Washington Examiner columnist (and former CEI Warren Brookes Fellow) Tim Carney has a must-read column today on Texas Governor Rick Perry’s economic policies. They appear suspiciously similar to Bush and Obama’s policies:
“I’m a pro-business governor — I don’t make any apologies about it,” Rick Perry told the crowds in Iowa this week. He’s right, but we can get more specific. Perry is pro-Merck, pro-Boeing, pro-Mesa Wind, pro-Texas Instruments, pro-Convergen, and pro-dozens of businesses that donate to his campaigns and hire his aides as lobbyists.
Perry promises to “get Americans back to work,” but his policies — from backroom drug company giveaways to green energy subsidies — eerily mirror the unseemly big business-big government collusion that has characterized President Obama’s presidency. Judging by his record in Texas, Perrynomics might just be low-tax Obamanomics.
Pro-business politicians are a dime a dozen. What the economy needs to recover are more pro-market politicians. Instead of putting their thumbs on the competitive scales to favor one business or another, Congress and the president should allow an open, competitive market process.
That means the rules of the game would be both clear and few; they would also be consistently enforced. Unlike politicians, markets respect no special interest. If they did, no company would bother with a Washington office.
Consumers do a much better job of picking winners and losers than politicians with campaigning and fundraising on the brain. They should be allowed to try it sometime.
What a shame that few politicians are likely to admit that; such is the curse of “do-something” bias.
It turns out that government workers have a vested interest in opposing cuts in government jobs. Who knew, right? The Washington Examiner today ran a depressing news story on that topic, which served as an excellent reminder of one reason why it’s bad to let that beast explode to Abomination size.
At a time when voters across the nation are railing against government spending and the incumbent lawmakers who support it, Northern Virginia, home to a sizable chunk of the federal government’s work force and private contractors dependent on the government’s business, provides a sharp contrast.
The piece goes on to report politician doublespeak — Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.) saying representatives in the Washington area have an obligation to understand this area’s unique partnership with the federal government.
Translation: loads of people in the Washington area feel desperate and entitled to have jobs paid for by taxpayers. So politicians ought to continue to force taxpayers to pay for deadbeat jobs they wouldn’t volunteer to pay for, left to their own devices.
No wonder it’s hard to shrink government from Abomination to human size. And no wonder the American economy struggles, when the people who generate real growth have to drag along that dead weight.
The federal government’s $800 billion stimulus package, which failed to cut unemployment, is now forcing states and local governments to raise taxes. The Wall Street Journal describes how “stimulus dollars came with strings attached that are now causing enormous budget headaches . . . At the behest of the public employee unions, Congress imposed ‘maintenance of effort’ spending requirements on states. These federal laws prohibit state legislatures from cutting spending on 15 programs,” such as ”welfare, if the state took even a dollar of stimulus cash,” even if a state’s tax revenue has since fallen due to the recession. “So when states should be reducing” their spending ”to match. . . lower revenue collections, federal stimulus rules mean many states will have little choice but to raise taxes.”
Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package actually would shrink the economy “in the long run.” Unemployment has skyrocketed past European levels, as big-spending countries have fared worse than thrifty ones.
The Washington Examiner says that “75,000 jobs” Obama has claimed credit for are “clearly imaginary” or “highly doubtful.” That includes thousands of jobs the administration claims credit for creating in nonexistent Congressional districts. As the Examiner notes:
If his stimulus program was approved, Obama promised, unemployment would not go above 8 percent this year. The reality is that it passed 10.3 percent in October. So now the stimulus books are being cooked to mollify an anxious public worried that real-world jobs continue to disappear and angry that Obama has thrown almost $1 trillion down the stimulus rathole.
The stimulus package actually destroyed thousands of real world jobs by triggering trade wars with Canada and Mexico that killed jobs in America’s export sector (the stimulus package barred a measley 97 Mexican truckers from U.S. roads, a minor NAFTA violation that led to massive Mexican retaliation against U.S. exports of 40 farm products and kitchen goods worth $2.4 billion). It also is wiping out jobs by inflicting costly mandates on state governments (such as repealing welfare reform, and imposing costly “prevailing wage” regulations and expensive racial set-asides).
The stimulus package has since spawned countless examples of government waste and corruption. Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento. Obama’s alleged justification for firing the inspector general turned out to be false.
Apologies for the late notice, but I had an article on the potential of solar power in last Friday’s Washington Examiner:
If the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which passed narrowly in the House of Representatives this week, also passes the Senate, does this mean that we’ll soon replace coal-derived electricity with clean and green solar power? Don’t count on it. Solar has a lot of problems, and those relying on it for the promised “green jobs” will probably be let down.
You might also be interested in the levelized cost-comparisons for building new power plants in 2016 from the Energy Information Administration, helpfully compiled by the Institute for Energy Research. The cheapest form of energy (assuming a cost of carbon at $15 a ton)? Nuclear. The most expensive? Solar thermal and solar photovoltaic.
The Washington Examiner today declared Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, a top adviser to Obama and likely future Assistant Attorney General, to be the “dim bulb” of the day for his racially-charged remarks branding America as a racist country:
“During an Oct. 25 panel discussion on race at Harvard, this top Barack Obama adviser said the U.S. should still be considered a racist nation even if the Illinois Senator is elected to the White House because Obama ‘happens to be biracial.’ So even if a majority of Americans vote for him, it won’t count. WHY IT’S DIM: Ogletree’s comments conjured up the discredited ‘one drop rule’ laws adopted by many Southern states during the Jim Crow era that were used to segregate the races. CURE: Take Martin Luther King Jr.’s advice and judge people by their character, not their color.” (Washington Examiner, Oct. 31, 2008, at page 15).
Even if you vote for Obama, you’re still probably a racist, according to Professor Ogletree. White America won’t vote for blacks, Ogletree argues, and Obama’s election is possible only because he’s partly white. Even Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, in his endorsement of Obama, was more optimistic about race relations than Ogletree.
The ABA Journal predicts that Ogletree, who has long advocated race-based reparations, will be the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration.
Ogletree is controversial for his history of plagiarism and association with Al Sharpton.
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