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September 2007
In the 2000 election, it was a tricky path for Democrat Al Gore to navigate, figuring out how closely he should identify himself with President Clinton, and to what degree he should seek to distance himself.
It's even trickier for Republicans leading up to the 2008 election, because their lame duck President is unpopular, and I don't mean only with Democrats. Republicans are pretty much looking forward to seeing Bush go, even while admiring his tax cuts and the noteworthy way he handled the response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
In fact, it's commonly felt that it's time for Republican candidates to start distancing themselves from the Bush administration, albeit in a judicious way so as to not alienate the loyal Republican voter.
Republicans in Congress have the same problem. They need to carefully and selectively distance themselves from an unpopular President while not appearing disloyal.
The trick is to find a place where the President has done something or taken a position that will be unpopular with his core constituency. By differing with the President on such an issue, you show greater loyalty to the ideals of the movement than even he apparently has. But you need the President to go off the reservation on something for this opportunity to open.
Well, good news to you all. The Bush administration has just given you all a tremendous gift. This administration (more particularly its inept policy process) has just handed right-thinking Republicans everywhere, at all levels of government, a golden opportunity to distance from the Bush administration. Read More...
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I'm not a big reader of Business Week, but when I got home from Geneva I found a column from the Oct. 1 edition of Business Week on my desk, put there no doubt by my colleague Bartlett Cleland, who shares my view of the Fed's recent actions.
This column, by Vitaliy Katsenelson, gets it exactly right. The Fed has inflated the entire economy, which punishes not only every American but also the productive citizens of other nations as well. And the Fed has done this to protect the Christmas bonuses of about 1,000 Wall Street bankers, who willingly took risks in exchange for higher returns, but apparently can't stomach it when the "risk" part of the risk/reward equation shows up.
Notice that we didn't start taking action when families were getting kicked out of their houses. No, we took action when politically-connected Wall Streeters saw their bonuses in danger. It just goes to show that the system works for the wealthy and well-connected, and the little guy gets stomped over.
Yes, I'm a Republican and a free-marketer. But people like me, who tend to defend the system and capitalism, have a particular burden to be honest and point it out when corruption (yes, I mean that word) is going on. Read More...
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With the GOP up to it ears in S-Chips and Continuing-Resolution Season soon upon us again, I’ve been reflecting back on the many missteps and missed opportunities since Republicans took control of the federal government in the name of the Conservative Movement. The more I sifted the ashes of failed Republicanism—especially where controlling the growth of government is concerned—the higher my blood pressure rose.
Then serenity descended as it dawned on me, politicians are like dogs: You can’t really hold politicians anymore responsible for their uncivilized habits, greedy pilfering and violent behavior than you do a dog that fouls the house of his master, attacks the neighbors and bites the hand that feeds him. It’s the nature of the beast.
We voters are politicians’ masters, and if they continue to behave badly, it is our own fault for not bringing them to heel and training them properly and constraining the environment they inhabit. Where is Cesar the Dog Whisperer when you need him to teach us how to get these politicians who are ruining our lives under control? Maybe Cesar could write a new book called the Politician Whisperer and hold some training sessions for voters to get the mangy curs under control. Read More...
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This image is circulating a bit under the radar on a few Marxist listservs. In fairness, it's a joke.
But the reason someone went to the trouble of creating this image is because they really think that something like this, if not to this degree, is what broadband companies want to do. They probably don't think that broadband companies would ever go to this degree, but secretly, when broadband guys go out for drinks after work and let their hair down, this is the kind of think they talk about that they'd REALLY like to do--limit customers options.
If you click here, a larger version of the graphic should load.
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Read George Pieler and Dr. Larry Hunter’s new oped in The Hill this week making the case for a national solution to insurance regulation reform in "Avoiding A Stormy Future of State Insurance Regulation."
With concerns over climate change making waves, the authors take note of how Florida’s state policies greatly discourage competition for the insurance industry. Pieler and Hunter encourage Congress to look thoughtfully at this issue as pending Optional Federal Charter proposal is udnerway, and to ensure that the rest of the country doesn’t follow Florida’s example.
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Has the Country Done Enough for the Katrina Victims?
Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says yes, if the money actually got to them.
The second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has come and gone with the country doing a lot of collective hand wringing. Did the government do enough for the New Orleans victims?
The Bush administration says the country has spent $127 billion trying to fix the broken city and the broken lives. Plenty of people say that’s not enough.
But Larry Kudlow, host of Kudlow and Company, says if you divide that number by the 300,000 people living in New Orleans, it comes out to about $425,000 per person. It would have been easier, and cheaper, just to write each of the victims a check.
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 Has the Country Done Enough for the Katrina Victims? |
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Late last week, I wrote a commentary on this blog that concluded:
“Give Hillary credit for her political wiles—she is positioning herself to hoist the Republicans on their own petard, stealing their ill-conceived ideas and making it increasingly difficult for even a Republican majority (which few people believe will return in 2008 anyway) to resist. Hillary’s new [health care] plan is really just a refinement and extension of the framework Republicans have pieced together during the past several years. . .Why is anyone surprised that Hillary is about to beat the Republicans at their own game and make them an offer they can’t refuse? It would be funny if the consequences weren’t going to be so gruesome.”
Now comes confirmation of exactly what I said. Read More...
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In listening to all the experts pro and con on whether the President should veto the SCHIP bill two issues remain virtually undiscussed.
First this is a tax increase. It really doesn't matter what the tax is on, the fact remains that it is a tax increase. One thing that President Bush Senior learned was that when you say you're not going to raise taxes the public tends to take you at your word and gets very testy when you renege on that promise. If you don't believe that check the 1992 election results.
President Bush Junior understands that and is passionate about his opposition to any increases in taxes. And anyway what's wrong with vetoing on principle? No he hasn't vetoed any fiscal legislation for his first six years but we should applaud his resolve even late in his presidency
The second point is about expectations. When you finance a program like children's health insurance on a tax for which there is likely to be a reduction in revenue over time due to a decrease in the use of the base that is taxed - i.e. tobacco - then somewhere along the line you are going to have to find a revenue replacement. It doesn't matter whether there is enough revenue for the next five years (according to the Congressional Budgeting Office), sooner or later this revenue source -- tobacco taxes--is going to dissipate -- like tobacco smoke! Congress is certainly not going to say, "Sorry kids there's been a reduction in smoking so we don't have enough money to fund your health insurance!" It'll never happen. Read More...
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I have already described the accusations of financial mismanagement that are going on right now at WIPO, and I have pointed you to an article by Claudia Rossett which was published in National Review.
At the end of Claudia's article, she mentions that WIPO's budget is largely paid for by private funds. In fact, almost all of WIPO's budget is paid for by companies through the fees they pay for patent applications through the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), which WIPO administers.
Because patent filings are up, WIPO actually enjoys a budget surplus. Because of the financial mismanagement concerns, no one is comfortable with WIPO sitting on top of a big budget surplus. It is likely that budget surpluses will be spent wastefully or counterproductively.
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I'm in Geneva at the annual General Assemblies of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
The trouble is, so far there is precious little going on here on intellectual property issues. Later this week the wake will be held for the Broadcast Treaty. The other thing that's going to happen later this week is the beginning of the end of the world intellectual property system with the adoption of the "Development Agenda," which will turn WIPO into an agency that promotes exceptions and limitations to the IP system, rather than promoting the IP system.
If you want to get up-to-speed about the WIPO Development Agenda, or at least up-to-speed on my take on the Development Agenda, there's plenty of stuff on this website. Just do a search on "development agenda" using the blog's search engine.
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Today’s edition of Roll Call features IPI President Tom Giovanetti firing back at Consumer Electronics Association President Gary Shapiro’s attack in last week’s oped “Time for Think Tank Funding Disclosure.”
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” says Giovanetti, regarding a new IPI piracy study disclosing the grave economic damages caused by global music piracy.
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The Strong-Willed Child
You know how children, especially the strong-willed ones, will occasionally decide to test the will and determination of their parents, just to see how much they can get away with?
Well, that’s pretty much where we are on the bill reauthorizing and greatly expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
When children decide to test parental determination, they will push an issue right up to the line, maybe even go over the line just a little, to see if the parent stands firm or caves. And if the child thinks he or she is losing, look for him to try and elicit the support of the other parent, in an effort to pit parent against parent. Divided they fall.
What’s at stake in these trials usually isn’t some moral principle. The issue is power, not principle. Read More...
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Generals tend to fight the last war and politicians are predisposed to run against the historical records of their opponents. Thus, it is not surprising to see Republican candidates for the presidency beginning to run against “HillaryCare” in response to Senator Hillary Clinton’s recently released national health care proposal.
No matter what newspaper or web site you open these days there seems to be another conservative critique of Hillary’s new health care proposal that condemns it by associating it with the Senator’s 1994 plan. A welcome exception to this proclivity is Kevin Hassett’s recent critique that, for the most part, confines the analysis to Clinton’s current plan.
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Read Peter Ferrara’s new oped in National Review Online today calling for the veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
Ferrara challenges the President to make good on his pledge to veto expansion of SCHIP, a program Ferrara says was created supposedly to help poor children get health insurance, but now would “finance subsidies to families earning as much as $82,000 a year.”
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IPI Senior Research Fellow George Pieler is joined by International Affairs Forum editor-in-chief Jens Laurson in a new oped featured in South Africa’s Business Day.
Pieler and Laurson discuss how the most important effort to bringing reform to Zimbabwe’s political scene are needed from African neighbors, rather than the US and UK.
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And Now a Word from our Sponsors
In a few weeks the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will hold a town hall meeting to examine the public policy issues involved in “online behavioral advertising.”
The FTC describes online behavioral advertising as “involv[ing] the collection of information about a consumer’s activities online – including the searches the consumer has conducted, the Web pages visited, and the content the consumer has viewed. The information is then used to target advertising to the consumer that is intended to reflect the consumer’s interests, and thus increase the effectiveness of the advertising.” Sounds like a consumer benefit.
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Read George Pieler and Jens Laurson’s new oped appearing today on CNET.
In the piece, the author duo discusses how members of the European Parliament have moved to cap roaming charges for their mobile phone usage throughout the Continent.
Say George and Jens:
This is convenient for those who travel and chat a lot, but it's not actually good for the majority of consumers or the long-term health of the telecom industry.
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Is NASA Misleading the Public About Global Warming?
Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says tracking global warming ain’t rocket science.
NASA scientist James Hansen has gotten lots of attention for his claim that most of the 10 hottest years have occurred since 1990.
However, a blogger recently discovered an error in those calculations, which has put the heat on NASA. The space agency now claims that:
- The hottest year on record was 1934, not 1998;
- The third hottest year was 1921, not 2006; and
- Three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940.
Thus while global warming might still be a problem, the warming trend apparently started before the real expansion of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions.
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Is NASA Misleading the Public About Global Warming? |
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While reading the Wall Street Journal's editorial on the flap over wiretapping, I noticed a passing reference to the now well-understood fact that long distance telephony can be switched for any call, at any place and in any direction. Acall from Peshawar, Pakistan, to Beirut, Lebanon, might easily travel over a fiber-optic cable that passes through the United States.
What occurred to me is that telephone switching (as in distribution and transmission) is obviously no longer of intra-state concern. Ergo, we should seriously look at state public utility commissions jurisdiction as a relic of the past.
Do state PUC's really have any business engaging in regulation of distribution and transmission of exchange service? Are digital communications geographically confined within any political jurisdiction?
In a digital environment the answer is clearly no. Read More...
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Warning, sarcasm ahead:
Yeah, piracy is a good thing, and only hurts those rich greedheads in the recording industry. What we should do to help developing African countries grow their economies is to obliterate this anachronism of intellectual property and start just giving all music away, because "information wants to be free," right?
Ghanaian Chronicle - AAGM: Country Loses U.S. $ 3.7 Million, Jobs to Music Piracy.
Joseph Coomson
18 September 2007
Ghanaian Chronicle Piracy of recorded music costs Ghana, sound and video recording industries billions of cedis in lost revenue and profits. These losses, however, represent only a fraction of the impact of recorded music piracy on the Ghanaian economy as a whole. Combining the latest data on nationwide piracy of recorded music and study done by Musicians Union of Ghana (MUSIGA) have reveal that piracy costs Ghanaian workers significant losses in jobs and earnings, and government, substantial lost tax revenue. Read More...
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Memo to my supply-side friends
Subject: The bailout goes on, and the price of gold is trying to tell you something urgently
Yesterday, the Fed cut the overnight fed funds rate by a half point to 4 ¾ percent and dropped the discount rate that banks pay to borrow money directly from the Fed to 5 ¼ percent, thus maintaining the rare small half-point spread between the two rates and continuing the unusual policy of allowing banks up to 30 days to repay discount-window loans with the right to renew those loans automatically. Yesterday’s move constituted the first formal policy change by the FOMC since it raised rates in June 2006, which then culminated a two-year gradual increase in the short-term rate from 1.0 percent to 5 ¼ percent that had begun in June, 2004.
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Read Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy Peter Ferrara’s latest oped today in National Review Online.
In the piece, Ferrara speaks out against Hillary’s health care initiative, saying her proposal would ration health care and “end any real private insurance in America”.
An excerpt:
The new Hillary health-care plan is very different from the old 1993-1994 Hillary plan. It is far slyer, and far cleverer, far more well-packaged. The same arguments that applied to the old Hillary plan do not necessarily apply to the new plan. But the new health plan ends up in the same place as the old health plan — with the government running everything.
Visit NRO to read the entire article. Read More...
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Is Earmark Reform Much Ado about Nothing?
No, but it does need to be better understood.
There is a growing frustration among conservatives that congressional spending is out of control. We share that frustration.
And nothing highlights Congress’ free-spending ways better than the battle over earmarks, special tags that dedicate money in the federal budget to this or that specific—and often ludicrous—spending project.
However, there appears to be a widespread presumption that if an earmark—such as that one for the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”—is canceled, that means a reduction in overall federal spending. In other words, people think an earmark eliminated is federal money saved.
If only it were so. Read More...
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In today’s Washington Post, Bob Novak reports on something we have known for some time now about Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel’s plans to parlay the future AMT crisis into left-wing tax “reform”.
Unlike the Republican Ways and Means chairmen over the previous 12 years, Rangel has a comprehensive tax strategy and a tactical game plan.
We agree with Novak that there are enough blocks in the legislative process available to conservatives to check Rangel’s gambit this year:
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Time to Make the Internet Tax Moratorium Permanent
For the fourth time in nine years Congress is again struggling with whether taxes that discriminate against electronic commerce should be allowed. Also, for the fourth time Congress is struggling over whether access to the Internet should be burdened with an additional layer of taxation—placing a discriminatory tax on just accessing the Internet. This debate has been popularly referred to as the Internet tax debate.
These arguments are trotted out every couple of years because Congress has never been able to bring itself to say no to any tax, even if blatantly discriminatory, for more than a couple years at a time—almost as if the members of Congress think that sooner or later discrimination will be okay.
And yes the debate really is that easy. Read More...
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Who Likes a Progressive Income Tax?
The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says not the formerly communist countries.
Karl Marx’s vision of a socialist society included a progressive income tax, where higher income people pay not just more tax, but higher rates on their income.
Ironically, while the U.S. and Western Europe tend to embrace capitalism, they adopted Marx’s progressive income tax. Yet nine of the East European and formerly communist countries have abandoned it for a flat tax, where only one tax rate is applied to all income.
And now Bulgaria and the Czech Republic are considering joining the flat taxers with a single 10 percent rate.
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Who Likes A Progressive Income Tax? |
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| Well once again, Gary North is right on the money in his commentary on the Fed with two important exceptions. First, he continues to rail against fractional-reserve banking, which only confuses matters: If you haven't heard about how fractional reserve banking allows commercial banks to expand the money supply and collect interest by lending the newly created money, you need to re-read the section on banking in your college textbook in economics. As I discussed in an earlier commentary “The Moral Hazard of Central Banking”, fractional-reserve banking isn’t the source of the problem; it is a natural outgrowth of private banking, and the only way to prevent it in a free market would be to pass a law against it. Read More...
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Government Regulation--The Real "Handcuffs"
There has been some complaining lately about the business models of the wireless companies—mostly driven by those who want to own an Apple iPhone, but who don’t want to be tied to AT&T as a service provider.
A recent story in USA Today picked up this theme, highlighting complaints about “handcuffs” on choices of hand sets and contract requirements. Their implied logical solution, of course, is for government to step in and lay a heavy hand of regulation on wireless providers.
What the story failed to note, of course, is that the wireless industry in the U.S. is pleasing consumers and growing like gangbusters in the process. Read More...
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Where Have All the Wealthy French Gone?
The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says to countries with lower taxes.
New French President Nicolas Sarkozy has a message for rich French citizens who have fled the country: We want you back.
According to a Bloomberg News story, the French don’t like or trust the rich. One well-known French author once wrote, “Behind every great fortune lies a crime.”
In order to punish the rich for, well, being successful, the French government imposed a “fortune tax” in 1981. That led to some half a million of the wealthiest French citizens moving to countries like Belgium, Switzerland and the U.S.
Now Sarkozy has proposed eliminating most inheritance taxes and modifying the fortune tax to lure the rich back to revive the struggling French economy. Read More...
Where Have All the Wealthy French Gone? |
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Check out Peter Ferrara's new oped published today on Forbes.com.
Ferrara examines not only the current push towards a national health care system, substantiated by the Democrats' move to double the amount of federal spending on SCHIP, but also discusses the positive moves Congress should make to reduce federal spending on health care.
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President Bush, who last week announced some modest measures to ease the burden of avoiding foreclosure for some sub-prime mortgage holders (principally those who are most likely to prove creditworthy, and stay in good payment status in the long term), does not impress Barack Obama. The Senator from Illinois got great media play for his August 29 Financial Times column, blasting various industries for having "forced" folks into accepting (presumably unwanted?) credit they couldn’t handle.
Still, once one gets past Sen. Obama’s blazing rhetoric against Predatory Lending, one is relieved to find that he doesn’t really want to deny less wealthy (and more risky) candidates for mortgages the miracle of home ownership. Instead, he just wants to federalize fraud actions against mortgage lenders, collect some fines (how to prove fraud is left to unidentified experts, which sounds dangerously like designated IRS-type officials to go bounty-hunting for Unscrupulous Lenders) and standardize the information disclosed to prospective borrowers before they close on a loan. Read More...
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In his September 2, 2007 Wall Street Journal Commentary “On the Road”, John Seemens contends the current “carnage” on American highways could be reduced significantly if the insurance industry were conscripted into the regulatory army of the state and required to license drivers and certify the safety of vehicles before they are allowed on the road. Unfortunately, this ersatz privatization scheme, like so many so-called “contracting out” schemes, simply force or bribe individuals, businesses or industries to become agents of the government. Ersatz privatization possesses few of the virtues of true privatization but exhibits most of the drawbacks of government bureaucracy, with a lot more potential for graft and corruption than either pure bureaucracy or private markets.
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California Scheming
Back in California, things are heating up between the big-spending Republican governor, who wants a massive new health care program that will cost taxpayers an estimated $12 billion to get “universal health care,” and the big-spending Democrat-controlled legislature that wants to require employers to spend at least 7.5 percent of payroll on health insurance or pay that amount into a state pool (known as a “pay or play” provision).
Where all of this will end is anybody’s guess at this point. But the only thing that will save California taxpayers from their elected representatives will be a political stalemate.
See, in California it takes a two-thirds vote in the legislature to pass a tax increase. Read More...
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When is the last time anyone saw a "reach out and touch someone" advertisement from AT&T touting their long distance services? [And the under thirty group responds, "What is long distance service?"]
The FCC has now caught up to what the rest of America has known for over a decade. The segmentation of local and long distance services in wireline is not necessary.
The FCC has announced that the former Bell companies no longer have to maintain artificial distinctions and firewalls between their long-distance operations and their main operations.
Hooray. It's about time.
The truth is that there are more wireless subscribers in America than wireline (have been since the end of 2004 and the separation is growing!) and virtually all of those wireless callers have calling plans that do not differentiate between calls based on distance.
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Author: Tom Giovanetti || Location: Lewisville, Texas, USA