Category: Politics

How many times does Lucy have to pull the football?

From Politico on Sen. Obama and gay equal rights:

So he took a different tack: “Now I’m a Christian, and I praise Jesus every Sunday,” he said, to a sudden wave of noisy applause and cheers.

“I hear people saying things that I don’t think are very Christian with respect to people who are gay and lesbian,” he said, and the crowd seemed to come along with him this time.

…his ability to sell gay rights in the black church is unique and appealing.

To which Andrew Sullivan replies:

Now you may have many reasons not to vote for Obama, and no gay voter should vote on one issue. But solely with respect to gay matters, there is simply no choice here. Obama’s positions, candor, courage, generation and religious embrace of us are dispositive.

Why is there no choice? Or, to be clear, why is there a different choice other than choosing neither candidate in this election on equal rights for gay Americans, just like every other election leading up to this one?

Sen. Obama is not selling equal rights. He’s said nothing more than so-called Christians are saying nasty things about gay Americans. He’s calling for such rhetoric to stop. He did not call for action to correct the separate legal treatment. For several years now, he’s had the opportunity to act, to sponsor legislation ending official United States bigotry. Has he sponsored a repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the most obvious target available to him as a senator?

At least the traveling salesman carries a product sample when he pitches grandiose claims as he stands on your front porch.

House Votes to Shift the Deck Chairs

I’m hard-pressed to imagine a scenario in which simplifying the tax structure is bad. Although this legislation would only achieve it on the front-end, replacing simplification with complication elsewhere, the front-end suggestion is good.

The House of Representatives brushed aside threats of a White House veto yesterday and voted 236 to 182 in favor of an $18 billion tax package that would rescind a tax break for the five biggest oil companies and use the revenue to boost incentives for wind and solar energy and energy efficiency.

There is no reason for Congress to pick winners and losers by giving tax breaks. (Again, redirecting those breaks to favored groups is not a principled stance by Congress.) As always, Congress is horribly short-sighted and unaware of unintended consequences.

The Bush administration, Republican lawmakers and big oil companies condemned the bill, which they said would raise fuel prices for consumers, discourage oil and gas exploration in the United States and unfairly discriminate against a single industry while other manufacturers continue to enjoy tax breaks.

Of course fuel prices will go up. If I could find a reason not to be cynical, I’d ignore the probability that members of Congress want this to happen so they have a continuation of one of their favorite targets to bully in populist, economically-ignorant rants. But I’m cynical, so I think they know this. How else to explain the nonsense my local Fox affiliate bombarded me with last night in claiming that a gallon of gasoline could rise to the “outrageous” price of $4. Adjectives require more than one data point.

That the price of a gallon of gas already includes – inefficiently – the $18 billion cost of the existing tax break. Removing inefficient tax breaks would push the price of gas (closer) to its true market price. That’s problematic?

On the second point, profit alone should encourage or discourage oil and gas exploration. Let the market figure out the details. The ongoing results will also work to push for alternative energy without requiring shifting tax breaks from one group to another. And, no, arguing that one industry will get tax breaks does not justify giving them to another.

Prove it.

Senator Clinton makes a bold claim:

Blasting “companies shamelessly turning their backs on Americans” by shipping jobs overseas and railing that “it is wrong that somebody who makes $50 million on Wall Street pays a lower tax rate than somebody who makes $50,000 a year,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton increasingly sounds like one of her old Democratic rivals, former senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

The first half of her statement is boring rhetoric. Corporations are evil, blah blah blah. Empty talking points. Whatever.

The second half of her statement is absurd. She needs to prove it. Show me one Wall Street executive who pays a lower tax rate than somebody who makes $50,000 per year.

No matter what, I will take no solace. If she could fine one, her solution would be to raise the rate on the individual making $50 million. She’d never imagine that she could (ask Congress to) lower rates or simplify the entire tax code.

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It’s interesting that the first screen a visitor encounters at her campaign website is a place to give her your information, accompanied by a big red SUBMIT button. Freudian, anyone?

Senator Obama does the same, but he doesn’t ask for first or last name and invites the visitor to LEARN MORE. I won’t pretend that the result isn’t nearly identical, when mentality meets policy, but the marketing difference explains a lot.

More of the same. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

George Will writes in today’s Washington Post on potential running mates for John McCain:

Three two-term governors might help McCain, including Mississippi’s Haley Barbour, 60. He has two things McCain lacks — impeccable conservative credentials and a genial disposition. He was conspicuously competent in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. …

Conspicuously competent? How about conspicuously unethical (link via).

Many Mississippians have benefited from Governor Haley Barbour’s efforts to rebuild the state’s devastated Gulf Coast in the two years since Hurricane Katrina. The $15 billion or more in federal aid the former Republican national chairman attracted has reopened casinos and helped residents move to new or repaired homes.

Among the beneficiaries are Barbour’s own family and friends, who have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from hurricane-related business. A nephew, one of two who are lobbyists, saw his fees more than double in the year after his uncle appointed him to a special reconstruction panel. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in June raided a company owned by the wife of a third nephew, which maintained federal emergency- management trailers.

Meanwhile, the governor’s own former lobbying firm, which he says is still making payments to him, has represented at least four clients with business linked to the recovery.

No evidence has surfaced that Barbour violated the law; at the same time, the pattern that emerges from public records and interviews raises “many red flags,” said Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a watchdog group in Falls Church, Virginia, that investigates the investments of government officials. “At the minimum, the public is entitled to a full explanation of the facts,” he said.

It gets worse from there.

I already have a low opinion of Senator McCain. I would expect this sort of thinking and marketing from him. I expect better from the usually reasonable George Will. Perhaps I’m confusing the quality of his analysis with the quality of his recommendations resulting from his analysis? If so, he should stick solely to the latter.

Unfortunately, Barbour also was a lobbyist for a while, and the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances” is another part of the First Amendment that the co-author of McCain-Feingold finds unimpressive.

Maybe I should rethink my opinion on the quality of Mr. Will’s analysis. It’s citizens, not lobbyists, that McCain has a problem with. Sure, his public statements suggest Mr. Will’s analysis. But his public (and private) actions do not. Those already in power are free to do much, much more than those not in power.

Sic Semper Medius Consilium¹

Megan McArdle on individuals who claim to want the government to tax them more:

No, I simply cannot grant that people really believe that they pay too little in taxes. It seems more like they think the government has a better use for everyone else’s money, and should therefore take it. They believe this so strongly that if they have to pay some of their own money to rectify the situation, they will do so. In other words, they don’t so much want higher taxes on themselves, as to purchase the good “State coercion of other affluent people”. That is not the same moral intuition as “I have too much money, and the government should take it away”, however much nicer it would be if that were true.

That is correct. And it’s a given that said individuals always know better how that good should be used by government.

Ms. McArdle’s “tax me more” thread continues here and here.

¹ Even with four years of Latin in school, I’m sure I’ve messed up the translation. Aside from simple grammar, maybe cogito should replace consilium?

Empty promises are a political guarantee.

Today’s column from Charles Krauthammer examines the messianic fervor surrounding the Obama campaign and how those promises of hope and change may ultimately be empty. It’s an interesting, if not terribly original, column. I think he hurts part of his supporting argument by ignoring the difference between American and Canadian politics, as well as the difference in time periods between Sen. Obama and Prime Minister Trudeau. Still, he’s effective in raising the correct basic questions.

His conclusion:

Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.

I agree, because our government is set up in order to create that reality. And I hope it happens when Sen. Obama is inaugurated. It can’t happen fast enough, given the conflict-avoidance we have now in Congress to the advancing hostilities of the Bush administration.

Of course, willful partisan blindness is not unique to Obamaniacs. For Mr. Krauthammer: In the face of all the evidence from the last seven years, how much would it help if the Bush dead-enders would come to the same rude awakening he expects of Obama’s supporters?

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I have a minor quibble over how Mr. Krauthammer’s establishes his foundation.

There’s no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: bottle it (Aquafina was revealed to be nothing more than reprocessed tap water) and charge more than they pay for gasoline.

Leaving aside the silly notion that water is free as most people consume it, the entrepreneur doesn’t see bottled water as selling a commodity. The entrepreneur sells convenience.

When I’m away from home, I need not bring my own water or even my own container. If I have a dollar, I’m freed from carrying either. It also meets my preference for cold water by allowing me to buy it from refrigerated storage, an additional convenience for me, given what I’d have to do to have that when and where I want it.

I have a different example of a free commodity. When I toured Wrigley Field many years ago, I took a pinch of infield dirt. I could clearly get a pinch of dirt almost anywhere. But I wasn’t getting the free commodity. I “purchased” something other than dirt. The mythical benefit that dirt gained by virtue of being placed in a specific plot of land on Chicago’s North Side mattered to me. Value is not always in what a product is, but what’s been added to it, as judged by the subjective preference of the consumer.

“They will always disappoint” isn’t exclusively cynicism.

I share Andrew Sullivan’s disdain for Hillary Clinton. Many, many people around the blogosphere are tired of his constant drum-beating on this point. I don’t care how often he raises the topic. His site, his rules. I already agree with him, so I just skim those posts. And while I don’t get his appreciation for Sen. Obama because – as he states – he disagrees with much of Obama’s policy recommendations, I understand his reasoning. But his appreciation for John McCain is simply irrational and not based in facts. He needs a jolt like the newsletters gave him about Ron Paul’s candidacy. Perhaps this is it:

I’m heartbroken. Torture is illegal and immoral whether it is conducted by the military or the CIA. That was McCain’s original position. It appears it is no longer.
…

So McCain reveals himself as a positioner even on the subject on which he has gained a reputation for unimpeachable integrity. …

Read the rest, if you feel compelled. But I’ll point you to what John Cole said. It’s the eyes-open view of politics that realizes that all politicians are merely politicians, no matter what line they sell.

Obfuscation of the Day

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer makes an inarguably incomplete argument regarding the subprime mortgage problem:

When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.

I wonder if he gave the essay its title – “Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime” – or the Washington Post’s editors added it.

Regardless, the only fact he has correct in his sanctimony is that what he’s selling is a tale. Its height is impressive. I can’t wait to see what he shovels when he runs for Congress or President.

If I wanted class warfare, I would’ve supported John Edwards.

Via Greg Mankiw, here’s Senator Obama on NAFTA:

… We can’t keep playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expect a different result – because it’s a game that ordinary Americans are losing.

It’s a game where lobbyists write check after check and Exxon turns record profits, while you pay the price at the pump, and our planet is put at risk. That’s what happens when lobbyists set the agenda, and that’s why they won’t drown out your voices anymore when I am President of the United States of America.

It’s a game where trade deals like NAFTA ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart. That’s what happens when the American worker doesn’t have a voice at the negotiating table, when leaders change their positions on trade with the politics of the moment, and that’s why we need a President who will listen to Main Street – not just Wall Street; a President who will stand with workers not just when it’s easy, but when it’s hard.

Kip offers an excellent rebuttal on Obama’s pandering to the Wal-Mart and Exxon non-angles, so I’ll point you there.

What struck me most in this nonsense is the last line. Apart from missing the truth that we need a President who understands that the President’s primary role in the economy is to get out of the way, Senator Obama is backwards on his spin. Telling people we’re going to erect barriers to free trade in an effort to protect domestic interests is easy. Telling people we’re going to stop listening to lobbyists while indirectly telling them we’re going to start listening to a different set of lobbyists is easy. Pitting one group of people against another group of people in order to win votes is easy.

The only hard task in American politics is telling people no. I haven’t seen a politician in my lifetime capable of doing that. Barack Obama is a politician.

The free market – which we do not have – works. There are winners and losers in the short-term as change disrupts the existing manner of operations. That is inevitable, and we can discuss a minimum safety next mechanism (public or private) necessary to squeeze through the turmoil. There will also be winners and losers in the long-term, but that hinges much less on individual skills and much more on motivation to adapt. Specific losing is not inevitable in the long-term.

Pandering to this type of class warfare, which is exactly what Sen. Obama engaged in, will lead to economic turmoil as government intervention designed on fixing perceived injustices only creates different injustice. It skews market incentives. It distorts individual tastes and preferences. It encourages inefficient economic behavior. That is not leadership. To any extent that he believes pretends otherwise, Senator Obama is not running on a platform of change.