Today’s New York Times has a classic dog-bites-man story. The green energy sector is shedding jobs, despite being given billions of taxpayers’ dollars by Presidents Bush and Obama.
As so often happens, regulators’ efforts to change people’s behaviors aren’t working as hoped.
To paraphrase Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren’s work on ethanol subsidies: if it’s commercially viable, then it doesn’t need any subsidies. If it isn’t, no amount of subsidy will make it so.
When Republicans are in the White House, Paul Krugman thinks budget deficits are bad. When a Democrat is in the White House, deficits are no problem at all.
Correctly noting in 2005 that the Bush deficits were “comparable to the worst we’ve ever seen in this country,” Krugman worried that investor confidence would wilt under the difficulty of paying back such massive obligations.
Now that President Obama has tripled the Bush deficits, he has a column poo-pooing deficit worriers as “being terrorized by a phantom menace — a threat that exists only in their minds.” Investor confidence will be just fine.
Would he be so sanguine if a Republican president ran up a $1,400,000,000,000 budget deficit in his first year in office? The party in power has nothing to do with whether deficits are good or bad. Deficits are either a problem or they aren’t.
Krugman’s partisanship is regrettable. What’s more regrettable is that it is taken seriously. Such is the tragedy of the partisan mind.
In light of the news about stimulus job creation statistics not being as advertised — complete with made-up Congressional districts — I offer another surprisingly relevant insight from Mises’ Human Action. Turns out there is a reason stimulus advocates are resorting to trickery:
“If government spending for public works is financed by taxing the citizens or borrowing from them, the citizens’ power to spend and invest is curtailed to the same extent as that of the public treasury expands. No additional jobs are created.”
-Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 4th ed., (Irvington-on-Hudson New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996 [1949], p. 776.
“[A] government can spend or invest only what it takes away from its citizens… its additional spending and investment curtails the citizens’ spending and investment to the full extent of its quantity.”
-Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 4th ed., (Irvington-on-Hudson New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996 [1949], p. 744.
President Bush’s $400 billion budget deficits were the largest in history. He deserved every bit of criticism he got for his big-spending ways.
Now comes news that the budget gap is up to $1.4 trillion. President Obama has broken Bush’s record by a trillion dollars. It took him less than a year.
A trillion.
Wow.
People are often surprised to hear how similar President Obama’s policies are to President Bush’s. They shouldn’t be. One may be a Republican and the other a Democrat, but make no mistake. Bush and Obama are two peas in a pod:
-Bush signed a $700 billion bank bailout bill. Obama continued the policy. And he extended it to other sectors, such as the automobile industry.
-Bush tried fiscal stimulus twice while in power. With some help from the Bush team, Obama oversaw the largest fiscal stimulus bill in history. There is occasional talk of another.
-Bush started two land wars in Asia. Obama could end them. Instead, he is committing more troops to Afghanistan.
-Bush oversaw Medicare part D, the largest expansion of government’s role in health care since 1965. Obama also would like to expand government’s health care presence.
-And now, we have the PATRIOT Act. The bill was perhaps the largest expansion of executive power in seventy years, and the Bush administration’s signature legislation. Now that Obama happens to be the executive with all these cool powers, turns out he likes the PATRIOT Act, too. So he wants to extend some of its expiring provisions.
Predictable. Still disappointing.
Welcome to a very special Inaugural Edition of LibertyWeek with your hosts Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist and Special Guest Ivan Osorio. We get started with The Day in Wikipedia and the Tweet of the Week, and then we discuss the many celebratory balls that can be found around town to mark the beginning of the new presidency. Bank of America headlines the next segment with its request for an additional $20 billion in bailout money, and then we look into what could become the first real scandal of the 44th President’s (first) term. Eventually we find our way to On the Waterfront with Ivan Osorio, where our favorite Editorial Director and labor policy analyst fills us in on the questionable activities of the Service Employees International Union and its President, Andy Stern.
Listen here.
When President Bush leaves office today, will the capital be warmer or colder than when he was sworn in eight years ago?
It’s not scientifically meaningful, but it is interesting.
Bush has been heavily criticized for doing precious little to curb our emissions of carbon dioxide. During his eight years in office, atmospheric CO2 levels climbed by over four percent.
So what did Bush’s dilly-dallying produce in terms of deadly global warming? The temperature at noon in Washington DC will give us one factoid. It’s a scientifically meaningless factoid, since the local temperature on any one day, let alone any one hour, tells us nothing about long-term temperature trends, but it’s heavy in symbolism.
When Bush was first sworn in, in 2001, the temperature at noon in DC was 36 degrees F. What will it be today, when he leaves office? Will the capital be warmer or colder than when he took office eight years ago?
Don’t be surprised if it’s colder. Today’s forecast is for relatively low temperatures. More importantly, despite steady increases in atmospheric CO2, and despite everything you’ve heard about climate catastrophe, there’s been no warming for about the last decade, and the planet has actually cooled over the last three years. (This is from the British Hadley Centre’s data on land and sea surface temperatures. The Centre’s global surface temperature graph shows this in somewhat compressed form, but you can easily graph its data yourself to get a better idea.)
That should lead us to ask where’s the warming?
But first, let’s see what the temperature is at noon, when President Obama is sworn in.
And I repeat–this is scientifically meaningless, but I think it’s interesting.
(As for Bush’s failure to curb CO2 emissions, I doubt that even stringent curbs would have had any effect on atmospheric CO2 levels. More importantly, that failure was, I believe, a good thing in terms of affordable energy and human wefare. And the CO2 curbs that Bush did support and which will soon go into effect, such as higher fuel efficiency standards for cars, will prove extremely harmful to both consumers and the auto industry. But that’s off topic, sort of.)
The Bush Administration is planning to use money from the $700 billion financial system bailout for an auto industry bailout. To do that, it is seizing on the fact that the bailout statute contains a very broad definition of “financial institution,” which the Administration claims includes virtually any institution, financial or not. The bailout statute defines “financial institutions” eligible for the bailout as ”any institution, including, but not limited to, any bank, savings association, credit union, security broker or dealer, or insurance company.” Never mind that Congress listed as examples of ”financial institutions” only entities that were banks, insurance companies, or financial institutions, not automakers.
The Heritage Foundation and Michelle Malkin have made a strong argument that this violates the financial bailout statute under the principle of statutory construction known as ejusdem generis, which says that when a term’s definition includes examples that are all of a similar kind, it limits the meaning of the term to things similar in kind to such examples.
But if that’s not so, and the bailout was just a big slush fund for the Administration to dispense with as it chooses, then the bailout law itself was unconstitutional, since it conferred unbridled discretion in the hands of the President to do whatever he wanted with it. The Supreme Court ruled in the Schechter Poultry case that giving the executive uncabined discretion violates the constitutional separation of powers between different branches of government, by giving the president essentially legislative powers. (An earlier version of the bailout law was even more clearly a violation of separation of powers, since it failed to provide for judicial review of the vast discretion it gave the president, unlike past delegations of power upheld in cases like the Amalgamated Meat Cutters case).
In other news, the Washington Post reports that bailed-out companies may be able to evade limits on executive compensation Congress included in the bailout, because of a loophole. The limits on executive pay apply only to companies that sell distressed assets to the government. And the Administration, rather than buying up distressed assets as it said it would do with the bailout money, is instead buying up shares in banks with the money (a step toward bank nationalization).
The incoming Obama administration may be able to use the $700 billion dollar financial system bailout as a vast political slush fund. All the bailout money, and Obama’s plans for extensive new regulation of energy and financial markets, are attracting a swarm of lobbyists.
GlobalWarming.org WorkPlaceChoice.org CEI.org
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
Twitter 
Facebook 
CEI.org 
WorkPlaceChoice.org 
GlobalWarming.org 
CEI On Demand Video 
Liberty Week Podcast