washington post

Poll: 14 Percent Approval Rating for Congress

by Ryan Young on October 5, 2011 · 1 comment

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Politics as Usual

The Washington Post does not paint a pretty picture:

For most it’s not just a casual dislike of Congress: Sixty-two percent say they “strongly disapprove” of congressional job performance. An additional 20 percent “somewhat” disapprove.

Only 3 percent of Americans said they “strongly approve” of the performance of lawmakers on Capitol Hill — essentially as low as possible, given the poll’s margin of error of four percentage points.

Congress is doing all it can to placate people who want it to do something, anything to help the economy. The trouble is that those somethings and anythings have been spectacularly ineffective.

Lawmakers need to do something about their do-something bias. Instead of more bailouts, financial regulations, stimuli, cash-for-clunkers, jobs bills, and the like, Congress should try a deregulatory stimulus. Besides stimulating the economy, it would likely stimulate approval ratings, too.

What Shrinking Government?

by Ryan Young on August 8, 2011

in Economy

I had a letter to the editor in Friday’s Washington Post:

Richard Cohen fretted that Tea Party activists have “shrunk the government.” He need not worry. Federal spending has gone from $2.9 trillion in 2008 to $3.8?trillion in 2011. Thirty percent spending growth in three years is hardly shrinkage. Even under the Boehner plan, federal spending will continue to increase every year for at least the next decade.

Meanwhile, federal agencies continue to finalize more than 3,500 new regulations per year. They repeal almost none, no matter how loud the Tea Party’s howls.

If anything, Tea Party activists have been devastatingly ineffective at shrinking government. Mr. Cohen can rest easy.

Ryan Young, Washington

The writer is a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Ideologies Undermine Attorney-Client Relationship, National Sovereignty, and Protection Against Crime

by Hans Bader on April 27, 2011

in International, Legal

At the Washington Examiner, I discuss the implications for the attorney-client relationship of a law firm’s decision to dump a client after signing a contract to represent it in the litigation over the Defense of Marriage Act. I also discuss the ideological double standards at work in the legal profession, and the potential implications of the decision for civil defendants in lawsuits. The Washington Post criticizes the firm’s about-face here. Law professor Jonathan Adler comments here.

At the Examiner, I also recently discussed the role of nebulous, fabricated , ideologically-driven norms of “customary international law” in undermining countries’ criminal-justice systems and sovereignty, and the courts’ seeming lack of empathy for victims of violent crime in places like Illinois.

WaPo Freaks the Heck Out Over Gov’t Shutdown

by Christine Hall on April 7, 2011

in Features, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

Post image for WaPo Freaks the Heck Out Over Gov’t Shutdown

For the second day in a row, I’m complaining about The Washington Post. Front page, center today — a giant color photo of a child at the National Zoo, gleeful about seeing Giant Pandas. “Shutdown Would Be Felt Far and Wide,” blares the headline beside the gratuitous photo. You must understand, people wielding machetes will be roaming the streets of America, locusts will plague every home, taxpayer-funded Blackberrys for government employees may be shut off!!! Well, the Blackberry part may be true. But that gets to my point. The Washington Post wants us to panic, I think.

The paper is freaking out over the prospects of, wait for it, a  shutdown of the Washington Monument, the Cherry Blossom Parade, and national parks. Oh, and there’s the Blackberry conundrum and the possible closing of the historic Ford’s Theater.  Now, I am not thrilled about the prospect of these inconveniences. I’m sure loads of tourists have travel plans to D.C. this month and will not be pleased, either. But, two sections over, over on the the WaPo Style section, there’s a helpful article about “10 Things Tourists Can Do — Without Their Uncle Sam.” Whew!  Before reading the Style section, one might have thought life as we know it would come to an end.  It turns out there are alternatives to ogling pandas at the zoo.

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Elitist WaPo Rant Against “Extreme Couponing,” Affordable Food

by Christine Hall on April 6, 2011

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

Post image for Elitist WaPo Rant Against “Extreme Couponing,” Affordable Food

A Washington Post reporter today heaped scorn on “Extreme Couponing,” a TLC show about people who go to great extremes to clip and use coupons.  (See: In ‘Couponing,’ shoppers with a strange compulsion.) “Deeply disturbing,” Hank Stuever called it, and then went on a recurring sanctimonious rant about how amassing grocery store products at a discount, from food to household cleaners, offended him.  What bearing does extreme couponing by other people have on Hank Steuver’s life?  None that I can see.  So what’s his problem?

“Repulsion may or may not be the show’s ultimate intent, but it stirs up unsettling and complex thoughts, not only about the sins of gluttony and pride, but also about the production and consumption of cheap, processed food. There’s also something to snack on for those of us fretting over an ever-widening wealth gap amid dwindling resources. “Extreme Couponing” — which has become a series after a successful special aired late last year — is a modern Cassandra’s sociological fever dream, a harbinger of how closely we teeter on the edge of economic anarchy.”

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2010’s Record Election Spending Is Surprisingly Small

by Ryan Young on October 28, 2010

in Politics as Usual

The Washington Post has a breathless write-up of this year’s midterm election spending:

In the latest sign of this year’s record-breaking election season, an independent research group estimated Wednesday that candidates, parties and outside interest groups together could spend up to $4 billion on the campaign.

$4 billion is a lot of money. The Post’s opinion staff writer thinks that’s frightening. $4 billion, of course, comes to $12.90 per person in a nation of 310 million people. So maybe not.

A bit more context: federal spending costs $11,290.32 per person. Regulation costs another $5,645.16 per person. That’s a total burden of $16,935.48 per person. American democracy is a very expensive form of government with surprisingly inexpensive elections.

Spending $12.90 to influence $3.5 trillion in spending and another $1.75 trillion in regulating seems like too little election spending, not too much. Total election spending is about the same as it was in 2000, when the federal budget was under $2 trillion.

Still, for a midterm, this year’s election spending is historically high. And a lot of people think there is too much money in politics. Fortunately, there is a surefire way for them to fix the problem: get politics out of our money.

Republicans and Democrats alike have made it clear that they have little interest in fundamental economic reform. So maybe the Post is right that they aren’t worth spending $12.90 on.

Unfortunately, as long as the Bush-Obama spending and regulating binge continues, people will be spending a lot more than $12.90 to get a piece of the action.

Economic Illiteracy and Stopping Foreclosures

by Alex Schibuola on October 11, 2010 · 1 comment

in Bailout Watch, Economy

Express, a publication of The Washington Post, notes that as a result of a stoppage in mortgage foreclosures: “Prices might stabilize because so many homes are penned up.”

The underlying logic is that:

(1) If there are fewer foreclosures today, then the supply of houses on the market will be reduced.

(2) If supply is reduced, prices will go up (or “stabilize,” i.e., not go down).

Their logic is sound, but they must follow through with the analysis. Yes, the foreclosures are delayed. But we know that they are coming eventually. Therefore in, say a year, we expect prices will decrease once the foreclosure process is re-initiated because those houses then show up on the market.

They [Express] imply that expected future prices are lower than today’s current prices. This won’t do however.

If sellers expect that prices will fall in the future, they will want to sell at today’s relatively higher prices. As a result more people start selling now which increases today’s supply and this brings down today’s prices. This will continue until future prices are equated with today’s prices. Why? Because if expected future prices are low relative to today’s prices more people would like to sell to capture the relatively higher selling prices of today.

A similar effect occurs on the demand side of the market: some potential home buyers expecting prices to fall in a year will wait to buy, until houses become relatively cheaper. Fewer home buyers today mean less demand today, and this entails lower prices today.

The main idea here is that expectations of future prices held by sellers and buyers affects today’s prices, such that future prices and today’s prices move to equality. In this case it means prices go down. The unfortunate take away from this is that the healing period is far from over.

More Mercantilist Claptrap

by Fran Smith on August 27, 2010

in Economy, International, Trade

No wonder people are confused about the trade issue when they read mercantilist articles like the front-pager by Howard Schneider in the Washington Post today – “Economic growth slowed by trade gap.”

According to this article’s premise, it sounds like we would all be better off if we just exported and didn’t import any goods and services.  Here’s the article’s lead sentence:

A widening U.S. trade deficit has become a substantial drag on economic growth as the country’s exports struggle to keep pace with the swelling sums that Americans are again spending on imported goods.

And then it goes on to say:

But the spike does raise fresh concerns about whether some of the same factors that led to the economic crisis, including U.S. overconsumption, are beginning to reemerge. The yawning deficit may also prove frustrating for the Obama administration as it seeks to create jobs by boosting U.S. exports.

But what about choices?  Does the U.S. produce everything we consumers – and producers — want and need at prices we can afford?  Of course not.   And therein lies the confusion, as with this assertion:

At a basic level, trade deficits represent a loss of wealth for a country – money flowing abroad for goods and services produced elsewhere, supporting businesses and workers in other countries.

I would offer that the lack of imports would also “represent a loss of wealth” for consumers and producers.

Cato’s Dan Griswold points out a major oversight of the Post writer – he ignores the fact that many of those “overconsumed” imports actually provide inputs for producers to use to produce goods for export!

That view neglects the supply-side role of imports. More than half of what we import consists of goods consumed by producers-capital machinery, raw materials, parts and other intermediate inputs. Those imports help us produce more, not less. The Keynesian view also confuses cause and effect: Imports usually grow in response to RISING domestic demand. Consumers more eager to spend “swelling sums” on imports typically buy more domestically produced goods as well.

Imports, when they represent less expensive alternatives, also may put more discretionary funds in the hands of consumers to purchase other goods or services, to save, or to invest.

Maybe some Post editor noticed some of the problems with that article – a different trade article with a coauthor is on the front page of the online edition.

Media Give Disgraced Politician Eliot Spitzer a Soapbox to Lecture the Public

by Hans Bader on June 4, 2010

in Bailout Watch, Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Labor, Legal, Mobility, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

Eliot Spitzer, who was forced out as Governor of New York after paying prostitutes tens of thousands of dollars and then violating federal finance laws in trying to cover it up, is now apparently going to replace respected journalist Campbell Brown in a prime slot on CNN.  Earlier, the leading liberal website Slate hired him as one of its financial commentators.

As attorney general of New York,  Spitzer was an overbearing, hypocritical bully who used the threat of prosecution and lawsuits to force profitable companies to dump their highly-competent CEOs, resulting in declining profits and losses to shareholders at companies like AIG, which the taxpayers later bailed out at a cost of $170 billion.

Spitzer is just the latest liberal crook given a soapbox by the liberal media.  The Washington Post just gave former auto czar Steve Rattner space to boast about the supposed success of the auto bailouts, even as the SEC was moving to ban him from Wall Street for three years because of his unethical conduct.  (Rattner whined about how critics of the bailout like Senator Charles Grassley, who exposed how General Motors was using taxpayer money to make a phony “repayment” of part of what taxpayers gave GM, were “elasticizing the facts,” even though the government’s own inspector general for the TARP bailout program confirmed what Senator Grassley was saying.)

And the Washington Post earlier gave former Fannie Mae head Franklin Raines a soapbox to lecture Fannie Mae’s critics, after he was fined for massive accounting fraud at Fannie Mae, which had to be bailed out by taxpayers shortly afterwards thanks to the risky practices he promoted.

As I noted at the time in a letter to the editor, “Mr. Raines stepped down as Fannie Mae’s CEO after a ‘$6.3 billion accounting scandal’ that rivaled Enron’s; in a settlement with the government, he and other Fannie Mae executives agreed to pay fines and forgo millions in stock, pension and other benefits. . .Yet The Post gave Mr. Raines a soapbox to make the same arguments against reforming Fannie Mae that he and Fannie’s lobbyists have made for years. Mr. Raines, a liberal power broker, derided “ideologues in the Bush administration” who, he said, tried to “undermine” Fannie Mae. Those officials were in truth warning about Fannie Mae’s risky practices.”

The Obama administration earlier lifted a $400 billion limit on bailouts for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two mortgage giants known as the Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs).  “Late last year, the Obama administration pledged to cover unlimited losses through 2012 for Freddie and Fannie,” reports The New York Times.

Fannie and Freddie helped spawn the mortgage crisis by buying up risky mortgages and repackaging them as prime mortgages, thus creating an artificial market for junk. ”From the time Fannie and Freddie began buying risky loans as early as 1993, they routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring, reporting them as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime.” They paid their CEOs millions, and engaged in massive accounting fraud–$6.3 billion at Fannie Mae alone–to increase the size of their managers’ bonuses. As Government-Sponsored Enterprises, they were exempt from the capital requirements that apply to private banks, so they did not have enough reserves to cover their losses when their mortgages started defaulting.

The Obama administration refuses to reform these mortgage giants, saying it is “too hard” to do. Earlier, Senate Democrats blocked reform of the mortgage giants in a party-line vote.

(Obama received $125,000 in contributions from these mortgage giants as a Senator, second only to the corrupt Senator Chris Dodd, who is retiring this year due to his financial scandals. Dodd is the chief drafter of the financial “reform” bill.)

At the direction of the Obama administration, Freddie Mac recently ran up more than $30 billion in losses to bail out mortgage borrowers, some of whom have high incomes. Federal regulators sought to make Freddie Mac hide the resulting losses from the SEC and the public.

The federal government has sunk over $50 billion into General Motors itself, $17 billion more into its finance arm GMAC, $15 billion into Chrysler, and spent billions more on the wasteful cash-for-clunkers program and pension bailouts for GM spin-offs.  Even if GM manages to recover, taxpayers will never get most of this money back.   (Taxpayers may get back some of the money sunk directly into GM itself, in an IPO, if all goes according to plan; but the remaining money sunk into related entities, and indirectly used to prop up GM, will never be repaid, even if GM recovers.)

Even if GM recovers, it will not be because of its ability to fairly compete (the Obama administration used the bailout to protect excessive union wages), but rather because of good luck (Toyota’s recent safety issues have driven car-buyers away from it to GM and Ford) and special favors from the government (the Obama administration artificially reduced GM’s costs by ripping off bondholders who had loaned the company money, and dumping costly pension obligations of GM spin-offs onto taxpayers).

FDA Salt Statement Leaves a “Mistaken Impression”

by Daniel Compton on April 28, 2010 · 2 comments

in Health and Illness, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Zeitgeist

Some 80 years ago this month, Mahatma Gandhi led tens of thousands on a 240-mile march in protest against a British salt tax, inciting millions to engage in widespread acts of civil disobedience.  In a seemingly unintentional display of historic irony, the Food and Drug Administration made national headlines on April 20th for its efforts to forcibly restrict the amount of salt that can be added to processed foods.  The Washington Post was among the first to pick up the story, and was subsequently chastised for its efforts in a statement from the FDA, released later that day.  The FDA accused the Washington Post story of “[leaving] a mistaken impression” in the minds of readers.  But examination of the facts shows that The Washington Post got it right, and that it is the FDA statement itself which leaves the mistaken impression.

The event that triggered media interest was the release of a report by the Institute of Medicine urging the FDA to revoke salt’s GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) classification, thereby granting regulators the legal framework needed to mandate acceptable levels of salt for processed foods.

The Washington Post responded to the release by reporting that the FDA’s plans to clamp down on salt were already underway and that the initiative would be launched later this year, citing FDA insiders who spoke only on the condition of anonymity.  Within hours, the FDA responded with a statement that the Washington Post article leads readers to believe that the FDA “has begun the process of regulating the amount of sodium in foods.”  The statement went on to assert that “[t]he FDA is not currently working on regulations… to regulate sodium content in foods at this time.”

While it is true that the FDA has made no official announcements regarding their stance on salt regulation, the claims that they have not begun the process and are not currently working on it are demonstrably false.

For 30 years, the FDA had largely ignored calls to reclassify salt, voiced by groups such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest.  That all changed in October of 2007 when, in an abrupt about-face, the FDA announced in the Federal Register that they would hold a public hearing to consider a change in the regulatory status of salt.  The hearing was conducted that November, and the public comment period was closed in August of 2008.  Just a few weeks later, the IOM kicked off a 21 month project titled “Strategies to Reduce Sodium Intake”—a project sponsored by the FDA.  This project would ultimately lead to the creation of the recent IOM report, also FDA sponsored.

Over the course of 2009, 14 meetings and phone conferences were held discussing the project.  All but the first two of these meetings were entirely closed to the public.

At the first meeting, a representative of the FDA itself made a presentation explicitly discussing the regulatory status of salt, as well as its history as a GRAS substance.  The second meeting included a presentation addressing the legality of a reclassification of salt—concluding that the FDA has “ample legal authority” to do so—and one discussing how low salt reduction levels could be set.

But what of the science underwriting this new FDA push?  Also included in the first meeting was a presentation by the Department of Health and Human Services stating that “100% of adults exceed the [adequate intake] of 1,500 mg sodium/day”.  Presented with such a statistic, certain questions spring to mind.  For instance, if 100% of adults eat more than 1,500mg of salt, what research could possibly have been conducted that would lead them to conclude that 1,500mg is adequate?  One might assume that such research was conducted on residents of other countries, but the reality is that the average American consumes about 9% less salt than the worldwide average.

The only places in the world where you might find a significant population who eat so little salt are in countries so poor that people don’t have reliable access to food at all. In such a place, one might indeed find low rates of hypertension-related illness, but only because those who live under such tragic circumstances don’t enjoy the luxury of living to the age where high blood pressure starts to become a concern.

Decades of research, encompassing multiple lines of evidence, have shown that our bodies naturally self-regulate salt intake.  Not unlike the feeling of thirst we experience when we need more water, our bodies send us queues—though more subtle than thirst—that lead us to unconsciously adjust our diets to meet our salt requirements.  One recent study by nutritionists at the University of California at Davis examined data collected from over 19,000 individuals across 33 countries to find that the normal range of salt consumption is 2,700-4,900mg per day.  The study went on to conclude that, because of our natural ability to regulate salt intake, it is “unlikely to be malleable by public policy initiatives, no matter how well intended.”

A study conducted 12 years earlier coincides with these findings, concluding that most people are simply unable to reduce their consumption below about 2,700mg per day, even when receiving regular dietary counseling and instruction.  A third study, conducted the same year, demonstrates that people will unconsciously increase or decrease their dietary salt intake to stay within the normal range, even when they don’t know how much salt is in their food.  Neuroscientists have even successfully identified the specific neurological mechanism by which this unconscious salt-regulation occurs.

Grossly out of step with the current scientific understanding, the FDA clearly has begun the process of regulating the amount of sodium in foods, and has been working on it for several years.  Between the hearing in 2007, their sponsorship of—and participation in—the 21 month project specifically aimed at reclassifying salt, and their sponsorship of the report itself, there is little more that the FDA could have done to expedite the process.

It is true that the FDA has not yet formally proposed a rule, but that is the obvious next step on the new path it’s been taking for the past few years.

It is an outrage that the FDA would deign to censure The Washington Post for publishing an article informing readers about the shape of things to come.  Far from leaving a “mistaken impression”, The Washington Post’s article hit the nail squarely on the head.  If a mistaken impression is to be had, then readers need look no further than the FDA’s own statement.  And why would the FDA go to such lengths to deny that which is both obvious and confirmed by insiders?  It’s a safe bet that they want the unveiling of their plans to be timed just right, as whatever they are about to drop on us is bound to be damned unpalatable.

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