Right Wing Nut House

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome AT’s Rich Baehr and Dan Riehl to discuss the uproar over Jim Bunning’s maneuver to block a $10 billion spending bill. We’ll also look at the status of health care and the presidents plan released today.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

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.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome technology writer Charlie Martin who broke a big story today on climategate, and IDB’s Monica Showalter.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

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.

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.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Ed Lasky of AT, Andrew Ian Dodge, and Vodkapundit’s Stephen Green for a discussion of the Tea Party Movement, the upcoming CPAC conference, and other hot issues making news.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

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.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Ed Lasky and Larrey Anderson of American Thinker and Fausta Wertz for a discussion of several issues of importance currently generating interest on the net and elsewhere.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.