From John Stossel...

It's amazing how modern politics resembles scenes of Ayn Rand's best-seller Atlas Shrugged.

Like the one in which a high-ranking government official pumps millions of dollars into a failing railroad company.  The grateful railroad CEO rewards the government official by renovating his hometown train station and naming it after the government official. The renovation costs $5,700,000 more than expected.

Then comes the ribbon cutting ceremony.   The CEO gets on one of his trains to go to the ceremony, but it breaks down. No surprise there: One out of every four trains his company runs is late. The CEO, chuckling at the irony, abandons the train and takes a car to the ceremony.

Unfortunately, that wasn't a scene in Atlas Shrugged. It happened this weekend.  The government official is Joe Biden.  By the way,  the first of three Atlas Shrugged movies opens next month, appropriately on April 15th.

http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2011/03/21/joe-biden-railroad/#ixzz1HFv5HNY6

At least Spring is coming...

From The Cato Institute website
The Senate on Wednesday voted down two proposed spending bills, one with $6.5 billion in cuts from the Democrats and one with $61 billion in cuts from the Republicans. Both bills would have extended federal funding until September 30, the end of the fiscal year. Comments Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner, "This is like taking a cupcake away from the world's fattest man and having somebody scream that he's starving. ...To actually bring the budget into balance will clearly require much bigger cuts."



James Gattuso, The Heritage Foundation (excerpt)
"It’s a classic economic fallacy, identified as early as 1850 by French economist Frederic Bastiat. Is it a good or a bad thing, Bastiat asked, if someone breaks a shopkeeper’s window? Superficially, it’s a good thing: more work to keep the glaziers busy and paid. But that work comes at the expense of other goods and services the shopkeeper would have bought if he didn’t have to pay for the window. And, while those other goods and services actually would have improved the lot of the shopkeeper and his customers, breaking and replacing the window enhances nothing.

It’s an obvious point, but one that is constantly overlooked. President Obama has consistently fallen into the broken windows trap, arguing that climate change rules would create millions of “green jobs” by increasing demand for new technologies. But this new demand comes at the expense of other expenditures that would have been made, and the jobs that would have been created elsewhere. Rather than a boon, the new green jobs are just so much broken glass.

The fallacy also traps some critics of regulation, who should know better. A few years ago, opponents of the proposed “do not call list” for telemarketers argued that if sales calls were restricted, jobs would be lost in the telemarketing industry. But so what? To the extent these jobs were based on the ability to call people at their homes against their expressed preferences, their loss is hardly something to be mourned.

Similarly, some have argued that pending FCC “net neutrality” rules would destroy jobs because the marketplace “losers” would be telephone and cable firms who employ large numbers of people, while the “winners” would be lean Internet content firms such as Google and Amazon.com, who have relatively small workforces. But such arguments completely miss the point. The problem with net neutrality rules has nothing to do with protecting fat telephone and cable payrolls. The problem is that, by interfering with innovation and investment, the recently-adopted rules will stymie growth of the Internet. That will probably mean fewer jobs for the economy as a whole – but certainly it would mean fewer benefits for society.

In fact, many regulations are harmful precisely because they protect jobs. Case in point: in New Jersey, it is illegal to pump your own gas at a service station. That law no doubt “saves” many jobs for gas-pumpers across the Garden State. But does anyone actually believe it leaves consumers or the economy better off?
Counting jobs is a misleading measure of the costs and benefits of regulation. As economist Richard Williams of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center put it, “Bad policies can increase total jobs, and good policies can decrease total jobs.” And, Williams points out, the number of jobs in the economy will remain about the same in the long-run. It’s the quality and composition of those jobs that will vary.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of regulations that harmfully destroy jobs. Nevertheless, regulatory policymaking shouldn’t be reduced to a simple exercise in job counts. The real goal, as Mr. Bastiat and his vandalized shopkeeper would agree, is wealth creation. And that is a far more difficult thing for government regulators to mandate, no matter how many windows they break."

True Words!

"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." --Benjamin Franklin

Are you kidding me?

"The term Muslim Brotherhood is an umbrella term for a variety of movements. In the case of Egypt, it is a largely secular group." --Director of National Intelligence James Clapper

I truly hope this does not represent where the U.S. stands on the future of leadership in Egypt...

The Gipper

"I come before you to report on the state of our Union, and I'm pleased to report that after four years of united effort, the American people have brought forth a nation renewed, stronger, freer, and more secure than before. Four years ago we began to change, forever I hope, our assumptions about government and its place in our lives. Out of that change has come great and robust growth -- in our confidence, our economy, and our role in the world. Tonight America is stronger because of the values that we hold dear. We believe faith and freedom must be our guiding stars, for they show us truth, they make us brave, give us hope, and leave us wiser than we were. Our progress began not in Washington, DC, but in the hearts of our families, communities, workplaces, and voluntary groups which, together, are unleashing the invincible spirit of one great nation under God. Four years ago we said we would invigorate our economy by giving people greater freedom and incentives to take risks and letting them keep more of what they earned. We did what we promised, and a great industrial giant is reborn." --Ronald Reagan

Familiar thoughts from the past

"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." --James Madison

Charles Krauthammer - Washington Post

Why Everything Starts With Repeal

By Charles Krauthammer · Friday, January 21, 2011

WASHINGTON -- Suppose someone -- say, the president of United States -- proposed the following: We are drowning in debt. More than $14 trillion right now. I've got a great idea for deficit reduction. It will yield a savings of $230 billion over the next 10 years: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion.
He'd be laughed out of town. And yet, this is precisely what the Democrats are claiming as a virtue of Obamacare. During the debate over Republican attempts to repeal it, one of the Democrats' major talking points has been that Obamacare reduces the deficit -- and therefore repeal raises it -- by $230 billion. Why, the Congressional Budget Office says exactly that.

Very true. And very convincing. Until you realize where that number comes from. Explains CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf in his "preliminary analysis of H.R. 2" (the Republican health care repeal): "CBO anticipates that enacting H.R. 2 would probably yield, for the 2012-2021 period, a reduction in revenues in the neighborhood of $770 billion and a reduction in outlays in the vicinity of $540 billion."

As National Affairs editor Yuval Levin pointed out when mining this remarkable nugget, this is a hell of a way to do deficit reduction: a radical increase in spending, topped by an even more radical increase in new taxes.
Of course, the very numbers that yield this $230 billion "deficit reduction" are phony to begin with. The CBO is required to accept every assumption, promise (of future spending cuts, for example) and chronological gimmick that Congress gives it. All the CBO then does is perform the calculation and spit out the result.

In fact, the whole Obamacare bill was gamed to produce a favorable CBO number. Most glaringly, the new entitlement it creates -- government-subsidized health insurance for 32 million Americans -- doesn't kick in until 2014. That was deliberately designed so any projection for this decade would only cover six years of expenditures -- while that same 10-year projection would capture 10 years of revenues. With 10 years of money inflow versus six years of outflow, the result is a positive -- i.e., deficit-reducing -- number. Surprise.
If you think that's audacious, consider this: Obamacare does not create just one new entitlement (health insurance for everyone); it actually creates a second -- long-term care insurance. With an aging population, and with long-term care becoming extraordinarily expensive, this promises to be the biggest budget buster in the history of the welfare state.

And yet, in the CBO calculation, this new entitlement to long-term care reduces the deficit over the next 10 years. By $70 billion, no less. How is this possible? By collecting premiums now, and paying out no benefits for the first 10 years. Presto: a (temporary) surplus. As former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin and scholars Joseph Antos and James Capretta note, "Only in Washington could the creation of a reckless entitlement program be used as 'offset' to grease the way for another entitlement." I would note additionally that only in Washington could such a neat little swindle be titled the "CLASS Act" (for the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act).

That a health care reform law of such enormous size and consequence, revolutionizing one-sixth of the U.S. economy, could be sold on such flimflammery is astonishing, even by Washington standards. What should Republicans do?

Make the case. Explain the phony numbers, boring as the exercise may be. Better still, hold hearings and let the CBO director, whose integrity is beyond reproach, explain the numbers himself.

To be sure, the effect on the deficit is not the only criterion by which to judge Obamacare. But the tossing around of such clearly misleading bumper-sticker numbers calls into question the trustworthiness of other happy claims about Obamacare. Such as the repeated promise that everyone who likes his current health insurance will be able to keep it. Sure, but only if your employer continues to offer it. In fact, millions of workers will find themselves adrift because their employers will have every incentive to dump them onto the public rolls.

This does not absolve the Republicans from producing a health care replacement. They will and should be judged by how well their alternative addresses the needs of the uninsured and the anxieties of the currently insured. But amending an insanely complicated, contradictory, incoherent and arbitrary 2,000-page bill that will generate tens of thousands of pages of regulations is a complete nonstarter. Everything begins with repeal.