Updated daily, InsiderOnline (insideronline.org) is a compilation of publication abstracts, how-to essays, events, news, and analysis from around the conservative movement. The current edition of The INSIDER quarterly magazine is also on the site.
November 21, 2012
Latest Studies: 25 new items, including a Free State Foundation report on how consumers will benefit from freeing up broadband pricing, and a report from the American Action Forum on the damage to innovation that will be done by ObamaCare’s medical device tax
Notes on the Week: Europe shows how not to fix the fiscal cliff, beware the carbon tax fairy tale, let’s give federalism a try, and more
To Do: Revive conservatism by talking about civil society.
Budget & Taxation
• The Medical Device Excise Tax: Another Barrier to Innovation – American Action Forum
• $150 Billion in Spending Cuts to Offset Defense Sequestration – The Heritage Foundation
• The Territorial Taxation Experience in the Netherlands – Tax Foundation
Economic Growth
• Green Jobs: How Unions and Environmentalists Came Together to Damage the U.S. Economy – Capital Research Center
Education
• The Futures of School Reform: Five Pathways to Fundamentally Reshaping American Schooling – American Enterprise Institute
• The Market for School Choice in Indiana – American Enterprise Institute
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• A Line in the Sand: Assessing Dangerous Threats to Our Nation’s Borders – American Enterprise Institute
• Chinese Economic Espionage Is Hurting the Case for Free Trade – The Heritage Foundation
• The U.S.–Thailand Alliance and President Obama’s Trip to Asia – The Heritage Foundation
• U.S. Should Use Japanese Political Change to Advance the Alliance – The Heritage Foundation
• The Other Tragic Foreign Story – Hoover Institution
Health Care
• Key Points on Health Insurance Exchanges – Goldwater Institute
• After the Fall (Off the Fiscal Cliff) – Health Affairs
• What’s The Implication? Courts and the Scope of Implied Medical Device Preemption – Washington Legal Foundation
Immigration
• The Revolving Door Deportations of Criminal Illegal Immigrants – Center for Immigration Studies
Information Technology
• Why Broadband Pricing Freedom Is Good for Consumers – Free State Foundation
Monetary Policy/Financial Regulation
• A Bubble to Remember – and Anticipate? – American Enterprise Institute
• Lessons from the Euro Crisis for the United States – American Enterprise Institute
Natural Resources, Energy, Environment, & Science
• The Clean Air Act: The Case for Reform – Texas Public Policy Foundation
• EME Homer City Generation, L.P. v. EPA: The D.C. Circuit’s Ruling and Implications for Future Rulemaking – Washington Legal Foundation
• Source “Aggregation”: Federal Appeals Court Reverses 30 Years of Faulty EPA Precedent – Washington Legal Foundation
Regulation & Deregulation
• Boom, Bust, and Beyond: A Look at Housing Market Data in Florida – American Action Forum
Retirement/Social Security
• Understanding Social Security Benefit Adequacy: Myths and Realities of Social Security Replacement Rates – Mercatus Center
The Constitution/Civil Liberties
• Free Speech for Big Pharma – Hoover Institution
Transportation/Infrastructure
• Airfield of Dreams – Manhattan Institute
Following Europe’s so-called “balanced approach” is folly. Addressing the “fiscal cliff” by increasing taxes and failing to cut government spending is exactly the wrong policy. That’s what Europe has been doing for the past four years, and it hasn’t worked, observes Matthew Melchiorre:
Spending cuts have been weak. Today, not a single Euro Zone government is spending less as a percentage of GDP than it did in 2007, according to Eurostat data.
Tax increases, on the other hand, have been rampant. The average cyclically adjusted total tax burden among Euro Zone countries increased by about 5% from 2007 to 2010, according to European Commission data. European politicians continue to reach deeper into their citizens’ pockets. Most recently, the French parliament approved Socialist President Francois Hollande’s proposal for sky-high 75% marginal tax rates on incomes greater than €1 million.
This misguided focus on raising taxes instead of cutting a morass of unaffordable spending has led to prolonged recession. The International Monetary Fund projects that total Euro Zone output in 2013 will remain below potential by 2.7% — worsening from 2.4% this year. Unemployment will rise accordingly.
Grim as they are, these trends aren’t surprising. A 2012 study by Professor Alberto Alesina of Harvard University found that economies undergoing fiscal consolidation centered on spending cuts recovered to pre-austerity output within roughly one year, while economies faced with rising taxes didn’t recover for more than three years. Cutting government largesse also had an immediate boost on business confidence, while asking taxpayers to pony up for more spending caused confidence to plummet. [USA Today, November 13]
A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero
To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak, or as happened to us three week ago, to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends. We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers; and in our deeds.
—William F. Buckley, Jr., remarks at the Intecollegiate Studies Institute’s 35th Annual Dinner, November 29, 1988, reprinted in Let Us Talk of Many Things, 2000.
Not exculpatory: Here is CBS’s lede in the latest Benghazi break:
CBS News has learned that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) cut specific references to “al Qaeda” and “terrorism” from the unclassified talking points given to Ambassador Susan Rice on the Benghazi consulate attack – with the agreement of the CIA and FBI. The White House or State Department did not make those changes.
That makes it sound like neither the White House nor Ambassador Rice intended to mislead anybody in claiming that the Benghazi attack was not preplanned but merely grew out of a protest against an anti-Mohammed video. Were they just victims of bad editing? Nope. Here is paragraph five:
“The intelligence community assessed from the very beginning that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.” DNI spokesman Shawn Turner tells CBS News. That information was shared at a classified level – which Rice, as a member of President Obama’s cabinet, would have been privy to. [CBS News, November 20]
Beware the carbon tax fairy tale. There are only two problems with supporting a revenue-neutral carbon tax as an alternative to regulating carbon emissions: The carbon tax will never be revenue-neutral; and it will never be an alternative to regulating carbon emissions. David Kreutzer:
The MIT professors who authored one of the studies purporting to show the benefits of a carbon tax must use a Newspeak version of “revenue neutral,” when they say “All of the carbon tax revenue, after assuring neutrality, is used for tax relief or social programs.” If it were truly a revenue neutral tax, there wouldn’t be any revenue left “after assuring neutrality.”
An anecdote is illustrative of the problem with revenue neutrality. The first person who sat next to me a the American Enterprises Institute’s program on the carbon tax, last week, told me her association’s industry has great plans for the carbon-tax revenue. There appeared to be over 150 people at the event. In all likelihood, many of them represent groups with similarly great plans for the revenue.
Revenue neutrality is out, but what about eliminating overly burdensome regulations? Some proponents of a carbon tax believe the tax properly prices the externalities that vex opponents of fossil fuels and, therefore, eliminates the need for regulation of carbon dioxide. Bolstered by this knowledge of economics, they expect any deal for the tax to include eliminating all or a significant part of these regulations.
If this logic did carry over, then cap and trade also would have eliminated the need for carbon regulation. Instead of reducing regulations, the cap and trade bills added them. For instance, the Waxman-Markey bill went on for nearly 700 pages before it even got to cap and trade. [National Journal, November 20]
Is it plausible that federal employees are underpaid by 35 percent? That’s what a new survey by the federal government claims, but it isn’t so, say Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine. If federal employees were really underpaid that much, they point out, then many would quit their jobs to go work in the private sector. That’s not happening: “Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey show that, from 2001 to 2010, federal employees quit their jobs at less than half the rate of workers in large private-sector companies.”
Biggs and Richwine also point out that the calculation from the “President’s Pay Agent,” exludes fringe benefits: “A Congressional Budget Office study published in January found that the federal retirement package was 2.7 times more generous than what is paid by large private-sector firms. Federal workers also receive more paid vacation and sick days.”
Other reasons the federal calculation contradicts three decades of academic research:
[I]t compares pay for federal jobs to nonfederal positions at a similar “grade,” or level. Yet both the CBO and the GAO have documented “overgrading” in the federal workforce, meaning that federal jobs could be assigned higher grades on the General Salary Schedule than the pay agent assumes for their nonfederal equivalents. This can create the appearance of pay differences where none exist.
The pay agent also doesn’t consider the relative qualifications of federal employees. In a 2002 study, economist Melissa Famulari concluded: “Federal workers have significantly fewer years of education and experience than private sector workers in the same level of responsibility in an occupation.” [Washington Post, November 18]
Why not try federalism before secession? Glenn Harlan Reynolds:
[I]n general, the causes of secession are pretty standard around the world: Too much power in the central government, too much resentment in the unhappy provinces. (Think Hunger Games).
So what’s a solution? Let the central government do the things that only central governments can do – national defense, regulation of trade to keep the provinces from engaging in economic warfare with one another, protection of basic civil rights – and then let the provinces go their own way in most other issues. Don’t like the way things are run where you are? Move to a province that’s more to your taste. Meanwhile, approaches that work in individual provinces can, after some experimentation, be adopted by the central government, thus lowering the risk of adopting untested policies at the national level. You get the benefits of secession without seceding.
Sound good? It should. It’s called federalism, and it’s the approach chosen by the United States when it adopted the Constitution in 1789. [USA Today, November 19]
The news tilted to Obama at the finish line; but social media provided more balance. These findings from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism will probably surprise few:
During this final week, from October 29 to November 5, positive stories about Obama (29%) outnumbered negative ones (19%) by 10 points. A week earlier, negative coverage of Obama had exceeded positive by 13 points. The final week of the campaign marked only the second time in which positive stories about Obama outnumbered negative dating back to late August.
For Mitt Romney in the final week, the tone of coverage remained largely unchanged from the previous two weeks. Negative stories in the press outnumbered positive ones 33% to 16%.
But Romney may have suffered in final days from the press focusing less on him relative to his opponent. After receiving roughly identical levels of coverage for most of October, in the last week of campaigning Obama was a significant presence in eight out of 10 campaign stories compared with six in 10 for Romney—one of the biggest disparities in any week after Labor Day.
Social media, however, was a different story:
[E]ach of the three major social media platforms offered a different sense of the candidates. On Twitter, for example, the conversation about Romney in the last week was the most positive of any during the general election while Obama’s was basically unchanged. On blogs, it was Obama who saw a surge in favorable conversation. On Facebook, the tenor changed relatively little in the final days. [Pew Research Center’s Project on Excellence in Journalism, November 19]
The European welfare state is collapsing. Alvaro Vargas Llosa:
Every decade since the 1970s the economic performance of the 27 countries that make up the European Union has deteriorated. In the 1970s, economic growth averaged 3.1 percent. In the 1980s the figure was 2.5 percent. In the 1990s it was 2.1 percent and in the last decade, 1.4 percent.
Obviously these averages don’t tell the whole story—some countries have done better than others. But the bulk of Europe has let the parasitical welfare state devour its social and economic energy. [Fox News, November 17]
• Find out how rediscovering civil society can help revive conservatism. The Hudson Institute will host a mini-conference on the topic on November 27 at its Washington, D.C., headquarters. The event begins at 11:30 a.m.
• Hear author Anne Applebaum talk about her new book Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956. The Heritage Foundation will host Applebaum at 12:30 p.m. on November 28.
• Students, get your applications in for a Koch Internship. The deadline for the Spring is December 10.
• Learn why the minimum wage hurts the least skilled workers. The Foundation for Economic Education explains it well in a new video.
• If you’re looking for a job, remember to check out the Leadership Institute’s job fair in the Hart Senate Office Building on November 28 and 29.
(And check our Conservative Calendar for more things to do!)
Have a tip for InsiderOnline? Send us an e-mail at insider@heritage.org with "For Insider" in the subject line.
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/InsiderOnline.
Looking for an expert? Visit PolicyExperts.org.
The Heritage Foundation
214 Massachusetts Avenue, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4999
phone 202.546.4400 | fax 202.546.8328
No comments:
Post a Comment