Monthly Archives: May 2012

Progressives, Terrorists, and Civility

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Brett Kimberlin, the Speedway Bomber, was convicted in 1981 of a week-long bombing spree in Indianapolis, IN, a serial bombing sequence in which eight separate bombs caused extensive property damage, destroyed a police cruiser, and severely maimed a man, which eventually led to the man’s suicide.  Kimberlin spent 17 years in prison for his crimes, including having his parole revoked when, after losing a $1.6 million judgment in favor of the widow of the suicide victim, he refused to pay—not couldn’t pay, refused to pay.

Of course, there is the possibility of redemption and of correcting old ways, of making amends.  But not all are repentant.  Consider that Kimberlin still hasn’t paid the judgment.  Consider the $200 thousand bounty that Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution put on the Chamber of Commerce’s Tom Donohue.  Consider the attacks on Patterico (also via Memorandum, if that link doesn’t work), and on Stacy McCain, and on Michelle Malkin.  While the attacks on Malkin may not have been perpetrated by Kimberlin and his…colleagues…they are of a type.

But, aside from these cowardly attacks from the Left against people whose only crime is that they are conservative and both act and write like it, I also am interested in the Progressive leadership condoning such bullying and potentially criminal behaviors.  Where is the hue and cry about Brett Kimberlin’s activities and those of his ilk?

To be sure, nor conservatives nor Progressives need decry every little wrong, every smearing speech such as Arizona State Senator Linda Lopez’ (D) attempt to lay the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords off on conservatives, that this or that extremist makes.  But surely these ongoing and dangerous attacks, not only against the conservatives, but their families also, warrant an outcry from an honest left.  But the President, his campaign advisors, the DNC leadership, the Progressive leadership in Congress all are silent.  And by their passive silence about these events of which they surely are aware, they actively condone them.

But it’s of a piece with Progressive civility.  This is the civility that has Congressman John Lewis (D, GA) claiming—without substantiation even today—that conservative Tea Partiers called him a nigger, that has Congressman Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) dismissing those who protested against Obamacare as not American and Astroturfers, that has DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz (D, FL), at her protest gathering outside then-candidate Allen West’s campaign headquarters, saying about conservatives and conservative protesters

I don’t see any swastikas or any pictures of the President in black face or burned in effigy here.  The difference between the way we express our First Amendment rights and the way I’ve seen Tea Party extremists—Republican Tea Party extremists—express their right is dramatically different.

And President Obama saying

Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care?

All they haven’t done, yet, is to send out their own SWAT teams.

The Long and Short of Fiscal Policy

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Sorry, I couldn’t resist.  That’s the title of another missive by Alan Blinder in a recent Wall Street Journal issue.

He begins with this Keynesian fiction:

In the short run—let’s say within a year or so—a larger deficit…boosts economic growth by increasing aggregate demand.  It’s pretty simple.  If the government spends more money without raising anyone’s taxes to pay the bills, that adds to total demand directly.

Umm, well, no, it doesn’t.  That increased government spending (accepting, arguendo, no associated increase in taxes) only comes at the expense of future taxes or current borrowing—which is more future taxes.  People aren’t as dumb as Keynes thought they were, or as Blinder thinks they are.  In the present case, Americans see this trap, and they reduce spending (and investing) today in favor of saving and/or paying down their own current debt, thus offsetting that spike (again assuming, arguendo, that a government actually can reduce spending after its spike up).

Moreover, that government spending crowds out a significant fraction of remaining private spending.  After all, why should we buy something that the government is going to buy and give to us?

On top of this, Swedish economists Andreas Bergh and Magnus Henrekson have a 2011 piece (login required; sorry), that surely Blinder has read, in the Journal of Economic Surveys that shows the deleterious effects of increases in government spending.  They conclude that a 10% increase in government size (relative to GDP) is associated with a 0.5%-1.0% lower annual growth rate in the economy.  This is no spike, but then governments don’t spike spending.

It really is pretty simple.  Just not as oversimplified as Blinder suggests, and not in the same direction.

In short, money that folks, and businesses, are paying in higher taxes is money that folks, and businesses, no longer have available for current spending.  Or investing, or saving.

It is true, though, that spending is increased relative to taxes.  But the only result of this “increase” is in the deleterious effects of deficit spending.

On this matter, Romer and Romer have a 2010 piece (login required here, too; sorry), that surely Blinder also has read, in American Economic Review, that shows the powerful effect of increasing tax rates on economic growth: an increase in taxes of 1% of GDP lowers GDP by nearly 3%.

Blinder has more in his piece, but with his underlying assumptions shown to be false, the rest has no more value than that.  For instance, he writes in all seriousness

But don’t we need to reduce the deficit—and by large amounts? Yes, we do, but that’s in the long run, where the effects of larger deficits are mostly harmful to economic growth.

Of course, as Blinder’s own Keynes noted so long ago, in the long run, we’re all dead.  More empirically, over the long run, governments do not unroll spending increases that they’ve foisted off on us for that good cause of the time.  As long as Blinder is satisfied that our present enormous debt can be safely reduced in that far-off fantastical long run, he’s satisfied that our present enormous debt never will be reduced.

Update: Deleted a section where I’d simply–and carelessly–misread Blinder’s statement, and so my argument became irrelevant.

Some Thoughts on Freedom

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The Archdiocese of New York, headed by Cardinal Timothy Dolan; the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, headed by Cardinal Donald Wuerl; the University of Notre Dame; and 40 other Catholic dioceses and organizations around the country announced on Monday that they are suing the Obama administration for violating their freedom of religion, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.  The problem, as described on the DC Archdiocese’s new Web site PreserveReligiousFreedom.org, is this:

It is not about whether people have access to certain services; it is about whether the government may force religious institutions and individuals to facilitate and fund services which violate their religious beliefs.

President Obama’s Health and Human Service’s mandate, which is intended to facilitate his Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and is the proximate object of the suit, forces religious organizations, against their most fundamental beliefs, to provide access to, or to make access available through their insurance programs, contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization procedures.

These drugs and services, and many of the behaviors that “need” these drugs and services, are held by a host of religions (Catholicism and Baptist congregations are only the most well-known) to be sinful.  It is, then, not only morally wrong for a religious entity holding these beliefs to provide these things, it is impossible for that entity that is true to its beliefs to do so, or to wink at their insurance programs that do so.

Take careful note: this problem is not about whether such things are, in fact, sinful.  This problem is not about whether Catholic women, by regularly going to Mass and then to their neighborhood pharmacy for contraceptives, seemingly give the lie to Catholicism’s position.  (Indeed, the existence of sin is a raison d’être for churches of all types—to help those sinners.)  This problem is not about “free” access to these services. (In fact, they are not free: by the government’s mandate, if the recipient isn’t paying for them, you and I are—whether it violates our religious teachings or not—through higher prices to us to pay for the subsidy.)

No, this problem is about whether government can define for religious entities what is sin.  It is about whether government can dictate to a religious entity what its religious tenets are.  It is about whether government can dictate to a religious entity what its practices in furtherance of its fundamental tenets are.  It is about whether government can dictate to us individually what our beliefs, what our private decisions, must be, and whether we must sin at government’s behest.

As a practical matter, which patients are being “protected” under the Act of that name?  Plainly only those of whom Obama approves.  Certainly not those with beliefs with which he disagrees.

As a matter of freedom, what is being protected by this government diktat?  Certainly not the fundamental freedom of conscience that Christian religions teach.  Certainly not the fundamental freedom of religion—a part of our Creator’s endowment—that is codified in our Constitution.

A False Premise

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It’s being widely reported that a continued, or accelerated, EU economic crisis could threaten President Obama’s reelection.

It’s certainly true that, in this increasingly globalized world (!?), the European crisis could impact the American economy, and through that, President Obama’s reelection.

But that’s an outcome, not a cause.  The cause is Obama’s mishandling of our economy in the first place, to the point that it’s so enormously vulnerable to the European downturn.

That mishandling is a…misunderstanding…of the type of growth that’s needed.  What President Obama and many of his EU counterparts pushed for at the just-concluded G-8 summit is growth in government spending and borrowing—and in Obama’s case, growth in tax rates—under the rubric of stimulating an economy.

On the other hand, we have Christina Romer (that Christima Romer) and David Romer demonstrating in a 2010 American Economic Review article (login required; sorry) the powerful effect of increasing tax rates on economic growth: an increase in taxes of 1% of GDP lowers GDP by nearly 3%.

And we have Swedish economists Andreas Bergh and Magnus Henrekson in a 2011 Journal of Economic Surveys article (again, login required; sorry again) concluding that a 10% increase in government size (relative to GDP) is associated with a 0.5%-1.0% lower annual growth rate in the economy.

Plainly, the answer, as I’ve been arguing lately, is smaller government and lower tax rates, to produce economic growth.

Economic, not government, growth.  Now that’s growth we can believe in.

Europe Can Spend Its Way to Growth

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That’s the claim made by Hannes Swoboda, an Austrian MEP and President of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in that European Parliament, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Mr Swoboda said about German reluctance to support continued excessive government borrowing:

Should companies that seek to grow not be allowed to take out loans anymore?  Should states, in order to fight recession and unemployment, not assume debt?

The first, of course, is little more than a disingenuous red herring.  Companies are not governments.  When a company (spends and) borrows too much and cannot repay, only the company’s investors and creditors, and in the most extreme cases the company’s employees, lose.  When governments (spend and) borrow too much, it is that polity’s taxpayers…well, we’re seeing the results of this sort of government irresponsibility play out today in Greece, California, Illinois, the United States as a whole.

…austerity politics and…their antisocial character, proven by record unemployment figures.  The collapse of some governments…notably in France and Greece…further demonstrate the political danger.

Of course generations of dependency on, and addiction to, government handouts don’t have anything to do with the pain of the forced withdrawal that results from these governments’ having run out of OPM.  Not a bit of it.  In fact, though, the only real, long-lasting political danger is to the political incumbents who find at risk their ability to keep the handouts coming and the capacity of the resulting dependency to preserve their power.

Then Swoboda (to coin a phrase) doubled down.

The fact that the current recession was preceded by a decrease of public investment in measures and policies that produce growth and employment clearly indicates that these must be the starting point of an alternative strategy.  In the evaluation of national budgets,…[e]xpenditures for these purposes should not be integrated in calculations of structural deficits….

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti has already called for policies that favor targeted public investments in growth and employment.…

We actually need to go a step even further. … The European institutions should enact legislation that requires all members to make public investments in growth and employment.

Those public investment measures are nothing more than the repeatedly failed Keynesian policy of “stimulus” spending at the expense of necessary fiscal discipline.  In fact, the current European recession also was not preceded by an increase in private investment—because the money wasn’t available due to excessive taxes and high government spending and borrowing for those dysfunctional spending and borrowing efforts.

Moreover, any remaining government expenditures, including any Keynesian “stimulus” (is there any serious economist who still thinks stuff is sound economics?), must strictly be on the books and in the public’s view.  If Swoboda thinks his policies are so wonderful, why does he demand to hide them behind locked doors and in the secrecy of off the books crony deals?

Finally, Mr Swoboda, not trusting the people to make their own personal and business decisions, demanded to codify in international law a permanent government interference with the market place.

No.  The answer to Europe’s—and the United States’—problems are for government to get out of the way of the private economy.  To get out of the way of the flower of individual ingenuity and out of the way of the collective wisdom of private citizens.

Mr Swoboda had more fanciful claptrap, but you get the idea.  One can only hope that we get the idea this fall.