Carney, courtesy of Conn Carroll and the Morning Examiner, notes….
Newt Gingrich Was A Lobbyist, Plain and Simple
When Newt Gingrich says he never lobbied, he’s not telling the truth.
When he was a paid consultant for the drug-industry’s lobby group, Gingrich worked hard to persuade Republican congressmen to vote for the Medicare drug subsidy that the industry favored. To deny Gingrich was a lobbyist requires an Obama-like word parsing over who is and who isn’t a lobbyist. (Or, perhaps more accurately, “Clintonesque”!)
Gingrich stated last week on Fox News, “I do no lobbying of any kind. I never have. A very important point to make. I have never done lobbying of any kind.” But the facts contradict that claim.
First of all, we know that Gingrich has been paid by drug companies and by the drug lobby, notably during the Medicare drug debate. A former employee of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, (the main industry lobby) told me Gingrich was being paid by someone in the industry at the time. A spokeswoman for Gingrich’s health care consulting firm, Center for Health Transformation, told me that drug companies have been CHT clients. PhRMA confirmed in a statement that they had paid Gingrich. Bloomberg News cited sources from leading drug companies Astra-Zeneca and Pfizer saying that those companies had also hired Gingrich.
So we know he was paid consultant for drug makers. That’s the first criterion for being a drug lobbyist.
Here’s the second criterion: While some consultants simply provide strategy or advice, Gingrich directly contacted lawmakers in an effort to win their votes.
Three former Republican congressional staffers told me that Gingrich was calling around Capitol Hill and visiting Republican congressmen in 2003 in an effort to convince conservatives to support a bill expanding Medicare to include prescription-drug subsidies. Conservatives were understandably wary about expanding a Lyndon Johnson-created entitlement that had historically blown way past official budget estimates. Drug makers, on the other hand, were positively giddy about securing a new pipeline of government cash to pad their already breathtaking profit margins.
One former House staffer told me of a 2003 meeting hosted by Rep. Jack Kingston where Gingrich spoke. Kingston would regularly host “Theme Team” meetings with a few Republican congressmen and some of their staff. Just before the House vote, Gingrich was the special guest at this meeting, and he brought one message to the members: Pass the drug bill for the good of the Republican Party.
Conservatives were worried about the potential for cost overruns, and about the credibility of their limited-government arguments if they passed this new entitlement bill. “Every concern that members raised,” the former House staffer told me, “Gingrich would respond with a poll number.” Gingrich invoked the American Express motto “Don’t Leave Home Without It,” and told Republicans they could not afford to go home for recess without some Medicare drug bill — regardless of the content. (Does this remind anyone else of Nancy the Red’s talking points for passing Obamascare?!?)
Two aides to other GOP members who had been resisting the bill told me their bosses were lobbied by Gingrich over the phone, sometimes citing politics, sometimes citing substance. And it worked. “Newt Gingrich moved votes on the prescription-drug bill,” one conservative staffer told me. “That’s for sure.”
Contemporaneous reporting confirms this: The Washington Post reported in 2003 that Gingrich addressed a closed-door meeting of conservative Republicans, pushing them to back the bill.
So Gingrich can be considered a non-lobbyist only by the same narrow definition of “lobbyist” President Obama uses: someone registered with the House and Senate under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. This is how Obama can claim to reject lobbyist contributions while taking money from vice presidents of government affairs and the like.
But that still doesn’t excuse Gingrich’s false statement that he has “never done lobbying.”
The law that defines “lobbyist” also defines “lobbying activity,” which includes all “lobbying contacts.” Someone makes a “lobbying contact” when he makes “any oral, written or electronic communication to a covered official [such as a congressman] that is made on behalf of a client with regard to … the formulation, modification, or adoption of Federal legislation.”
So if Gingrich is going to rely on a legalism to claim he’s not a lobbyist, that same legalism defines him as engaged in “lobbying,” which he has denied.
His only conceivable out: Yes, he was a consultant helping drug companies pass this bill, but when he was persuading conservatives to back the bill, that was on his own time, and out of his own personal convictions — and it had nothing to do with the drug industry cash he was receiving at the time.
Are you ready to believe this about Gingrich?
About as much as we believe Der Schlickmeister “didn’t have sexual relations with that woman”!
And since we’re on the subject of lying pieces of human excrement, Best of the Web reports….
“Democratic Sen. John Kerry launched a broadside against fellow Massachusetts politician Mitt Romney on Sunday, calling him a flip-flopper,” Politico reports. To be sure, Romney is vulnerable to the charge of flip-floppery, but coming from the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who by the way served in Vietnam? Even Kerry seems to have been dimly aware that was rich:
Kerry, who was famously accused of flip-flopping during his 2004 presidential campaign by President George W. Bush, contrasted his flip-flop on the Iraq War with Republican Romney’s evolution on the issues.
“I did it as a matter of principle,” Kerry said. “I’ll defend that until the day I die. He’s going to have to defend his positions throughout this race if he’s the nominee.”
So there’s the difference between the two Bay Staters: Romney flip-flops out of political expedience or necessity. Kerry flip-flops as a matter of principle.
Turning to the Environmental Moment, James Taranto once again highlights the hypocrisy of the Climatescammers:
“He is the climate change minister who pledged to ‘lead by example’ in the fight against global warming,” reports London’s Daily Mail:
But Charles Hendry is facing accusations of hypocrisy after buying himself a 20-bedroom castle–with a potentially massive carbon footprint–as a second home.
Blair Castle in Ayrshire, which went on the market for £2.5million [about $3.9 million], has three storeys, 16 bathrooms and a heated outdoor swimming pool set in 260 acres of beautiful countryside.
It is likely to rack up colossal energy bills during the cold Scottish winter if Mr Hendry plans to heat all 14 bedrooms, two kitchens and four reception rooms in the main castle.
Just like Al Gore. Of course, it’s unfair to judge global warmism by the behavior of politicians. But what about scientists? Blogger Anthony Wattsreports that NASA’s James Hansen, father of global warmist alarmism, has been cashing in:
NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to–and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for–his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.
This does not include six-figure income over that period in travel expenses to fly around the world to receive money from outside interests. As specifically detailed below, Hansen failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in global travel provided to him by outside parties–including to London, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Tokyo, the Austrian Alps, Bilbao, California, Australia and elsewhere, often business or first-class and also often paying for his wife as well–to receive honoraria to speak about the topic of his taxpayer-funded employment, or get cash awards for his activism and even for his past testimony and other work for NASA.
Ethics laws require that such payments or gifts be reported on an SF278 public financial disclosure form. . . . Hansen nonetheless regularly refused to report this income.
Nice work if you can get it.
Which begs two question:why is Hanson still employed, and what precisely must a government employee do to warrant termination?!? Or, put another way, what….
….CAN’T they do?!?
On the Lighter Side….
Then there’s this photo funny from John Cotton confirming Navy has finally hired three new coaches to address the obvious flaws in it’s kicking game:
And in another startling story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter….
Florida School Calls Police After 12-Year-Olds Kiss on Playground
A school administrator in Florida called the sheriff after a pair of consenting 12-year-olds shared a kiss on the playground. Lee County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to Orange River Elementary School after two female students were debating over who liked a 12-year-old boy more. At that point, one of the girls walked over and kissed the boy – leading an assistant principal to call authorities.
The administrator initially contacted the Florida Dept. of Children and Families. However, DCF told the school that they needed to call local law enforcement. “They called us and said they caught two children kidding on the playground,” Sgt. Stephanie Eller told Fox News & Commentary. “The reality is it was probably something innocent between two kids on the playground.”
Gee….ya think?!?
Finally, in a related item, James Taranto again informs us….
“Seattle Mariners outfielder Greg Halman was stabbed to death early Monday and his brother was arrested as a suspect,” the Associated Press reports. It happened in the Netherlands:
Rotterdam Police spokeswoman Patricia Wessels said police were called to a home in the port city in the early hours of the morning and found the 24-year-old Dutch player bleeding from a stab wound. The officers and ambulance paramedics were unable to resuscitate Halman.
Wessels said the officers arrested Halman’s 22-year-old brother. She declined to give his name, in line with Dutch privacy rules.
She declined to give his name, but she gave his age and his relationship with the famous victim. It seems “Dutch privacy rules” have something in common with Dutch treats and Dutch courage.
We’ll drink to that!
Magoo
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