Quotulatiousness

February 12, 2013

The State of the Union address is the political version of the NFL’s Pro Bowl

Filed under: Football, Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

Jim Geraghty explains:

If you said to me, “let’s end the NFL Pro Bowl,” I’d probably disagree. Because while I haven’t watched a Pro Bowl in its entirety in decades, I’d hate to see a tradition end. But as any football fan will acknowledge, the Pro Bowl is a quasi-necessary event that is executed in a fundamentally flawed fashion. For starters, it occurs at the end of the season, instead of at the halfway point of the season like in other sports. This is because of players’ legitimate fear of injury in a game that has only pride on the line; as a result, everybody plays at about half-speed. Selected players decline to go, so you get the second, third, and sometimes fourth-best players at each position. The NFL moved it to the week before the Super Bowl, to make it less of an afterthought to the season, but now the players on teams in the Super Bowl skip the game.

My friends, the president’s State of the Union Address is our national pro bowl — a simulation of the art of persuasion and politics featuring all the big stars, played at about half speed, with no real consequence.

[. . .]

You’ll recall Matt Welch’s discovery from last year about just how interchangeable the rhetoric is:

    Starting with John F. Kennedy’s address to a joint session of Congress in 1961, you could take one sentence from each SOTU since, in chronological order, and cobble together a speech that will likely resemble much of what you’ll hear tonight. So that’s precisely what I’ve done.

Every president uses the event as just another speech, and avoids anything resembling a hard-nosed assessment of where they’ve made progress and where they need to improve their performance. What’s fascinating is the ritual news articles about drafts of the speech and previews, as if you or I couldn’t predict a half dozen points and themes. This is why we have State of the Union drinking games — because people can often predict the precise phrases, never mind the topics or arguments.

February 8, 2013

Pinpointing the exact moment that the principled anti-war movement packed up its tents and decamped

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:34

Nick Gillespie helps us find that mystical moment when honourable, principled dissent became treason again:

Remember back in what was it — 2006 or thereabouts — when left-leaning critics of President Bush couldn’t stop talking about how nothing was more red, white, and blue than good old-fashioned American dissent? Why, our very country was founded by an act of dissent, didn’t you know! So back when Vice President Dick Cheney — routinely likened to Darth Vader and Voldemort — was running things, the very air was filled with cries of “not in our name” and all that, because it was so damned important that the United States not contravene its basic principles even in the name of self defense!

Those were good times, friends, and they stopped pretty much the minute that liberals and Democrats took control of the federal government. The antiwar movement disappeared once it became clear that Barack Obama wasn’t going to shut down Gitmo or stop bombing places or give a rat’s ass about that constitutional stuff he used to teach in law school.

But cheer up, because things can always get worse, as the last few days have demonstrated.

[. . .]

It’s sad, though never unexpected, when leaders such as Obama flip flop like a fish on the sand once they ascend power. Cromwell did it, the French revolutionaries did it, Castro did it, the Sandanistas did it, and on and on. It’s one of the oldest plots in history and infinitely adaptable to new conditions. How else to explain, as Jacob Sullum notes, that candidate Obama rejected the Bush administration’s position that it could detain U.S. citizens as enemy combatants without pressing charges while President Obama claims the right to kill U.S. citizens without laying charges? The guy may not be able to pass a budget but christ, give him credit for ingenuity and brass balls.

But Obama is a politician — what do you expect? Politicians are not just the bottom of the barrel — they’re what’s under the bottom of the barrel, right?

February 5, 2013

The President’s “license to kill”

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

At Reason, Jacob Sullum has a few concerns about the information that came to light in a Department of Justice memo leaked to the media:

The Justice Department white paper on “The Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or an Associated Force,” noted earlier tonight by Mike Riggs, fills in the fine print of the license to kill claimed by President Obama in several ways, none of them reassuring. The main conclusion of the paper, which was obtained by NBC News, is that “it would be lawful for the United States to conduct a lethal operation outside the United States against a U.S. citizen who is a senior, operational leader of al-Qa’ida or an associated force of al-Qa’ida without violating the Constitution or…federal statutes…under the following conditions: (1) an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; (2) capture is infeasible, and the United States continues to monitor whether capture becomes feasible; and (3) the operation is conducted in a manner consistent with the four fundamental principles of the laws of war governing the use of force” — i.e., “necessity, distinction, proportionality, and humanity.”

[. . .]

More generally, the white paper fleshes out the Obama administration’s argument that U.S. citizens killed by drones are getting all the process that is appropriate in the circumstances; hence the Fifth Amendment, though implicated, is not violated. And since these targeted killings are lawful acts of self-defense, the Justice Department says, they do not violate the law against killing U.S. nationals in foreign countries or the executive order banning assassination. After all, “A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination.” Duh.

The problem is that to accept this position, you have to put complete trust in the competence, wisdom, and ethics of the president, his underlings, and their successors. You have to believe they are properly defining and inerrantly identifying people who pose an imminent (or quasi-imminent) threat to national security and eliminating that threat through the only feasible means, which involves blowing people up from a distance. If mere mortals deserved that kind of faith, we would not need a Fifth Amendment, or the rest of the Constitution.

January 31, 2013

Blaming “austerity” for most recent slowdown

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

David Harsanyi discusses the named (by the mainstream media) culprits for the unexpected drop in US fourth-quarter GDP:

So, U.S. consumer confidence unexpectedly plunged in January to its lowest level in more than a year. The U.S. economy unexpectedly posted a contraction in the fourth quarter of 2012 — for the first time since the recession — “defying” expectations that economic growth is in our future.

If the economy were as vibrant as President Barack Obama has told us it is, a belt tightening in a single sector of government surely wouldn’t be enough to bring about “negative growth.” But one did. Unexpectedly. No worries, though. Pundits on the left tell us that this contraction was good news — possibly the best contraction in the history of all contractions. The White House blamed Republicans and, I kid you not, corporate jet owners because — well, who else? But mostly, the left is bellyaching about the end of temporary military spending and a brutal austerity that’s enveloped a once great nation.

There’s a small problem with that argument. There is no austerity. In the fourth quarter of 2012, Washington spent $908 billion, which was $30 billion more than it spent in the last quarter of 2011 and nearly $100 billion more than it spent in the third quarter of 2012. Taxpayers took on another $400 billion in debt during the quarter. If this is poverty, can you imagine what robust spending looks like?

As always, for “austerity” to take the blame, there’d actually have to have been some austerity to start with. The US government certainly hasn’t been practicing austerity over the last four years.

January 21, 2013

Reason.tv: It’s not what he said, but how he said it

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:50

“And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

Reason TV looks back at Obama’s 2009 inaugural address to see how well his rhetoric compares to his first four years in office.

Produced by Meredith Bragg.

January 16, 2013

The odd concept that is “money”

Filed under: Economics, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

In his nominally NFL-related column, Gregg Easterbrook talks about the phenomenon that is money:

Currency is surprisingly abstract as a concept. Money is whatever you agree to accept in trade, with the understanding that others will accept it in turn. If there’s a $20 bill in your wallet or purse, you view it as valuable because you know that others will as well. If you have $1 million in a bank account, you view it as valuable because you know that others will as well. But you can’t eat a $20 bill or sleep under a bank account. Money is valuable only if others agree that it is.

Even if money is backed by some precious substance such as gold, the abstraction doesn’t change much. You can’t eat or wear gold. You view gold as valuable only because you know that others will as well. Whether a thin sheet of linen-like paper or a gold ingot or a string of digits on an electronic financial statement, money is, itself, worthless.

That money has value only when others think it does is why currencies collapse. The ruble and the Zimbabwean dollar lost value when no one wanted them, because a person holding this currency couldn’t be sure that others would also view it as valuable. But if Barack Obama ordered the minting of a trillion-dollar platinum coin, and it was viewed as having a trillion dollars’ worth of value, then it would.

[. . .]

Bear in mind, that’s how the past six years of irresponsible debt-based federal giveaways — two years under George W. Bush, now four years under Obama — have been funded. The Federal Reserve keeps buying Treasuries, or mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae and similar federal agencies. That gives the executive branch money to spend. One division of government tells another, “Here is a new string of numbers,” and money comes into existence.

What’s underlying these transactions? Nada, beyond the belief that strings of numbers issued by the United States are more likely to be useful in trade than strings of numbers issued by, say, Greece. Because the credibility of the United States is so high, its strings of numbers bear heft. But if government keeps printing money and talking about obvious gimmicks such as trillion-dollar coins, how long will that credibility last?

Economists including Friedrich Hayek have contemplated the idea that privately issued money would be more solid than government-issued money, since privately issued money would be cross-checked by market forces, while government is run to please campaign donors. Governments from the Roman emperors of the far past to the liberal Scandinavian democracies of today insist that they alone control the supply of money. One reason is to ensure taxation. At a deeper level, governments know how easily it could all unravel, and money be viewed as worthless.

January 15, 2013

“Spending cuts” in Washington are not like actual reductions in spending

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

A. Barton Hinkle clues us in on how to save big in our budget plans:

Would you like to save $20,000 this year? Of course you would. Here’s how: Plan a month-long vacation to Disneyland, and budget $20,000 for the trip. Then don’t go. Presto! You just “cut” your family budget by 20 grand.

This sounds absurd — because it is. Yet that is precisely how Washington operates.

A couple of weeks ago, President Obama claimed on national TV that “I cut spending by over a trillion dollars in 2011.” But as many people quickly pointed out, in fiscal 2011 federal spending rose from $3.4 trillion to $3.6 trillion. Nevertheless, the President repeated the claim on Jan. 2, insisting that “last year we started reducing the deficit through $1 trillion in spending cuts.”

What he meant was that in 2011 he agreed to “cut” spending in future years, in much the same way canceling a future vacation “cuts” your own budget. It is a fiction necessary to sustain the president’s pose that he wants a “balanced approach” to deficit reduction.

That is also nonsense. Take the midnight deal to avert the fiscal cliff, which the White House says will reduce the deficit $737 billion. Of that amount, $620 billion comes from raising taxes. Some balance.

January 14, 2013

QotD: Political perception

Filed under: Humour, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:15

The way President Barack Obama’s acolytes are calling for bold action in his second term, you’d think he had been some kind of prudent Calvin Coolidge in his first.

Tim Cavanaugh, “Beware Obama’s Big Ideas: The president and his fans say the best is yet to come. That can’t be good.”, Reason, 2013-01-14

January 13, 2013

Calling it a “debt ceiling” is misleading: it’s actually a “debt sky”

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:40

In Reason, Sheldon Richman explains the absurdity of allowing governments to go this deeply into debt:

The last time the debt-ceiling controversy arose, it occurred to me that if the raising the “ceiling” is a mere formality — if in fact the sky’s the limit to government borrowing — it’s no ceiling at all. Hence, I dubbed this charade the “debt sky.”

Those who favor automatic increases in the “limit” — or no limit at all — give the game away when they argue that the borrowing authority must be increased because the full faith and credit of the United States is on the line. After all, they say, the money is needed to pay bills already incurred, not for new spending. Obama makes this claim routinely, as though the case for raising the limit is open and shut.

Who knows if that is true? But if it is, think about what it means. Congress has been incurring bills the payment of which depends on a future increase in the debt limit that theoretically could be rejected. It’s bad enough that Congress can incur financial obligations under the statutory authority to borrow; it’s intolerable that Congress can incur financial obligations based on a possible but not certain future expansion of its authority to borrow. This is truly government run amok.

You and I can’t force banks to raise our credit-card limits merely because we have bills to pay. Why should Congress be able to do the equivalent? The road to fiscal responsibility would begin with an end to this practice. Better yet, no more raising of the debt limit — cut spending and live within the current limit. And even better: No more borrowing. Government borrowing is a source of many evils, not least of which is that for decades it made big government appear cheaper than it is. Could the federal government spend nearly $4 trillion a year if it had to raise every penny through taxation? Unlikely. A tax revolt would have been ignited. But let the government borrow a trillion dollars a year, more than 40 cents of every dollar spent, and government looks relatively inexpensive — or it did before things got so out of hand that everyone could see the looming danger.

January 4, 2013

On politicians needing to kick their own asses

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:58

Nick Gillespie responds to a recent Bob Woodward column:

In sort-of documenting the dysfunction of a government that can’t even trim chump change from its petty cash drawer, much less write and pass a goddamned budget, Woodward manages to also illustrate why press solons are pretty useless in this whole process too. Sequestration cuts aren’t odious, except to congenital pants-wetters on both sides of the aisle (such as the neo-con defense hawks at the American Enterprise Institute and Leon Panetta, who can’t abide a single dollar ever being cut from any military budget, even after the Second Coming of Christ and the beating of swords into non-voting GM shares). We’ve been racking up trillion-dollar annual deficits for years now, and the idea of cutting $3 trillion from future deficits over a 10-year period causes things to explode? That shouldn’t be a reach under any circumstances, but especially under one in which both parties agree that we need to stop spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need. If the leadership of both parties couldn’t agree to $3 trillion in deficit trims over a decade in which they expect to spend between $40 trillion and $47 trillion, they weren’t going to agree to cuts of $1.2 trillion anyway. That’s the the real story, and it’s one that need to be retold every single day.

Woodward’s invocation of today’s “vulture politics” and his by-comparison invocation of the good old Reagan days is ridiculously ahistorical, especially coming from one of the guys who presided over the past 40-plus years of American history. Today’s political situation isn’t unique in its “demonization” of the opposition. Jesus Christ, George McGovern likened Nixon to Hitler and Reagan was attacked in similar terms. As was Clinton (by Jerry Falwell, who credited the Man from Hope with multiple murders in Arkansas). And then there was also the Bushitler stuff and novels and faux-documentaries about Dubya’s assassination. Somehow, both sides somehow managed to pass budgets (as awful as they were). The fact that Boehner takes a lot of man-tan heat and Obama is called a socialist is light fare by comparison. What is different is the inability of our top men to freaking complete the most basic tasks required of them: to hash out what they government is going to spend each year according to basic and simple-to-understand legislative rule.

In the end, that is not something mystical or overly complicated or tough because they belong to different parties. It’s the easiest thing in the world to get done and while of course “staffers” will do most of the grunt work, Boehner and Obama — and Harry Reid, the hugely incompetent Senate leader who is arguably the single-most responsible villain in the whole dramedy, need to be running the show.

And when it comes to kicking their own asses, our triumvirate of leaders — Obama, Boehner, and Reid — should get in line behind the rest of us. In the end, we pay their tab, so we should be at the front of the line.

January 2, 2013

The corporate welfare pork in the fiscal cliff negotiations

Filed under: Business, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

As widely expected, Congress did finally put something to a vote to “save” the country from going over the fiscal cliff. And as everyone should have expected, even a bill to “save” the country was still amply provided with pork for certain corporations:

Throughout the months of November and December, a steady stream of corporate CEOs flowed in and out of the White House to discuss the impending fiscal cliff. Many of them, such as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, would then publicly come out and talk about how modest increases of tax rates on the wealthy were reasonable in order to deal with the deficit problem. What wasn’t mentioned is what these leaders wanted, which is what’s known as “tax extenders”, or roughly $205B of tax breaks for corporations. With such a banal name, and boring and difficult to read line items in the bill, few political operatives have bothered to pay attention to this part of the bill. But it is critical to understanding what is going on.

The negotiations over the fiscal cliff involve more than the Democrats, Republicans, the middle class and the wealthy. The corporate sector is here in force as well. One of the core shifts in the Reagan era was the convergence of wealthy individuals who wanted to pay less in taxes — many from the growing South — with corporations that wanted tax breaks. Previously, these groups fought over the pie, because the idea of endless deficits did not make sense. Once Reagan figured out how to finance yawning deficits, the GOP was able to wield the corporate sector and the new sun state wealthy into one force, epitomized today by Grover Norquist. What Obama is (sort of) trying to do is split this coalition, and the extenders are the carrot he’s dangling in front of the corporate sector to do it.

Most tax credits drop straight to the bottom line — it’s why companies like Enron considered its tax compliance section a “profit center”. A few hundred billion dollars of tax expenditures is a major carrot to offer. Surely, a modest hike in income taxes for people who make more than $400k in income and stupid enough not to take that money in capital gain would be worth trading off for the few hundred billion dollars in corporate pork. This is what the fiscal cliff is about — who gets the money. And by leaving out the corporate sector, nearly anyone who talks about this debate is leaving out a key negotiating partner.

December 30, 2012

“We Have Passed The Point Of No Return”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:22

Zero Hedge recommends that everyone listen to outgoing Congressman Ron Paul’s analysis of the fiscal cliff negotiations:

In a little under three minutes, Ron Paul explains to a somewhat nonplussed CNBC anchor just how ridiculous the charade that is occurring in D.C. actually is. This succinct spin-free clip should be required viewing for each and every asset-manager, talking-head, propagandist, and mom-and-pop who are viewing the last-minute idiocy of the ‘fiscal cliff’ debacle with some hope that things will be different this time. “We have passed the point of no return where we can actually get our house back in order,” Paul begins, adding that “they pretend they are fighting up there, but they really aren’t. They are arguing over power, spin, who looks good, who looks bad; all trying to preserve the system where they can spend what they want, take care of their friends and print money when they need it.” With social safety nets available to rich and poor, there is no impetus for change and “the country loses,” but Paul concludes, the markets are starting to say “there is a limit to this.”

December 28, 2012

The new Zero-Sum era of American politics

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

P.J. O’Rourke offers some mild congratulations to President Obama for a few accomplishments during his first term, then explains why the way he won his second term is a bad thing both for the United States and for the rest of the world:

You sent a message to America in your re-election campaign. Therefore you sent a message to the world. The message is that we live in a zero-sum universe.

There is a fixed amount of good things. Life is a pizza. If some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box. You had no answer to Mitt Romney’s argument for more pizza parlors baking more pizzas. The solution to our problems, you said, is redistribution of the pizzas we’ve got — with low-cost, government-subsidized pepperoni somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza-parlor owners.

In this zero-sum universe there is only so much happiness. The idea is that if we wipe the smile off the faces of people with prosperous businesses and successful careers, that will make the rest of us grin.

There is only so much money. The people who have money are hogging it. The way for the rest of us to get money is to turn the hogs into bacon.

Mr. President, your entire campaign platform was redistribution. Take from the rich and give to the . . . Well, actually, you didn’t mention the poor. What you talked and talked about was the middle class, something most well-off Americans consider themselves to be members of. So your plan is to take from the more rich and the more or less rich and give to the less rich, more or less. It is as if Robin Hood stole treasure from the Sheriff of Nottingham and bestowed it on the Deputy Sheriff.

But never mind. The evil of zero-sum thinking and redistributive politics has nothing to do with which things are taken or to whom those things are given or what the sum of zero things is supposed to be. The evil lies in denying people the right, the means, and, indeed, the duty to make more things.

December 9, 2012

Frank Fleming asks why the Republicans are so down on Susan Rice

Filed under: Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

He’s genuinely puzzled at the Republican stance:

The Republicans’ opposition to Susan Rice’s potentially becoming the next secretary of state is pretty hard to understand.

It wasn’t long ago that Republicans were all for a different black woman named Condoleezza Rice taking the same job — is the GOP just bigoted about the name Susan?

Republicans’ stated objections to Rice make no sense. They complain that she’s “dishonest” and “incompetent,” to which she could easily respond, Well, duh, that’s why I work for the government.

[. . .]

This idea that President Obama should only appoint honest, competent people is really unfair. The guy is a Chicago politician; he’s probably never once met anyone like that.

Just look at his first Cabinet to see how out-of-the-blue this demand for competency is. He has a treasury secretary who couldn’t figure out how to pay his own taxes. His attorney general leads a Justice Department that somehow thought selling guns to Mexican drug cartels would have good results.

Then there are Obama’s secretaries of commerce, who were supposed to be promoting job creation and economic growth — who in the world knows what they’ve been up to these past four years?

Really, looking at the administration as a whole, Obama did better than we could have expected by appointing only one czar who was a Communist truther.

November 30, 2012

Republicans widely expected to trade “no tax” pledge for promise of future spending cuts PLUS some awesome magic beans

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:45

Most of the conservative pundits seem to expect the Republicans to cave in almost immediately and give Obama the tax increases he’s asking for:

1. President Obama is convinced he will walk out of this crisis with an extremely sweet deal. [. . .]

2. Democrats are completely convinced that enough Republicans in Congress will cave and acquiesce to almost everything they want as the cliff approaches. They have some recent historical examples to provide encouragement in this belief.

3. Democrats are completely convinced that if no deal is reached, the Bush tax cuts expire, and sequestration takes effect, Republicans will get most of the blame. This is probably largely correct, but I think they’re whistling past the graveyard on the consequences to an Obama presidency if 2013 dawns with tax hikes, defense-spending cuts, and another recession.

[. . .]

4. For the GOP, a deal on Obama’s terms is probably worse than sequestration. The middle will not suddenly like the GOP a lot more because they embraced tax increases for the rich. Even if they did, it’s unlikely they would gain enough ground to offset the damage such a move will do among a betrayed and enraged party grassroots. As I said this morning, “Once the Republicans become the party of tax increases, why do we need them? They become indistinguishable from the Democrats.”

[. . .]

The biggest obstacle to all of the options for real deficit reduction and real entitlement reform is that the public doesn’t really think they’re necessary; they think a few tax hikes on the rich will do the trick. Perhaps it’s best to let taxes go up for everyone, from the highest earners to the lowest earners, and let the public see how little that changes the numbers.

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