David Boaz

Truth may be a rare commodity in the halls of Congress, but at least now there's a statue of the abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth.

I offer some evidence in today's Chicago Tribune:

Last week, Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter was one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate. Today, he's the most conservative Democrat…. But party-switchers often change their votes as well as their labels. The day after Republicans won control of the Senate in 1994, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama switched to the Republican Party. He had been a relatively conservative Democrat and had high-profile conflicts with President Bill Clinton, so the switch wasn't a great surprise. But observers might be surprised to look back at what happened to Shelby's voting record. According to the American Conservative Union, for eight years Shelby's conservative voting percentage had ranged between 43 and 76. Even in 1994, as Shelby often found himself opposing the Clinton administration, the ACU gave him only a 55. But from 1995 to 2000, his ACU rating only once dipped below 90, and he scored a perfectly conservative 100 in 2000 and 2001…. In 2001, Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont left the Republican Party and became an independent. Conservatives said he was actually voting like a liberal Democrat. But that wasn't quite right. Since he entered the Senate in 1989, his average ACU rating had been 27 -- definitely the most liberal Republican, but not Ted Kennedy country. His ADA average was 58 -- liberal for a Republican, but a long way from Vermont Democrat Pat Leahy. After the switch, Jeffords' ACU rating started falling like GOP approval ratings: from 40 in 1999 to 29 in the year of the switch to 6, 10, 4, 8 and 4 during the rest of his tenure.

Specter says he won't become a party-line Democrat, any more than he's been a reliable Republican vote. But the evidence from previous party-switchers is that his votes will end up much more in line with his new party.

Billions and billions of dollars! Get yours today! I've written before about the massive lobbying game in Washington to get your own special interests written into the stimulus and budget bills. And about the efforts to pressure governments into spending that money NOW. Today a friend sent me a new piece of the incredible expanding stimulus economy. A publishing company has created a new newsletter on how to keep up with "ever-changing opportunities and the complex requirements to apply for them" -- The Money for Main Street Monitor. Yes, for only $229 a year, with this special offer, you can keep up with the lucrative and ever-changing "new stimulus funding opportunities." I'm omitting the specifics so as not to give this parasitical industry any more publicity, but here's the text of the email advertisement:

Dear Nonprofit Professional, Billions of dollars from the Obama stimulus plan are becoming available daily for funding thousands of new state, local and nonprofit programs! And while it’s extremely time consuming and difficult to keep up with the ever-changing opportunities and the complex requirements to apply for them, we can help make that task easier than you’d imagine. That's why [the company] is proud to introduce our newest and much-needed online service: The Money for Main Street Monitor. Just click on or cut and paste the following link into your Web browser to take advantage of a special one-week offer on this continuously updated service: ... Continuous Stimulus Funding Updates While we have diligently kept our readers up to date on the billions of dollars in funding coming from the Obama stimulus package, many tell us they need much more coverage! Consequently, we have assigned a team of experienced Washington, DC-based editors to focus exclusively on new stimulus funding opportunities for health care, family services, education, mental health, disabilities and substance abuse programs, housing and community development!< Through continuously updated articles, subscribers to this new online service will be kept up to date on the latest funding opportunities as soon as they emerge. And with our online format, subscribers will have access to our user-friendly search tools to instantly find the funding opportunities most suited for their organizations! Plus, our updates -- unlike those on government Web sites -- are in plain English and easy to find.  And, we’ve included a wealth of grant-writing tips designed to help your organization get its share of stimulus funding! We know how important it is for every organization to watch their dollars closely these days, and we’re doing are best to help. That’s why we are offering you a specially reduced rate for this much-needed publication, The Money for Main Street Monitor. Just click on or cut and paste the following link into your Web browser to find out more about this special one-week offer: ... Or you can call in your order toll free at 1-800-[GET OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY].

This isn't the only company making such offers. Lobbyists, consultants, newsletter publishers, and others will be making money this year guiding their clients to the pot of gold at the end of the stimulus. But in economic terms, all this effort is deadweight loss. Instead of devoting time and talent and resources to the production of real economic value, these people are being lured into the parasite economy, jockeying for money extracted from productive workers and businesses and redistributed by a Washington bureaucracy and the lobbyists that revolve around it.

Cato is planning a seminar in New York on April 30 with an all-star lineup of speakers: Nat Hentoff, our new senior fellow and perhaps the leading First Amendment advocate of the past generation. Top climate scientist Pat Michaels. Peter Schiff, the financial guru who spent 2006 and 2007 failing to persuade people that the U.S. housing and financial markets were on the verge of collapse. And Freeman Dyson, one of the world's top scientists and the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine profile for his "heretical" views on global warming. Check out the program:

• 11:05–11:35 a.m. Nat Hentoff —Keynote Address: An Endangered Native Species: The First Amendment
• 11:35–11:55 a.m. Pat Michaels —Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know
• 11:55 a.m.–12:15 p.m. Peter Schiff —Economic Crisis: A Government Failure
• 12:30–2:00 p.m. Freeman Dyson —Luncheon Address: Climate Disaster, Safe Nukes, and Other Myths

Register for the event here ($100 per person).

At Capitol News Connection, brought to you each morning by your tax dollars, they reported this morning:

With more than a trillion tax dollars tied up in the Troubled Asset Relief Program and stimulus spending, Congress is trying to figure out how to account for every penny.

Uh-huh. Congress is always on top of our federal dollars. Coincidentally, just hours after the CNC report, the Government Accountability Office released a report warning about the lack of oversight procedures in the kitchen-sink stimulus bill. And a few days earlier the inspector general for the TARP program reported that Treasury has no real details on how TARP funds are being spent. In fact, IG Neil Barofsky told Congress that there were 20 criminal investigations into possible TARP fraud already underway. Two months ago Barofsky and the comptroller general had warned of the likelihood of waste in huge new government programs:

Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, told a House subcommittee that the government’s experiences in the reconstruction of Iraq, hurricane-relief programs and the 1990s savings-and-loan bailout suggest the rescue program could be ripe for fraud… Gene Dodaro, acting comptroller general of the U.S., told the subcommittee that a reliance on contractors and a lack of written policies could “increase the risk of wasted government dollars without adequate oversight of contractor performance.”

Read more...

I happen to own shares in Bank of America, so I've just received a proxy statement for the upcoming annual meeting. The Board of Directors recommends that I authorize them to vote my shares FOR an uncontested slate of candidates for the board. Usually I go along with such proxy requests. But this time I thought: Why should these people get something like $250,000 a year to take orders from President Obama and Secretary Geithner? It's become pretty clear that the Obama administration intends to use the bailout money to control private companies. He intends to tell companies what cars to make, how much to lend, how much to charge for credit cards, what to pay their executives, what kinds of bonuses are acceptable, and other crucial management decisions. So I decided to write in "Barack Obama" for all 18 positions on the Board of Directors. However, neither the paper ballot nor the online ballot allowed for write-ins. I guess the official slate will win. But make no mistake. Obama's the boss.

At the New York Times Economix blog, economist Nancy Folbre of the University of Massachusetts writes:

The libertarian Cato Institute often emphasizes the issue of corporate welfare, but it’s remained remarkably quiet so far on the topic of bailouts.

Excuse me? Since she linked to one of our papers on corporate welfare, we assume she's visited our site. How, then, could she get such an impression? Cato scholars have been deploring bailouts since last September. (Actually, since the Chrysler bailout of 1979, but we'll skip forward to the recent avalanche of Bush-Obama bailouts.) Just recently, for instance, in -- ahem -- the New York Times, senior fellow William Poole implored, "Stop the Bailouts." I wonder if our commentaries started with my blog post "Bailout Nation?" last September 8? Or maybe with Thomas Humphrey and Richard Timberlake's "The Imperial Fed," deploring the Federal Reserve's help for Bear Stearns, on April 14 of last year? Cato scholars appeared on more than 90 radio and television programs to criticize the bailouts during the last quarter of 2008. Here’s a video compilation of some of those appearances. Folbre complains that some people seem more concerned about welfare -- TANF, in the latest federal acronym -- than about welfare for bankers -- TARP. Google says that there are 138 references to TANF over the past 13 years or so on the Cato website, and 231 references to TARP in the past few months. Now she has a legitimate point. Welfare for the rich is at least as bad as welfare for the poor. And as much as welfare for the poor has cost taxpayers, the new welfare for banks, insurance companies, mortgage companies, and automobile industries is costing us more. Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times has written that "reassignment," an economic policy that changes individuals' ranking in the hierarchy of incomes, is far more offensive than a policy of redistribution, which in his idealized vision would merely raise the incomes of the poorest members of society. By that standard, taxing some businesses and individuals to subsidize the high incomes of others is certainly offensive. Of course, Brittan underemphasized the harm done by welfare to people who become trapped in dependency. But there's good reason to oppose both TANF and TARP, and Cato scholars have done both. Lest the good work of Cato's New Media Manager Chris Moody go under-utilized, here's a probably incomplete guide to Cato scholars' comments on the bailouts of the past few months. (Note that it doesn't include blog posts, of which there have been many.) Quiet? I don't think so: Read more...

Too many people in Washington look out upon the beauty and bounty of America and see a vast wasteland, enlivened only by government programs. If government isn't doing it, they think, then it isn't being done. When the Republicans threatened to nick the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton wailed that the proposal "not only threatens irrevocable damage to our cultural institutions but also to our sense of ourselves and what we stand for as a people." Seriously, she thought that if the then-$167 million of the NEA were eliminated, the $37 billion that Americans spent on the arts that year would somehow disappear in a puff of smoke? Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was even more sweeping when he said  in 1992, "The ballot box is the place where all change begins in America" -- conveniently forgetting the market process that has brought us such changes as the train, the skyscraper, the automobile, the personal computer, and charitable or self-help endeavors from settlement houses to Alcoholics Anonymous to Comic Relief. And today the Washington Post weighs in with the chart below. It's titled "Percent of GDP spent on social/family expenditures," and it shows the United States at a shockingly low 0.7 percent, while Obama-esque countries like Sweden and France are above 3 percent. But could it really be true that America spends less than 1 percent of its wealth on families and children? Of course not. The proper title for the chart would be "Percent of GDP spent by government on social/family expenditures." (Indeed, given the federal nature of the United States, it's possible that the proper title would be "Percent of GDP spent by the central government on social/family expenditures.") Every American family spends a large portion of its income on children's needs, and a larger portion on the needs of children and parents. The point of the article, as the caption above the chart indicates, is to argue that the Japanese government needs to spend more on programs that would encourage women to join the paid workforce. (If the government hired all the mothers in Japan and paid them to care for their neighbors' children, would that be a better world? It certainly would raise Japan's position on the Post's chart!) If that's what Post reporters believe, they're certainly free to advocate that position. But they shouldn't assume or imply that the government is the entire society. Families in Japan and the United States spend most of their income -- or at least most of their after-tax income -- on child and family needs. The chart ignores that reality and seeks to make Japanese and Americans embarrassed that government taxes and spends less in their countries than in the European welfare states.  

The latest poll to ask the question “would you prefer a more active government with more services and higher taxes or a smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes?” found that 66 percent prefer smaller government and lower taxes, to only 25 percent who prefer a “more active government” with more services. Note that the poll doesn’t even say “larger government”; Rasmussen has actually made the wording more favorable toward big government. As I've noted before, the usual “smaller government” question, as asked by CBS and other pollsters, is incomplete. It offers respondents a benefit of larger government -- "more services" -- but it doesn’t mention that the cost of “larger government with more services” is higher taxes. The question ought to give both the cost and the benefit for each option. That's what the Rasmussen poll does. And it shows that people prefer lower taxes to more government services.

One of the great things about Ron Paul's presidential campaign was its cross-ideological appeal. Libertarians, free-market conservatives, and antiwar young people all found his candidacy appealing. As someone who has despaired for years about the split between free-marketers and civil libertarians, who ought to be part of the same broad freedom movement, I looked forward to seeing that combination continue. So here's a suggestion. President Obama's frightening tax-spend-and-take-over-private-businesses policies are re-energizing a free-enterprise constituency that had been depressed and dispirited by the reality of a Republican government giving us bigger, more expensive government for eight years. Cato's full-page newspaper ads against the "stimulus" bill generated much enthusiasm and media discussion. CNBC's Rick Santelli and South Carolina governor Mark Sanford have become folk heroes for speaking out against Obama's economic policies. Now there are anti-tax "tea parties" planned in more than 300 cities. The growing resistance to Obama's spending agenda is encouraging. But meanwhile, where's the antiwar movement? President Obama rose to power on the basis of his early opposition to the Iraq war and his promise to end it. Now he has doubled down on the war in Afghanistan and has promised to keep the war in Iraq going for another 19 months, after which we will have 50,000 American troops in Iraq for as far as the eye can see. If McCain had proposed this sort of minor tweaking of the Bush policy, I think we'd see antiwar rallies in 300 cities. Calling the antiwar movement! So here's my suggestion. Some libertarian group -- which may or may exist already; the Internet makes it amazingly easy to organize a new group at a moment's notice -- should start a campaign to unite the antitax and antiwar constituencies with a simple message:

Stop the War, Stop the Spending

Or maybe it should be "Stop the Wars, Stop the Spending." But it would pick up on Ron Paul's appeal with his TV ads in which he said, "I'm the only presidential candidate who'll bring our troops home from Iraq immediately and stop wasteful government spending." Millions of Americans are tired of the war and worried about soaring federal spending. Somebody should give them a rallying point.