Tag Archives: political parties

Cynicism

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Fred Barnes writes in The Weekly Standard about the boneheaded economics of “liberal Democrats.  With all due respect to Mr. Barnes, who is a far better writer than I, I beg to differ with his characterization.  Here are the examples he presents of their boneheadedness.

Barbara Lee, a House member from California, is upset about computerized checkout lines at grocery stores. She avoids lines with no flesh-and-blood checker.  “I refuse to do that,” Lee said at a House Appropriations Committee hearing, “I know that’s a job or two or three that’s gone.”

Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois is up in arms about the iPad, which he declared on the House floor recently is “now probably responsible for eliminating thousands of jobs.”  Alas, “what becomes of bookstores and librarians and all the jobs associated with paper?” Quite soon, he said, “such jobs will simply not exist.”

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi has her own remedy for the jobs dearth: Extend unemployment benefits.  “It injects demand into the economy,” she insists.  “It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.” It has the “double benefit” of putting money in the pockets of the jobless and acting as a “job creator.”

Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota is the champion of job creation by adding to the regulatory burden of businesses. Sounds counter-productive, right? Not so, Ellison told MSNBC. Companies will have to hire more people to comply with new regs.  “If the government says, look, we have got to reduce our carbon footprint, you will kick into gear a whole number of people that know how to do that or have ideas about that, and that will be a job engine,” Ellison said.

These are all very smart people; they know better, Mr. Barnes notwithstanding.  Rep Lee knows that technology creates more, and better, jobs than its lack.  Otherwise, she’d be pushing legislation to return us to the 19th century when roads were built with shovels and picks, there’d be no electricity to light her reading lamp, and there’d be no telephones or cars to ease her communication or travel.

Rep. Jackson had just been extolling the virtues of the iPad a few months prior to his remarks above.  I don’t think this flip-flop is an indication of any boneheadedness on his part.

Rep Pelosi didn’t get to be the Representative of the 8th District of California for 24 years and Speaker of the House of Representatives for 6 years because she’s a ditz.

Finally, Rep Ellison knows regulations don’t create jobs.  If they did, we’d have full employment, what with the number of government regulations expanding from 2600 pages in the Federal Register in 1936 to over 80,000 pages today.

It’s clear that these Progressives do think we are boneheaded, though.  It’s been their mantra for the last couple of years, for instance, that if only we understood what they were saying to us we would, perforce, agree with them and fall right in line with their government-will-take-care-of-us meme.  But since we don’t agree, they say it must be because we don’t understand; there must be something wrong with their messaging.  They need, they say, to keep adjusting their message until we do understand them.  They just need to keep dumbing down their message until we finally get it.

No, these Congressmen aren’t boneheaded.  Nor is their economics; those words aren’t intended to have any meaning.  This is just part of their messaging, and part of their cynical attitude toward us.  They’re used to having us dependent on themon government for our welfare, and they’re loathe to lose that power.  When they were swept to dominant positions by the 2008 elections, they rolled the dice on their control of our welfare.  They passed “stimulus” spending for the benefit of their unions, then they rammed through Obamacare to drastically increase our dependency on themon government, and then they rammed through Dodd-Frank to hamstring American businesses so as to increase our dependency.  Only three years on, with unemployment ranging between 9% and 10% the entire time, did they finally get around to paying lip service to a “jobs” bill.  But this is, in the event, just an attempt to push class warfare, while looking to continue paying us for (still) not working with yet more “unemployment insurance”—insurance designed to insure that we continue to not work and remain dependent on…government. Oh, and it has further spending for their unions.

After the midterm elections last year, and with the continuing disaster of their policies these last three years, they’re simply worried about losing their power.  This latest round of claims which Mr. Barnes provides just shows the Progressive cynical attitude toward us: they’ll say anything they can think of to pander to us, get our votes, and stay in power.

The Progressive and the Law

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The law be damned.  Constitution-schmonstitution.

We can’t have our way through democratic procedure, so we’ll just blow up democracy and rule by fiat.  Because We Know Better.

That’s Rep Jesse Jackson, Jr’s (Dem, IL) attitude, as reported in The Daily Caller yesterday.  He was holding forth on the virtues of Obama’s Stimulus Lite, that $500 billion “jobs” bill that failed a cloture vote in the Senate a couple of days ago.  But let’s let the good Representative speak for himself, with my commentary interspersed.

I hope the president continues to exercise extraordinary constitutional means, based on the history of Congresses that have been in rebellion in the past.  He’s looking administratively for ways to advance the causes of the American people, because this Congress is completely dysfunctional.

I’m not aware of any Congresses that have been in rebellion in the past.  I must have slept through that part of my junior high Civics.  But what about that alleged dysfunction?  The “dysfunction” stems from Congressmen actually have the gall to honor their commitment to their constituents to work to hold down government spending (this “jobs” bill wanted to spend $175 billion we don’t have and to continue to pay people for not working, rather than stimulating job growth) and to hold down taxes (the bill wants to “pay for” those $175 billion by adding a surtax of 5.6% on “millionaires,” the Progressives’ more new taxes mantra).  And this elides objections to the Progressives’  class war, which they’re using as justification for the taxes.

President Obama tends to idealize—and rightfully so—Abraham Lincoln, who looked at states in rebellion and he made a judgment that the government of the United States, while the states are in rebellion, still had an obligation to function….  On several occasions now, we’ve seen…the Congress is in rebellion, determined…to wreck or ruin at all costs.

The Progressive is accusing the Congress, for doing its duty with its power of the purse, of committing Treason (the Constitution’s definition (Art III, Sect 3)) by being in open rebellion against the President of the United States—how, exactly?  The Congress isn’t rolling over and giving the President everything he’s demanding is the treasonous, rebellious behavior.

Listen to the video, too; it’s highly instructive.  We have, for instance, this from Rep Jackson:

The President had an opportunity to exercise Section 4 of the 14th Amendment; he chose not to.

This is what the 14th Amendment actually says:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Notice that there is nothing authorizing the President to create new or to increase existing debt by Executive fiat.

Rep Jackson’s entire performance is a breathtaking, Ezra Klein-esque ignorance of the Constitution (which is understandable; it is, after all, so old).

On the other hand, Rep Jackson insists that the Congress “is in rebellion;” how can any debt that it creates or increases be valid at all?  Hmm….

The Campaign and My Choice

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With this post, I conclude my short series consisting of my analyses of the Republican candidates for the nomination for President.  To recap, I limited my discussions to three candidates: Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and Rick Perry.  The structure of this series consisted of a collection of posts concerning what I didn’t like about the candidates and then a series of what I did like about them.  This is my endorsement of a single candidate.

None of the candidates have adequately addressed the matter of illegal immigration and of illegal aliens.  Some have taken a hard line toward sealing and controlling our borders, and this is entirely appropriate.  However, controlled borders are only half the problem.  The vast majority of the illegal aliens are present in the United States because they want a chance to participate in the American dream, to avail themselves of the benefits of America’s exceptional culture.  They would be highly productive and valuable citizens were they given the chance.  Yet we throw up roadblocks after barriers after obstacles to impede them.  It can take a couple of months to get a non-immigrant visa; B-1 visas can take a month, H-1B visas as long as six months, and the H-1Bs have very low annual quotas. It shouldn’t be that hard to enter the United States legally.  There should be border crossing stations every mile along our border (which, just incidentally, would put the human traffickers—the mules, and worse—immediately out of business).  Visa approval should occur in days, not months (in today’s computerized world, it shouldn’t take months to run a background check), and there should be no quotas.  With none of the candidates addressing this aspect of illegal immigration, their handling of immigration generally is, in this context, I think a wash.

Perry: Perry’s attack ad campaign is tactically foolish and so calls in to question his judgment.  The Republican candidates should be running against Obama and touting their own superior qualities for that task; they should not be attacking each other and giving the Progressives ammunition for the Presidential campaign.

When asked, in Tuesday’s Dartmouth University debate, to be specific about his economic plan, Perry repeatedly said he’d unroll his plan “over the next three days.”  When Romney asked him directly, he responded that Romney had been developing his plan over the last five years, whereas Perry had been developing his only over the last 6 weeks.  This was pretty weak and smacked of excuse-making, especially since Perry has been governor of the second largest state for the last 11 years (and he’s not yet passed up a chance to remind us all of that), and so he has considerable experience at developing economic plans.

Finally, Perry doesn’t communicate well in a fluid environment.  A man who can’t think on his feet isn’t Presidential material.  A Texan who can’t is disappointing.

Romney: Romney’s responses concerning Romneycare and Obamacare in the Dartmouth debate increased my confidence both in his willingness and his ability to repeal Obamacare were he to be elected President, and it showed an ability to respond to Democrats’ attempts at assimilation of Romneycare into Obamacare.

He also has a 160 page Economic Plan, with 59 policy proposals in it.  However, it isn’t that hard to fix our economy and government’s interference with it by limiting spending to less than revenues.  This isn’t rocket science.  This is a Technocrat is overcomplexifying things.

His evasive generalities in response to other economic questions, though (Cain: “can you name some points in your 59-point complex economic plan?”  Romney: <mumble>), indicate to me that he still hasn’t very many specifics fully developed.  And he doesn’t seem willing to get specific; would he take a stand on specifics in dealing with Congress?  Yeah, yeah, I said he’d take a stand here, but his Dartmouth performance makes me wonder about his constancy.  His campaign has been one of avoiding mistakes rather than of advancing concrete ideas.

Finally, at a campaign stop the day before the Dartmouth debate, The Daily Caller asked Romney whether current AG Eric Holder should resign over his performance with DoJ’s Fast and Furious.  Romney’s answer was lengthy and evasive—it took him 35 seconds to say he wasn’t going to say.  When the question was repeated later to Romney’s aide, Eric Ferhnstrom, the aide said Romney “prefers [press] availabilities like this, where his thinking is more organized, as opposed…answering questions on the fly. He doesn’t think that’s conducive to a good conversation.”  See my remarks above about thinking on one’s feet.

Romney is no Eric Cantor, or Paul Ryan.  Or Newt Gingrich.

Cain: Cain’s up from the ranks experience in small businesses and large are a serious plus: in a free market, the entrepreneurs, small businesses, and large businesses are in a positive feedback loop, and that’s a strong economy with a plethora of opportunity.  Cain understands the limits to government effectiveness in that environment, and he understands the necessary fixes, simple fixes.

I like his view of making every section of government justify its budget in detail.  That’s not zero-based budgeting, but it’s close enough, and it’ll work well if not done too often.  He’ll never pull it off, but the threat of it will have its own benefit.

In the Dartmouth debate, he faced serious criticism for the first time: now he’s one of the front-runners, and so a target.  His ability to keep his humor, while providing specifics (he was subject to an “insider” cheap shot when he refused to violate a confidence concerning a couple of possible nominees for his administration) rather than evasion or generalities was refreshing.  And he was able to defend those specifics.  On the other hand, he wasn’t often seriously challenged: “turn 9-9-9 upside down; the Devil is in the details?”  How cute.

His consumption tax is a serious problem, but that can be worked.  Overall, his tax proposal represents a lower set of rates for individuals and businesses, and that’s all to the good: the more of our money left in our hands, under our judgment, the better off our country will be.

In the end, my preference is Herman Cain.  He has the best ideas, and he does, if not the best job, at least a very solid job of presenting and selling them.  And, crassly, it’ll be difficult for the Progressives to keep playing their race card on anyone who disagrees with Obama.  Although we might hear mutterings of Uncle Tom, or Oreo.

The Campaign and Herman Cain, II

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With this post, I continue a short series consisting of my analyses of the Republican candidates for the nomination for President.  To recap, I’m limiting my discussions to three candidates: Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and Rick Perry.  The structure of this series consists of a collection of posts concerning what I don’t like about the candidates and then a series of what I do like about them.  I’ll conclude with my endorsement of a single candidate.  At this point I’m in the series of what I like, and here I’ll talk about what I like about Herman Cain.

Business Experience: Mr Cain’s experience runs the gamut: he came up from the ranks, running individual restaurants, then a chain of restaurants, then a restaurant association, and finally a large corporation.  Cain also is fully capable of turning around failing businesses, and doing that without government handouts.  He rescued both Pillsbury’s chain of Burger Kings in the Philadelphia area and a failing Godfather’s Pizza corporation, returning them both to profitability.

His experience in business, also, is concrete: he didn’t come in at the top and learn business only from senior management’s perspective; he learned it from the small business perspective, also, with that individual restaurant experience.  Cain began with an actual working man’s experience.

Economy: On the whole, he’s got it right on taxes and on spending.  His 9-9-9 program has that serious flaw of a consumption tax, but the program reduces tax rates for both corporations and individuals.  Further, it greatly broadens the tax base so everyone does, indeed, “pay their fair share.”

He’s not afraid to cut, either: his opening move is an across the board cut which will reduce spending substantially, and with everyone’s ox being gored by the cuts, it’ll be difficult for anyone to resist without their being exposed as plainly addicted to spending for its own sake.  This is front and center on his campaign Web site:

Every federal agency, every government program and expenditure must be reviewed and revised with a keen eye and a red pen. Leaders should be willing to shrink budgets by target percentages….

On the matter of the nation’s debt, Cain is equally clear:

While both parties can claim some political victory in this compromise [to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for some trivial spending cuts], the American people got short-changed. The debt ceiling will be raised, opening the door for further debt ceiling and tax increases with no sign of treatment for the addiction to spending in Washington.

Communication: He’s plain-spoken with a sense of humor.  He’s fully capable of explaining his positions with brevity and clarity, as he’s shown repeatedly in the formats of the early primary debates.

Character:  Here is Cain in his own words:

One of the most important lessons Dad taught us was not to feel like victims. He never felt like a victim; he never talked like a victim.  And both of our parents taught us not to think that the government owed us something. They didn’t teach us to be mad at this country.

This, of course, is anathema to the incumbent Progressive government, which believes that government is the answer to every problem, and that America isn’t so hot, anyway.

The Campaign and Mitt Romney, II

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With this post, I continue a short series consisting of my analyses of the Republican candidates for the nomination for President.  To recap, I’m limiting my discussions to three candidates: Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and Rick Perry.  The structure of this series consists of a collection of posts concerning what I don’t like about the candidates and then a series of what I do like about them.  I’ll conclude with my endorsement of a single candidate.  At this point I’m in the series of what I like, and here I’ll talk about what I like about Governor Mitt Romney.

Experience: Governor Romney is one of the few candidates in this field who has actual business experience.  He’s run businesses, and he’s met payroll.  With Bain Capital, Romney expanded the company’s size and finances with successful leveraged buyouts, turning around those companies and making them successful (their impending financial failure making them ripe targets for such acquisitions), and then selling them on the open market.  On criticism that such buyouts and resales often cost jobs, he has responded, correctly, that the surviving companies were sounder and were successful—without Bain’s corrections, the companies would have failed entirely, and all of the employees would have lost their jobs.   His experience is broad, too: he’s successfully run nonprofits.  He became CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee in the wake of corruption allegations in the Salt Lake Olympic Committee and of a financial shortfall for those winter games that threatened their removal to another venue.  He turned around the situation and made the 2002 Winter Games a financial and competition success.

Nor is Romney a bailout artist.  After his success at Bain Capital, he was recruited (back) to Bain & Company, where he had started his business career (and which had helped get Bain Capital started), with the purpose of rescuing that now failing company.  He restructured the company and its cost structure and returned it to profitability within a year—without need of bailout funding from any source.

Education:  Governor Romney has stressed that the Federal government legitimately can play only a limited role in the education of our children, not the massively intrusive role of the current (and recent) administrations.

Romney also supports school choice and, within the current tax system (as opposed to a flat tax, or the tax system proposed by Herman Cain), a tax credit for the expenses incurred by those who prefer home schooling to the current failures of our public school systems.  Also, as Governor of Massachusetts, he has vetoed legislation that would have hindered the growth of charter schools.

Finally, Romney favors immersion in English for our immigrants, rather than committing scarce funding and resources to bi-lingual education.

Flip-Flops: For all his reputation as a flipper, he doesn’t seem to be afraid to take a stand.  The Left likes to conflate his evolution of policy with flip-flop, and sometimes they’re right.  But sometimes they’re wrong.  His positions on abortion and on Romneycare are examples.  He’s made no bones about the evolution of his views on abortion: as a private citizen, he could view the matter from the outside and take an abortion-tolerant position; however, once he became governor and had to face this matter of life directly, his position evolved.  On the matter of Romneycare, he makes no bones of his belief that this program was—and is—right for Massachusetts, but that it’s not right for every state, nor is it right for the federal government to impose it.   A flipper changes positions with the political winds; that’s a different behavior than a position legitimately evolving—and not changing back.  Romney’s position on these matters—whether we agree or disagree with him—is quite clear and steady.

Finally, here’s Romney’s take on taking a stand in the context of vetoes, including those he knows he can’t sustain, courtesy of The New York Times:

[P]eople used to say to me…“Governor, you’ve had a lot of vetoes and a lot of them get overridden. Most of them get overridden. That weakens your power.” I said, “Baloney. I want people to know what I stand for. And I’m going to veto items even if that 85% [Democratic] legislature goes out and spends it, I’m going to veto it to make sure people know what is right and what is wrong for the leadership in our state.”

Communication: Romney is an effective communicator who can clearly present his positions, and he can debate well.  As I’ve written elsewhere in this series, the best ideas in the world have no value if they can’t be offered in a coherent manner.