Monthly Archives: December 2012

Another Party?

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Speaker of the House John Boehner (R, OH) is now joining the growing chorus of…Republicans…who are begging for surrender on the economy: he’s offering tax rate increases, albeit on Americans with more than $1 million of annual income.  This will be an abject failure: President Barak Obama, standing tall with the Republicans now on their knees in front of him, has no need of accepting this.  In fact, he has an excellent chance of succeeding with a gambit that seemingly failed in the debt ceiling negotiations of 2011, when he made a last minute demand for even more taxes: with Republicans now begging for mercy, he can, at this late hour, add to his demands—yet more taxes beyond the $1.6 trillion he’s currently demanding (the offered reduction to $1.4 trillion was never serious).

Given this abject failure, should we walk away from the Republican Party and form a third national party, one more honest and courageous and better rooted in the principles of conservatism—the 18th Century Liberal principles on which our nation was founded and which underlie our prosperity and power?

I’m of two minds on this.  On the one hand, with the Republican Party as currently constituted now empirically in shambles and a failure, we need a national party capable of retrieving our nation from the nearby disaster of Europe-like social and political failure, and from the disaster waiting to be imposed politically and militarily later by our enemies.

The Tea Partiers have the national reach, but remain politically naïve.  They are, however, learning.  Forming a new national party would represent a strategic retreat for the principles of individual liberty and responsibility and of the small, limited government that is the only thing that can help preserve these.  However, sometimes retreat is necessary in order to be able to reengage from a position of greater strength.

On the other hand, the infrastructure of an existing national party is no mean thing.  The primary things wrong with the Republican Party are the RINOs in positions of leadership, who are too willing to sacrifice principle for political expediency however well intended the sacrifice, and their utter inability to make their case in the practical terms of interest to their constituents—and to their neighboring Progressives’ constituents.

The Tea Partiers have made great inroads in the last few years in inserting greater conservatism into the GOP, along with inserting people who will actually hew the GOP to those principles.  Their success was demonstrated in 2010, and confirmed in 2012, other than at the Presidential level.  Their success was both confirmed and expanded down-ticket in the state houses in those 2012 elections.

The Tea Partiers, though, whether in a new national party or through further recovery of the Republican Party, will need to communicate, also.  It isn’t sufficient to make tempestuous—or mild—speeches on the floor of an empty House or Senate and hope the Progressives’ news outlets will give it coverage.  Nor are digital media, important though they are, sufficient.  The new or recovered party needs to get out among the people—in their neighborhoods, their community centers, their diners, their living rooms, and in those of their Progressive constituents’—and explain in practical terms the values of conservative principles.  For this, the Professional Communicators of the GOP need not apply.  They’ve shown their level of competence already.

And the leaders, and membership, of this new or revised national party must understand that this is a struggle for our nation’s soul.  There will be conflict.  There will be demands for compromise of principles.  But they must also understand that if a man has no principles for which he’ll sacrifice, he has no principles.  That means that, sometimes, we have actually to sacrifice, not just bleat.  The present crop of Republican leadership seem to have lost sight of that last, critical part.  And it’s been fatal.

Now is Not the Time

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…to surrender.  Yet that’s what Peter Berkowitz advocates Conservatives do in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed [emphasis added].

Conservatives should…come to grips with two entrenched realities that pose genuine challenges to liberty, and whose prudent management is critical to the nation’s well-being.

The first entrenched reality is that big government is here to stay.  This is particularly important for libertarians to absorb.  Over the last two hundred years, society and the economy in advanced industrial nations have undergone dramatic transformations. And for three-quarters of a century, the New Deal settlement has been reshaping Americans’ expectations about the nation-state’s reach and role.

…

In these circumstances, conservatives must redouble their efforts to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities.  But to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities reflects a distinctly unconservative refusal to ground political goals in political realities.

Conservatives can and should focus on restraining spending, reducing regulation, reforming the tax code, and generally reining in our sprawling federal government. But conservatives should retire misleading talk of small government. Instead, they should think and speak in terms of limited government.

Yet the only way to “reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities” is to shrink the government back to a manageable size—to regain the small, limited government we used to have and that is created in the documents of our social compact.  Limited government and small government are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin.  Yes, yes, monarchies can be small governments, too.  But they’re not limited.

Accepting the status quo and declining to seek to “reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities” by shrinking—limiting—that over-large and out of control government is most assuredly an unconservative thing to do; it is to accede to the modern Liberal’s goal.

Berkowitz seems not recognize the role reversal that has occurred.  The modern Conservative is the 18th Century Liberal—the champion of limited government that protects and enhances individual liberty, individual responsibility, and the resulting national prosperity.  The modern Liberal is the 18th Century Conservative, a man who favored government control over men’s lives on the theory that both the common man was too stupid to see to his own ends and that Government—the King—Knows Better.  The only difference between the modern Liberal and that 18th Century monarchist is the accepted superficial structure of the Big Government that Knows Better.

Berkowitz’ second entrenched reality,

…this one testing social conservatives, is the sexual revolution, perhaps the greatest social revolution in human history[]

is wholly irrelevant without the individual freedom and responsibility available only with small, limited government.  With government determining what our lives should be like and how we should live them, things like the sexual revolution and our responses to them also are for governments to determine.

Even under the shadow of big government and in the wake of the sexual revolution, both libertarians and social conservatives, consistent with their most deeply held beliefs, can and should affirm the dignity of the person and the inseparability of human dignity from individual freedom and self-government. They can and should affirm the dependence of individual freedom and self-government on a thriving civil society, and the paramount importance the Constitution places on maintaining a political framework that secures liberty by limiting government.

Indeed, but a modern Conservative is not a libertarian—and he never was.  Moreover, the “social conservative” is a modern invention, defined less by social mores than by opposition to the mores of the modern Liberal.  And the affirmation of the need of civil society as one means of guaranteeing “individual freedom and self-government” and that “political framework that secures liberty by limiting government” separately and together demand an actual limiting of government—its size and the reach of its powers.

Republicans, Fiscal Cliff, and Spending

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We’ve wondered here, there, and elsewhere why the “fiscal cliff” negotiations are occurring in secret.  Is it because the Republicans have been planning on folding all along, and they’re trying to keep that quiet until the last moment?  Is it because they naively think Democrats will negotiate in better faith if they don’t have to be seen as folding to the Republicans until the last moment?

Whatever the excuse, it’s got to stop.  Tried that the last several weeks, it’s failed utterly.  Now it’s time for the Republicans to take overt, public action.  Marc Thiessen, in The Washington Post, has some thoughts on what that overt, public action should look like.  In the main, I agree with him; excerpts below.  RTWT.

…pass legislation extending current tax rates for all Americans.  Let Obama reject it and take us over the “fiscal cliff”—and then be prepared to live under the Clinton tax rates while negotiations on tax reform continue.  In the short term, Americans may blame you.  You can recover from that.  What you will never recover from is surrendering your principles and giving up your brand as the party of low taxes and limited government.

But those Clinton tax rates are wonderful, don’t you know: when Republicans got them cut, across the board, during Bush the Younger’s administration, those tax cuts were, according to our Progressive betters, only good for the rich; the middle class could never benefit from them.  Thus, it’s plain that reverting to those rates can’t possibly harm the middle class since the lower rates never did us any good.   And, of course, those wonderful Clinton tax rates went along with Clinton’s spending rates—some one-third of President Barack Obama’s.  But never mind about that.

Additionally, Obama and his publicity machinethe NLMSM will ensure that Republicans get the blame; there’s no “may” to it.  As Thiessen points out, though, they can recover from this—see below.

Go on the offensive.  Immediately put forward a plan to fundamentally reform the tax code.  You will be able to outbid Obama and the Democrats in any tax-cut fight.  And the intellectual groundwork has already been done.  During the supercommittee negotiations last year, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) put forward a plan to lower rates, raise revenue and limit deductions.  Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) has a revenue-neutral corporate tax reform plan that lowers the rate to 25 percent and moves to a territorial system.

On the spending side, “soak the rich” by getting rid of the billions of dollars in government benefits, taxpayer subsidies and corporate welfare the wealthy receive each year and don’t need, and by means-testing government programs from unemployment benefits to farm subsidies.

On entitlements, put forward a plan to save Social Security and Medicare through structural reforms and by reducing benefits for well-off retirees and eliminating them entirely for the wealthiest seniors.  Propose a “Buffett Rule” of your own: Warren Buffett does not need taxpayers to subsidize his retirement and health care.

The Romney tax reform proposal is a good place to start: personal income tax rates cut 20% across the board with total deductions capped at $50,000, and business income tax rates cut to a peak rate of 25% (still too high, but it’s a start).  Also, include in the tax reform the Obamacare investment taxes and the medical device tax—these should be withdrawn entirely.  There’s already significant Democratic support for getting rid of these jobs killers.

The corporate welfare cuts should include subsidies to oil and gas companies (chump change) and to “green energy” businesses and dependencies (not at all chump change) alike.

Social Security and Medicare should be privatized altogether; however, that’s…unlikely…this year.  Severe means-testing is a good start, though.

Pass your plans.  If the president refuses to negotiate and no progress is made by February, inform him that you will attach all or part of your plan to legislation raising the debt limit and pass it in the House.  Then do so.

Obama’s failure here will put both serious spending and tax reform, and default, on his plate.  Not even the NLMSM will be able to cover up Obama’s disaster here.  Moreover,

According to Bob Woodward, when Obama told his advisers he intended to veto the debt-limit bill the Republican-controlled House had passed, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told him he couldn’t—that if Republicans didn’t give in, he had no choice but to sign their bill.  “You can’t veto,” Geithner reportedly told Obama, because the consequences “would be indelible, incurable.  It would last for generations.”

Now Republicans know better.

We’ll see if they’ve found any courage.  So far, I’m not sanguine.

Democracy the Chicago Way

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Or maybe the Detroit way.  Whatever.  Via Power Line:

This short video is an example of the union reaction to the democratic process outcome in Michigan last week.

Then President Barack Obama, the Chicago community “organizer,” had this to say about the violence through his press spokesman Jay Carney:

[T]the president believes in debate that’s civil.

And he refused to elaborate.  This is reminiscent of the speech candidate Obama made in 2008 tossed off on the role of racism in politics—an empty, vapid speech, with the subject never to be addressed again.  With all the Progressive cries of racism whenever Obama or his policies are criticized.

As Power Line put it,

Remember the good old days when Sarah Palin’s producing a flyer that had sights on Congressional districts was unacceptably violent?  Now, punching someone in the face is just fine.

Online Sales Taxes and State Revenues

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Governor Christine Gregoire (D, WA) and Sally Jewell, President and CEO of REI, have an op-ed in a recent Wall Street Journal.  In it, they claim a desire to “level the sales-tax playing field” by imposing a national requirement for online retailers to pay local state sales taxes.

Local retailers—who create jobs for our families, friends and neighbors—have long been required to collect and remit state sales taxes.  By contrast, online vendors that operate from out of state are under no such requirement, even though the taxes are still owed by the consumer in the 45 states that collect sales taxes.  This disparity undermines the competitiveness of the retail marketplace….

They claim a “cost:”

… diverts $23 billion from state and local treasuries every year.

And

For every supposedly tax-free sale, fewer dollars are available for schools, infrastructure, public-safety providers or (in flush times) tax reductions.

Never mind that online retailers also create jobs for “families, friends and neighbors.”  Those families, friends, and neighbors aren’t constituents of any concern.  Never mind the evident lack of tax reductions.  There’s always a good cause on which Democrats—and too many Republicans—should spend OPM.

A clue bat is here, in Gregoire’s and Jewell’s own words, but the bat swung and missed [emphasis added]:

Imagine a customer who walks into a sporting-goods store and asks for help in buying the coolest new running shoes.  An attentive salesperson spends half an hour with the customer to find the most comfortable fit, the best performance and the right price.  Just as the salesperson thinks she has found the ideal pair, the customer decides to make the $100 purchase via smartphone from an online competitor who doesn’t charge sales tax.

They omit another path to “leveling the playing field:” lower their in-state sales and other taxes levied on their brick and mortar businesses.  Watch the increase in economic activity from the suddenly lowered costs to the consumer/taxpayer, which increase will produce a net increase in revenues for the state government.  Besides which, the states (and I’m not just picking on Washington here) have not established they really need all that revenue, that they really are not doing things better left to the private sector.

Public pension systems have become famous for their bloat, for the overly optimistic assumptions state governments make concerning expected rates of return and state bureaucrat investment acumen.  Were these moved from defined benefit to defined contribution, the private sector would do a fine job of managing these public employee retirement programs, for instance.  As a first step in this transition, the state governments should publish widely the return on investment assumptions on which they base their pension benefit and taxpayer contribution requirements; alongside these, state governments should publish their empirically achieved return on investments.

Schools?  Get out of the way of school choice in the hands of the parents.  Pouring more money into the coffers of failing public schools only enriches the unions running those schools; it does nothing for the students damaged by those schools.

Infrastructure?  Stop paying union rates for the construction unless those rates win a truly competitive bid process.

And so on.

It’s for the several states to fix their own gaping potholes on America’s Main Streets.