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.
April 12, 2013
Latest Studies: 60 new items, including a Pacific Research Institute guide to municipal bankruptcy, and a Mercatus Center review of the Federal Reserve’s new regulatory powers
Notes on the Week: Margaret Thatcher turned Britain around, lowest labor force participation rate since 1979, what police think about gun control, and more
To Do: Celebrate your tax freedom—symbolically that is, until next year
Budget & Taxation
• Is It Fannie and Freddie’s Turn to Bailout the U.S. Treasury? – e21: Economic Policies for the 21st Century
• Heritage Employment Report: March Job Market Goes Out Like a Lamb – The Heritage Foundation
• House and Senate Budgets: A First Step Toward Restoring Congressional Budgeting – The Heritage Foundation
• The Dos and Don’ts of Tax Reform – The Heritage Foundation
• Maryland’s Spending and Affordability Committee Lacks Fiscal Discipline – Maryland Public Policy Institute
• The Perils of Automatic Budgeting – National Affairs
• Municipal Bankruptcy: An Overview For Local Officials – Pacific Research Institute
• Tax and Licensing Reform Bills Would Improve Our Business Climate – Washington Policy Center
Crime, Justice & the Law
• The Need for a Mistake of Law Defense as a Response to Overcriminalization – The Heritage Foundation
Economic and Political Thought
• James Madison: Father of the Constitution – The Heritage Foundation
• The Art of Limited Government – National Affairs
Economic Growth
• Grow the Economy through Small Businesses – American Enterprise Institute
• Unfounded Optimism: The Danger of FHA’s Mispriced Unemployment Risk – American Enterprise Institute
• Research Review: Who Creates Jobs? Start-up Firms and New Businesses – The Heritage Foundation
• The Economic Ignorance of Barack Obama – Hoover Institution
Education
• Scaling Turnaround: A District-Improvement Approach – American Enterprise Institute
Elections, Transparency, & Accountability
• Measuring the Drapes – National Affairs
Foreign Policy/International Affairs
• Arms Trade Treaty: Problems with Substance and Process – The Heritage Foundation
• Kerry’s First Visit to Asia: Where Is the Pivot? – The Heritage Foundation
• No European Union Membership in the Arctic Council – The Heritage Foundation
• The U.S. Should Support New South Korean President’s Approach to North Korea – The Heritage Foundation
Health Care
• You Want Affordable Care?: Common Sense from a Practicing Physician – Centennial Institute
• 21st Century Health Care Options for the States – Galen Institute
• Galen Institute Comments on the HHS Proposed Rule Regarding Mandatory Coverage of Contraception Services Under the PPACC – Galen Institute
• Medicare Savings: 5 Steps to a Downpayment on Structural Reform – The Heritage Foundation
• Obamacare’s Essential Benefits Regulation Creates Disparities Among States – The Heritage Foundation
• A Prescription for Medicaid – National Affairs
Immigration
• America’s Patriotic Assimilation System Is Broken – Hudson Institute
• Measuring Immigrant Assimilation in Post-Recession America – Manhattan Institute
Information Technology
• The Challenge of VoIP to Legacy Federal and State Regulatory Regimes – Free State Foundation
International Trade/Finance
• Regulatory Protectionism: A Hidden Threat to Free Trade – Cato Institute
Monetary Policy/Financial Regulation
• Inflation Poised to Accelerate – American Institute for Economic Research
• Breaking Up Big Banks: Right Question, Wrong Answer – The Heritage Foundation
• An Introduction to U.S. Monetary Policy – Mercatus Center
• Evaluating the Centralized-Layers Approach to U.S. Federal Financial Regulation – Mercatus Center
• The Federal Reserve’s Expanding Regulatory Umbrella – Mercatus Center
National Security
• Dutch Hard Power: Choosing Decline – American Enterprise Institute
• North Korea’s Bluffing Blowhard – American Enterprise Institute
• Chemical Security: Risk-Based Solutions Key to Fixing Flaws – The Heritage Foundation
• Mixed Oxide Fuel Facility in South Carolina Needs Congress’s Support – The Heritage Foundation
• North Korean Threats: What Washington Should Do – The Heritage Foundation
Natural Resources, Energy, Environment, & Science
• Peer Review of ‘The Economic, Utility Portfolio, and Rate Impact of Clean Energy Development in North Carolina’ – Beacon Hill Institute
• 10 Questions for DOE Nominee Ernest Moniz – The Heritage Foundation
• 10 Questions for EPA Nominee Gina McCarthy – The Heritage Foundation
• Boxer–Sanders Carbon Tax: Economic Impact – The Heritage Foundation
• EPA Administrator Nominee Gina McCarthy: In Her Own Words – The Heritage Foundation
• Ernest Moniz: In His Own Words – The Heritage Foundation
• Power to the People: End SB 3 with Its Expensive, Regressive Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard – John Locke Foundation
• New Technology for Old Fuels: Innovation in Oil and Natural Gas Production Assures Future Supplies – Manhattan Institute
• Rare Earths Mining Potential in the United States – National Center for Policy Analysis
• The Economic Impact of Washington State’s Renewable Portfolio Standard – Washington Policy Center
• Law Mandating Use of Renewable Energy Costing Wisconsinites Hundreds of Millions – Wisconsin Policy Research Institute
Philanthropy
• Transparency in Philanthropy – Philanthropy Roundtable
Regulation & Deregulation
• Reviewing Regulatory Review – National AffairsNational Affairs
• Workers’ Comp Reform Will Spur Oklahoma Economy – Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs
The Constitution/Civil Liberties
• The Second Amendment as an Expression of First Principles – Hillsdale College
• The Persecution of Joseph Bruno – Hoover Institution
• Knives and the Second Amendment – Independence Institute
Transportation/Infrastructure
• Transportation Priorities for North Carolina – John Locke Foundation
• Orange County Toll Roads: Serious Concerns Should Lead to Significant Review by State and Local Officials – Pacific Research Institute
Margaret Thatcher, R.I.P. Margaret Thatcher died Monday morning at 87. As the Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, she revived Great Britain’s economy by beating back socialism and trade unionism. Iain Murray explains:
Politicians of all three main parties had come to believe that a high-tax society with public control of the means of production (“the commanding heights of the economy,” as Lenin himself put it) was the way forward for Britain. The result was a country where bureaucracy and trade unions ruled while enterprise and innovation stagnated.
It took weeks to get a new telephone. Getting a new heating system involved a visit to the local Gas Board “showroom,” with its pitiful selection of products. Britain’s once proud automobile industry had become a national joke, with workers striking for huge pay raises on a regular basis. The coal miners’ union had brought down one Conservative government and threatened to do so again. Just before her election, the “Winter of Discontent” strikes had led to weeks of garbage collecting in major cities and the dead lying unburied.
Mrs. Thatcher recognized the great error of socialism. As she put it, the trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. She proposed a twofold solution. First, stop spending other people’s money. Second, give them the opportunity to earn it. In short, she sought to reintroduce liberal capitalism to the country that had once been at its vanguard—from the repeal of the Corn Laws to the Industrial Revolution.
To achieve the first objective, she slowly but surely privatized nationalized industries (though, unfortunately, not the BBC), took on the trade unions and won, and reduced the size of the civil service. She achieved the second objective by lifting onerous regulations on Britain’s financial sector—one of her first acts was to lift capital controls—and implementing sound monetary policy. And she did all this in defiance of the received economic wisdom of the time.
At the polls, she defeated the error of socialism three times in a row (four if you include her Tory successor John Major’s 1992 victory). The result was vindication of the best kind, as the Labour Party, under Tony Blair, rejected a return to nationalization and instead recognized the truth that people did best under capitalism. [“The Lady Wasn’t for Turning,” The American Spectator, April 8]
Of course, there is a lot more worth knowing about Margaret Thatcher. Here is a smattering of readings and other resources:
Tributes
• “Nine Things You Should Know about Margaret Thatcher,” by Joe Carter, Acton Institute PowerBlog, April 8;
• “Counterfactual: What Would Have Happened to the UK Economy Without Thatcher?” by James Pethokoukis, AEIdeas, April 9;
• “Margaret Thatcher, RIP” by Stephen Hayward, The Ashbrook Center, April 8;
• “Margaret Thatcher’s Compassion,” by Edward Hudgins, The Atlas Society, April 8;
• “Thatcher: Anecdotes from a Biographer,” by Walter Olson, Cato Institute, April 8;
• “Her Iron Road,” by Claire Berlinski, City Journal, April 8;
• “The Lady Who Changed the World,” The Economist, April 8;
• “Heritage Mourns Loss of Lady Margaret Thatcher, ‘Intrepid Warrior for Freedom,’” by Ed Feulner, The Foundry, April 8;
• “What Margaret Thatcher Can Teach Illinois,” by Kristina Rasmussen, Illinois Policy Institute, April 8;
• “Remembering Margaret Thatcher,” by Lawrence Reed, Mackinac Center, April 8;
• “How Margaret Thatcher Brought Economic Freedom to Britain,” by Ira Stoll, Reason, April 8;
• “Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013),” Margaret Thatcher Foundation [This brief biography contains lots of links to Thatcher’s speeches and writings, organized chronologically.];
• “Margaret Thatcher Put ‘Great’ in Great Britain,” by John Blundell, USA Today, April 8.
Writings by Margaret Thatcher
• “Margaret Thatcher: How I Privatized Britain and Rebooted the ‘Enterprise Society’” by Margaret Thatcher, Reason, April 8, reprinted from the Reason Foundation’s Annual Privatization Report, January 2006;
• Statecraft, HarperCollins, 2002 [An excerpt was published in The Heritage Foundation’s 2005 President’s Essay.];
• “The West Must Prevail” The Heritage Foundation, December 9, 2002;
• “The Moral Foundations of Society,” Imprimis, March 1995.
Video
• “The Real Legacy of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s Iron Lady,” The Heritage Foundation, January 13, 2012.
Previously Published
• “Female Force: Margaret Thatcher,” by John Blundell, Bluewater Productions, 2010;
• “How Margaret Thatcher Helped to End the Cold War,” by Theodore Bromund, September 28, 2009;
• “Achieving Change: What We Can Learn from Margaret Thatcher,” by John Blundell, December 31, 2007.
Obama’s latest big government budget: By the numbers, from Patrick Louis Knudsen:
Spending in the President’s budget totals $3.778 trillion in FY 2014, a $151 billion increase from the Administration’s own projection of spending under current policies. Spending rises to $5.66 trillion in FY 2023, or 21.7 percent of GDP, which is 1.5 percentage points above the historical average as a share of the economy—and that is before the explosion of entitlement spending in the next decade. […]
Tax revenue rises from 17.8 percent of GDP in 2014 to a near-record 20 percent in 2023. Once again, these figures are significantly higher than the historical average of 18.5 percent, further demonstrating Obama’s commitment to bigger government.
Yet despite a net tax increase of more than $1 trillion, the budget never balances, and in fact adds $5.3 trillion in new deficit spending [over] 10 years. Deficits remain in the neighborhood of one-half trillion dollars until the very end of the budget window. In 2023, the deficit reaches its “smallest” level: $439 billion. Gross federal debt soars from $17 trillion in 2013 to $25 trillion in 2023.
Consequently, debt held by the public remains at economically risky levels of nearly three-fourths the size of the economy. Its lowest point is an alarming 73 percent of GDP in 2023. The historical average is 37 percent of the economy. [The Foundry, April 10]
Only 42 years to a balanced budget: The budget President Obama unveiled this week contains some long-term projections based on current policies, and, as you can see from this chart, the White House envisions the federal government will have a balanced budget in the year 2055.
Whew! Problem solved, right? James Pethokoukis:
[A] drill down reveals the Obama budget accomplishes this feat by a) taking tax revenue from its traditional 18% of GDP to nearly 24% of GDP—an increase of 33%, and b) by cutting spending over the long-term to less than 16% of GDP. A libertarian dream!
But how does it reduce spending that much? By cutting discretionary spending, including defense, from around 9% of GDP to 2.3% of GDP. In other words, disarmament! That is not going to happen. [AEIdeas, April 10]
Lowest labor force participation rate since 1979: The March jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics contains disappointing news, report James Sherk and Salim Furth:
Employers added a net of only 88,000 new jobs, and labor force participation dropped sharply. The labor force drop caused the unemployment rate to fall by 0.1 percentage point to 7.6 percent despite the low job gains. However, revisions to the January and February reports found better job creation than previously estimated.
Labor force participation dropped to 63.3 percent, the lowest rate since 1979. BLS estimates that the U.S. civilian population has increased by 2.4 million during the past year, but only 300,000 have entered the labor force.
One of the most significant features of the report was what it did not find. Government employment barely changed despite the implementation of sequestration. Government jobs declined in March due to job losses in the Postal Service, a long-term trend driven by electronic communications. Thus far, sequestration has had little noticeable effect on government payrolls. To the extent the slowdown can be attributed to government policy, the January tax increase is a more likely culprit. [The Heritage Foundation, April 5]
What do police think about gun control? Most law enforcement officers think more restrictive gun control laws will not reduce violent crime, according to a new poll conducted by PoliceOne.com, a news website for law enforcement professionals.
The results of the poll should be read cautiously, since the respondents were not a random sample but the law enforcement professionals among the website’s readership. Still, the survey received answers from over 15,000 law enforcement officers. Also, PoliceOne.com is a news site, not an advocacy group composed of members who share a common view of an issue.
Some of the results are overwhelmingly anti-gun control. For example:
Also:
Notice that 91.5 percent of the respondents think a ban on “assault weapons” would either have no effect on violent crime or make the problem worse.
Other results:
• More permissive concealed carry laws was the number one choice (28.8 percent) among options to prevent large scale shootings; 15.8 percent said more armed guards was the best option; 14 percent said better background checks was the best option;
• 79.7 percent said prohibiting private non-dealer transfers of firearms would have no impact on violent crime;
• 81.5 percent said gun-buy-back programs are ineffective;
• 91.3 percent support concealed carry laws;
• 86.2 percent said the presence of legally armed citizens would have reduced or eliminated casualties in the Newtown and Aurora incidents. [“Gun Policy & Law Enforcement: Survey Results,” PoliceOne.com, April 8]
Destroying health insurance: Smoking is a pre-existing condition, according to the D.C. Health Exchange Board. That’s the entity that decides the rules for the health insurance exchange that will be set up under ObamaCare in the nation’s capital. The decision means insurers won’t be able to charge smokers more for health insurance. This decision might seem like not a big deal, but, as Kevin Williamson points out, it actually reveals a lot about how ObamaCare works and what it will do to health care:
There are many ways to implement a bad idea. For instance, Congress might have passed a law requiring that all U.S. insurance companies no longer charge smokers more for their coverage. The state of Connecticut might have passed a similar law. New York City might have passed that law. But in each case, voters who saw that stupidity for what it is would have somebody to vote against. Obamacare eliminates the option for democratic response. Instead, it creates a body of political appointees immune from being held accountable at the ballot box. […]
Obamacare is designed to destroy the insurance market. Markets do not function without prices, and Obamacare ensures that prices will not be allowed to emerge. There is a medical price associated with smoking, but the District of Columbia has decided to suppress that price by law. Pretending that smoking has no relationship with health-care costs does not make it so—it is only a way to push costs around in a way that is agreeable to the likes of Barack Obama, converting a system that prices risk into a system of entitlements. […]
A market without prices is by definition a market that will not function. What comes after that is obvious. The argument for Obamacare was “Everybody gets insurance,” but the final product will be something between “Everybody is on Medicaid” and “Everybody has access to the fine health care on offer at the infirmary in the county jail.” And that is happening, one unaccountable decision at a time. [National Review, April 10]
There is no infrastructure crisis. President Obama recently proposed another program to boost federal spending on infrastructure, but the idea that we’re not spending enough already is a myth, writes Evan Soltas:
Believe it or not, infrastructure has improved significantly over the last two decades. In its report for 2010, the Federal Highway Administration said that 57 percent of all vehicle-miles were traveled on federal highways with ratings of “good” or higher – according to a measure of road quality pleasingly known as the International Roughness Index. That was up from 48 percent in 2000. The percentage of roads in bad condition has also declined: In 1989 6.6 percent of rural and urban interstates were rated “poor”; now only 1.9 percent of rural interstates and 5.4 percent of urban ones earn that grade.
Despite warnings from President Barack Obama, America’s bridges have never been safer. The highway administration rated 21.9 percent of its bridges “deficient” in 2009, as compared to 37.8 percent in 1989. And contrary to Obama’s implication, the word “deficient” does not mean unsafe, at least as the highway administration uses it. A bridge is “deficient” when it would benefit from expansion and renovation in line with usage.
Traffic congestion has diminished. In 1989, 52.6 percent of urban interstates were rated “congested” according to a comparison of peak volume to planned capacity. In 2009, the figure was 26.3 percent. [Bloomberg, April 8]
More money does not equal better results. A new MSNBC ad has gotten a lot of attention. It features commentator Melissa Harris-Perry saying:
We have never invested as much in public education as we should have, because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of “these are our children.” So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the households’, then we start making better investments.
In addition to being creepy for asserting that kids belong to communities, Harris-Perry’s homily is incorrect both in implying that there has been a dearth of public investment and in equating more public spending with better results. As Andrew Coulson noted recently in response to a similar argument by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the United States spends three times more per pupil in real dollars today than it did 40 years ago; yet there has been no improvement in student achievement over that period. [Cato Institute, February 13]
Other community—i.e., federal government—interventions have also proven to be poor investments. David Muhlhausen notes in his new book Do Federal Social Programs Work?: “[T]he Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified 69 federal programs that provide support for pre-kindergarten and childcare. According to a conservative estimate, the federal government spent more than $25 billion on these programs in FY 2009.” [Internal citation omitted]
Muhlhausen’s book contains a mere thousand or so footnotes documenting the conclusion: “Despite the best social engineering efforts, the evidence overwhelmingly points to the conclusion that federal social programs are ineffective.” About programs for children specifically, he quotes Isabel Sawhill and Jon Baron’s summary of the literature:
Since 1990, there have been 10 instances in which an entire federal social program has been evaluated using the scientific “gold standard” method of randomly assigning individuals to a program or control group. Nine of these evaluations found weak or no positive effects, for programs such as the $1.5 billion Job Corps program (job training for disadvantaged youth); the $300 million Upward Bound program (academic preparation for at-risk high school students); the $1.2 billion 21st Century Community Learning Centers (after-school programs for disadvantaged youth); and, most recently, the $7 billion Head Start preschool program. Only one program – Early Head Start (a sister program to Head Start, for younger children) – was found to produce meaningful, though modest, positive effects.
Muhlhausen goes on to show that even Early Head Start is not very effective.
Check the facts on background checks. The argument for more background checks has the facts wrong, explains John Lott:
The president kept claiming this week and last week that: “as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases take place without a background check” and that “background checks have kept more than 2 million dangerous people from buying a gun.” But both statistics are false.
Start with the 40 percent figure. That number comes from a very small study covering purchases during 1991 to 1994. Not only is that two decades-old data, but it covered sales before the federal Brady Act took effect on February 28, 1994. The act required federally licensed dealers to perform background checks.
And what’s more, Mr. Obama conveniently forgets that the researchers gave this number (well, actually 36%, not his rounding up to 40%) for all transfers, not just for guns sold. Most significantly, the vast majority of these transfers involved within-family inheritances and gifts.
Counting only guns that were sold gives a very different perspective, with only 14 percent not actually going through federally licensed dealers. But even that is much too high as there were biases in the survey. For example, two-thirds of federally licensed dealers at the time were so-called “kitchen table” dealers who sold gun out of their homes and most buyers surveyed were likely unaware these individuals were indeed licensed. […]Remember the five times that the late Sen. Ted Kennedy was “initially denied” flights because his name was on the anti-terror “no fly” list? His name was just too similar to someone that we really did want to keep from flying. By Obama’s method of counting, that means the “no fly” list stopped five flights by terrorists.
For gun purchases, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives dropped over 94 percent of “initial denials” after just the first preliminary review. The annual National Instant Criminal Background Check System report explains that these cases were dropped either because the additional information showed that the wrong people had been stopped or because the covered offenses were so many decades old that the government decided not to prosecute. At least a fifth of the remaining 6 percent were still false positives. [Fox News, April 9]
The process turned into a weapon, too. The Arms Trade Treaty that the United Nations General Assembly adopted last week isn’t likely to stop any bad guys from getting weapons and using them for bad ends. Ted Bromund explains:
Though the vote in favor of the treaty seems overwhelming, a closer look shows something different. Among the major exporting and importing nations, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Russia abstained. So did most of the Arab Group, as well as a range of anti-American regimes, including Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and a smattering of others, including Belarus, Burma, and Sri Lanka.
A further 13 nations did not vote, including some known opponents of the treaty, such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Finally, while Pakistan voted in favor of the treaty, its statement in explanation implied that it was voting for the treaty because it anticipated that India would abstain, and it wanted to look good by comparison.
Thus, what the U.N. vote amounts to is the tacit rejection of the treaty by most of the world’s most irresponsible arms exporters and anti-American dictatorships, who collectively amount to half of the world’s population.
The problem with the ATT was never the idea that nations should have a system for controlling their arms exports: The U.S. is widely acknowledged to have the best such system in the world. The problem with the ATT was always that it would end up constraining the U.S. (and other democracies), but not the genuinely dangerous, lawless, and irresponsible regimes in the world. The fact that these regimes abstained or voted against the treaty is proof of that point: They have openly stated that they have no intention of being bound by the ATT.
But the U.S. decision to abandon multilateral negotiation and push the treaty through the General Assembly instead does set a bad precedent:
The next time out, when the “international community” demands a treaty—on global warming, for example, or the use of armed drones—that is not in the interests of the U.S., they will be free to use the precedent that we have just reinforced: If you don’t like the results of a multilateral negotiation, and even if a substantial number of important states are opposed, you should run to the General Assembly and push the treaty through. [The Foundry, April 2]
• Celebrate—or commemorate—Tax Freedom Day, the day on which the average taxpayer will have earned enough money for the calendar year to pay his tax bill for the year. This year, that day is April 18; the Tax Foundation will host a Capitol Hill Reception marking the occasion on April 16. The reception begins at 5 p.m. and will be held at 1302 Longworth House Office Building in Washington, D.C.
• Find out whether Medicaid expansion is a good idea for Michigan. The Mackinac Center will host a discussion with Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute. The event begins at noon on April 18 at the Michigan Restaurant Association in Lansing, Michigan.
• Don’t forget to register for Resource Bank 2013, which is April 25 - 26 in Orlando, Florida. Among the confirmed speakers: James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Ben Domenech of the Heartland Institute, Christopher Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute, Joseph Lehman of the Mackinac Center, John Von Kannon of The Heritage Foundation, and Erik Telford of the Franklin Center.
• Check out these videos: “Straight Talk About the Wage Gap,” from the Independent Women’s Forum; and “Puppies & Kittens & Censors … Oh My! Government Muzzles Internet Pet Vet,” from the Institute for Justice.
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