In The Washington Post, Allan Sloan points out that while President Obama wants to cap American citizens’ IRAs at $3 million or substantially less—discouraging saving and investment in the process—Obama’s own-taxpayer-subsidized retirement benefits are worth more than twice as much, a generous $6.6 million. A sweet pension for me, but not for thee, seems to be Obama’s thinking. Discussing the president’s “proposal to limit the value of 401(k)s, pensions and other tax-favored retirement accounts to about $3.4 million” (or much less, as interest rates rise), Sloan notes that Obama want “to limit savers’ tax-favored accounts to only about half the value of what he stands to get from his post-presidential package. Based on numbers from Vanguard Annuity Access, I value his package at more than $6.6 million. . . .And that doesn’t include [his] IRA . . . Or the $18,000 (plus cost of living) a year he will get at age 62 for his service in the Illinois Senate.”
He also notes that “the point at which Obama wants to eliminate the ability of you and your employer to deduct contributions to your retirement account isn’t actually the $3.4 million in his budget proposal—that’s just an estimate. The real number is how much a couple age 62 would have to pay for an annuity that yields $205,000 a year. That $3.4 million—which applies to the combined values of your pension and retirement accounts—is subject to a sharp downward change in the future because annuity issuers charge significantly less for an annuity when interest rates are higher than they do today, with rates at rock-bottom levels.”
Obama has discouraged saving in other ways, such as raising taxes on capital gains and dividends, imposing a new Obamacare tax on investment income, and by giving costly bailouts to irresponsible people who, despite ample incomes, saved so little money that they could not “afford” more than a tiny downpayment, and thus ended up with negative equity on their home later on due to declines in the value of their home, qualifying them for the bailouts that certain favored underwater mortgage borrowers have received.
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Reflecting on Thatcher’s recent passing, Warren Brookes Fellow Matthew Melchiorre and I explore that theme in today’s American Spectator:
In pursuing what she described as an “enterprise society,” Thatcher revolutionized politics on both the right and the left. In fact, her policies were so popular with the working class its support for the Conservative Party was 51 percent higher than normal during her term, according to our calculations of polling data. Thatcher’s restoration of the Conservative Party as a credible alternative to Labour gave Tony Blair no choice but to re-brand Labour into the more market-oriented “New Labour” to win national elections again.
What can today’s Republicans learn from comparing Thatcher’s legacy with their own? The GOP’s failure to match tax cuts with spending cuts hasn’t worked — in the economy or at the ballot box. A better approach to encourage entrepreneurship would be to make real spending cuts, lighten regulation to free up access to credit, and restore government finances through a simpler tax code instead of higher rates.
Thatcher certainly earned her nickname, the Iron Lady. It is a shame that, across the board, today’s politicians are made of much more malleable material. Read the whole thing here.
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CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, is the largest annual event of its kind. It is also one of the most controversial, due to its exclusion of gay conservative groups such as GOProud. CEI hosted a widely publicized panel discussion at CPAC, titled “A Rainbow on the Right: Growing the Coalition, Bringing Tolerance Out of the Closet.” CEI Founder and Chairman Fred Smith, who moderated the panel, reflects on the importance of inclusiveness.
Politicians love to sell alcohol tax hikes as pennies on the drink that won’t really hurt anyone’s pocketbook, while helping to pay for the burden that drinkers put on the rest of society, as they did in Minnesota this week, when lawmakers there introduced a proposal to increase the state excise tax on alcohol by at least 300 percent.
These arguments are deceptive. The cost estimates used by politicians to increase taxes are usually misleading and grossly inflated. Worse, these seemingly small increases in the cost of alcohol will have significantly harmful effects on Minnesota businesses and consumers, and potentially reduce state tax revenue as businesses close and consumers cross the border to buy cheaper alcohol in neighboring states.
According to a 2011 Minnesota Institute of Public Health (MIPH) study commissioned by the Minnesota Department of Health, alcohol use costs the state $5.07 billion a year. That number is far greater than the $296 million in revenue collected each year from alcohol taxes, but a closer look at the study shows that the majority of the “costs” aren’t paid by the state at all. Most of those costs, such as the $3.71 billion in productivity loss, lost wages, absenteeism, and premature death, are borne by individual and arguably their families and employers, not taxpayers. As is often the case, government researchers are conflating private costs with public, or social, costs.
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We know the story of Chicken Little. The little chick thought the sky was falling because he was hit in the head by an acorn. He convinced the other barnyard animals that the sky was falling and soon they were all in hysterics.
Well, when it comes to sequestration cuts impact on federal employees, union officials have adopted a Chicken Little approach. Feeding Big Labor’s frenzy is tomorrow’s March 1 sequestration deadline with no deal to delay budget cuts in sight.
For the past few weeks, federal union leaders have been lobbying anyone who will listen to deflect cuts away from federal workers in favor of anything else. Today in U.S. News and World Report, I criticize these union officials, which many never do any government work:
When President Carter signed the Civil Service Reform Act in 1978, he said he did so to “promote the general welfare, contribute to the effective conduct of public business and to facilitate and encourage amicable settlements of labor-management disputes.” He said nothing about creating dozens of jobs within government devoted solely to the conduct of union business. But that is precisely what has happened.
According to records obtained by Americans for Limited Government through Freedom of Information Act requests, the Department of Transportation had 35 employees who did nothing but union work in 2012, and the Environment Protection Agency had 17. All 52 made at least $72,000 per year, and 37 made more than $100,000.
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Federal cancer research money funded a “laughable conspiracy-theory report smearing” the Tea Party as being created by the tobacco companies and the Koch brothers, which we earlier debunked. The left-wing academics that authored it have “received $7 million” from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
But the senior author of the “study,” Professor Stanton Glantz of the University of California at San Francisco, has now doubled down on his wacky conclusions. He told Fox News that the Tea Party ”pretty much originated with that smokers’ rights stuff.” As a sarcastic Rick Moran notes, if you doubt Glantz’s conspiracy theory, “It’s obvious you’ve missed the thousands of signs at Tea Party rallies calling for an end to tobacco taxes and setting up cigarette vending machines in grade schools.” As one Tea Party leader noted to Fox News, “If you’re going to have a conspiracy theory, at least try to make it pass the laugh test … and this one doesn’t even do that.”
Glantz’s “study” is a tissue-thin, 10-page smear, produced using federal grants that reportedly exceeded $1 million, that contains wild claims, such as the ridiculous assertion that “the Tea Party has origins in the ultra-right John Birch Society of the 1950s.”
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In backward cultures, people ignorantly blame their misfortunes on witches and the devil. Similarly, progressives scapegoat the Koch brothers for seemingly everything, with equally little basis in reality. For example, the Kochs were falsely blamed by an MSNBC commentator and others for pushing gun rights legislation in Florida, even though it turned out that the only position the Kochs ever took regarding guns in Florida was to oppose, on property rights grounds, an NRA-backed bill that would have forced businesses to let employees bring their guns into employee parking lots. Now, having destroyed the Kochs’ reputations by blaming them for all manner of real or imagined extremism, progressives — aided by government funding — are smearing others by associating them with the Koch brothers and Big Tobacco (The Koch brothers have nothing to do with Big Tobacco).
A government-funded study — paid for by the National Cancer Institute! — says (ridiculously) that Big Tobacco and Koch brothers created the Tea Party. The study is now being parroted by Al Gore. The study is based on strange reasoning, such as the fact that one group funded in small part by tobacco companies used the word “Tea Party” in passing in 2002, a group largely unrelated to the groups that later came into being and used it in 2009. (Because, obviously, no one had ever used the words “Tea Party” before the 21st century.) Never mind that much of America’s non-profits get money from tobacco companies, which fund countless causes, such as arts funding, domestic violence shelters, and non-profits across the political spectrum — the family behind Lorillard Tobacco is famously liberal and donates to liberal politicians. But Al Gore trumpets the study, relying on its taxpayer-funded status to buttress its credibility:
A new study by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Medicine reveals that the Tea Party Movement was planned over a decade ago by groups with ties to the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. The movement was not a spontaneous populist uprising, but rather a long-term strategy to promote the anti-science, anti-government agenda of powerful corporate interests.
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Why not Moody’s? Why not Fitch? Of all the questions raised about the U.S. government’s strange case against Standard & Poor’s—a lawsuit that actually asserts that some of the nation’s largest banks were S&P’s “victims,” and that the credit rating firm somehow fooled these banks about products the banks actually created—the lack of similar actions against S&P competitors still rings the most alarm bells.
S&P, Fitch and Moody’s all gave AAA rating to many packages of subprime mortgages that imploded. But of those three, only S&P downgraded the U.S. government from its decades-old AAA credit rating.
Floyd Abrams, the attorney representing S&P’s parent company McGraw-Hill in the litigation and a veteran First Amendment lawyer (and yes, the First Amendment is a strong concern here, as I will get to in a second), has said that the government ramped up its investigation of S&P shortly after the downgrade in 2011. “Is it true that after the downgrade the intensity of this investigation significantly increased? Yea,” Floyd Abrams, S&P’s lead attorney, told CNBC in an interview last week. “We don’t know why.”
The Justice Department’s civil suit against S&P looks even more suspicious when paired with the action a few weeks ago by another arm of the government against a small, upstart credit ratings firm that also had the temerity to downgrade the U.S. In late January, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) stripped rating agency Egan-Jones of its accreditation as a “nationally recognized statistical rating organization” (NRSRO) in rating the creditworthiness of government or asset-backed securities. This was the first time the SEC had ever stripped a rating agency of its NRSRO status, an action that effectively bars financial institutions from relying on the rating agency to meet capital requirements.
Ironically, Egan-Jones’ rating had been widely praised as an alternative to that of the “Big 3″ of Moody’s, Fitch and S&P. Receiving its funding through investor subscriptions, rather than payment of the entities being rated, it avoided the conflicts of interest that “Big 3″ critics say led to inflated ratings for mortgage securities. The firm also turned out to be prescient in its early downgrades of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the first institutions to implode in the mortgage crisis.
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There’s a hilarious sketch in the comedy show “Portlandia” that features a painfully liberal couple attempting to order a meal in a restaurant. Unfortunately, their earnest desire to be politically correct in all things thwarts their efforts as they barrage the flummoxed waitress with a flurry of questions about the food on offer:
Is the chicken organic? Is that U.S.D.A. organic, Oregon organic, or Portland organic? How big is the area where the chickens are able to roam free?
And on and on…
The sketch, like the show, is a good-natured ribbing of left-wing concerns, a reductio ad absurdum of the liberal mind. Unfortunately, as so often happens, real life threatens to out-satirize even the best satire, as The Huffington Post brings us news guaranteed to warm the hearts of Portandia’s socially concerned couple:
Following their mission to improve wages and working conditions for the nation’s restaurant workforce, ROC — the Restaurant Opportunity Centers — have launched the ROC National Diner’s Guide to Ethical Eating, a yearly publication that puts labor issues at the forefront. The rating criteria include wages, benefits (including health insurance and sick days), and opportunities for professional advance and internal promotions.
To assist in this mission, Clay Ewing, an assistant professor at the University of Miami, has teamed up with ROC to create a mobile app that, in Ewing’s words, “…allows customers to make a decision on their restaurant based off of different decisions rather than just the food.” The app ranks restaurants in five categories, including whether or not they offer paid sick leave, and whether they provide a “suitable” living wage (whatever that means).
But wait a minute: Just what is a “Restaurant Opportunity Center,” and who are they to rate eateries?
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America’s immigration debate is heating up, and conservatives anxious about liberal solutions to the issue are looking for answers of their own. Unfortunately, the major immigration groups that often receive the name “conservative” are anything but. A new study published in Human Life Review reveals these groups all were founded by the same radical environmentalist that advocates ending population growth with immigration restrictions, abortions and sterilizations.
The largest and most active anti-immigration groups — that is, groups that want to restrict the number of legal admissions — are the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and NumbersUSA. All these groups were founded by the same man: radical environmentalist John Tanton (top-left), the former national chairman of the Sierra Club population committee and a former national board member of Zero Population Growth.
The Sierra Club and other environmental groups blame environmental problems on too many people, even though the U.S. and other modern capitalist countries have managed to drastically cut pollution and clean rivers while their populations doubled. Until the 1990s, the Sierra Club’s official position opposed new immigration on these environmental grounds. As John Tanton said, “If we cut pollution per capita in half, but double the number of people, we’re back where we started.”
Tanton served as board member for local Planned Parenthood organizations, founded the Michigan Women for Medical Control of Abortion, chaired the Zero Population Growth Immigration Study Committee and served as a sexuality education consultant and curriculum development advisor for local middle schools. He worked for the Sierra Club until the mid-1970s.
Because of its predominately liberal membership, the Sierra Club could not be as zealous about its anti-immigration agenda as Tanton wanted. So, over several decades, he went on to found FAIR, CIS and NumbersUSA. “It is immigration that is making us grow and that must be cut to levels where immigration = emigration, if we’re to avoid continuous population growth,” he said. Tanton received immediate support from the radical population-control forces within the environmental movement.
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