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www.freedomandprosperity.org |
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The views expressed by Andrew Quinlan and Dan Mitchell on this weblog are solely their own and are not necessarily those of their employers, The Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation and The Heritage Foundation, respectively. |
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The Market Center Blog |
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Observations and insights on the global fight |
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CF&P's Market Center Blog Archives |
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Thursday, June 30, 2005 ~ 12:39 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: ...the country that for hundreds of years was best known for emigration, tragic poets, famines, civil wars and leprechauns today has a per capita G.D.P. higher than that of
Germany, France and Britain. How Ireland went from the sick man of Europe to the rich man in less than a generation is an amazing story. It tells you a lot about Europe today: all the innovation is happening on
the periphery by those countries embracing globalization in their own ways - Ireland, Britain, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe - while those following the French-German social model are suffering high
unemployment and low growth. ...The country was going broke, and most college grads were emigrating. "We went on a borrowing, spending and taxing spree, and that nearly drove us under," said Deputy
Prime Minister Mary Harney. "It was because we nearly went under that we got the courage to change." And change Ireland did. In a quite unusual development, the government, the main trade unions,
farmers and industrialists came together and agreed on a program of fiscal austerity, slashing corporate taxes to 12.5 percent, far below the rest of Europe, moderating wages and prices, and aggressively
courting foreign investment. ...In 1990, Ireland's total work force was 1.1 million. This year it will hit two million, with no unemployment and 200,000 foreign workers (including 50,000 Chinese). Link to this Blog Entry
Wednesday, June 29, 2005 ~ 12:10 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: The White House is putting heavy pressure on Congress to support this agreement, which it should. But one cannot help feeling that its own
missteps on trade are what have gotten this administration to the point where it must pull out all the stops to gain passage of a very modest trade agreement that probably won't have much impact one way or
another. ...the Bush administration has played politics with trade since day one, which has done serious damage to the fragile alliance that still
supports free trade. It imposed utterly unjustified tariffs on steel, torpedoed the Doha Round of multilateral trade talks by supporting a huge increase in agriculture subsidies, and has never missed an
opportunity to demagogue China for all our trade woes. Having destroyed the prospects for a multilateral trade agreement, which was supposed to be primarily about eliminating agriculture subsidies, the
Bush administration has tried to salvage some semblance of a free trade agenda by pursuing bilateral trade agreements. ...Still, much more could have been accomplished with CAFTA if the White House had made more
of an effort. For example, it could have used this as an opportunity to start dismantling the absurd U.S. sugar policy, which keeps domestic prices far above world levels just to enrich a few producers. Although
CAFTA opens the sugar market a little, much more could have been done without making the sugar lobby any more opposed to the agreement than it is anyway. Free traders have no choice but to support
CAFTA. Its failure would be seen as a victory for protectionism and would crush the hopes of economic reformers throughout Latin America.
...The effort shouldn't have been this difficult. If President Bush had been more consistent in his support for free trade over the last five years, he would now be in a stronger position to get CAFTA approved.
Thursday, June 30, 2005 ~ 11:32 a.m., Andrew Quinlan Wrote: Europe is the citadel of hypocrisy. Considering Europeans' contempt for the United States and George Bush for not embracing the Kyoto
Protocol, you'd expect that they would have made major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions -- the purpose of Kyoto. Well, not exactly. From 1990 (Kyoto's base year for measuring changes) to 2002, global
emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, increased 16.4 percent, reports the International Energy Agency. The U.S. increase
was 16.7 percent, and most of Europe hasn't done much better. Here are some IEA estimates of the increases: France, 6.9 percent; Italy, 8.3 percent; Greece, 28.2 percent; Ireland, 40.3 percent; the Netherlands,
13.2 percent; Portugal, 59 percent; Spain, 46.9 percent. ...Even if rich countries actually curbed their emissions, it wouldn't matter much. Poor
countries would offset the reductions. "We expect CO2 emissions growth in China between now and 2030 will equal the growth of the United
States, Canada, all of Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Korea combined," says Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist. In India, he says,
about 500 million people lack electricity; worldwide, the figure is 1.6 billion. Naturally, poor countries haven't signed Kyoto; they won't
sacrifice economic gains -- poverty reduction, bigger middle classes -- to combat global warming. ...we should acknowledge that global warming
is an iffy proposition. Yes, it's happening; but, no, we don't know the consequences -- how much warming will occur, what the effects (good or bad) will be or where. If we can't predict the stock market and next
year's weather, why does anyone think we can predict the global climate in 75 years? Global warming is not an automatic doomsday. In some regions, warmer weather may be a boon.
Thursday, June 30, 2005 ~ 10:19 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: The threat of the U.S. withholding cash from the United Nations has sent Kofi Annan into overdrive recently, with the secretary-general putting
his name to yet another round of articles proclaiming such stuff as a fresh start and much progress and grand plans for reforming the U.N.--which he is particularly practiced at, having done it twice already,
in 1997 and 2002. ...Let's even assume that this time, his record of failures notwithstanding, Mr. Annan is serious about U.N. reform. Who knows? At this stage, the secretary-general may be able to glean some
pointers from the eight or nine or 10 investigations (even France has finally found it unavoidable to launch one) still trying to mop up after his own mismanagement of the U.N. Oil for Food Iraq program--the
signature relief deal of Mr. Annan's U.N. leadership to date. Oil for Food fortified Saddam, helped corrupt the U.N. Security Council, and has since provided such diversions as the evolving tale of how the U.N.
Office of the Iraq Program happened to hire a company that for more than five years paid the secretary-general's own son for not working in
West Africa. ...if there is one item in all Mr. Annan's talk of reform that should provoke distinct horror, cold sweats, and mighty fears over the
trajectory of the U.N., it is a small cipher embedded in Mr. Annan's tastefully printed and expensively bound proposal for U.N. reform, "In
Larger Freedom," Annex item No. 5(d). That would be the proposal that developed countries contribute 0.7% of their gross domestic income to
the cause of "official development assistance." For the U.S. alone, where gross national income now totals about $11 trillion, that would
add up to more than $82 billion per year--by itself more than 10 times what the U.N. has already failed miserably to manage well. And though Mr. Annan does not spell out exactly how such official aid would
"officially" reach its intended beneficiaries, the clear implication is that it would go through the "official" U.N.--generating a great gush of cash,
with no more need for the U.N. to worry about reform, or Mr. Annan and his successors even to strain themselves sending staffers to lobby Washington, or signing self-laudatory Op-eds. ...Investigators are still
trying to follow the money from that last U.N. grand scam. To think seriously for even a second about Mr. Annan's plan to levy a percentage tax, of any size whatsoever, on the GDP of the developed world, is a
route not to help for the hungry, but to Orwell's "Animal Farm."
Thursday, June 30, 2005 ~ 9:32 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: The framers of our Constitution gave us the Fifth Amendment in order to protect us from government property confiscation. The Amendment
reads in part: "[N]or shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Which one of those 12 words is difficult to
understand? The framers recognized there might be a need for government to acquire private property to build a road, bridge, dam or fort. That is a clear public use that requires just compensation, but is
taking one person's private property to make it available for another's private use a public purpose? ...The Court's decision helps explain the
vicious attacks on any judicial nominees who might use framer-intent to interpret the U.S. Constitution. America's socialists want more control
over our lives, property and our pocketbooks. They cannot always get their way in the legislature, and the courts represent their only chance. There is nothing complex about those 12 words the framers wrote to
protect us from governmental property confiscation. You need a magician to reach the conclusion reached by the Court's majority. I think the socialist attack on judicial nominees who'd use framer-intent in their
interpretation of the Constitution might also explain their attack on our Second Amendment "right of the people to keep and bear Arms." Why?
Because when they come to take our property, they don't want to risk buckshot in their butts.
Thursday, June 30, 2005 ~ 8:45 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: The recent practice of using foreign laws as bases for judicial decisions about American laws likewise turns law into the caprices that John
Stuart Mill feared more than he feared bad laws. There is no such thing as generic foreign law. There are the specific laws of France and the very different specific laws of Saudi Arabia and of hundreds of other
countries around the world. It is a matter of individual prejudice or caprice which of these laws any given judge chooses to cite. Justice Anthony Kennedy, for example, referred to foreign laws as a reason for
declaring an American state's law unconstitutional because it permitted the execution of murderers who were not yet 18 years old, which some
foreign governments do not. In other words, laws enacted by the elected representatives of an American state can be wiped out if people in Spain
or New Zealand think otherwise. Not only does this prevent the millions of people who want to be law-abiding citizens from knowing which laws
to abide by, it deprives American voters of the right of self-government through elected representatives that is at the heart of American society.
If our votes decide only which candidates get which offices, but not what laws and policies those elected representatives can enact for us to live
under, our elections will become more and more like placebos, with the real power being exercised from the judicial bench by people we never voted for.
Thursday, June 30, 2005 ~ 7:18 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: ...the most important thing Congress can do is not to use $60 oil as an excuse to repeat the energy policy mistakes of that decade. Ronald
Reagan's first Executive Order upon taking office in 1981 was the immediate repeal of all Nixon-Ford-Carter era price controls on oil and natural gas. The windfall profits tax was eliminated on domestic
producers. Subsidies for alternative fuel boondoggles, including the infamous Synthetic Fuels Corporation, were ended. This revival of free-market energy policy resulted in exactly what we need today: a
boom in production and exploration that led to a 20-year decline in prices to less than half their peak levels. On this score, the energy bill
now moving through Congress is mostly beside the point, or worse. (The Alaska oil-drilling expansion is being addressed in a separate budget
bill.) This monstrosity repeats most of the subsidy mistakes of the Carter years--for wind, solar, "biomass," you name it. The only one of these
that will affect the price at the pump is a new eight-billion-gallon ethanol mandate that will actually increase gas prices by as much as a dime a
gallon on the East and West coasts. ...In some of our 50 states, the price of gasoline now exceeds $3 a gallon, or $40 to $50 for a fill up. Sticker
shock indeed. Washington shouldn't add insult to injury by making consumers pay twice for higher gas prices by also saddling them with billions of dollars of extra costs for an energy bill laden with corporate
welfare.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005 ~ 6:30 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: Proposals by Germany's ruling Social Democrat Party (SPD) to introduce a new wealth tax have been interpreted by observers as a ploy
to appeal to its core left wing vote ahead of the general election, which is expected in September. Speaking after the party's top brass met in Berlin
to discuss the election manifesto, SPD leader Franz Müntefering told reporters that the party plans to impose a 3% surtax on the 42% top rate of income tax for individuals earning more than EUR250,000 ($300,000)
per year and couples earning more than EUR500,000 per year. The surtax is only likely to generate a relatively small amount of additional revenue, and the party has made no secret of the fact that the measure is
as much a psychological move as a serious attempt to fill the government's coffers.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005 ~ 4:12 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: ...small businesses are concerned the law will cause financial and time-consuming burdens, because protection from sunlight is included in
the proposed rules. "The current proposal places completely unrealistic and onerous obligations on firms with employees working outdoors and
is a perfect example of the type of unnecessary regulation that reinforces the negative public perception of the EU," said Oliver Loebel, from
UEAPME, the small and medium-sized enetrprises' lobby. The pending directive is at its second reading and is part of broader health and safety
legislation, designed to protect workers from risks caused by exposure to physical agents. ...SMEs are concerned about the parliament's suggestion
that the commission should prepare "a practical guideline" with concrete measures that could actually lead to further burdens on companies - both for the daily evaluation of meteorological conditions,
and for the protection to be provided, like sunglasses or suncream. "We think the protection from sunlight should be excluded from the directive
and left up for member states to regulate. It is clear sunlight has varied intensity in different parts of Europe, and different people are also
affected by it in a different way. So the EU measures in this field would be inconsistent with the subsidiarity principle", said the UEAPME spokesman.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005 ~ 11:00 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: The DeMint-Ryan plan, if passed into law, would mark a giant first step toward personal ownership of Social Security benefits. Moreover, it
addresses the Democrats' main objections to personal accounts. We will now see, in other words, whether congressional Democrats have been debating the issue in good faith, or whether they have ulterior motives.
Announced last week by Sen. Jim DeMint, along with several influential House Republicans, the plan is based on the radical idea that our Social
Security surplus should actually be set aside for Social Security. As it is, Social Security funds drawn from payroll taxes run a surplus of billions
of dollars a year. This coming year it will exceed $80 billion, and before the great demographic shift of 2017 -- when baby boomers begin turning
65 -- the cumulative surplus will approach $2.2 trillion. In theory, that money is held in trust for future retirees. In practice, of course, the
surplus is spent by Congress on programs great and small, turning what ought to be an asset into massive future debt. Under the DeMint-Ryan plan, instead of just gobbling up the Social Security surplus, the
government would, in effect, rebate each worker's share of the surplus in the form of voluntary personal accounts invested in U.S. Treasury bonds.
Workers would be sure that their retirement money is safe because it would be stored away in an account that they would own -- a true
"lockbox" of solid construction, containing assets beyond the reach of politicians. ...It is true that the personal lockbox proposal does not
address Social Security's long-term solvency problem. Nor, at first, would it give young workers a very wide range of options -- a diversified
equities portfolio that could make for a much larger retirement savings. But partial reform is better than none at all.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005 ~ 10:30 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: There's an old tale which says that if you take a frog and throw him in a pot of hot, boiling water the frog will jump out. But if you take the frog
and put him in a pot of cold water, and gradually turn up the heat, little by little over a long period of time, the frog's body will adjust to the
incremental increases of heat and eventually boil to death. The U.S. economy is like a frog in a pot of boiling water and he can't jump out to
save himself. One of his legs is the oversized tax code, and the other leg is the dysfunctional Social Security system. ...The politics of obstruction
are slowly killing our economic future, while countries like China and India are closing the economic gap. Even though some of our nation's best economic and intellectual minds have repeatedly endorsed the
optional personal retirement accounts concept, the Democrats in Congress are content to do nothing. ...the Democrats will use the same "do-nothing" attack against changing the obese tax code when the
President's Tax Panel issues its report. No matter what the Tax Panel recommends, the Democrats will make their usual cries of, "it's a tax cut
for the rich." That's Democratic code again for "let's keep the economic frog in hot water and turn up the heat for the good of the Party and the
next election." The Democrats in Congress try to create the perception that they are the political party that best represents the poor. There is
some truth to that claim. They want everybody to be poor when they retire in the future by doing nothing today.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005 ~ 8:57 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: ...more than nine months have passed and the first crime numbers are in. Last week, the FBI announced that the number of murders nationwide
fell by 3.6% last year, the first drop since 1999. The trend was consistent; murders kept on declining after the assault weapons ban ended. Even more interesting, the seven states that have their own
assault weapons bans saw a smaller drop in murders than the 43 states without such laws, suggesting that doing away with the ban actually reduced crime. (States with bans averaged a 2.4% decline in murders; in
three states with bans, the number of murders rose. States without bans saw murders fall by more than 4%.) And the drop was not just limited to
murder. Overall, violent crime also declined last year, according to the FBI, and the complete statistics carry another surprise for gun control
advocates. Guns are used in murder and robbery more frequently then in rapes and aggravated assaults, but after the assault weapons ban ended,
the number of murders and robberies fell more than the number of rapes and aggravated assaults. ...For gun control advocates, even a meaningless ban counts. These are the same folks who have never been
bashful about scare tactics, predicting doom and gloom when they don't get what they want. They hysterically claimed that blood would flow in
the streets after states passed right-to-carry laws letting citizens carry concealed handguns, but that never occurred. Thirty-seven states now have right-to-carry laws - and no one is seriously talking about
rescinding them or citing statistics about the laws causing crime.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005 ~ 7:45 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: As a Canadian transplanted to the United States, I urge my American neighbors to listen to the Canadian patients, not the American
advocates. The Canadian health care system provides a poor model for the United States. Rather it serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when a single payer, the government, is put in charge of a large and
critical system. Incentives drive any system, and the incentives of a government-financed health care system are contrary to the best interests of patients. In a multipayer system, patients produce revenues
for the institutions that treat them. As a result, they are courted and welcomed. In a system of bureaucratically set global budgets, patients
are cost centers, drains on resources and thus must be rationed. ...Last year, more than 800,000 Canadians, 2.5 percent of the population, were
waiting for health procedures. The average wait to see a specialist, according to the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, is nearly 10 weeks.
The institute pegs the estimated cost to these patients at $2.2 billion, or roughly $2,700 a person. The problems plaguing Canada's health care
system -- long lines, lack of access to technology and dwindling doctor supply -- are unavoidable in a single payer system. Consider the lack of
technology. Since procedures are "free," investing in technology merely costs the government money. Government officials have a strong
incentive to underinvest in advanced technology, and they do. Canada ranks 20th of 25 industrialized countries in the number of MRI machines. It ranks 16th of 25 for CT scans... The Canadian health care system
provides yet another vindication of the insight that in socialistic systems, everything is free yet nothing is available.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005 ~ 8:00 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: Last week's regrettable 5-4 decision in Kelo v. City of New London marks a new low point in the Supreme Court's takings jurisprudence.
...In the mid-1950s, the Supreme Court held that takings were for public use when they were intended to relieve various forms of urban "blight"
-- a slippery term with no clear constitutional pedigree. Thirty years later, the Court went a step further by allowing Hawaii to force landlords to sell their interests to sitting tenants, as a means to
counteracting ostensible "oligopolistic" market conditions. Now any "conceivable" indirect social benefit would do, without regard to the
attendant costs. Given this past legacy, Justice Stevens found it easy to take New London at its word. Any comprehensive public project will produce some benefit for someone, so that -- as Justices O'Connor and
Thomas stressed in dissent -- his test always allows the legislature to gin up some rationale for taking public property for just compensation
(which alas falls far short of making the individual landowner whole: legal, appraisal and moving costs, for example, are systematically ignored). But the slightest bit of reflection should have shown just how
the new public use cases have migrated from the old mining cases, or even under the Hawaii statute, which did not displace sitting tenants.
...The Court could only arrive at its shameful Kelo ruling by refusing to look closely at past precedent and constitutional logic. Courts that refuse
to see no evil and hear no evil are blind to the endemic risk of factional politics at all levels of government. And being blind, this bare Supreme
Court majority has sustained a scandalous and cruel act for no public purpose at all. In effect, the majority in Kelo v. New London held that the words "public use" in the Fifth Amendment -- "nor shall private property be
taken for public use without just compensation" -- can mean wholly private use, so long as the government expects it to yield some incidental
public benefit -- more tax revenue, new jobs, "maybe even aesthetic pleasure," as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in a dissent joined by
Chief Justice William Rehnquist and justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Would your town's tax base grow if your home were bulldozed and replaced with a parking garage? If so, it may not be your
home for long. As a result of this evisceration of the Public Use Clause, "the specter of condemnation hangs over all property," the dissenters
warn. "Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a
factory." ...In a separate dissent, Thomas made the same point: "These losses will fall disproportionately on poor communities . . . the least
politically powerful." Fifty years of eminent domain statistics drive home the fact that families uprooted by eminent domain tend to be nonwhite
and/or nonwealthy. No wonder urban renewal came to known bitterly as "Negro removal." ...It isn't the high and mighty on whom avaricious
governments and developers prey. Justices John Paul Stevens, Steven Breyer, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Anthony Kennedy are responsible for this execrable decision, which shreds what little was left
of the principle that a man's home is his castle. But they'll never have to live with its consequences. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution contains what has come to be known as the Takings Clause: "nor shall private property be taken
for public use without just compensation." As Justice Thomas argued, "The Takings Clause is a prohibition, not a grant of power." Eminent
domain, an awesome and dangerous power even for truly public uses, was restricted by the Bill of Rights to only truly public purposes. But
instead, the Court majority expanded the meaning of "public use" to encompass "politician use." Certainly, the only meaningful public benefit
is more tax dollars collected and spent by politicians. The public gets whatever trickle down benefits come of this government spending. Lucky
us. The term "public use" ceases to have any real meaning under this tortured logic. "When the government takes property and gives it to a
private individual, and the public has no right to use the property," Thomas writes, "it strains language to say that the public is 'employing'
the property, regardless of the incidental benefits that might accrue to the public from the private use."
Tuesday, June 28, 2005 ~ 7:23 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: A quarter-century ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted how it was the Republicans who had become a party of ideas, while the Democrats'
philosophical foundation was ``deeply eroded.'' But even Moynihan would be surprised by the bankruptcy in the Democrats' current intellectual account. Take trade and Central America. The status quo
there is widespread poverty. The Bush administration has proposed doing something about it: a free trade agreement encompassing five Central American countries plus the Dominican Republic. It's a
no-brainer. If we have learned anything from the last 25 years in China, India, Chile and other centers of amazing economic growth, it is that open markets and free trade are the keys to pulling millions, indeed
hundreds of millions of people, out of poverty. The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) is a chance to do the same for desperately poor near-neighbors. You would think this treaty would be a
natural for the Democrats, who have always portrayed themselves as the party with real sympathy for the poor... Not so. CAFTA is in great jeopardy because Democrats have turned against it. Whereas a decade
ago under President Clinton, 102 House Democrats supported NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), that number for CAFTA is down to 10 or less. ...Eighty percent of goods from these countries are
already entering the United States duty-free, so CAFTA would have a minimal impact on the United States. It would, however, have a dramatic impact on these six neighbor countries -- countries that
Democrats used to care about. Or so they said.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005 ~ 6:45 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: For the Founders, dependence on government in private and public life was to be avoided at all costs -- such dependence, as they rightly saw it,
being the root of bondage. "Dependence," said Thomas Jefferson, no doubt reminiscent of the abuses of the British Crown, "begets
subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." Independence, then, was the key to
private liberty and public virtue. ...The process described here is what's known as "welfare democracy," and its ever-growing presence has
become the pattern characterizing -- to one degree or another -- every industrialized democracy in the world today. In fact, the growth of such
welfare democracies has become so predictable that we can identify its basic pattern: A country becomes a stable democracy (of some variety); democracy promotes the country's growth in wealth; the now-wealthy
country perceives its "duty" to use this wealth for social care and betterment (welfare); the ever-growing entitlements sap the state's
original economic vitality; and the citizenry becomes dependent on the state from cradle to grave. Today, France, Sweden, Germany, Great Britain and Canada are only a few of the worst offenders. ...Perhaps
Benjamin Franklin was the first to see the dangers of the emerging welfare state in England; he remarked that such a system removed "the
greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and sobriety, by giving [the poor] a dependence on somewhat else than a careful accumulation
[of wealth] during youth and health." Rather, said Franklin, "the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but
leading or driving them out of it." To that end, Franklin and many of the other Founders practiced what they preached and were active in organizing and promoting private associations to provide public
assistance -- precisely the relationship they envisioned between a democratic society and its neediest members. ...In every case, well-intentioned government economic assistance becomes the harbinger
of unintended and detrimental social consequences.
Monday, June 27, 2005 ~ 1:00 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: The key to assimilation, of course, is language. The real threat to the United States is not immigration per se but bilingualism and, ultimately,
biculturalism. Having grown up in Canada, where a language divide is a recurring source of friction and fracture, I can only wonder at those who
want to duplicate that plague in the United States. The good news, and the reason I am less panicked about illegal immigration than most, is
that the vogue for bilingual education is waning. It has been abolished by referendum in California, Arizona and even Massachusetts. As the
results in California have shown, it was a disaster for Hispanic children. It delays assimilation by perhaps a full generation. Those in "English
immersion" have more than twice the rate of English proficiency than those in the old bilingual system (being taught other subjects in Spanish
while being gradually taught English). By all means we should try to control immigration. Nonetheless, given our geography, our tolerant culture and the magnetic attraction of our economy, illegals will always
be with us. Our first task, therefore, should be abolishing bilingual education everywhere and requiring that our citizenship tests have strict standards for English language and American civics. The cure for
excessive immigration is successful assimilation. The way to prevent European-like immigration catastrophes is to turn every immigrant -- and most surely his children -- into an American.
Monday, June 27, 2005 ~ 12:41 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: Unemployment Insurance (UI) also does not redistribute to the poor. In Massachusetts, a state considered to have a very generous UI program,
the UI benefits were financed in 2003 by a payroll tax on only the first $10,800 of earnings (with a zero marginal tax rate above that level)
while basic benefits were 50 percent of previous wages up to more than $50,000 of wages per year. An individual who earns $50,000 a year pays the same tax as someone who earns $11,000 a year but would receive
benefits that are nearly five times as high. Taken by itself this would mean a substantial redistribution from low wage earners to higher wage
earners. Moreover, since benefits are paid only to individuals who have earned some minimum amount during the past year, those with long spells of unemployment may not be eligible for any benefits at all.
...Noneconomists who write about social insurance programs often implicitly assume that social insurance programs do not affect the behavior of beneficiaries or the overall performance of the economy.
Evidence shows that the opposite is true. Social insurance programs have important and sometimes harmful effects on the economy that are not fully recognized by the public, the Congress, or the politically
responsible officials. A substantial volume of work during the past quarter century has shown the various ways in which social insurance programs do affect individual behavior and the overall economy. These
effects include reducing national saving, inducing early retirement, raising the unemployment rate, pushing up the cost of health care, and crowding out private health insurance. ...social insurance programs not
only distorts economic behavior directly, thereby creating deadweight losses, but also creates further deadweight losses because of the taxes
that are levied to finance those programs. I believe that the deadweight losses of those taxes are much larger than is generally recognized. ...A
high level of unemployment insurance benefits helps the unemployed to maintain consumption but also encourages longer spells of unemployment and the choice of jobs that have a greater likelihood of
leading to a layoff. ...Today economists recognize that high marginal rates of income tax and the marginal tax rates implicit in various benefit
rules reduce taxable income and create substantial deadweight losses. ...Unemployment insurance benefits raise the unemployment rate in a variety of ways that economists have now analyzed and measured. But
back in the 1960s and 1970s, the higher unemployment rates that were actually induced by unemployment insurance were instead incorrectly perceived as due to inadequate demand. When the government tried to
reduce this high structural unemployment with expansionary monetary and fiscal policies, the result was rising inflation. ...accumulating evidence showed that UI benefits were inducing excessively long periods
of search in which the gain from the marginal search was less than the value of the foregone output. For example, Larry Katz and Bruce Meyer (1990) showed that the probability that an unemployed person takes a
job rises dramatically in the few weeks just before their benefits would expire. Jim Poterba and I (1984) found that the median value of the
reported reservation wage of new UI recipients was actually higher than the wage on their previous job, that it was an increasing function of the
UI replacement rate, and that it came down only very slowly during their spell of unemployment.
Monday, June 27, 2005 ~ 11:17 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: The only foolproof way for colleges and universities to avoid lawsuits was to make their athletic rosters "proportional" to overall enrollment.
Since women account for about 56 percent of undergraduates on the average campus, women must make up more than half of all athletes if school administrators are to sleep soundly at night. There are two ways
to make the math work. First, schools can try to lure more women into sports by creating new teams for them. ...when Brown University was sued under Title IX, there were 85 unfilled spots on women's varsity
teams. The second way of meeting the quota is more certain: eliminate men's teams. Scrapping men's sports works every time and costs nothing,
and so many universities across the country have taken this route. ...In total, universities have eliminated more than 200 male track teams, 120
wrestling teams, and nearly 90 male gymnastics teams, leaving just 20 schools with gymnastic programs for men. The only winners from cutting men's teams are radical gender ideologues fixated on mathematical
parity between men and women. ...The Bush administration's regulatory clarification means that schools now have the option of surveying their
students to assess interest in athletic participation. Different responses between genders can now serve as a basis for explaining different levels
of participation in athletics. ...Hostility toward reform is likely based on fear of what an honest assessment may find: that more men are drawn to sports than women. And indeed, evidence that men have a greater
interest in athletics abounds. Men's participation in intramural leagues on college campuses dwarfs women's; men spend more time watching sports; men spend more money on sports; and male athletes are more
willing to sit on benches as second stringers than female athletes, who often quit when not regularly played. The feminists and left-wing
politicians who sing the praises of Title IX don't want to face these facts. They envision a world in which men and women act the same and are
equally represented in all walks of life. But that's not how actual men and women behave. These social engineers want government to force that outcome anyway.
Sunday, June 26, 2005 ~ 3:00 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: The Internal Revenue Service is investigating whether unauthorized people gained access to sensitive taxpayer and bank account
information... The U.S. tax agency -- whose databases include suspicious activity reports from banks about possible terrorist or criminal transactions -- launched the probe after the Government Accountability
Office said in April that the IRS "routinely permitted excessive access" to the computer files. The GAO team was able to tap into the data without
authorization, and gleaned information such as bank account holders' names, social security numbers, transaction values, and any suspected terrorist activity. It said the data was at serious risk of disclosure,
modification or destruction. ...IRS officials were not immediately available for comment.
Sunday, June 26, 2005 ~ 2:31 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: Most conservatives hoped that, in the most important case the court was to decide this term, judicial activism would put a leash on popularly
elected local governments and would pull courts more deeply into American governance to protect the rights of individuals. Yesterday conservatives were disappointed. ...The question answered yesterday
was: Can government profit by seizing the property of people of modest means and giving it to wealthy people who can pay more taxes than can be extracted from the original owners? The court answered yes. The
Fifth Amendment says, among other things, "nor shall private property be taken for public use , without just compensation" (emphasis added).
All state constitutions echo the Constitution's Framers by stipulating that takings must be for "public use." The Framers, who weighed their
words, clearly intended the adjective "public" to circumscribe government's power: Government should take private property only to
create things -- roads, bridges, parks, public buildings -- directly owned or primarily used by the general public. Fighting eviction from homes
one of them had lived in all her life, the New London owners appealed to Connecticut's Supreme Court, which ruled 4 to 3 against them. Yesterday
they lost again. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5 to 4 ruling that drains the phrase "public use" of its clearly intended function of denying
to government an untrammeled power to dispossess individuals of their most precious property: their homes and businesses. ...Those on the receiving end of the life-shattering power that the court has validated
will almost always be individuals of modest means. So this liberal decision -- it augments government power to aggrandize itself by bulldozing individuals' interests -- favors muscular economic battalions
at the expense of society's little platoons, such as homeowners and the neighborhoods they comprise. ...Liberalism triumphed yesterday. Government became radically unlimited in seizing the very kinds of
private property that should guarantee individuals a sphere of autonomy against government. Conservatives should be reminded to be careful
what they wish for. Their often-reflexive rhetoric praises "judicial restraint" and deference to -- it sometimes seems -- almost unleashable
powers of the elected branches of governments. However, in the debate about the proper role of the judiciary in American democracy, conservatives who dogmatically preach a populist creed of deference to
majoritarianism will thereby abandon, or at least radically restrict, the judiciary's indispensable role in limiting government.
Sunday, June 26, 2005 ~ 1:54 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: Brown is a remarkable woman. She is the daughter of an Alabama sharecropper, as the Republicans repeated ad nauseam. She rose from a
segregated childhood to become a prominent jurist with a sizzling pen and fierce convictions. Her worldview is that of an uncompromising libertarian, particularly as concerns property (or economic) rights.
Property and contract are, for her, the lifeblood of liberty; and when, in the late 1930s, the country and the Supreme Court began treating property rights cavalierly, they set loose an inexorably advancing
leviathan state. To Brown, moreover, it makes no sense to treat speech and privacy rights as sacrosanct but property rights as trivial, when the
Founders viewed all those rights as of a piece. ..In a 2000 speech to the Federalist Society in Chicago, she said, "We no longer find slavery
abhorrent. We embrace it. We demand more. Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate: the drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms; for regulated industries and
rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens." She spoke of the Supreme Court's belated acquiescence to the New Deal as "the
Revolution of 1937," resulting today in "a debased, debauched culture." There is much more in this vein, and not just in her speeches. In a 2002
dissent involving a San Francisco housing regulation, she declared that private property "is now entirely extinct in San Francisco," replaced by "a neo-feudal regime."
Sunday, June 26, 2005 ~ 12:13 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: Republican reformers are introducing a new plan to invest Social Security surplus funds into personal accounts that has the potential to
shake up the debate. Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan and South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint are calling for legislation to bring an immediate halt to the ongoing political raid on the surplus payroll taxes
collected by Social Security. Congress now spends that cash on current programs--from cotton subsidies, to defense, to the Dr. Seuss Museum.
Every day that Congress fails to act, another $200 million is spent rather than being saved for future retirement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once
called this "thievery," and if corporate America were engaged in this type of accounting fraud Eliot Spitzer would be hauling CEOs to jail.
Instead of spending this retirement money, the reformers would allow individual workers to divert every surplus Social Security dollar--from now until the extra cash runs out in 2016--into personal retirement
accounts. ...DeMint-Ryan would allow workers to create individual personal retirement accounts and place marketable government bonds worth their portion of the Social Security surplus into these accounts.
Think of this as creating 140 million "lock box" accounts, one for every American worker. After three years, workers could trade these Treasury
bonds and invest instead in higher-return mutual funds containing a combination of corporate stocks and bonds. ...The virtues of this proposal are both economic and political. By investing the surplus,
rather than letting Congress spend it, the money would be put to better economic use and add to net national saving. The latter ought to please
the deficit scolds in particular. Another benefit is that Congress wouldn't be able to keep using the Social Security surplus to disguise its other
spending habits. This means more-honest federal budgeting, and we hope more pressure for spending discipline.
Saturday, June 25, 2005 ~ 3:30 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: Throughout the mid-1990s, the Republican Congress did a good job controlling spending. Combined with pro-growth policies like welfare
reform and a capital gains tax cut, an environment of rapid revenue growth and limited spending growth emerged. The net result was a budget surplus. But this was not the fiscal Promised Land. Like hungry
children who happen upon a bag of candy, Congress just couldn't control itself once there was extra money on the table, and the Clinton White
House certainly was not interested in exercising adult oversight. ...Any hope that the Bush administration would steer the "Republican
Revolution" back on course was dashed almost immediately. First there was the enactment of the President's education bill, No Child Left Behind. Since when do Republicans stand for federal spending on
Education? Yet, in four years, President Bush increased spending at the Department of Education by 98.6 percent. However, instead of being ashamed, Republicans see the increase as an accomplishment. Then,
there was the farm bill. This bill is best characterized as a bipartisan orgy of special interest politics. It makes a mockery of the Freedom to
Farm Act signed in 1996 by President Clinton. Today, old subsidies have been increased, new subsidies created and the budget of the Department
of Agriculture is up 40 percent. Finally, the Republicans are responsible for the biggest expansion in Medicare since 1965. ...To be sure, President
Bush never pretended to be a Goldwater or a Reagan Republican. His campaign promised a new "compassionate conservatism" and a desire to "change the tone in Washington." Today, we know that
compassionate conservatism is really just big government and changing the tone means his veto pen is buried under the ground.
Saturday, June 25, 2005 ~ 2:24 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: According to deputy finance minister Barbara Hendricks, the SPD wants to eliminate the different tax rates paid by private and incorporated
companies which sees 90% of Germany's 3.4 million firms pay corporate tax at a top rate of 42%, whilst public companies pay a flat rate of 25%
with surcharges. "Signs are that the party will adopt the proposal, the only realistic way to simplify the tax system," Hendricks told reporters in
Berlin on Tuesday. Under proposals announced in March by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, the 25% flat rate will be reduced to 19%. However, the ruling SPD and the principal opposition Christian Democratic Union
have been unable to agree on how the tax cut will be financed in the light of falling revenues and a stagnating economy. ...With Germany's fiscal finances in a mess at both federal and state level, even the
right-of-centre CDU, which had previously trumpeted cuts in the bottom and top rates of income tax, accepts that simplification is a higher priority now. In particular, the CDU is keen to bring smaller German
firms, which have a different legal form to larger companies, into the tax net. Fewer than 20% of Germany's small firms pay corporation tax.
Saturday, June 25, 2005 ~ 12:29 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: The Court's four liberals (Justices Stevens, Breyer, Souter and Ginsburg) combined with the protean Anthony Kennedy to rule that local
governments have more or less unlimited authority to seize homes and businesses. No one disputes that this power of "eminent domain" makes
sense in limited circumstances; the Constitution's Fifth Amendment explicitly provides for it. But the plain reading of that Amendment's
"takings clause" also appears to require that eminent domain be invoked only when land is required for genuine "public use" such as roads. It
further requires that the government pay owners "just compensation" in such cases. The founding fathers added this clause to the Fifth
Amendment--which also guarantees "due process" and protects against double jeopardy and self-incrimination--because they understood that
there could be no meaningful liberty in a country where the fruits of one's labor are subject to arbitrary government seizure. That protection
was immensely diminished by yesterday's 5-4 decision, which effectively erased the requirement that eminent domain be invoked for "public use."
...In his clarifying dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas exposes this logic for the government land grab that it is. He accuses the majority of replacing
the Fifth Amendment's "Public Use Clause" with a very different "public purpose" test: "This deferential shift in phraseology enables the Court to
hold, against all common sense, that a costly urban-renewal project whose stated purpose is a vague promise of new jobs and increased tax revenue, but which is also suspiciously agreeable to the Pfizer
Corporation, is for a 'public use.'" And in a separate dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor suggested that the use of this power in a reverse
Robin Hood fashion--take from the poor, give to the rich--would become the norm, not the exception: "Any property may now be taken for the
benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with
disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms." ...in just two weeks, the Supreme Court has rendered two major decisions on the limits of
government. In Raich v. Gonzales the Court said there are effectively no limits on what the federal government can do using the Commerce
Clause as a justification. In Kelo, it's now ruled that there are effectively no limits on the predations of local governments against private
property. These kinds of judicial encroachments on liberty are precisely why Supreme Court nominations have become such high-stakes battles.
If President Bush is truly the "strict constructionist" he professes to be, he will take note of the need to check this disturbing trend should he be presented with a High Court vacancy.
Saturday, June 25, 2005 ~ 10:14 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: The plaintiffs' bar has discovered another golden goose to fleece. Merchants throughout the world recognize the benefits of credit and
debit cards, but have turned to lawsuits and governments to reduce the costs. A class-action suit filed in Connecticut this week seeks billions
from Visa, MasterCard, and their member banks for alleged "collusion" in setting prices. Australia and other countries have even imposed
controls on the price that card issuers can charge merchants. ...credit cards can be a superior form of credit for some consumers. Too often,
those who scoff at this use of plastic do not need credit or are wealthier individuals with better credit options than many Americans. Compared
to home-equity loans, for example, credit cards do not require that one own a home or that one further mortgage the home that he owns. Credit cards are clearly superior to traditional forms of credit such as
pawnshops, payday lenders, and borrowing money from family and friends. Furthermore, personal-finance company loans can be more expensive and have much higher initiation fees than do payment cards.
Given the enormous benefits of payment cards, government efforts to interfere with this market are taken at great risk. Consider the Australian price controls, which this week's class action may seek to
emulate. Like such controls throughout history, these restrictions have adversely affected the product under control and interfered with consumers' ability to transact as they please. Today in Australia,
cardholders are forced to pay more while getting less. Australians have seen higher card fees, fewer payment choices, and a reduction in loyalty and reward programs.
Saturday, June 25, 2005 ~ 10:12 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: Republican reformers are introducing a new plan to invest Social Security surplus funds into personal accounts that has the potential to
shake up the debate. Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan and South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint are calling for legislation to bring an immediate halt to the ongoing political raid on the surplus payroll taxes
collected by Social Security. Congress now spends that cash on current programs--from cotton subsidies, to defense, to the Dr. Seuss Museum.
Every day that Congress fails to act, another $200 million is spent rather than being saved for future retirement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once
called this "thievery," and if corporate America were engaged in this type of accounting fraud Eliot Spitzer would be hauling CEOs to jail.
Instead of spending this retirement money, the reformers would allow individual workers to divert every surplus Social Security dollar--from now until the extra cash runs out in 2016--into personal retirement
accounts. ...DeMint-Ryan would allow workers to create individual personal retirement accounts and place marketable government bonds worth their portion of the Social Security surplus into these accounts.
Think of this as creating 140 million "lock box" accounts, one for every American worker. After three years, workers could trade these Treasury
bonds and invest instead in higher-return mutual funds containing a combination of corporate stocks and bonds. ...The virtues of this proposal are both economic and political. By investing the surplus,
rather than letting Congress spend it, the money would be put to better economic use and add to net national saving. The latter ought to please
the deficit scolds in particular. Another benefit is that Congress wouldn't be able to keep using the Social Security surplus to disguise its other
spending habits. This means more-honest federal budgeting, and we hope more pressure for spending discipline.
Friday, June 24, 2005 ~ 1:32 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: A top level Canadian Senate committee has called upon the government to cut taxes for businesses and individuals as a matter of urgency in
order to close the growing productivity gap between Canada and the United States. The Senate banking, trade and commerce committee has urged the federal government to put in place a tax reform strategy by
2006 to stem the decline in the nation's productivity. The committee has suggested the the reforms should cut federal capital tax, corporate tax
and individual tax for middle and upper-income workers. It also wants to see businesses allowed to write off capital investments more aggressively. "That's not just that Canadian workers aren't working
hard, the real issue is that there is not enough capital investment per worker in our economy compared to the United States. That all goes to the question of tax incentives," observed Liberal Senator Jerry
Grafstein, the committee chairman. The committee's report noted that a decade ago, Canada was almost equal to the United States in productivity, but now trails 15% behind the US in terms of productivity
per worker. ..."Here, we tend to punish success," commented Conservative Senator David Angus. "You make a big score on a new
productive business with a new invention and something really exciting - boom - that money is all gone in tax and there's not enough money to attract the people to stay here in Canada," he added.
Friday, June 24, 2005 ~ 12:17 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: What is the true nature of Europe's crisis? It is not institutional, despite the many flaws of Brussels' technocrats and their nontransparent
dealings. It is not the failure to agree on a budget, as such a deal can wait another year and even longer. And it is certainly not the rejections
of those hundreds of pages of legalese which so many commentators now assume to be the starting point of Europe's disarray. Even the staunchest
defenders of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's oeuvre have yet to explain why Europe couldn't continue to function without it. Rather, the rejection of
the constitution, certainly in France, is a symptom of the country's and Europe's real crisis -- its economic decline. And economic policy is still
primarily national policy and not formulated at EU level. The European crisis, in other words, is above all a crisis of leadership in the various
capitals of the Continent, primarily in those of its three biggest economies, Berlin, Paris and Rome. It is hard to imagine that the French would have rejected the constitution if France didn't have double-digit
unemployment and little economic growth. ...Capitalism and the mythical Polish plumber seem to have become the greatest threats to West European civilization since the days of Attila and his Huns. Western
civilization in this context of course means the so-called French social model, which, as Mr. Chirac's rival Nicholas Sarkozy has pointed out, is
neither social nor a model because nobody is emulating it and with more than 10% unemployed, you can't really call it social. ...For Europeans
accustomed to the conventional concepts of social justice, the ideas that strict labor laws might not protect but destroy jobs or that lower tax rates might lead to higher, not lower, government revenues are
counterintuitive and hard to accept. That's why they are quick to believe that caricature of the heartless, neoliberal Anglo-Saxon economy and
that all those favorable economic data must come at a terrible price for the "underprivileged." ...In the end, the budget is not really the key to
economic progress in Europe. The EUR40 billion farm budget is only a fraction of 1% of the combined EU GDP, and shifting some of it from subsidizing farmers to subsidizing researchers is economically speaking
only a marginal improvement. Scientists are definitely more important for the 21st-century economy than farmers, but financing their work through subsidies would still be very 19th century.
Friday, June 24, 2005 ~ 10:43 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: Feminists keep demanding new laws to protect women from the so-called wage gap. Many studies have found that women make about
75 cents for every dollar a man earns. Activists say the pay difference is all about sexism. ...But how could this be possible? Suppose you're an
employer doing the hiring. If a woman does equal work for 25 percent less money, businesses would get rich just by hiring women. Why would any employer ever hire a man? ...Suppose two people have equal
potential, but one takes on more demanding, consuming, lucrative jobs while the other places a higher priority on family. The one who makes work the focus will be more productive for an employer than the one
who puts his or her home life first. The latter will get more of the pleasures of family. So he (and it tends to be "he") will make more money, even though she would be equally productive and equally
rewarded if she made the same choices. ...The market is just. It rewards you for the work you do, not for the work you choose not to do. If men
want the family time many women have, we must accept lower financial rewards -- and if women want the money, they have to work like money-grubbing men.
Friday, June 24, 2005 ~ 9:53 a.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: America's socialists advocate that we adopt a universal healthcare system like our northern neighbor Canada. Before we buy into complete
socialization of our healthcare system, we might check out the Canadian Supreme Court's June 9th ruling in Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General). It turns out that in order to prop up government-delivered
medical care, Quebec and other Canadian provinces have outlawed private health insurance. By a 4 to 3 decision, Canada's high court struck down Quebec's law that prohibits private medical insurance. With
all of the leftist hype extolling the "virtues" of Canada's universal healthcare system, you might wonder why any sane Canadian would want to purchase private insurance. Plaintiffs Jacques Chaoulli, a
physician, and his patient, George Zeliotis, launched their legal challenge to the government's monopolized healthcare system after having had to
wait a year for hip-replacement surgery. In finding for the plaintiffs, Canada's high court said, "The evidence in this case shows that delays in
the public healthcare system are widespread, and that, in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public healthcare. The
evidence also demonstrates that the prohibition against private health insurance and its consequence of denying people vital healthcare result
in physical and psychological suffering that meets a threshold test of seriousness." ...I wonder just how many Americans would like to import
Canada's healthcare system, which prohibits the purchase of private insurance and private healthcare services. In British Columbia, for example, Bill 82 provides that a physician can be fined up to $20,000 for
accepting fees for surgery. In my book, it's medical Naziism for government to prohibit a person who wishes to purchase medical services from doing so. But let's not look down our noses at our northern
neighbors, for we too are well along the road toward medical Naziism.
Thursday, June 23, 2005 ~ 1:01 p.m., Dan Mitchell Wrote: ...as recently as 1997 the Senate voted 95-0 for the Byrd-Hagel Resolution assailing Kyoto's provisions. Bill Clinton never even brought the Protocol up for a vote. ...Since that Byrd-Hagel vote eight years ago, the case for linking fossil fuels to global warming has, if anything, become even more doubtful. The Earth currently does seem to be in a warming period, though how warm and for how long no one knows. In particular, no one knows whether this is unusual or merely something that happens periodically for natural reasons. Most global warming alarms are based on computer simulations that are largely speculative and depend on a multitude of debatable assumptions. ...the computer models that predict it suggest the upper atmosphere should have warmed substantially in recent decades. But data from weather balloons and satellites don't match the projections. There's also the matter of the alleged melting of the Antarctic ice cover, threatening a catastrophic sea level rise. In fact, recent data suggest the ice is thickening and temperatures are dropping in most of the continent. Finally, an | ||||||||||