The Law of the Sea Treaty would drastically undermine American sovereignty, giving massive powers to the U.N. (aka the Dictators’ Club of New York), but the Senate is actually considering passing it — get this — as a tribute to Dick Lugar, whose voters unceremoniously dumped him last week. Seriously, couldn’t they just give him a medal? This is enough to make me think the House of Lords is a good idea.
In any event, Let Freedom Ring has an action site up on this – Let’s Lose LOST.
For further background, here are two studies from CEI on the subject of LOST that we issued when the George W. Bush administration was thinking about getting it ratified to curry international favor.
The Cato Institute has identified $17-20 billion in readily-achievable savings to the 2013 military budget. Such cuts can help stave off tax increases. As Cato’s Christopher Preble notes, if no other action to cut the deficit is taken, “the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011″ will require “$110 billion in spending cuts in January 2013 via sequestration, half of which need to come from DoD.” Such spending cuts are a long overdue first step towards getting America’s skyrocketing budget deficit under control. The deficit is now so huge that America racked up more debt in just one month of 2010 than it did in an entire year in 2007. The national debt rose more in Obama’s first three years in office than all of Bush’s eight years.
But unfortunately, “neither the White House nor Congress” wants the automatic budget cuts through sequestration “to occur; both sides hope to amend the law and achieve equal deficit reductions by other means. . .Republicans want to cut other spending, Democrats to raise taxes.” Liberal Senators can block many of the cuts in social programs sought by House Republicans to reduce the deficit, leaving tax increases as a possibility if cuts are not made elsewhere, such as to the Pentagon budget. (And a few GOP congressmen like Duncan Hunter, who have close ties to Defense contractors, have said they would prefer tax increases to Pentagon cuts.)
Meanwhile, the White House has sacrificed national security for short-run political gain. Obama administration officials outed an undercover agent to wrongly take credit for his work exposing bomb plots against America, endangering his life. Recently, news reports discussed how an al-Qaeda infiltrator exposed the bomb plots, erroneously claiming he was a “CIA mole.” But it now turns out that the al-Qaeda infiltrator was working for the Brits, not the CIA, and his cover was blown for election year politics: “The leaks about the operation from the American side have infuriated British intelligence officials, who had hoped to continue the operation. The leaks not only scuttled the mission but put the life of the asset in jeopardy. Even CIA officials, joining their MI5 and MI6 counterparts, were describing the leaks as ‘despicable,’ attributing them to the Obama administration.” Reprehensible acts like this make it more difficult and expensive for the U.S. and its allies to achieve their security goals.
OPINION
FARHAD MANJOO: “What Does Facebook’s $100 Billion IPO Mean for You?”
“When Facebook filed for its initial public offering in February, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a frank letter to potential investors in the firm. ‘Facebook was not originally created to be a company,’ he began. ‘It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.’ The founder went on to say that while making money was important to Facebook, raking in cash was not its primary goal. ‘Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.’”
SEN. LISA MURKOWSKI and SEN. DAVID VITTER: “Obama’s Mulligan on Keystone XL”
“TransCanada’s decision to reapply for a federal permit to build the Keystone XL pipeline across the U.S.-Canadian border offers President Obama something that rarely comes around – a second chance to do the right thing. When the president rejected TransCanada’s original Keystone XL application – finding a project capable of delivering roughly 1 million barrels of oil a day to American refineries not in the national interest – he threw away a golden opportunity to create jobs and improve America’s energy security.”
TIM CARNEY: “Look Who Favors Corporate Jet Subsidies Now”
“Remember when Obama was railing on about “the tax-break for corporate jets,” during the debt-ceiling fights of 2011? He repeatedly invoked this “tax break,” which was really about how some corporate jets were depreciated over five years instead of seven. The message was clear: Republicans are in bed with corporate-jet owners. His loyal legions on the Left joined the chant. But today, Obama’s export-subsidy chief promised a billion dollars in taxpayer-backed subsidies for corporate jets, according to Bloomberg News.”
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In yet another victory for workers and job creators, a federal district court has struck down the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) ambush election rule. The ruling is the latest in a series of cases where the courts have overturned the NLRB. This time U.S. District Judge James Boasberg threw out the NLRB’s rule because the board rushed through the rule without the requisite three member quorum.
The Hill reports:
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg struck the regulation down, saying the labor board only had two members when it voted on the final rule in December 2011. Boasberg said the agency needed at least three members to have a quorum for action on the rule.
“According to Woody Allen, 80 percent of life is just showing up. When it comes to satisfying a quorum requirement, though, showing up is even more important than that. Indeed, it is the only thing that matters — even when the quorum is constituted electronically. In this case, because no quorum ever existed for the pivotal vote in question, the Court must hold that the challenged rule is invalid,” Boasberg wrote.
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The latest edition of my colleague Wayne Crews’s annual snapshot of the regulatory state, “Ten Thousand Commandments,” is out. This year’s lowlights include:
- Estimated regulatory costs, while “off budget,” are equivalent to over 48 percent of the level of federal spending itself.
- The 2011 Federal Register finished at 81,247 pages, just shy of 2010’s all-time record-high 81,405 pages.
- Regulatory compliance costs dwarf corporate-income taxes of $198 billion, and exceed individual income taxes and even pre-tax corporate profits.
- Agencies issued 3,807 final rules in 2011, a 6.5 percent increase over 3,573 in 2010.
- Of the 4,128 regulations in the works at year-end 2011, 212 were “economically significant,” meaning they generally wield at least $100 million in economic impact.
- 822 of those 4,128 regulations in the works would affect small businesses.
- The total number of economically significant rules finalized in 2011 was 79, down slightly from 2010 but up 92.7 percent over five years, and 108 percent over ten years.
- Recent costly federal agency initiatives include the Environmental Protection Agency’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards Rule and the Department of Transportation’s Fuel Economy Standards.
- While some people talk about Republican tentacles, this report clearly shows how vast the Leviathan of the federal government has grown, with its massive tentacles extending into every business — and every pocket — in the nation.
Direct link to the PDF is here.
Obamacare will drive up costs for most patients and insurance policyholders. Yet “health-insurance companies must tell customers who get a premium rebate this summer that the check is the result of the Obama administration’s health-care law, according to federal guidelines released Friday. . . .Rules finalized by the Department of Health and Human Services on Friday instruct insurers to notify recipients of rebates in the first paragraph of the mailing by writing: ‘This letter is to inform you that you will receive a rebate of a portion of your health insurance premiums. This rebate is required by the Affordable Care Act-the health reform law.’” Never mind that Obamacare has already caused sizeable hikes in insurance premiums for some policyholders.
Earlier, HHS Secretary Sebelius warned insurers not to inform policyholders that their premiums were rising due to Obamacare, even though that was the truth. Obama’s HHS secretary sought to gag insurers that disclosed how Obamacare’s mandates are increasing the cost of health insurance, even though such speech is clearly protected by the First Amendment, telling them if they did so, they could be excluded from health insurance exchanges. Prior to that, the Obama administration attempted to gag insurers from disclosing how Obamacare harms Medicare Advantage participants, drawing criticism from First Amendment experts like UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, the author of two First Amendment textbooks.
Forcing companies to make politicized disclosures to customers implicates the First Amendment, as does interfering with the content of their speech to customers in billings. In International Dairy Foods v. Amestoy, 92 F.3d 67 (2d Cir. 1996), an appeals court struck down a Vermont law that required labeling for milk derived from animals treated with bovine growth hormones, where the labeling could not be justified on consumer deception or public health grounds.
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Constellation, the Bush administration’s plan to return to the moon, was canceled a couple years ago. But not all of Constellation was canceled. The Orion crew module, designed to go to lunar orbit and back, survives, with plans to test fly on a Delta IV rocket in a couple years, and Congress, eager to preserve the Space Shuttle jobs base, demanded that NASA reinstitute a new heavy-lift launch vehicle to replace the canceled Ares V with the Space Launch System. So at this point, despite the cancellation, Constellation continues to waste money, except for the Ares I, the new crew rocket that NASA was developing. Derived from Space Shuttle and Apollo hardware, it used a new five-segment version of a shuttle solid rocket booster (SRB) as a first stage, with a new LOX/hydrogen upper stage. At the time of cancellation, it had been experiencing development issues, missing performance, cost and schedule milestones.
Now it looks like even it could be resurrected.
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I’ve written extensively about federal surface transportation reauthorization, which is currently pending in conference. CEI, along with The Independent Institute and Reason Foundation, will be holding a Capitol Hill briefing tomorrow at noon titled, “Reforming Federal Surface Transportation Policy: Problems, Solutions, And A New Path Forward.”
The Highway Trust Fund is facing imminent insolvency. This is the result of keeping federal fuel excise tax rates at the same level since 1993. Since then, inflation has eroded about one-third of those dollars’ buying power. Rather than attempt to fix this very serious problem, the Senate’s Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) merely kicks the can down the road. We find this unacceptable.
In addition, MAP-21 — which is more accurately described as a 15-month extension relying on 10 years of revenue — contains some very undesirable provisions. It mandates the installation of electronic onboard recorders for commercial motor vehicles, something the independent trucking industry expects will cost $2 billion. Now is certainly not the time to saddle our nation’s small businessmen with additional, unnecessary regulatory burdens.
Non-germane policy changes include the RESTORE Act, which includes a seven-year reauthorization of the Department of Interior’s Land and Water Conservation Fund (Sec. 1701) — a land-grab tool used by environmentalists. In total, MAP-21 contains $6.8 billion in new non-highway program spending.
It also contains a particularly loathsome amendment offered by Senator Jeff Bingaman that attacks the public-private partnership (P3) model. Even some self-described fiscal conservatives are siding with Bingaman, relying on farcical misinformation that argues that P3s somehow constitute double-taxation. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, these P3s are friendly to taxpayers in that they reduce public costs and the risk associated with construction (cost overruns) and financing — while bolstering state treasuries in the short-run. If you have not read it already, I highly recommend Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ excellent rebuttal to Sen. Bingaman’s falsehoods and distortions in The Washington Post.
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With the prospects for a Greek pro-austerity coalition fading rapidly, here is a round-up of the most useful stories on the Greek tragedy:
- The BBC’s business editor, Robert Peston, asks if the Euro could survive a Greek exit. His comments on German reactions are key.
- A group of economists and financiers comment on what a Greek exit would mean. The consensus: economic disaster for Greece, but only a couple note that the Greek position right now isn’t exactly bread and roses.
- A useful note from JP Morgan that suggests that immediate losses from a Greek Euro exit could be around $400 billion.
- The suggestion that Greece could run out of money as early as tomorrow.
- In a leading indicator of capital flight, Greeks, Italians. and Spaniards have flooded into the London real estate market.
- Trading desks in London have started adding a shadow Drachma to their computer systems (and lots more in that excellent rolling blog from The Guardian).
- Drafts from Berlin suggest that Germany wants a Europe-wide bailout fund to stabilize the European economy after a Greek exit (now being elided to “Grexit” in City of London shorthand). This would mean non-Eurozone members helping pay for the costs of the Euro.
- Paul Krugman finally catches up to what the rest of us have been saying for some time.
- A straw that some are clutching at is that Greeks remain committed to the Euro, ignoring the role that it has played in their crisis.
- AEI’s James Pethokoukis points out the obvious — that a Euro recession could have significant implications for the presidential election.
For the record, here’s my two American Spectator articles on Greece, one from November last year. I wish I’d been more wrong.
America — the world’s most recent great civilization — faces a demographic problem that calls for a solution from the dawn of civilization. When civilization began in ancient Sumer over 6,000 years ago, city life increased trade and wealth, but also created the perfect environment for diseases to spread. Epidemics wiped out much of the working age population, but help soon arrived. Akkadians from neighboring rural areas traveled to the Tigris and Euphrates river basin to build Sumer’s irrigation canals, roads, and other infrastructure. The first great civilization survived, not by social isolation, but thanks to a constant supply of migrant workers.
Unlike Sumer, America has so thoroughly subdued disease and prolonged death that it has produced the opposite demographic situation — an aging population supported by a shrinking workforce. America’s over-65 demographic grew three and a half times faster than the general population during the 20th century. By 2050, it will have increased from 13 percent — a historic high — to over 20 percent, according to the Census Bureau. Meanwhile, America’s fertility rate has fallen from 3.7 births per woman in 1960 to barely replacement levels at 2.05.
All this adds up to fewer workers to pay for more retirees’ public benefits. Workers per Social Security beneficiary have fallen from 42 in 1945 to under three, and it’s only going to get worse. By 2050, there will be down just two workers. According to Social Security and Medicare Trustees, the unfunded liabilities for these programs exceed $18.7 trillion over the current generation’s lifespan plus $24.4 trillion from general revenues for Medicare Parts B and D.
Fewer workers will also mean less production, which equals less economic growth and innovation. As the European Commission has concluded, “ageing populations over the coming decades at the global level will [cause] not only a slowdown in the growth rate of output and living standards but also… falling rates of capital accumulation and a slowdown in productivity growth.” This slowdown means growing public services will rest on a shrinking tax base.
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