Monthly Archives: November 2011

Progressives: Republicans, Economy, Take a Hike

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Republicans on the Super Committee, that Congressional facility charged with finding a deficit-cutting compromise for the welfare of our nation as a whole, have offered their ProgressiveDemocratic party counterparts $500 billion in revenue increases, including $300 billion from plugging loopholes in the present tax code.  This represents a significant move away from the Republicans’ spending cuts only push, a move made in an effort to save the talks and our economy.

Those Democrats, though, have dismissively rejected the compromise offer without any serious consideration.  For instance, we have Senator Patty Murray (D, WA):

I have yet to see a real, credible plan that raises revenue in a significant way to bring us to a fair, balanced proposal.

And Senator John Kerry (D, MA):

They’re anxious to promote a certain concept with all of you.  I’ll be very clear that whatever they put there doesn’t get the job done.

With this knee-jerk, offer not to be taken seriously, rebuff, the Progressives have, once again, demonstrated lack of interest in compromise.

The Democrats refuse to close loopholes; that would jeopardize their own tax shenanigans (“green” energy subsidies, for instance, and loan programs for failing, but connected, “green” energy companies).  Instead, the Democrats insist on wholesale tax rate increases, particularly on Progressive-disfavored groups.  The Democrats insist on prosecuting their class warfare, trying to pit American against American for no better reason than their own personal political gain.  And they don’t care a whit about the damage to our economy their intransigence or their taxes cause, if they can get that.

What’s Missing?

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Spiegel Online International writes

There is a lack of alternatives to Berlusconi in Italy. The left has spent years criticizing the prime minister, making fun of his dyed hair and of his philandering — but they forgot to present a political program of their own. The Berlusconi phenomenon, which has caused mystification outside of Italy, is the result of this weakness. Berlusconi is a joke. But behind him is a void.

The Republicans threaten their chance for success in 2012 with a similar failure.  There is a critical difference, though, between their position and the Berlusconi opposition: the Republicans actually have a plan—or rather subsets of a plan.

The Republicans have a budget, passed by the House of Representatives, that makes a serious start at addressing our budget deficit and national debt problems, even if its effects generally show up in later years.  The Republicans have several bills that address in the immediate term the existing employment crisis that, as much as the existing debt crisis*, stands in the way of any serious economic recovery, all passed by the House of Representatives.  The Republicans have a partial answer to Obamacare, having passed its repeal in the House of Representatives.

But the Republicans have failed to do a number of things that are critical to their success.  They have not put these various subsets together into a coherent plan, at least not in any way that the public has heard.  They have not pushed the fact that Obama’s “do-nothing Republican Congress” is, in fact, a do-nothing Obama/Reid Senate, where that budget has languished to the point of functional expiration (it was for the 2011 fiscal year), nor have they pushed the fact that their 15 jobs-related bills are languishing in that same do-nothing Obama/Reid Senate.  Nor have the Republicans pushed the fact that, in both cases, the refusal to act is because Reid and Obama are so terrified of them that Reid won’t even allow the bills to be discussed on the floor of the Senate, much less let them come up for a vote.  The Republicans also have not offered an alternative to Obamacare beyond niggling around the edges (“repeal and replace” is a medicine man’s chant): their budget only sought to tweak Social Security and to convert Medicare from a defined benefit program to a defined contribution program.

All of these flow from the biggest—and entirely too typical—Republican failure: their inability to get their message out.  They’ve ceded, once again, the information high ground to the Progressives.  Republicans explain their moves only with sound bites in the immediate moment; even their criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy performance are limited to one-offs, such as this one by Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC).  Thus, it is a “do-nothing Republican Congress,” the Republicans are painted as having no alternative to Obamacare beyond going back to the “failed policies of the past,” the Republicans are painted as being anti-jobs as they continually block the Obama/Reid tax and spend bills that are labeled by them “jobs.” The Progressives don’t even have to speak of their foreign policy failures.

What’s missing, then, are two things.  The Republicans need to unify their message.  What is their overall plan for recovering our economy and our standing in the world?  How do their budget (I presume the House will pass another Ryan-like plan for the coming fiscal year) and jobs bills support this overall plan?  How does repeal of Obamacare support this?  What do they intend to replace Obamacare with (the status quo ante is vastly better, but it’s badly broken itself)?  How does their overall plan enhance individual liberty and responsibility, and how does it reduce the size and reach of government?

The second thing the Republicans need to do is understand—and then act on that understanding—that they need to get their word out repeatedly, often, in a steady drumbeat.  They can’t succeed with only short, one time interviews and quick sound bite pressers following a vote in Congress.  The Progressives understand the need for constantly talking to Americans.  Obama’s left-populist message is motivated by that understanding, and being the only message on the bulletin boards, it’s having the (Progressive) desired effect.

The Republicans—and not just the leadership; all Republicans—need to get out on the hustings, get onto the NLMSM TV and radio talk shows, frequently and steadily.  And when reporters ask them a misleading or loaded question, these Republicans need to push back, point out the distortions in the question, and then answer the real question.  And if the NLMSM publishes inaccurate edits of the interviews, the Republicans need to point that out, also, and publish their own, unedited, copies of those interviews.

The Republicans also need to move away from the NLMSM as their primary outlet.  “Non-traditional” outlets are powerful venues for reaching all Americans.  The social media (Facebook, yahoo!, and Twitter are just some examples, podcasts can be a powerful tool) are powerful messaging mechanisms with the whole of the United States for their audience.  Americans also are moving away from print newspapers and reading the online news outlets (The Daily Caller, The Weekly Standard, National Journal are examples); Republicans need to talk to these outlets early and often.

*As an aside, our debt crisis is a borrowing demand problem, driven by that lack of employment, as much as it is a borrowing supply one.

GPS Tracking, Privacy, and the Government

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Today, the Supreme Court began hearing a case, United States v Jones, concerning among other things, whether the police need a warrant to plant a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car: is doing so without a warrant a violation of the suspect’s 4th Amendment rights? Is even the mere use of such a device a violation of the suspect’s 4th Amendment rights?

The government makes the following arguments, among others:

the device “did not meaningfully interfere” with Jones’s property rights, because it didn’t affect the Jeep’s gas mileage, drivability or other characteristics.

and

using technology to enhance surveillance, without a warrant, was condoned in the 1983 case United States v. Knotts, a case in which police hid a beeper in a vehicle to track a suspect.

These arguments seem deficient to me.  With regard to the first, it’s disingenuous. A telephone wiretap placed on a person’s telephone system doesn’t “meaningfully interfere” with a person’s property rights, because it doesn’t affect the telephone’s clarity of speech communication, dialability or other characteristics, either, yet a warrant is required.

On the other hand, requiring a warrant to place a GPS tracker on a person’s car won’t meaningfully interfere with the government’s investigation any more than the warrant does in placing a tap on a person’s telephone.

The second argument is equally disingenuous; it’s just a Brandeis-ian excuse to perpetuate judicial error and the ensuing injustice.  Further, the argument is nothing more than a cynical red herring.  The government knew, in Jones, that a warrant would be necessary for this sort of surveillance; they had, in fact, gotten one.  They’d just let it expire before they acted on it, and then the GPS tracker was planted outside the warrant’s jurisdiction: in a Maryland parking lot, rather than in DC, where the warrant had been issued.

The Court, on the other hand, asks these questions.

How does technology change traditional law enforcement?

and

Could [police] get the same information from 30 deputies [devoted to surveillance]?  What you’re saying is police have to use the most inefficient methods.

and

…how are peoples’ privacy expectations [changing] as technology changes….  Technology is changing people’s expectation of privacy.

The answer to the first question is clear: it does not change it at all.  The Constitutional limits and authorities concerning police surveillance and investigation remain entirely intact.  All that changes is police’s capability to operate—still within those traditional limits and authorities.

As to the second question, no, we’re not.  We’re saying get a warrant for the activity, and then (properly) use the most efficient methods at your disposal.  The need for a warrant to do these things is both unchanged and technology agnostic.  Just execute it without the idle delays that led to the original warrant, in Jones, for instance, expiring before the surveillance was carried out.  As I noted above, getting the warrant only interferes with the police’s “methods” if the investigation isn’t…warranted…in the first place.

Additionally, the convenience of the government is not an excuse for abridging individual liberties.  The convenience of the government is limited by our Constitution to 17 enumerated powers, and nothing else.  Just to saucer and blow this, our Constitution also notes that the contents of that “nothing else” are explicitly reserved to the States and to the People.

As to the third question, it shows a misunderstanding of privacy.  Privacy remains the property and the business of the individual, independently of the technology available with which to penetrate that privacy.  Most especially, privacy is not something our government will choose to allow according to its convenience and magnanimity.  Indeed, the fact that there is an ongoing hue and cry over the abuses of our privacy by the various social media and the various cell phone software providers demonstrates that, even in today’s technologically-driven openness capability, we still demand our individual privacy be respected.

America’s Future—Foreign Policy Principles, Part I

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In the next few posts on America’s future, I’ll explore what our foreign policy should entail if we’re to have a successful future as a nation.  In order to identify that policy, though, it’s necessary to understand our purpose, and what our principles are, in the conduct of our foreign policy.  Accordingly, in this post and the next, I’ll talk about our necessary foreign policy principles.  In a later post, I’ll discuss what a foreign policy structure might be that would make our efforts more efficient and more effective in satisfying these principles.  Note that this will not be a restructuring of our Department of State, but of the principles that State should satisfy.

The purpose of our government is to protect our individual, inalienable rights; the purpose of our foreign policy must be to support that on the global stage.  Thus, our primary foreign policy principles must be those things that, if satisfied, serve that purpose and thereby enhance our government’s ability to satisfy its domestic purpose.  These foreign policy principles, then, will be those things that address foreign impediments to our government’s purpose while those impediments are small and overseas, and so neutralize them before they become problems for us at home.

What are these principles that are the extra-domestic support of our government’s purpose?  The overriding principle must be a focus on doing what is in our own national interest and not simply what will enhance our popularity.  (I don’t set aside popularity altogether; that can be narrowly useful in short-term situations, but it can only be useful in this fashion.)  Within this there are three principles that give substance to our national interest: protection of American citizens while they are abroad, assured access to the resources we need for our economy, and support for our friends and our allies.  (Notice that these also have military implications; I’ll address the military aspects of these goals in a post on our necessary future military policy.)

There are a number of reasons, both practical and moral, why our own national interest must come ahead of all else in our foreign policy.  The practical reasons include these.  As noted above, the purpose of our government is to protect our inalienable rights—this is why we formed our social compact those 200 and more years ago.  Wealthy as we are, we have only finite resources, and we must see first to our own welfare with those resources before we can see to any others’ welfare.

Secondly, we must operate our foreign policy from an “enlightened selfishness” perspective.  If we are not as strong as we might be, if our citizens are not as safe as they need to be, if our economy does not have access to the resources we need, then our ability to support our friends and allies, even our ability simply to help other nations, other peoples, will be impaired, perhaps to the point we are unable to provide any support at all.  The depth of another nation’s need has no impact on our capacity to help satisfy that need.

Finally, related to this, is the fact that we simply cannot afford to help others if the damage to ourselves from the assistance is greater than the gains from providing that aid.  An extreme example of this comes from WWII.  Our materiel aid to the Soviet Union and to Great Britain sorely tried our industrial output and our ability to equip our own military forces, both in preparation for the coming fight, and in its prosecution.  Yet helping these two, one an ally and one a friend, were critical to the combined effort of destroying NAZI Germany in Europe.  On the other hand, providing monetary assistance to a bankrupt nation that shows no capacity for learning the lessons of its bankruptcy, and doing so in a time of our own economic crisis, will harm us far more than it will aid that nation—and so we must not provide that assistance.

There are moral reasons for seeing to our own national interest first.  One is that it is our duty, as it is the first duty of all nations, to satisfy our own interests first so as to not become a burden on other nations by shifting the necessity of satisfying our needs onto them.

Secondly, this helps prevent our hand up aid from being transformed into a handout, thereby shifting the receiving nation into dependency on us rather than leaving them responsible and capable in their own right.   As German Chancellor Angela Merkel noted a year ago as the present Greek crisis was becoming fully developed, the other EU member states would not make as much of an effort (in helping Greece or themselves), nor would Greece make as much of an effort on its own behalf, if Germany proved too generous.  Making other nations dependent on us does not support their moral health or ours.

The failure from losing this moral aspect is illustrated by these examples.  Fifty years of dependence on the American military umbrella left Europe completely unable to deal with the mayhem in the Balkan states that followed President Josip Broz Tito’s death and Yugoslavia’s subsequent dissolution.  We had to apply American airpower so that the scant European troops could have the protection they needed in order to impose a semblance of peace on the region.  The situation had gotten little better 20 years later in Europe’s attempt to support the rebels in Libya.  After less than two months of a low key air “campaign,” the European air forces began dropping American ordnance—they’d run out of their own.  And we had to supply almost all of the air surveillance, command and control, and air refueling assets: the Europe nations, still dependent on us, had too little of their own military assets.

In a later post I’ll talk about the foreign policy principle of supporting our friends and allies.  This principle not only is important in its own right, it also facilitates the remaining two principles.  For that reason, I’ll spend that later post on this principle, and I’ll talk about the remaining two principles after that.

What Can We Learn from Europe?

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Between 1995 and 2008, which is prior to the onset of the current Panic, goods prices inflated by 67% on average in Greece, and by 56%, 47%, and 41% in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, respectively, in that same period.  German prices inflated by 9% over those years.  The difference between the PIGS and Germany centered on the nations’ domestic policies.

The Germans went through social, tax, and spending policy reforms which, among other things, limited the amount of money in their economy that didn’t have savings or goods to absorb.  The PIGS spent their money, and they also freely spent other people’s money which they borrowed, without regard for the amount of goods available from their domestic production, or from foreign imports, to absorb their money.  Indeed, as domestic prices rose, the PIGS spent more, tautologically from those increasing prices, and via printing and borrowing more in order to spend more in absolute terms in the face of those rising prices.  An additional result from those increasing prices is that the PIGS’ own production lost competitiveness in the international markets (including the rest of the EU), and so they couldn’t earn money from trade to cover their spending.

Hmm….

I suggest that there is a lesson for us, here in the US.  More money in our economy from government spending, whether fueled by borrowing or printing or both, will produce rapid inflation as our economy attempts to recover if there aren’t production increases to keep the growth in the supply of goods for sale in step with the growth of the money available with which to buy those goods.

It is the nature of demand and of production that the former can, and does, turn on a dime, while production can only increase slowly as plant is ramped up and as workers are hired and trained (with training an especially large problem today, given the length of time today’s used-to-be-experienced work force has been unemployed), and production can only decrease quickly at the expense of jobs.

Today’s American economy has already accumulated a vast overhang of funds (in the trillions of dollars) from Federal Reserve Bank printing and government spending and from subsequent funds retention by businesses and families in the face of ongoing economic uncertainty.  We are thus at severe risk of a burst of potentially ruinous inflation as those funds come out of their personal and business piggy banks to be spent on production that cannot meet that demand as the economy tries to begin a recovery.  That inflation will threaten what should be a robust post-recession growth period.  Some of this money, to be sure, is being absorbed by businesses and families paying down their own accumulated debt, but the present “stimulus” spending, borrowing, and money printing greatly outstrip absorption through private debt reduction.  And in the end, private debt reduction doesn’t reduce the overhang; it just changes the overhang’s location.  Further, this overhang shift is exacerbated by the current lack of employment in our economy.

This situation is made worse by repeated bouts of government spending.  Under present conditions, the overhang only increases: the money is simply sequestered in those business and personal accounts against future spending needs, rather than used for current spending, in anticipation of continued unemployment.  That unemployment and associated uncertainty about the future puts a premium on having savings with which to pay the mortgage or to buy food, since there is no income with which to pay for these things.

This is an important lesson in its own right.  But underlying all of this is the fact that the economic crisis faced by the United States and the European Union (of which Greece is only a present example) is at bottom a debt crisis, not an “ordinary” cyclic (if unusually deep) recession/spending crisis.  Solving the spending/inflation problem, important as it is, will do little to solve the debt crises; these can be solved only through actually paying down the debts or by going through default and bankruptcy.

The spending question can feed into debt crisis resolution in an important way, though: reducing spending below revenues, more than eliminating budget deficits, produces budget surpluses that then can go directly to paying the debts.  And reducing spending below revenues by reducing spending rather than by raising tax rates leaves more money in the hands of the individual citizens and their businesses, who are far better equipped to make spending—and debt repayment—decisions than any government has shown itself to be.