Right Wing Nut House

Ten billion dollars. Ten lousy billion dollars held up by Jim Bunning and Washington explodes in tears, hand wringing, and vituperative finger pointing at the retiring senator, the author of all this pain. (Evidently, Bunning did a little finger pointing of his own, but it was the middle digit and was directed at an ABC News producer - not necessarily a bad target but I question the timing.)

Welcome to the future. This is how it will be when even minimal, nonsensical, irrelevant, and paltry cuts in federal spending are attempted. It can be argued - and I am happy to do so - that Bunning chose the wrong time, the wrong place, and the wrong bill to fight for fiscal sanity.

But ten lousy, fricking, billion dollars engendering an explosion of hate and angst directed toward Bunning? What in God’s name is wrong with this country?

By the reaction, you would think that Bunning was trying to throw poor people out into the street, force grandma and grandpa to eat Meow Mix, strip soldiers naked and send them into battle, while singlehandedly increasing his carbon footprint to the point that the ocean drowns Los Angeles in a wave of melting arctic ice due to global warming.

The reality is, that what Bunning is asking is impossible; that the Congress find $10 billion dollars to cut at the same time they want to spend $10 billion on all these worthy, and necessary programs.

That’s $10 billion out of a budget of $3.6 trillion that the Congress can’t find. Are you getting the sense that Washington has turned into some bad Dadaist dream - a surreal nightmare with rabbits in top hats, chameleons sitting on park benches that change colors in rapid succession, while toothless hags wander among the ruins cackling uncontrollably? (That’s MY surreal nightmare, thank you. Butt out.)

Harry Reid farts and the EPA spends $10 billion on air purification. Nancy Pelosi sneezes and NIH gets a $10 billion grant to study allergic reactions by west coast society matrons. Max Blumenthal picks his nose and Democrats spend $10 billion to memorialize it.

Washington spends $10 billion - and ten times ten billion - without breaking a sweat. The spend $10 billion on their lunch breaks.

“But it’s an emergency!” scream the Democrats and liberals. Fine. If you don’t think a trillion dollar deficit is an “emergency” get the hell out town. When are we going to have the same zeal to cut spending as we do in increasing it? Are you trying to tell me that a couple of committee chairmen from the House and Senate couldn’t sit down for an hour and come up with $10 billion to cut? Are we that far gone where three trillion plus in federal spending has generated such powerful lobbies that Congress fears for its political life if they vote to cut less than 0.003% of the budget? What is going to happen when we are forced to cut hundreds of billions of dollars in order to deal with the deficit crisis?

Emergency? Absolutely. Let’s treat it like one. If you’re so all fired eager to spend $10 billion then by God, you should be equally glad to cut the same amount. We’ve reached the point in Washington where cutting a measly $10 billion in order to pay for necessary expenditures causes a reaction more in keeping with a threat to the stability of the republic rather than a simple exercise in minimal - minimal fiscal discipline.

Robert Samuelson presciently describes the mindset in Washington:

There is a make-believe quality to modern American politics: People — and this applies across the political spectrum — say things that are stupid, misleading or unattainable and think (or pretend) that these very same things are desirable, candid and realistic. A disconnect between the language of politics and the nation’s actual problems is growing. The politics of the budget offer a splendid example.

On the right, we have conservatives clamoring for tax cuts when, as a practical matter, today’s massive budget deficits preclude permanent new tax cuts. With present policies and a decent economic recovery, the federal government could easily spend $12 trillion more than it collects in taxes from 2009 to 2020, reckons the Congressional Budget Office. So before reducing taxes, the tax-cut advocates need to identify hundreds of billions of annual spending reductions — or accept huge and hazardous annual deficits. Naturally, a comprehensive list of spending cuts is nowhere in sight.

On the left, President Obama and Democrats have spent the past year arguing that, despite the government’s massive deficits and overspending, they can responsibly propose even more spending. Future deficits are to be ignored (present deficits, to be sure, partially reflect the economic slump). The proposal is “responsible” because it’s “paid for” through new taxes and spending cuts. Even if these financing sources were completely believable (they aren’t), the logic is that the government can undertake new spending before dealing with the consequences of old spending. Of course, most households and businesses can’t do this.

Politicians can, because it’s all make-believe. They pretend to deal with budget deficits when they aren’t.

Certainly part of this “make-believe” is denial. Another aspect of fantasyland on the budget is an adherence to the old procrastinator’s maxim, updated to reflect reality in Washington; “Never cut today what someone else will be forced to cut tomorrow.”

Finally, simple politics is at play. It is more popular to spend money than to cut it out of the budget, more popular to cut taxes than to raise them. I mentioned the lobbies that have sprung up to protect their share of the $3.6 trillion budget. Every program, every proposed purchase that is cut affects real people. Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not just the poor who benefits from federal spending. It’s the rich, the super rich, the middle class, and everybody in between and above and below. The government has burrowed so far into our lives in the last half century that removing it will be literally like operating without anesthetic.

America has been on a binge since the end of World War II and purging what we’ve gorged on will be worse than any emetic on the market. The problem has been that we - and through us, our elected representatives - have refused to make choices regarding what we want our government to do for us. Some need it to do more than others. Some desire it to do more than most. A few want it to do more than can be accepted in a democratic republic and maintain individual liberty.

Because we refuse to make choices - except that we don’t want to pay for whatever Washington does for us - we are staring upwards at a mountain of debt that will bury us sooner rather than later. And into this charged atmosphere comes retiring Jim Bunning like a bull in a china shop trying to bend the Congress to his will. He has made his point. It is time to relent.

As I said, wrong war, wrong time, wrong battlefield. But Bunning’s piquancy should be a cautionary tale. Samuelson again:

The common denominator is a triumph of electioneering over governing. Every campaign is an exercise in make-believe. All the good ideas and good people lie on one side. All the “special interests,” barbarians and dangerous ideas lie on the other. There’s no room for the real world’s messy ambiguities, discomforting contradictions and unpopular choices. But to govern successfully, leaders must confront precisely those ambiguities, contradictions and choices.

The make-believe of campaigns increasingly shapes the process of governing. Whether this reflects cable TV and the Internet — which reward the harsh hostility of extreme partisanship — or the precarious balance between the two parties or something else is hard to say. But the disconnect between policy and the real world is harmful. Proposals tend to be constructed more for their public relations effects than for their capacity to solve actual problems.

The result is a paradox. This electioneering style of governing strives to bolster politicians’ popularity. But it does the opposite. Because partisan rhetoric creates exaggerated expectations of what government can do, people across the ideological spectrum are routinely disillusioned. Because actual problems fester — and people see that — public trust of political leaders erodes.

When our chickens come home to roost, and the unsustainable debt and deficit has had its way with our economy, our budget, and our way of life, two partisans will be seen standing in the rubble tossing bricks at each other, screaming vile epithets back and forth, blaming each other for the collapse. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be sitting in the smoking ruins of a once dynamic, liberty loving country wondering pitifully what the hell happened.

The simple minded Congressman who wondered out loud whether abortion in the black community was so rampant that it can be compared to the suffering of slaves inadvertently has done us a favor.

Rather, he would have if the left was willing to engage in a conversation about the efficacy of federal government policies that are specifically directed at poverty stricken black communities. This is a “no go” zone because it challenges the foundation of modern liberalism to ask questions that have no good answers when it comes to the state of the black family, the ravaged inner city black communities, and an African American culture that tolerates a shocking number of teenage mothers, absent fathers, and the social problems that arise from dependency.

“Racism” as an encompassing catch all to explain the above doesn’t cut it. But its all the race baiters like Jackson and Sharpton - and their liberal allies - have because the alternative would be actually examining the problems of black communities in a cold, rational manner, devoid of the kind of emotionalism so beloved of the left, in order to eliminate or adjust federal policies that may in some cases, be contributing to the holocaust.

By contrast, it is much easier to take the inelegant words of Trent Franks out of context, twist their meaning, and play the race card for all it’s worth.

This fellow is a rabid abortion foe - so much so that he hyperbolically tried to connect abortion in the black community to slavery:

We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America’s soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery. And I think, What does it take to get us to wake up?

He’s 100% wrong, of course. The idea that “far more” of the African American community has been affected by abortion than slavery is, on its face, absurd. And Rep. Franks didn’t mention the other half of that equation; 70% of children delivered to African American mothers are born out of wedlock.

What makes Rep. Franks remarks offensive is not the hate, but the tone deafness. It brings to mind a defense of Jim Crow that was common in the south in the 1950’s; blacks were better off when they were slaves and had massah to take care of them. I don’t believe that was Frank’s intent in saying that abortion was more devastating than slavery but it is easy - if you’re simply trolling to score political points against your foe by taking context out of meaning - to promote the perception that he was.

It is tempting to take statistics from 1965 on the effects of poverty on the black family and compare them to today, drawing the easy conclusion that federal poverty programs are to blame for the radical decline in the viability of the black family.

But nothing is ever that simple or easy. The fact is, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan penned his famous “Moynihan Report” when he was Assistant Secretary of Labor in 1965 that eloquently and in devastating detail raised the alarm about the disintegrating black nuclear family, the crisis was already at code red. The litany of statistics used by Moynihan compared the status of the black family in the 1950’s to where it was in 1965. The divorce rate was twice that of whites at 25% (now 68%). Female headed households was at 22% in 1965 (45% today). And while 70% of black children today are born out of wedlock, that number was at 25% in 1965.

It would be wrong to blame all the problems of the black family today for policies promulgated in the 1960’s. But it is a valid question to ask have any or all of those policies made things worse than they would have been if care had been taken to mitigate the impact on black families?

Federal programs targeted the symptoms of poverty largely by granting in kind payments to the head of household. I recall some spirited debates at the time among liberals about whether a guaranteed annual income, or Basic Income, should be substituted for housing vouchers, food stamps, and other Great Society expansion of welfare payments.

What could never be imagined by Johnson, and his social engineers was the devastating impact that dependency would have on the black community, and specifically, the black family. Those policies emasculated the black male, encouraged female welfare recipients to keep having children so that her welfare payments would increase, and made it more profitable for black couples not to marry. In short, all the cultural nuclear bombs identified by Moynihan back in 1965 that were already detonating on the African American landscape were, at the very least, exacerbated by some federal programs. Clearly, the increased opportunities available to blacks in the education and employment spheres had a positive impact. But others engendered consequences we still can’t talk about today.

A guaranteed annual income might have altered that equation. We’ll never know. Along with forcing cities to address the crisis in inner city schools, and more effective job training programs, building self esteem and promoting independence might have gone at least some ways toward saving the black family.

Bobby Kennedy was eager to change the thrust of much of the welfare state from dependency to freedom. How he might have accomplished this if he had been elected president is another of those “What ifs” in history that prick at our conscience. Was there - is there - another way to assist those Americans in poverty that would lift them up rather than keep them down? As long as even discussing the problem brings false cries of “racist,” we’ll never know.

Abortion, drug use, gangs, illegitimacy - all of these are symptoms of the destruction of the black family. Rep. Franks was making an accusation - overripe, in my opinion - that federal policies are responsible for the abortion rate among blacks, and by extension, the other symptoms of decline as well. He is suffering for his inelegance and tone deafness.

Too bad his critics refuse to engage on the substance of his critique.

Yes, it was great the our president reached out his holy hand and tried to bring his adversaries to the promised land of health insurance reform. Just more proof that our president really, really, really wants to govern in a bi-partisan manner. Liberals and little children believe that fairy tale - and if you can point to a difference in emotional and intellectual maturity between the two, I would welcome it.

Only partisans believe the bi-partisan shtick, of course. Just as only partisans on the other side believe that the GOP was anxious to cut a deal. It’s part of the reason that this whole summit idea was stupid to begin with. When the president has been plotting with Harry Reid for weeks to ram health insurance reform through using reconciliation, the idea that there was any attempt to do anything save make the GOP look bad at the summit is absurd. “Bi-partisanship” was the farthest thing from Obama’s mind, and the cynicism it took to stand in front of a television audience and piously proclaim otherwise was breathtaking.

And what of the “start over” Republicans? Yeah, right. Since many conservatives think our health care system is the finest in the world and we shouldn’t mess with it at all, the idea that any of the GOP ideas on health insurance reform - some of them good ones - would be advanced by the Republicans is equally absurd. The GOP was no more interested in bi-partisanship than Obama and the Democrats but at least they didn’t pretend that they could find enough common ground to pass something both parties could support.

Meanwhile, health care costs and the price of insuring Americans continues to go through the roof while millions go uninsured because they can’t afford it or can’t get coverage at any price due to a pre-existing condition.

Earth to Republicans: This is a problem. This is a problem that needs to be addressed by responsible legislators. I agree with you that the ultimate goal of the Democrat’s plan is a single payer insurance system and a near total takeover of the health care segment of the economy. Plenty of Democrats haven’t even bothered to hide their feelings about that and have openly said as much. But this is why God gave you a brain; figure out a way to pass health care reform that will prevent that from happening. Slippery slopes are not inevitable if you recognize them and work to avoid them.

Moon to Democrats: Read any good polls lately? That sucking sound you hear is your ironclad majorities going down the drain because, as the economy slips even further into recession, your constituents are wondering what in the name of all that is good and holy you are doing fiddling with health care reform while they can’t even get a job flipping burgers. Have you noticed those cooking pots of tar and people tearing into feather pillows when you’re speaking to the home folks? Lots of pitchforks in evidence too. The contorted faces of rage that shocked you last summer are nothing compared to the lynch mobs that await many of your colleagues on election day if you continue to pursue this Ahab-like obsession of our presidents’s.

Did one side “win” the day yesterday?” I’d say from what I saw of the summit (the first 4 hrs - then I watched woman’s hockey which was far more interesting), the Republicans had a clear advantage. It’s always better to be on offense and the GOP speakers scored several hard blows to the Democrats while offering some modest reforms of their own. For their part, the Democrats weirdly tried to get everyone watching to break down weeping as they related story after story of Americans losing insurance, having inadequate insurance, or some insurance executive beating them up, eating their children, or sucking their blood vampire like from their necks. I’m sure the wonks who were watching the fiasco had to excuse themselves to dry their eyes and blow their noses. Or not. Such emotionalism plays well on campaign commercials but only made Democrats look unserious and mostly silly for their going for the heart tactics.

For their part, the Republicans scored some good points when pointing out reality about many parts of the bill. There was an interesting dust up over a useless argument on CBO’s estimate of premium costs for the average family. Lamar Alexander said the CBO calculated that premiums would rise, Obama differed. The president was right; the CBO said premiums will go down - except that families may choose to purchase more insurance at a higher cost.

The whole question is moot anyway. The CBO numbers calculate that Obamacare will find $500 billion in Medicare savings. Everyone knows that’s off the table so, while the actual CBO report claims lower premiums for families, the reality is going to be different if Obamacare is passed because the CBO estimates on premiums are based on the idea that the Medicare reduction in hospital and doctor payments will actually come about and lower health care costs. No lowering of health care costs means no lowering of health insurance premiums. So, score one for the president on accuracy, but deduct a half for disingenuousness.

Other than that, Dr. Tom Coburn had some devastating points about malpractice and defensive medicine and really landed some body blows when talking about waste and fraud in Medicare. Since there is no tort reform in the bill, Democrats had no coherent answer. And in one of the few truly bi-partisan moments, the entire room agreed about waste in the system.

Such esoterica was nothing compared to the tour de force presentation by Paul Ryan (video here). Ryan took the Democrats to school with his treatise on the budget and deficits, and how simply dishonest the Democrat’s bill is in presenting itself as a budget cutting measure. Ryan proved once again why he is a young turk in the Republican party. That 5,000 watt brain of his cannot be ignored.

I was wracking my brains thinking of something good to say about another Democrat on the panel but frankly, only the president impressed me. The rest of his colleagues only revealed a “stature gap” as Mike Gerson pegged it. There was the president. And then there were the seven dwarfs.

But no clear Obama advantage this time, as there was in Baltimore at the GOP retreat a couple of weeks ago. There, Republicans sputtered while Obama - completely at ease and in full professorial mode - lectured his opponents and made them look small.

But the GOP came loaded for bear yesterday and it showed. They were sharp, penetrating, and for the most part, reasonable. If the White House strategy was to repeat the president’s performance from Baltimore, they were clearly disappointed. Even David Gergen, who spends a lot of his face time on TV bashing Republicans, said it was the GOP’s “best day in years.”

Considering what has transpired in recent years, that ain’t saying much.

This is the kind of post that could easily degenerate into a swirl of numbers, percentages, tables and graphs - in short, all the boring stuff that causes us to roll our eyes and click away to something else.

I will try to keep that kind of thing to a minimum - if only to define the universe we will be looking at. The real thrust of this post will be philosophical; asking questions to which there may not be any answers, but should cause us to think about government, it’s expanding role in our lives, and the very nature of public service.

After remaining steady for 28 years - 1980-2008 - at between 1.1 and 1.2 million, the number of civilian federal workers in 2010 will have grown to 2.15 million. Some 80,000 of those are temporary census workers, but even once they are off the payroll in 2011, the federal government will still be paying more than 1.35 million employees - the largest number ever and a number that only promises to go up if some kind of national health insurance reform is passed.

State and local government employee increases have been even more remarkable. The number of state workers since 2000 has tripled.

Let’s leave the numbers for a moment and ask an obvious question; is more necessarily bad? There is a direct correlation between the increase in the size of government (i.e., the tasks that government has decreed it has a duty/right to perform) and the increase in public employees at all levels of government. There are some increases that may, indeed, be beneficial. More policemen means safer streets, generally speaking. More firemen is also a good idea. As long as there is reasonable justification to believe that increasing the number of public safety employees will improve the lives of citizens, there aren’t too many who would turn up their nose at that kind of increase in the size of government.

More teachers? If increases in the education bureaucracy was confined to adding educators to the rolls, that too, would be beneficial. But schools and their districts have become so bloated with unnecessary bureaucrats that any add ons there would be counterproductive.

Other increases in employment, such as more service employees at departments that have extensive contact with the public (D.L. Bureaus, state aid agencies) may also be justified. The point is, not all of the increase in the size of federal, state, and local government is necessarily bad. Making a blanket condemnation of the growth in the number of public employees then, is relatively meaningless.

This graph from the Census Bureau lists the total number and total salaries of state employees for 2008. The total is about 14.5 million full and part time employees drawing salaries totaling a little over $49 billion.

Here’s the census data from 2000. Back then, there were about 4.9 million employees being paid $13.2 billion. This represents a tripling in the size of government over 8 years. Even with the caveat that many of those employees may be necessary to the functioning of good government, or are needed to protect and serve us, no one can reasonably make the argument that the need for government by the American people has tripled in 8 years.

Along with the increase in the number of employees has come the uncomfortable idea that government employees have not only increased their share of total US employment, but have surpassed the private sector in average salary and benefits.

This is my second question; should the idea of public service mean that public employees must make sacrifices that include making an inferior salary to those in the private sector?

Let us agree to recognize the reality that in order to attract and keep good employees, the public sector must at least offer competitive wages to those paid in the private sector. But this equation affects a relatively small number of technocrats. What about the bulk of public workers?

One problem with trying to make that determination is that many jobs in government have no counterpart in the private sector. Career Builders carried out this survey a couple of years ago but might cause a few raised eyebrows:

Attorney
Government average: $105,577
Nationwide average: $110,520

Financial Manager
Government average: $95,257
Nationwide average: $96,620

Economist
Government average: $89,441
Nationwide average: $80,900

Microbiologist:
Government average: $80,798
Nationwide average: $63,360

Architect
Government average: $80,777
Nationwide average: $68,560

Accountant
Government average: $74,907
Nationwide average: $58,020

Librarian
Government average: $74,630
Nationwide average: $49,110

Human Resources Manager
Government average: $71,232
Nationwide average: $89,950

Nurse
Government average: $60,935
Nationwide average: $56,880

Tax examiner
Government average: $36,963
Nationwide average: $49,460

Medical Technician
Government average: $35,526
Nationwide average: $33,170

The trouble with averages in this case is that most government jobs are in high cost of living urban areas that tend to bump up the total while private sector data includes ex-urban and rural areas with a far lower cost of living. Still, when you think about the fact that the public employees get an extremely generous benefit package along with a competitive salary, it is a legitimate question to ask if the old fashioned idea of stressing the “service” part of government service hasn’t been lost in some respects.

I don’t want to trash public employees, nor minimize the importance of their work. But at what point is it injurious to the republic that employees of the taxpayer see more benefit in working for themselves than the people? For a couple of hundred years, the idea of working for the government meant service to a higher cause. This was considered a greater reward than being paid on par with private sector workers. It was a matter of sacrificing personal gain for public service.

That idea has been turned upside down today. More than the number of public employees, it is this change in the nature of public employment that is the real threat to liberty. There is no talk of “sacrifice” today. In fact, with the incredible growth in power and influence of public employee unions, there is concentration only on what public employees can rip from politicians representing the taxpayer in the form of gold plated pensions, health care plans, and other extras including outsized vacation packages, overly generous sick day provisions, and holidays not granted to most in the private sector. (Note: Most federal employees are not unionized.)

How does AFSCME, SEIU, NEA, and other public employee unions manage this? Public sector unions gave nearly $400 million to Obama and the Democrats in 2008 in campaign contributions, not to mention many millions more in in-kind contributions such as manning telephone banks, door to door canvassing, get out the vote activities, and other election-related assistance.

Third question: Should public employee unions be allowed to influence politicians by contributing to their campaigns when these same politicians will be making decisions on their salary and benefit packages?

Here’s where the first amendment bumps up directly against what should be considered “good government” practices. In a perfect world, public employee unions would probably voluntarily refrain from such political activity. Until that world arrives, the courts have come down on the side of first amendment protections for the unions rather than common sense, good government policy. Hence, the spectacle of public employee unions basically buying protection from politicians who are only too glad to maintain the status of their ruinously expensive pension and health insurance plans, not to mention virtually guaranteeing job security to the point that even gross inefficiency and illegal behavior will not cause a public sector employee to lose their job.

We have allowed public employees to ascend to a privileged place - a pedestal that they were never intended to occupy by the Founders - to the point where their influence over politicians, especially at the state and local level, have made them a force unto themselves in growing the size of government. More public employees means more union members, which means more dues money, which translates into more political contributions to friendly politicians who will gladly repeat the cycle.

This vicious circle must be ended. The biggest reason is that it is bankrupting us:

Despite the lofty promises made by policymakers, public employee retirement plans have been neglected over the years and have become huge liabilities that severely threaten the financial health of many states. If legislators do not properly address the crisis in public pensions, they will make current state budget problems look trivial. In fact, as of 2006, states had accumulated nearly $360 billion in unfunded pension obligations, according to a new 50 state study conducted for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The report entitled “State Pension Funds Fall Off a Cliff,” is co-authored by Dr. Barry Poulson of the University of Colorado and Dr. Arthur P. Hall of the University of Kansas.

Much of the current data regarding liabilities in public employee pensions was taken before the recent economic downturn, and the study’s authors warn the problem is much worse today since stock market losses have not been fully realized in many official government pension statistics. Other estimates with recent data place the unfunded pension liabilities at $1 trillion nationally.

Already, the seams are bursting as some towns have been forced into insolvency as a result of public employee pension and health care plans. Many more will certainly follow unless the idea of “sacrifice” when working for the people once again becomes part of the idea of public service. Are these hugely expensive pension plans necessary to get and keep good employees? Pension plans that pay up to 80% of the average salary for the last three years of an employee’s work history - years in which the employee’s salary sometimes triples?

There aren’t too many Americans who would answer yes to that question. Until the philosophy and culture of public employee unions changes to reflect the principles of our Founders about working for the government, the public sector will only continue to grow at the expense of the private sector to the detriment of our economy and our liberty.

After having just seen the euphoria and confident words coming out of CPAC about how conservatism isn’t dead - it’s back and better than ever - I feel some trepidation in trying to rain a bit on that parade.

I really don’t like being a Cassandra. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to be able to report on a popular, dynamic, vibrant conservatism that is in the ascendancy and ready to reinvigorate government. But blinding oneself to the facts, misinterpreting straws in the wind, and basing a conservative comeback more on wishful thinking than on the evidence before our eyes only makes the task of asking you to face our shortcomings, own up to them, and change course all the more difficult and depressing.

For those of you who refuse to believe that all polls are rigged against the right, and all pollsters have it in for conservatives, you may find the following interesting. The rest of you can move on to more agreeable sites who would rather blindly engage in cheerleading, while ignoring the fact that conservatism is still seen as a marginal philosophy among the young, and that the right’s comeback is the result almost entirely of a huge jump in support among those aged 65-82.

First, the numbers (via Larison), that show some movement toward the right among “millenials” (18-29) but still show a huge gap in party ID:

However, over the course of 2009 the Democratic Party’s advantage among Millennials in party affiliation weakened considerably from its high point in 2008. The most recent party affiliation data (from the fourth quarter of 2009) show that in terms of straight partisan identification, Democrats held a 36% to 24% lead over the GOP among Millennial voters, a significantly narrower edge than the nearly two-to-one margin (41% vs. 22%) in 2008. At the same time, the percentage of Millennials who said they lean Republican has nearly doubled, from 8% in 2008 to 15% at the end of 2009. There was little change in the percentage who leaned Democratic (20% in 2008 vs. 18% in late 2009). While the Democratic Party has a larger advantage among Millennials than it does among the two oldest cohorts, a greater proportion of the party’s support comes from people who do not explicitly identify as Democrats but only lean toward the party.

Despite the shift in partisan leaning among Millennials, the Republican Party has had limited success in increasing the number of Millennials who identify as — and not just lean –Republican. Just 22% of Millennial voters identified as Republican in 2008, and there was no significant rise in the latest polling (24% in the 4th quarter of 2009).

In other words, no sale. Gains were also made by the right among the Gen X, Boomers, and the “Silent Generation” (65-82) with the last of those showing a complete flip in support away from Obama and the Democrats. However, all but the “Silents” still show majority support for the Democrats.

On average, Millennials’ underlying social and political views put them well to the left of their elders. If you dig into the full report, you will see that the recent Republican resurgence owes almost everything to the dramatic shift among members of the so-called “Silent Generation,” whose voting preferences on the generic ballot have gone from being 49-41 Democrat in 2006 to 48-39 Republican for 2010. There have been small shifts in other age groups toward the Republicans, but by far it is the alienation of voters aged 65-82 that has been most damaging to the Democrats’ political strength*. As we all know, these are the voters who are far more likely to turn out than Millennials, which is why Democratic prospects for this election seem as bad as they do even though the Pew survey says that Democrats lead on the generic ballot in every other age group. Among Boomers, Democrats lead 46-42, and among Gen Xers they barely lead 45-44. In other words, the main reason why the GOP is enjoying any sort of political recovery is that many elderly voters have changed their partisan preferences since the last midterm. Republicans remain behind among all voters younger than 65.

What does it mean for Republicans and the right that they now find themselves in the position of defending Medicare against fiscally responsible moves to rein in its costs? Catering to the elderly voting bloc means maintaining the complete integrity of their entitlements.

Even a cursory examination of the huge hole that Medicare is digging for future generations will tell you that addressing the problem is going to entail much more draconian cuts than the measly $500 billion contemplated by the Obama administration in their health insurance reform package. When we’re talking about an eventual shortfall of tens of trillions of dollars, such gestures are hardly worth the political blood spilled to get them enacted.

But the GOP now finds themselves the Defenders of Medicare - an irony too sour for many of us who believe that entitlements need to be drastically overhauled in order to save us from ruinous decline. But since old people vote, it isn’t likely that the Republicans will give up their current advantage in that age group willingly.

It is the young that should concern us, however, Unless something unexpected occurs, the Millenials will be lost to conservatism largely due to what is perceived to be a much less tolerant and less expansive view of social issues:

The percentage of self-identifying conservatives among Millennials is basically equal with that of self-identifying liberals (28% vs. 29%). The youngest generation of voters is unusually ill-disposed towards movement conservatism of the sort on display at CPAC, which is the event Gardiner hails not only as proof that conservatism is the future but as an “intellectually vibrant” gathering.

Gardiner can believe what he wants, but the evidence we have available right now suggests that conservatism is losing, indeed has already lost, most of the next generation, and that conservatism as we know it today is going to keep losing ground in the future. It is possible that something could happen in the next few years that could change that significantly, but typically once a cohort attaches itself to one party or the other its later voting habits become fairly predictable. The generation that came of age during the Bush years and overwhelmingly backed Obama is not going to become receptive to movement conservatism.

Larison’s analysis fails in one respect; the idea that the Millenials will always vote Democratic because they have attached themselves to the Democratic party and their voting habits become “predictable.” The survey Larison references, in fact, shows a growing comfort with conservatism the older one gets.

The Democrats feel they have a chance to cement the loyalty of Millenials to their party by passing national health insurance. Perhaps the “right bill” might have done so, but the monstrosity that has come forth will almost certainly drive them away from the party or, at least, make them so cynical that they drop out of the voting process altogether. The entire burden in the current health insurance plan falls on the youngest wage earners. Once they get wise to that, I suspect they won’t like it much at all and will be looking for someone to blame.

Larison’s point, then, has some deficiencies but its thrust is correct; the current state of Millenial attraction to movement conservatism is very weak and may get weaker over time. Obviously, the conservatives will never abandon their anti-gay marriage stance (and the perception that this makes them bigots plays a significant role in the standoffishness of Millenials), nor is the right likely to move away from the pro-life position - a stance that drives away Millenial women in droves. (While the numbers may be near equal, better educated and wealthier Millenial women are more pro choice.)

Perhaps social upheaval caused by a significant economic downturn would shunt social issues like gay marriage and abortion to the sidelines enough that a conservative economic populist message would resonate more with the Millenials. Then there’s always the chance that they might go the opposite way and embrace more liberal solutions. Given the fact that neither side will change their base conclusions about social issues, something along those lines would appear to be the only real chance to cause the Millenials to give conservatism another look.

As for the other age groups, it was encouraging that in the NJ and VA governor races last year, and the MA senate race this year, it appeared that the right was making a small comeback in suburbia. But it should be noted that the GOP candidates in all three of those races downplayed their social conservatism and talked up economic populism.

The recently completed CPAC conference also lends credence to this idea that the dominance of social issues on the GOP agenda may be on the wane with only 1% of attendees believing that opposition to gay marriage should be the number one issue of the GOP. No word on how many think it should be #2, or #3 which makes me think that the perception that the GOP is anti-gay might not be changing any time soon.

In 2010, where only half the number of people will vote who cast a ballot in 2008, the general level of enthusiasm on the right along with the turnout among the old folks will mean sizable, perhaps spectacular Republican gains.

But what of 2012? Conservatives still have a huge problem with the highly educated, the wealthy, and still trail the Democrats in support by the Middle Class. In a general election with elevated turnout, the Millenials may once again give the Democrats victory despite all that has happened.

Perhaps instead of crowing about a comeback, conservatives should keep their focus on developing alternatives to what the Democrats are doing in order to offer a positive program that would win over those independents who will decide the next two elections.

Was the Austin terrorist John Stack a right wing loon?

Sure - because as we all know, liberals love to pay taxes and never get mad at the IRS.

Don’t believe me? Here’s Paul Begala wanting to make April 15 “Patriot’s Day:”

Happy Patriots’ Day. April 15 is the one day a year when our country asks something of us — or at least the vast majority of us.

[...]

This country has showered me with the blessings of liberty. So what do I owe my country in return? Paying my fair share of taxes, it seems, is the least I can do. Thanks to President Obama and the Democratic Congress, 95 percent of Americans will get a tax cut this year. No one — not even the wealthiest 1 percent — will have to pay higher income taxes until 2011.

But no one kisses the ass of our IRS overlords with more nauseating obeisance than Matt Stoller:

I just paid my taxes, and I have to say, I always take pride when I do so. I don’t like having less money to spend, of course, and the complexity of the process is really upsetting. But I am proud to pay for democracy, and I feel when I do send money to the DC Treasurer and the US Treasury that that is what I am doing. The right-wing likes to pretend as if taxes are a burden instead of the price of democracy. And I suppose, if you hate democracy, as the right-wing does, then taxes are the price for paying for something you really don’t want. Personally, I find banking fees, high cable and internet charges, health care costs, and credit card hidden charges much more abrasive than taxes, because with those I’m just being ripped off to pay for someone’s summer home.

To which I responded:

When liberals like Stoller make noises of satisfaction like an infant who has just soiled their diaper just because they obeyed the law one wonders what lefties like our Matt do when they come to a complete stop at a stop sign. The celebrations must go on far into the night.

Obviously, liberals love it when they are racked and stretched by the IRS - even for honest, piddly-sh*t transgressions. They get off on a government agency that can make your life miserable - and, as Mr. Stack suggests - unlivable once caught up in the maw of IRS enforcement procedures. The trauma and torture wears one down, as forcefully and unrelentingly as tectonic plates grinding against each other.

Here’s Amanda Marcotte who suggests that Mr. Stack was indeed a left winger but that he was trying to goose right wing nuts into picking up on his IRS jihad:

Stack’s beef with the IRS seems to have developed from personal problems stemming from possible tax evasion on his part. But it appears to have turned into a full-blown ideological stance, and again, it’s clear that he hopes others who share his ideological stance—and believe me, there are a lot of crazy right wing nuts in the area who do, and I have no doubt Stack was aware of this—will act on his wishes. This is what I mean by a mish-mash. Most of his ranting seems very left wing, but if you’re living in central Texas and you do something like this, you’re sending a signal to right wing nuts, and you know it.

“Most of his ranting seems very left wing…” but ignore that, pay it no mind. It disturbs the narrative that this fellow was a tea party type.

What was that “left wing rant?”

And while they appear to make it look like it’s all about anti-government and anti-IRS, they fail to mention his anti-Catholicism, anti-Bushism, anti-capitalism and pro-communism.

I guess it doesn’t fit the preferred narrative

No, it doesn’t. But when has that ever stopped anyone on the left from jumping to conclusions? Recall that suicide of the federal worker in Kentucky that the left flayed conservatives over before it was discovered he took his own life and wasn’t murdered by “anti-government extremists.” Or Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan’s “PTSD transference” where he heard so many bad things about Iraq coming from his patients that he snapped. I wrote here about both right and left jumping to conclusions about Hasan but in the case of the Austin terrorist, there is a clear, and laughably ignorant attempt by many on the left to tie Mr. Stack to tea partyers.

Why can’t a nutcase just be a nutcase? Why does he have to be “motivated” by political views at all? I’m not a mental health professional, but I’ve read enough to know that trying to glean intent from a diseased mind is a ludicrous sport for amateurs. The reason someone commits suicide in the first place is that the natural, healthy, normally functioning mind breaks and the primal urge of self preservation is either short circuited or is prevented from working properly. This does not happen in minds that are in love with logic or reason.

The left is ascribing a rational thought process to an irrational man. If it weren’t so stupidly obvious that there’s is a political attack rather than a serious attempt to reach a conclusion based on observation, investigation, and a familiarity with how mental disease can lead to suicide, we might excuse liberals for simply being dumb. But tis the season for idiotic political bloviating so we’re stuck with nonsense like this:

Joseph Stack was angry at the Internal Revenue Service, and he took his rage out on it by slamming his single-engine plane into the Echelon Building in Austin, Texas. We now know this thanks to the rather clear (as rants go) suicide note Stack left behind. There’s no information yet on whether he was involved in any anti-government groups or whether he was a lone wolf. But after reading his 34-paragraph screed, I am struck by how his alienation is similar to that we’re hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement.

I was not struck by that at all. What struck me was this guy’s lack of a clear ideology - something that some of the less reason challenged liberals recognized and, to their credit, are writing about.

Or this:

5. He was mad at the IRS, and left what CNN reports was a suicide note on a local website, detailing his trials with the agency. In fact, a lot of his rhetoric could have been taken directly from a handwritten sign at a tea party rally.

The question of whether this guy was a terrorist is a no brainer; of course he was. Maybe the FBI and Homeland Security refuse to call incidents like this “terrorism” because of the increased paperwork involved in reporting it that way. Otherwise, the only explanation that makes sense is they don’t want to make a big deal out of the incident.

But in this case, we have a terrorist without portfolio. His motivation, given the building housed a regional IRS office, seemed to have been revenge more than anything. His ranting about wanting to inspire people is just that - the mouthings of a madman who wanted to give his death a twisted kind of meaning. It’s not logical or rational. It is delusional.

Maybe some day both sides will realize that the only people they are fooling with their politicization of the insane are themselves.

I am not attending CPAC this year. Finances have become problematic and since neither one of my employers were going to pay my way, the $1,000 or so that the trip would cost me will be put to better uses I’m sure.

Not that they would have rolled out the red carpet for me anyway. RedState is running Blogger’s Row this year and it’s strange, but my invitation somehow got lost in the email. Or perhaps they’re still smarting from my post criticizing RedState as “a barbarous brew of angry yawpers.”

A mystery, yes?

Then there are the few conservatives who have gotten angry enough to de-link me, or write long screeds calling me a liberal or other swear words who would have taken great pleasure in confronting me at CPAC for my apostasy. I apologize for not giving you your “Chief Brody slap” moment. Maybe next year.

So who is going to be welcome at CPAC this year?

“There needs to be a purging of the movement, and I think we’re already starting to see a different of hierarchy of groups,” said Erick Erickson, the Macon, Ga.-based founder of RedState.com, who predicts that “you’re going to see a much more diffuse conservative movement that is being led in large part from outside of Washington and is much more in line from the grass roots.”

Erickson, a favorite of the new activists, said, “Some of these legacy groups have become so entrenched in the Republican establishment in Washington that a lot of these new activists don’t think they can trust them.”

As examples, Erickson singled out CPAC’s primary sponsor, the American Conservative Union, as well as CPAC stalwarts including the Heritage Foundation think tank and the groups headed by Grover Norquist and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Those groups and other organizations that once formed the vanguard of the conservative movement — such as the National Rifle Association, the Family Research Council and Young America’s Foundation — haven’t made major inroads in the tea party movement.

And thus my first observation; this is not a friendly gathering where independent thought - or much thinking at all - is welcomed. It is the Palinization of conservatism; the rise of Joe the Plumberarianism on the right as George Will (another who is in bad odor with this crowd) points out:

America, its luck exhausted, at last has a president from the academic culture, that grating blend of knowingness and unrealism. But the reaction against this must somewhat please him. That reaction is populism, a celebration of intellectual ordinariness. This is not a stance that will strengthen the Republican Party, which recently has become ruinously weak among highly educated whites. Besides, full-throated populism has not won a national election in 178 years, since Andrew Jackson was reelected in 1832.

Note: It is not what these establishment conservatives say, nor especially what they think as much as what they represent that has Erickson and others pining for a Stalinist purge. Sidelining Norquist I can see. The man is a toad of a lobbyist who facilitated the sale of the Republican party to special interests. But kicking the Heritage Foundation out the door? Or Newt Gingrich? What connects these targets of the neo-right is that almost all of them approach politics and the issues with a thoughtfulness that is painfully lacking in their purge-happy opponents. They are no less fiscally conservative than the neo-rightists who want their scalps. Nor are they less devoted to the Constitution. To imply otherwise is libelous.

But the neo-rightists who smell blood in the water and wish to take control of the conservative movement are arrogant enough to believe that they have a corner on love for our founding document, and take the simple minded approach that if you criticize them, your devotion to First Principles are suspect. They constantly refer to themselves as “patriots” as if designating oneself thusly actually confers legitimacy on the honorific.

As I mentioned previously, I have never heard of this kind of self-reverence until tea partyers began to identify themselves as “patriots.” Real patriots allow others to append that appellation to them and eschew doing the honor themselves. That’s because some of the prerequisite qualities for being considered a patriot are humility and self-abnegation - not much of which will be on display at CPAC this year.

Second observation; welcoming the Birchers back into the fold while gleefully kicking intellectual conservatives and other “elites” out into the street may be enormously satisfying on an emotional level but brands the neo-rightists as gigantic failures in appreciating irony.

If there is one thing I wanted to do at CPAC if I had been able to attend, I would have loved to stand around the John Birch Society booth and talk to the visitors. Would they be aware of the battle that mainstream conservatives fought in the 1950’s and early 60’s to sideline these wackos, and bring conservatism into the intellectual mainstream? Probably not. In response to my criticisms of CPAC for allowing the JBS to co-sponsor and exhibit, I was informed that, at least as far as fringe nutjobs are concerned, the conservative tent should be expanded to include them. Others, who might not agree with the neo rightists on 100% of their pet issues need not apply.

Third observation; if this indeed, is a changing of the guard with the conservative establishment being marginalized and the neo right ascendant, then it stands to reason that the definition of “conservatism” will narrow considerably.

Protestations to the contrary will do no good. I have experienced first hand the definitional constriction of who these jamokes believe is “conservative enough.” We have seen the repudiation of Newt Gingrich, George Will, Peggy Noonan, David Frum, and countless others who, at one time or another, have been tarred with the “liberal” epithet, or RINO, or “Democrat-lite.” Their sin has been to disagree with the notion that there is one overarching definition of conservatism, that differences on issues or tactics does not mean that there are differences in principles.

But the neo right is unable to differentiate between issues and principles, and thus, there will be precious few “acceptable” conservatives from the northeast, the upper midwest, and most of the mid-atlantic. Ceding that much territory to your opponent will eventually lead to permanent minority status.

Right now, the right is rising because of the demonstrated incompetence and overreach of the Democrats. The voter literally has nowhere else to go if they disagree with health care reform, the bailouts, the buy outs, and the corporate cozying being carried out by the Obama administration. Since conservatives have offered nothing positive for voters to rally to, the recent polls showing people gravitating toward conservatism can be seen as a reaction to what Obama is doing, not to anything conservatives are offering as an alternative.

This will be fine for 2010. But what happens in 2012? And beyond? The bad economic times will be with us for a while, and there will come a point where people will get tired of hearing about sticking to principle and want their government to do something to help them. Since this is a foreign language to the neo-right, they will elect those who seem to care about their problems.

What problems? Here’s David Frum commenting on the vapid Mount Vernon Statement released yesterday:

* Are you an American who was earning less in 2007 than in 2000? The document has nothing to say to you.

* Did you lose your home or job or savings in the crisis of 2008-2009? Blank to you.

* Are you worried about the loss of your health insurance – or how you will pay for nursing care for your aged parents – or what 20% youth unemployment will mean for your newly graduated child’s life chances? Not our department.

* Do you wonder whether we are winning or losing the war on terror? Do you want an explanation for why it took so long for a conservative administration to react to military disaster? No answers here.

I’ve said it before; there are many on the neo right who claim allegiance to the Constitution but refuse to recognize a role for government in modern society. Their notion of “limited government” is more akin to the Articles of Confederation than the Constitution, more comfortable in a 19th century setting than the 21st century.

With that kind of attitude, and if candidates are elected to office that espouse this kind of extraordinarily narrow and restrictive view of what government is about, then conservatives will find themselves shunted to the sidelines before they know what hits them.

The true believers and ideologues who are angling to overthrow the existing conservative regime will eventually discover that populism, as George Will noted, hasn’t won an election in 187 years. And noble goals do not always translate into success at the ballot box. Government, limited or expansive, must answer the needs of the people. Forgetting or eschewing that fact will lead to marginalization and defeat.

The earthquake that shook the world’s financial system in September of 2008 opened many eyes to the fact that the largest companies on Wall Street had become heavily engaged in the extremely profitable but wholly unregulated derivatives market without a clue as to understanding the extraordinary damage their gambling could do to the economies of the industrialized countries if a financial shock came along.

There were some - in government and out - who sensed the trouble we were in but whose voices were drowned out in the speculative frenzy, the drive for ever larger profits, and the mania for secrecy upon which these firms traded. And the enablers in the Clinton Administration - including Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Robert Rubin - along with the anti-regulatory Fed Chief Alan Greenspan, worked hard during the 1990’s (as did their successors in the Bush administration) to keep the regulators at bay, discrediting them with Congress, and trying to bully them to toe the party line on keeping the derivatives market free of scrutiny by the government.

We paid for this shortsightedness with a meltdown of the financial industry that we are still feeling today and are likely to feel for years to come.

Those who continue to believe that the collapse of Lehman Brothers and subsequent tsunami that led to our current economic problems was the result of a few hundred thousand poor people who got loans they shouldn’t have received through the Community Reinvestment Act need to wake up and smell the coffee. The still unregulated derivatives market is worth $600 trillion today. That is not a misspelling. An unknown tens of trillions of that market - nobody can possibly know exactly - are in “toxic assets” still being carried on the books of big banks just waiting for the next shock to hit Wall Street to bring these great houses of finance to their knees again.

Yes, mismanagement of risk by Fannie and Freddie had something to do with the crisis, and the CRA had its own small role to play. But this crisis virtually begins and ends with the mind boggling way in which the largest financial service companies in the world fought tooth and nail to keep the government from finding out just what they were up to with these credit swaps.

I suppose I should mention that my understanding of all this is a mile wide and an inch deep. But the political explanations offered by both sides never satisfied my curiosity. The crisis was more than 2 decades in the making, and the idea that one side is more or less to blame for it is nonsense. Both Clinton and Bush, Democrats and Republicans in Congress have a lot to answer for and trying to place relative blame on a scale and weigh out who should be designated as the winner of the blame game is an exercise in futility.

No transparency, no record keeping, and little understanding by either the companies or the government of the systemic risk of these derivatives and credit swaps led directly to the collapse. But we can’t get rid of derivatives even if we wanted to, as business writer for the NY Times Timothy O’Brien points out:

But it’s really important to remember that there are a lot of good, practical uses for derivatives. In fact, the average person who’s a homeowner owns a derivative. It’s the insurance policy on their house, and it’s essentially a contract that you enter into with an insurer that pays you a certain amount of money if some kind of damage or calamity happens to your home. And you pay a little bit of money, or a lot of money depending on the size of your home, each year for that policy.

Wall Street has all sorts of contracts like this. Derivatives, in essence, are insurance policies that various players on Wall Street and in the business world enter into to protect themselves from unforeseen calamities, whether it’s wild interest-rate swings, changes in the values of currencies, someone’s debt going bad. …

And that’s a good thing. When people have protection from things they can’t control, it enables them to take sensible risks, which allows them to grow their business and allows more money to get created and creates jobs. These are all good things, as long as that’s what these things are being used for.

As you might have guessed, it was the other things derivatives were used for that sealed our fate:

The problem is, no one really knows exactly what derivatives are being used for because it all exists in a black box. They’re unregulated; the contracts aren’t traded on exchanges; they’re entered into between private parties. No one knows whether or not one company, let’s, for example, call them AIG, a big insurance company, has entered into so many of these contracts that if an unforeseen financial hurricane comes and hits the house known as Wall Street and suddenly AIG is required to make good on … so many of these policies that they don’t have enough money to do this, and they run into danger of going belly up. Which is exactly what happened at AIG.

And the lingering question is, if these transactions - if the derivatives market - had been regulated adequately, could we have avoided the worst of the meltdown? Joe Nocera, also of the Times:

The technical term for the kind of derivatives that really got us into trouble is bespoke derivatives. Bespoke means one of a kind. And these were complicated contracts that covered a particular, you know, one deal only. It couldn’t be replicated. It wasn’t like buying a share of IBM that is exactly the same as every other share of IBM. You bought a credit default swap; it would be built around a particular series of deals. It would have a particular set of terms. It would be one of a kind.

This is, by the way, why this stuff became so untradable. How do you trade a one-of-a-kind? There is no real market for them. It has a utility as a contract on a one-on-one basis. But there is no trading function. And that has been part of the whole problem. They don’t mark to market, i.e., because there is nothing to compare it to. What’s out there that you can compare this one thing to? So they mark to model. They come up with fancy, financial models every quarter. And they mark this thing to the model.

And for many years the model said they were worth more, worth more, worth more, so you mark them up. And then finally the model said: “Uh, you know what? Foreclosures are up. Subprime is down. We have got to start marking them down.” You start to blow up. But even though they are blowing up, you are still stuck with them. There is nothing you can do with them. You can’t trade them.

Bottom line:

So one of the big problems with the rise of credit derivatives is that Wall Street was terribly resistant to the idea of standardizing contracts and allowing them to be traded on an exchange, because it would hurt their profits.

The question now before us is what should be done about it? And for me and for many conservatives, the question becomes is there any regulatory regime that would be consistent with conservative principles?

It is a false assumption that regulation of markets is inherently un-conservative. Libertarians might take that position but since conservatives should value order above almost all else, sensible regulation of markets is a requirement for promoting a just and orderly society.

The size of companies like JP Morgan and Citigroup gives them an enormous advantage in the market already. And as I demonstrated above, these credit swaps take place in a totally unregulated, secret environment. Add the potential for harm to the community - harm that could be avoided or mitigated with a regulatory regime - and I think a solid, general case can be made for conservatives to support some kind of minimal regulation.

The problem as I see it, is that as with everything else President Obama wishes to do, he takes a good idea and ruins it by overkill. The president wants to transform the financial services industry. Conservatives want to rein it in. Obama wants to drastically reduce risk. Conservatives recognize the value of risk (as explained above) and want to minimize it without destroying its many advantages. The president wants to create a federal agency - the Consumer Financial Protection Agency - that some analysts believe would make credit extremely difficult to get for ordinary Americans. Conservatives believe that laws already on the books to protect consumers in this regard could be strengthened, but that a whole new agency is dangerous and unnecessary.

The differences then, are a matter of degree. Clearly, where there is no regulation or transparency, government must be there to create it so that not only is the economy protected, but that the derivatives market itself becomes less prone to the kind of exploitation that secrecy encourages.

Being supportive of a free market most decidedly does not mean that conservatives should oppose all regulation, or support less than adequate regulation, due to an ideological belief that such “interference” is an anathema to the functioning of the market. If the derivatives crisis showed anything, it is that our modern financial system is so complex that ordinary market forces that are supposed to correct imbalances are actually a danger to the economy as a whole. There may have been steps short of trillions in bail outs for firms “too big to fail.” We will never know because they weren’t tried. But even solutions like forced mergers of teetering banks, managed liquidations, guided bankruptcies, and the like would have required massive government intervention in the markets to achieve. And since the problem was worldwide, such measures may still have not been enough to keep the crisis from imperiling the world’s banking system.

A free market is only free if all benefit from its workings. When big companies can skew the market to gain advantages not available to others, or when they can game the system - backed by taxpayers - to take wild risks and place our economy in peril, it behooves conservatives to support reasonable steps by the government to rectify the situation.

Some of what the president proposes makes sense. Preventing big banks from both taking deposits and trading securities that benefit their own house - a small move back toward Glass-Steagell - is a good idea. Other ideas, like making the Fed the overseer of “systemic risk” and the creation of the CFPA smack of overreach. What eventually emerges from negotiations with Congress, with Wall Street, and the White House we can only hope will be adequate to address the problems without being so burdensome that they stifle economic activity.

First, let’s dispense with the notion that Obama has not cut taxes for a very large majority of Americans. In fact, the administration went a step further and “refunded” monies to people who don’t pay any taxes in the first place - a giveaway little noticed at the time.

But most critics are focusing on the payroll tax cut that grants an individual an extra $400 a year in take home, and a married couple filing jointly $800. This is a tax cut - period. Of course, at the end of the year when you do your taxes, your calculated tax includes that extra cash so your refund may be slightly smaller. It’s not like you didn’t earn the money and don’t owe taxes on it. The government just decided to allow you to keep a little more of what you earned each pay period by reducing the amount they withheld from your check in payroll taxes.

Some administration opponents are trying to make the case that because this does nothing to decrease the average American’s tax bill that it is not a tax cut. Technically, they may have a case. But if you ask the average taxpayer if taking home more cash every week is a tax cut, they would almost certainly say yes.

It was a good plan, although fairly modest in its workings. It didn’t help the economy much at all and the reason most Americans think their taxes haven’t been cut is probably due to the fact that the average taxpayer’s take home pay was increased by only around $13 a week.

Also, concentrating solely on the reduction in withholding is disingenuous. There were other tax cuts in the stim bill (they didn’t work either) as well as extensions or enhancements of Bush era tax cuts that the president - being disingenuous himself - is claiming as his own.

Here are a few:

First time home buyer credit: Enacted under Bush, enhanced up to $8000 credit for buying a new home.

Reduction or elimination of sales tax and use taxes paid on qualified new car purchases. (Expired 1/1/10).

American Opportunity Tax Credit on college scholarships. Changed the name from the “HOPE scholarship credit” and enhanced and relaxed rules for broader participation.

Expanded and enhanced energy tax credits already in place.

Then there are “tax cuts” that primarily targeted Americans who don’t pay any taxes at all. Including these measures allows the president to say he has “cut” taxes for 95% of Americans:

Child Tax Credit. The Stim bill enhanced the child tax credit by making a larger portion of the credit refundable for 2009 and 2010. Even if you paid no income tax, you can still receive the money.

The Stim bill increased the Earned Income Tax Credit. This is another refundable credit that allows taxpayers that pay no income tax to get thousands of dollars “refunded” to them.

There were also a couple of items in the stim bill that either extended Bush era cuts for small business or enhanced existing programs.

What we can glean from this thumbnail summary is that both sides are right, and both sides are being disingenuous in picking and choosing what constitutes a tax cut and what doesn’t. The facts, however, are clear; taxes were cut for a large majority of Americans while the president is taking credit for some tax cuts not of his own design.

I think it very revealing of the philosophy of both sides in this argument as it relates to taxes in general and how the government funds itself.

Whose money is it anyway? It appears to me that on the left, there is the feeling that whatever you earn belongs to the government and it is up to government to decide how much of your money you can keep. Admittedly, this is put rather crudely but I think it an accurate reflection of what liberals believe, at least subconsciously. It is philosophically satisfying for many liberals to reduce what the government withholds from your paycheck because it signifies the government’s power to determine how much of your own property you are entitled to - even if the amount is paltry as it is in the stim bill.

Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that your earnings are your property and that the citizen consents to have the government take that portion it needs to operate efficiently. Ideally, we give our consent by electing representatives whose philosophy reflects that basic, underlying creed of personal liberty and the sanctity of private property. If taxes become too high, we elect people who promise to ease the burden. That also, is a form of consent.

I never hear the word “consent” from the left when it comes to a citizen parting with their property for taxes. Is it an important distinction? I believe it is indeed and that this fundamental outlook on taxes highlights a huge divide between right and left.

So perhaps all the hub-bub on the right about Obama not cutting taxes for the vast majority of Americans has more to do with a basic disagreement over whose money we’re talking about to begin with. Liberal governments appear to take an entirely different view of property than conservatives ones. This manifests itself in support for expanded eminent domain powers by the left, and a more limited definition of “private” property.

But if we’re going to criticize the president, let’s do it for his disingenuousness in claiming credit for tax provisions he had absolutely nothing to do with creating.

It would be easy to dismiss the deficit reduction plan offered by Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) a couple of weeks ago as a non-starter politically. Indeed, ordinarily I would castigate either a Republican or Democrat for offering such a pie in the sky, politically unfeasible plan with regard to anything.

But what makes Ryan’s deficit reduction plan worthy of serious discussion is what it portends for the future; that the longer we go without addressing the underlying causes of the deficit, the harder it is going to be to save the US from bankruptcy.

Even liberals were impressed. Ezra Klein totally disagreed with it but called the plan “daring.” Ygelsias said of the plan that Ryan “has gone where I thought no Republican would dare to tread.” But the establishment Republicans tiptoed around Ryan and virtually disavowed his efforts at finding a way forward. Ryan himself said he wasn’t speaking for his fellow Republicans, thus letting them off the hook.

Ryan’s plan can be considered very stiff medicine indeed. He calls for the elimination of Medicare and Medicaid as we know it by substituting vouchers that seniors can purchase to buy their own insurance plans. The value of these vouchers will go up in succeeding years but - and here’s the kicker - they will not rise as fast as the cost of medical care. Basically, it is rationing health care through individual choices.

Bruce Bartlett writing in Forbes, gives us the barebones outline of Ryan’s bitter pill deficit reduction plan:

[I]t is really heroic that Rep. Ryan did not shrink away from confronting head-on the necessity of slashing entitlements for the elderly in order to achieve his goal of abolishing the federal debt without an increase in the tax-to-GDP ratio.

On Social Security Ryan would reduce initial benefits for retirees by changing the benefit formula. Private accounts would be established immediately for those under age 55 that would be partially funded by payroll taxes.

Ryan would also raise the age to qualify for Medicare from 65 to 69 years and 6 months for people born in the year 2022. After the year 2021, the Medicare program as we know it would cease to exist. Instead of receiving health benefits through Medicare, those over age 65 would instead receive government vouchers worth $5,900. These vouchers would be adjusted for age and health status, which would put the average voucher at $11,000. Medicare beneficiaries would buy private health insurance with the vouchers.

These amounts are considerably less than estimated Medicare spending per enrollee in 2022, so there is a sharp cut in spending right off the bat. Furthermore, these amounts would only be indexed to half the historical rate of price inflation for medical care. This means that the real, inflation-adjusted voucher amount would fall continuously. To cover the shortfall, Medicare beneficiaries would either have to pay out of their own pockets for medical care or buy private insurance over and above what could be purchased with the Medicare vouchers.

Ryan also calls for the elimination of the tax exclusion for employer health care plans. This would mean a huge tax increase for workers who would have to pay income tax on the cost to the employer of their insurance.

The plan is political poison - but illustrative of the kinds of draconian measures that will be necessary to get us out of this deficit mess. In this way, Ryan has done a huge service to the American people by having the political courage to present this plan with all its pain, and the political opening you can drive a Mack truck through if you were a Democrat seeking to make hay out of it.

The GOP showed in the health care debate how easy it is to demagogue Medicare cuts; just pretend that you never supported the idea of cutting Medicare and lambaste the Democrats for wanting to cut $500 billion over 10 years. You instantly become a hero to seniors who go nuts if you even whisper about cutting Medicare. They don’t know that as recently as 2007, Republicans were calling for similar cuts in Medicare. And thus will be the fate of any politician or party who seeks to fiddle with Medicare reimbursements or costs.

This is a recipe for total disaster, as the former GAO chief David Walker has been trying to tell us for the last 4 years:

“History has shown that when America faces difficult challenges and when it rises to the occasion, anything is possible,” he said in an interview. Yet “a fiscal cancer,” he said, “is growing within us, that if we don’t treat, can have catastrophic consequences.”

For more than a year that’s been Walker’s message to Americans. It is part of what he calls a Fiscal Wakeup Tour, an itinerant, bi-partisan lecture panel known as the Concord Coalition, which is traveling to college campuses in advance of the 2008 presidential elections. Accompanying Walker are economists from the left-leaning Brookings Institution and the conservative Heritage Foundation (usually Isabel Sawhill from the former and Stuart Butler from the latter). They may disagree about the potential solution, but they are in accord that a problem exists.

The crux of the campaign: to spread the word that Americans and their government are living beyond their means and that fiscal fecklessness is imperiling the country’s living standards.

Here we are, 3 years after that column was written and the prescience of Walker and others who have been shouting in the wilderness for so long about how absolutely imperative it is to address our long term deficit problem becomes obvious. We are only at the beginning of our “unsustainable” deficits. With the debt ceiling primed to rise above our GDP for the first time, we will get a very close look at what Walker, Ryan, and others have been grousing about; less and less government spending devoted to items like defense, education, the environment, and aid to the poor with more and more of the budget being forced to fund social security and Medicare.

When I profiled Rep. Ryan here, I highlighted the kind of muscular conservatism he stands for; meaty, intellectually coherent, and now add politically courageous to that thumbnail.

Bartlett challenges the tea party movement to embrace Ryan:

I think it is irresponsible to say, as almost all tea party goers do, that they are unalterably opposed to tax increases without specifying spending cuts–large cuts in popular programs that go far beyond foreign aid, earmarks and even a budget freeze. And if they are serious they must admit that coming anywhere close to budget balance cannot be done without slashing Social Security and Medicare benefits. There’s no way around that and anyone who says so is either ignorant or a fool.

When I see people like Paul Ryan addressing large tea party conventions and receiving standing ovations for his budget plan, maybe I will begin to think it is possible to avoid a massive tax increase. But right now, I don’t see even the tiniest glimmer of understanding among the tea party crowd about the true nature of our budget problem and what it would take to avoid a major tax increase.

The next time I see pictures of a tea party crowd I will be looking carefully for signs that say “Abolish Medicare,” “Raise the Retirement Age” and “Support the Ryan Plan!” I won’t hold my breath waiting.

Indeed, those familiar with this site know that I have, on several occasions, called out conservatives for their lack of specificity in defining what they mean by “limited government.” Where would you cut? Whose ox would you gore? How would you be able to do it when the political winds blow so strongly against you? In response, I’ve gotten vague intimations of some kind of “Super-Federalism” that would transfer most of what the federal government does now to the states, or a “let them eat cake” attitude where many on the right wish to roll back not only LBJ’s Great Society, but also FDR’s New Deal. Some wish to go even further and set up what would amount to a pre-constitutional government where the states would be supreme - “an Articles of Confederation on steroids” I’ve called it.

Ryan’s plan shows it won’t be easy, that it won’t come by only cutting spending, and that not only our lawmakers, but voters as well must become responsible citizens of the republic in order to bite down - hard - and do what is necessary to save us from our own profligacy. A nation that defeated fascism, communism, and can rise above its own sordid past and elect a black man president can do anything it sets its mind to.

Just give us a couple of hundred more Paul Ryans, please.