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.
December 8, 2012
Latest Studies: 67 new items, including an Alabama Policy Institute assessment of ObamaCare’s exchanges, and a Texas Public Policy Foundation report on the dos and don’ts of regulatory analysis
Notes on the Week: Right-to-work will be good for Michigan, Sen. DeMint sees opportunity working on the outside, gun control has a racist history, and more
To Do: Remember what World War II veterans sacrificed
Budget & Taxation
• An Economic Guide to Cliff-Diving – American Action Forum
• Eight Common Sense Suggestions for the Fiscal Discussions – e-21: Economic Policies for the 21st Century
• Let’s Talk Specifics on Itemized Deductions Limitations in Fiscal Cliff Negotiations – e-21: Economic Policies for the 21st Century
• Six Bipartisan Entitlement Reforms to Solve the Real Fiscal Crisis: Only Presidential Leadership Is Needed – The Heritage Foundation
• The Politics of Tax Reform – Hoover Institution
• The Economic Costs of Tax Policy Uncertainty: Implications for Fundamental Tax Reform – Mercatus Center
• What Went Wrong with The Bush Tax Cuts – Mercatus Center
• Diving Off the Fiscal Cliff: An Economy on the Rocks – Tax Foundation
• Summary of the Latest Federal Income Tax Data – Tax Foundation
Crime, Justice & the Law
• Ohio Takes the Lead on Asbestos Reform – Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions
• A Federalist Conception of the Pardon Power – The Heritage Foundation
• Putting “Corrections” Back in State Jails: How to Reform Texas’ Expensive, Ineffective State Jail System – Texas Public Policy Foundation
Economic and Political Thought
• Economics and Res Publica : The Virtues and Limits of Economic Analysis – American Enterprise Institute
• Leadership, Liberty, and the Crisis of Authority – Centre for Independent Studies
• Economic Freedom of North America – Fraser Institute
Economic Growth
• Housing Chart Book – American Action Forum
• Rethinking Competitiveness – American Enterprise Institute
• Flight of the Kiwi: Addressing the Brain Drain – Centre for Independent Studies
• Economic Freedom of the Arab World: 2012 Annual Report – Fraser Institute
• Measuring Income Mobility in Canada – Fraser Institute
• Understanding Job Statistics – National Center for Policy Analysis
Education
• Increases in Education Spending Do Not Result in Higher Academic Performance – American Action Forum
• Tough Choices Ahead – The Coming Catastrophe for Financial Aid – American Action Forum
• School Reform, the Texas Way – Hoover Institution
• The Rise of Faux Diversity – Hoover Institution
Family, Culture & Community
• The Plight of the Alpha Female – Manhattan Institute
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• For Dignity in Democratic Citizenship: Russia’s Unfinished Moral Revolution and Anti-authoritarian Movements Today – American Enterprise Institute
• Israel’s Right to Defend Itself: Implications on Regional Security and US Interests – American Enterprise Institute
• The U.S. Can Mine the Deep Seabed Without Joining the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea – The Heritage Foundation
Government Reform
• Indian Tribal Lands and the Carcieri Fix – The Heritage Foundation
Health Care
• Health Insurance Exchanges – Alabama Policy Institute
• Taking Ownership: The Patient Role in Medicaid – Empire Center for New York State Policy
• Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, 2012 Report – Fraser Institute
• The Contradictions of Pain Theory – Hoover Institution
• Health Care for All without the Affordable Care Act – National Center for Policy Analysis
• Two Roads – One Goal – Private Enterprise Research Center
Immigration
• As the Numbers Surge: Border Incidents Increase in Arizona – Center for Immigration Studies
• STEM Jobs Act: Next Step for High-Skilled Immigration Reform – The Heritage Foundation
Information Technology
• The Sound-Recording Performance Right – American Enterprise Institute
• City of Arlington v. FCC: Questioning an Agency’s Authority to Determine Its Own Jurisdiction – Free State Foundation
• Do High International Telecom Rates Buy Telecom Sector Growth? An Empirical investigation of the Sender-Pays Rule – Mercatus Center
International Trade/Finance
• Abolish the Costly Sugar Program to Lower Sugar Prices – The Heritage Foundation
Monetary Policy/Financial Regulation
• The Third Way? A Risk-Sharing Approach to GSE Reform – American Action Forum
• Does Interest Rate Risk Matter If You’re the Fed? – American Enterprise Institute
• The 1930s All Over Again – American Enterprise Institute
• Expansionary Monetary Policy Can Create Asset Price Booms – e-21: Economic Policies for the 21st Century
• Monetary Policy: Little Economic Impact, High Risks – e-21: Economic Policies for the 21st Century
• Political Troubles Forecast for the Fed – e-21: Economic Policies for the 21st Century
• Refocusing the Fed – e-21: Economic Policies for the 21st Century
• The Fed Should Put Its 2% Inflation Goal to Work – e-21: Economic Policies for the 21st Century
• The Unlikely Return to “Normalcy” in U.S. Monetary Policy – e-21: Economic Policies for the 21st Century
National Security
• America Needs a Permanent Independent Panel to Stress Test the Pentagon’s QDR Strategy – American Enterprise Institute
• U.S. Military Technological Supremacy Under Threat – American Enterprise Institute
• Benghazi Terrorist Attack: Select Committee Needed to Investigate – The Heritage Foundation
• Deterrence and Nuclear Targeting in the 21st Century – The Heritage Foundation
• National Security: Independent Quadrennial Defense Review Panel Needed – The Heritage Foundation
• “No Exit” Strategy – Hoover Institution
• Law and Ethics for Robot Soldiers – Hoover Institution
Natural Resources, Energy, Environment & Science
• Rachel Was Wrong: Agrochemicals’ Benefit to Human Health and the Environment – Competitive Enterprise Institute
• U.S. Should Put U.N. Climate Conferences on Ice – The Heritage Foundation
Philanthropy
• The Rockefeller Foundation at the Century Mark: Betraying Donor Intent and Harming America – Capital Research Center
Regulation & Deregulation
• Putting Music Copyright Policy on a Free Market Footing – Free State Foundation
• Seven Myths and Realities About Food Trucks: Why the Facts Support Food-Truck Freedom – Institute for Justice
• Regressive Effects of Regulation – Mercatus Center
• Regulatory Impact Analysis: Dos and Don’ts – Texas Public Policy Foundation
Transportation/Infrastructure
• The Port Authority’s Cloudy Future – Manhattan Institute
• Dispelling the Myths: Toll and Fuel Tax Collection Costs in the 21st Century – Reason Foundation
Workplace freedom can help Michigan, too. Michigan is poised to become the 24th right-to-work state, now that Gov. Rick Snyder has announced he will sign a right-to-work bill if it reaches his desk. Right-to-work laws prevent unions from forcing people to pay union dues as a condition of employment. They also bring jobs and growth, observes Michael LaFaive:
Of the nine states that saw the greatest population growth in that decade, six have a right-to-work law and a seventh — Colorado — enjoyed a quasi-RTW status thanks to its “labor peace act,” which makes it difficult for unions to extract fee payments from non-members in a workplace. (Right-to-work laws do not affect collective bargaining, other than to prohibit labor contracts that make union dues or fees a condition of employment.)
To be sure, many factors go into individual migration decisions (high growth states also have more days of sunshine than Michigan, for example), but scholarly studies of the issue using sophisticated statistical techniques to isolate the different factors nevertheless suggest that having right-to-work protections for employees has a positive impact on a state’s in-bound migration.
For example, a 2010 study by Mackinac Center for Public Policy adjunct scholar Richard Vedder examined other possible explanations including climate, taxes, population and the “occupational composition of the workforce,” and still concluded, “Without exception, in all the estimations, a statistically significant positive relationship … was observed between the presence of right-to-work laws and net migration.” Mackinac Center analyses of Michigan migration also discovered a “revealed preference” for right-to-work states.
My colleague James Hohman reports that from 2000 to 2009, right-to-work states gained nearly 5 million people from non-right-to-work states. From Census to Census, right-to-work states grew by 15.5 percent, while non-right-to-work states grew by only 6.1 percent. [Mackinac Center, December 5]
Senator DeMint thinks he can be more effective on the outside. On Thursday, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) announced he intends to resign from the Senate to become the next president of The Heritage Foundation. He explained the decision:
I think I can do a lot to support these conservatives inside the Senate and the House [by] working with the Heritage Foundation all over the country to convince Americans that our policies are the best for them. […] One hundred percent of Americans, whether they’re poor or rich – the conservative ideas will make the lives of Americans better. And Heritage has the platform for me to help spread that idea. […]
In the Senate, a lot of my role has been trying to stop bad legislation and explaining to America why the policies of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party are not good for them. […] And that’s an important role. But after spending most of my life in advertising and marketing and research, I know that we can do a whole lot better job of convincing the American people, winning their hearts and souls. If we do that, then we are going to be more effective inside of Congress and more effective at election time. [Remarks on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, as quoted by Huffington Post, December 6]
Eldridge Cleaver disagrees with Jason Whitlock. The sports columnist who this week said “I believe the NRA is the new KKK,” got his history a little backwards. From an insightful article from William Tonso:
[A]llied with sportsmen in vocal opposition to gun controls in the 1960s were the militant Black Panthers. Panther Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver noted in 1968: “Some very interesting laws are being passed. They don’t name me; they don’t say, take the guns away from the niggers. They say that people will no longer be allowed to have (guns). They don’t pass these rules and these regulations specifically for black people, they have to pass them in a way that will take in everybody.” […]
San Francisco civil-liberties attorney Don B. Kates, Jr. […] describes early gun control efforts in his book Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptic Speak Out. As Kates documents, prohibitions against the sale of cheap handguns originated in the post-Civil War South. Small pistols selling for as little as 50 or 60 cents became available in the 1870s and ‘80s, and since they could be afforded by recently emancipated blacks and poor whites (whom agrarian agitators of the time were encouraging to ally for economic and political purposes), these guns constituted a significant threat to a southern establishment interested in maintaining the traditional structure.
Consequently, Kates notes, in 1870 Tennessee banned “selling all but ‘the Army and Navy model’ handgun, i.e., the most expensive one, which was beyond the means of most blacks and laboring people.” In 1881, Arkansas enacted an almost identical ban on the sale of cheap revolvers, while in 1902, South Carolina banned the sale of handguns to all but “sheriffs and their special deputies—i.e., company goons and the KKK.” In 1893 and 1907, respectively, Alabama and Texas attempted to put handguns out of the reach of blacks and poor whites through “extremely heavy business and/or transactional taxes” on the sale of such weapons. [Reason, December 1985, as reproduced at GunCite.com]
States don’t need more federal aid to maintain their payrolls. They just need workers who can put in a 40-hour week. Jason Richwine and Andrew Biggs look at the Census Bureau’s American Time Use Survey:
What we found was that during a typical workweek, private-sector employees work about 41.4 hours. Federal workers, by contrast, put in 38.7 hours, and state and local government employees work 38.1 hours. In a calendar year, private-sector employees work the equivalent of 3.8 more 40-hour workweeks than federal employees and 4.7 more weeks than state and local government workers. Put another way, private employees spend around an extra month working each year compared with public employees. If the public sector worked that additional month, governments could theoretically save around $130 billion in annual labor costs without reducing services.
We’ve excluded teachers from the full-year comparison because of their naturally shorter work year. But could public-private differences in work time be due to other occupational differences between the sectors? Large differences in work hours actually persist even when comparing workers with similar jobs and similar skills in each sector.
Based on the most detailed and objective data set available, the private sector really does work more than the public sector. This fact may hold different lessons for different people, but our own take is simple: Before we ask private-sector employees to work more to support government, government itself should work as much as the private sector. [Wall Street Journal, December 4]
Taxpayers vote with their feet. Top five shrinking states, according to ResidencyHQ: Illinois, New York, California, New Jersey, Ohio. [Fiscal Times, November 28]
Where those states rank in the Tax Foundation’s 2013 State Business Tax Climate Index: Illinois, 29; New York, 50; California, 48; New Jersey, 49, Ohio, 39.
One little noted reason Twinkie production is moving to Mexico: protectionism. Bryan Riley:
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, “U.S. sugar prices have been well above world prices since 1982 because the U.S. Government supports domestic sugar prices through loans to sugar processors and a marketing allotment program.”
The U.S. government artificially inflates sugar prices to help sugar growers by imposing quotas that restrict the amount food manufacturers and consumers in the United States can buy from producers in other countries. If a bakery or a candy company wants to import more sugar than is allowed under the government’s quota, it must pay a prohibitive tariff of 15.36 cents per pound for raw sugar.
In October, sugar cost 52.54 cents per pound in the United States and 44.78 cents per pound in other countries. The difference between 52.54 cents and 44.78 cents is not “zero.”
In October, people in the United States paid 7.76 cents per pound extra for sugar, but the “no-cost” sugar program usually costs Americans even more. Over the past 12 months, Americans paid a big surcharge for sugar. The average price of sugar in the United States was 68.95 cents per pound, 41 percent above the world market price. [Internal citations omitted.] [The Heritage Foundation, December 5]
Health and safety regulations represent trade-offs that make sense to the wealthy, but not necessarily the poor, finds a new study by Diana Thomas:
Well-intentioned regulation often represents the preferences of the wealthy by regulating otherwise negligible risks. By driving up prices for all consumers, such regulation is likely to have disproportionately negative or regressive effects on the poor. This study shows that compared to potential private risk-reduction strategies, regulation tends to target low risks that are extremely expensive to mitigate. Such regulations, therefore, represent the preferences of the wealthy and come at the expense of low-income households.
The 36 different regulations included in this rough estimation of the cost and benefits of public risk-mitigation strategies resulted in a total reduction in the risk of a fatality of 0.18 in 10,000 of population and cost approximately $604 per household, which translates to $3,359 for a 1 in 10,000 reduction in mortality. In contrast, the private risk-reduction strategy of moving to a high-income neighborhood would reduce mortality risk by roughly 8.3 in 10,000 people for adult mortality risks and by 1 in 10,000 for pediatric injury risk. Such private risk-reduction costs a total of $6,000 per household, which translates into a cost of $645.16 for a mortality risk reduction of 1 in 10,000 people. In consequence, having to pay for small risk reductions through regulation may prevent low-income households from taking more beneficial private risk reduction strategies that would result in a greater reduction in mortality. [“The Regressive Effects of Regulation,” Mercatus Center, November 12]
Restaurants and food trucks are two flavors that go great together. Food trucks—the target of much regulation designed to protect restaurants from competition—are good for a city’s restaurant scene, and even established restaurants are starting to see they benefit, too, report Bert Gall and Lancee Kurcab:
Austin’s food trucks and food trailers are a rising tide lifting all boats in the local restaurant industry; one way they have done so is by attracting more people—both new residents and tourists—into the city. In Houston, restaurants have experienced increased business generated by food trucks parking nearby and drawing more people to the restaurants’ neighborhoods. It is for this reason that restaurant owners have asked the Houston City Council to ease existing laws that make it difficult for food trucks to operate. And in Las Vegas, George Harris, the owner of Mundo, an award-winning upscale restaurant in Las Vegas, has observed that food trucks help his business by bringing new customers to the neighborhood.
Furthermore, historical evidence suggests that banning food trucks from an area in which they currently operate will harm nearby restaurants by decreasing the number of potential customers. For example, when street vendors were banned from New York’s Lower East Side and Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market, brick-and-mortar businesses complained that they suffered lower revenues as a result.
Simply put, food trucks draw people out of their offices and homes and into the community, opening their eyes to all of the meal options their neighborhood has to offer.
As Gall and Kurcab observe, there’s nothing unfair about using a different business model, as long as everyone is free to use whatever business model he wants. Restaurants, in fact, are using food trucks, too:
All over the country, restaurant owners are launching their own food trucks. For example, the owners of Curried, an Indian restaurant in Chicago, started a food truck with the same name in order to better market the restaurant. Mission accomplished: “We’ve definitely seen an increase in business at the restaurant,” says Scott Gregerson, Curried’s managing partner. Jose Hernandez, general manager at POPS Cheesestakes in Las Vegas, says that the business at the restaurant’s physical location has been boosted by the restaurant’s food truck: “The truck has been great advertising.” [“Seven Myths and Realities about Food Trucks: Why the Facts Support Food Truck Freedom,” Institute for Justice, November 2012]
President Obama’s data contradict his story on the Bush tax cuts. The chart below, based on Barack Obama’s own 2012 Economic Report of the President, show the Bush tax cuts are not the cause of the deficit.
[Investor’s Business Daily, November 30]
• Go see or request a screening for the new movie Honor Flight, a documentary about a project to thank World War II veterans by sending them on a trip to the World War II memorial in Washington, D.C.
• Discover how speech and behavior codes are trampling the civil liberties of college students around the country. At noon on December 11, the Cato Institute hosts Greg Lukianoff, President of the Foundation for Indivdual Rights in Education and author of the new book Unlearning Liberty.
• Learn how the filibuster is an essential check on overbearing majorities in the Senate. On December 11, at 11 a.m., The Heritage Foundation will host authors Richard Arenberg and Robert Dove.
• Get activated with the new Heritage Action for America website, which now has more tools for getting involved in the fight for liberty.
• See how well you know your economic freedom rankings. EconomicFreedom.org has an Economic Freedom Face-Off game.
• Check out these videos: EconStories has just released the greatest collection of economic hits ever aggregated; almost one year ago today, at a meeting of the Conservative Women’s Network at The Heritage Foundation, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) laid out a game plan for championing conservative ideas.
(And check our Conservative Calendar for more things to do!)
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