Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Courage Rewarded

Chris Christie Rips Obama for Supercommittee Failure | The Weekly Standard

Chris Christie Rips Obama for Supercommittee Failure | The Weekly Standard


The Great Global Warming Fizzle


The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom.


How do religions die? Generally they don't, which probably explains why there's so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can't kill what wasn't there to begin with.
Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it's worth asking what.
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.
As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.
This week, the conclave of global warming's cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years. The idea is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year, and to require rich countries to pony up $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the alleged effects of climate change. This is said to be essential because in 2017 global warming becomes "catastrophic and irreversible," according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.
Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.
The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won't be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won't make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they've spent it all on Greece.
Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent's heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. "Green" technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.
All this has been enough to put the Durban political agenda on hold for the time being. But religions don't die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.
That's where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the "hide the decline" emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.
But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren't going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn't turning green. Florida isn't going anywhere.
The reply global warming alarmists have made to these dislosures is that they did nothing to change the underlying science, and only improved it in particulars. So what to make of the U.N.'s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its "watered down" predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.
Meanwhile, the world marches on. On Sunday, 2,232 days will have elapsed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm. Great religions are wise enough to avoid marking down the exact date when the world comes to an end. Not so for the foolish religions. Expect Mayan cosmology to take a hit to its reputation when the world doesn't end on Dec. 21, 2012. Expect likewise when global warming turns out to be neither catastrophic nor irreversible come 2017.
And there is this: Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that's another way religions die.

The United States of EPA


Ms. Jackson's agency takes over automobile design.


Here's one good way to consider the vote in 2012: It's about whether to re-elect President Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, which these days runs most the U.S. economy.
The EPA heaved its weight against another industry this month, issuing a regulation to sharply increase fuel economy. Under this new rule, America's fleet of passenger cars and light trucks will have to meet an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, adoubling of today's average of about 27 mpg. By the EPA's estimate the rule will cost $157 billion, meaning the real number is vastly greater.
The fuel-economy rule is classic Obama EPA. Until this Administration, fuel standards were the remit of Congress, via its Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program. In 2007, the legislative branch raised those standards with a bill requiring the U.S. fleet to hit 35 miles per gallon by 2020, a 40% increase. The industry is struggling to keep pace with those steep requirements.
President Jackson is now casting aside 35 years of Congressional prerogative. Because the Obama EPA has declared carbon dioxide a "pollutant," and because cars emit CO2, Ms. Jackson is citing the Clean Air Act in her bid to commandeer Detroit. While the EPA officially worked with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (Nhtsa, the agency previously in charge of efficiency standards), it's clear the EPA is calling the shots.
At least when Nhtsa was overseeing efficiency, it was charged by Congress with taking into account vehicle safety and a rule's effect on the economy and consumer demand. The EPA can't be bothered with such detail.
Associated Press
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson
The National Automobile Dealers Association, which has opposed the EPA rule, has compiled Obama Administration documents showing the average price of a new vehicle will increase by $3,100 by 2025, thanks to the cumulative fuel-efficiency rules. Vehicles that currently cost $15,000 or less will effectively be regulated out of existence. The rule will reduce the mass of a car by 15% to 25%, decreasing safety.
The only way Detroit can hit these averages will be by turning at least 25% of its fleet into hybrids. But hybrid sales peaked in the U.S. two years ago at 3% of the market and are declining. The EPA's $157 billion price tag includes only the estimate of what manufacturers will have to invest in new technology, not the billions more that will hemorrhage when nobody buys their EPA-approved products.
Yes, 13 automakers agreed to this standard in July, confirming behavioral science on hostages. The industry has been living for years under the threat of California's strict efficiency mandate. Federal law pre-empts states from setting their own standards, and the Bush Administration refused to grant California a waiver. But the Obama administration made clear to automakers that their choice was between one crushing EPA-devised rule, or a national patchwork of crushing rules from California and acolyte states. They chose the federal poison.
House Republicans are pushing to return efficiency standards to the one regulator Congress has decreed: Nhtsa. They note that not only are California bureaucrats dictating federal policy, but the EPA has wasted $25 million to duplicate or demolish Nhtsa rules.
The EPA is seeking to impose, by fiat, greenhouse gas reductions that even a Democratic Congress rejected with the Waxman-Markey bill in 2009, and that would drive policy at least 13 years past this Administration. It's all more than a tad authoritarian. Welcome to the Obama-Jackson Presidency.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

The Budget Sequester's Silver Lining


Barack Obama has made it easier for the next president to begin the repeal of government health care.



Uniting a divided Congress around a major deficit-reduction plan was never going to be easy, but it is virtually impossible when the incumbent president campaigns instead of governs and seeks to divide the nation based on how much money people make.
As markets and the media conclude that the congressional super committee on deficit reduction is likely to fail, public attention is increasingly focused on the "draconian" across-the-board cuts that will ensue. A little refresher course on the size of these cuts in the context of the spending spree that occurred since 2007—when the Democrats took control of Congress—is in order.
More importantly, it's time to look at the fine print of the 1985 Gramm-Rudman Act, which was revived by this year's Budget Control Act, and the final chance it might give to the next Congress and the next president to do the job right if this president and this Congress fail.
David G. Klein
The super committee and the threatened across-the-board cuts were created by the Budget Control Act, which converted the debt ceiling agreement between the president and Congress into law on Aug. 2. It required that debt increases be fully offset by spending cuts over the subsequent 10 years. The first debt limit increase contained in the Budget Control Act capped and reduced total spending by $917 billion. The second debt limit increase will require an additional $1.2 trillion reduction to be accomplished either by the super committee or by automatic across-the-board spending reductions called a sequester—a budget-control mechanism from Gramm-Rudman.
If the super committee fails to agree on a budget plan, or if the plan is rejected in Congress or vetoed by the president, the combination of the reduction in spending already made ($42 billion in fiscal year 2013) and the potential sequester ($68 billion in 2013) would reduce 2013 spending by $110 billion, with $16 billion coming from nondefense mandatory spending and the rest split between defense and nondefense discretionary spending.
Across-the-board cuts are clearly inferior to rationally setting priorities, but they'd be far from debilitating. Spending has grown so fast in the last five years that even if the cuts are triggered, total spending in 2013 would still be a whopping $3,582 billion—32% more than projected by the Congressional Budget Office in January 2007. Even after adjusting for inflation, real nondefense discretionary spending would be up $41 billion, or 7.6%, and real defense discretionary spending would be up $77 billion, or 13%.
While a sequester would not be the end of the world, even for Washington, happily there is another chance to get this right. When Congress passed the Budget Control Act setting up the sequester process, it also repealed the expiration dates in Gramm-Rudman, bringing back to life provisions enabling the president and Congress to propose alternatives after the sequester is ordered. Gramm-Rudman never intended across-the-board cuts to be used for anything other than a prod to action and an impetus to force hard decisions lest the dreaded sequester be unleashed on the programs Congress cherished. We also knew Congress would do the right thing only after it had exhausted every other alternative, which would take time. So we gave Congress and the president a few last-chance opportunities, after the sequester was ordered, to come to their senses.
When the Budget Control Act brought Gramm-Rudman back to life, the final alternatives to the across-the-board cuts were restored, allowing the president to submit a resolution reordering the Department of Defense sequester to shift reductions among defense accounts. This resolution is highly privileged, and while it can be amended, it cannot be filibustered. This option—when combined with the unilateral power the president already has to protect defense personnel accounts from the sequester, and the ability of the president and Congress to reduce other spending in lieu of defense spending—should be sufficient to protect our effort in the global war on terrorism.
But the most important Gramm-Rudman provision revived by the Budget Control Act provides that 20 days after the final sequester order, the majority leader in either house of Congress may proceed to consider a joint resolution that can "modify" or "provide an alternative" to the sequester order. Such a resolution can be amended only with relevant amendments, debated for only 10 hours and can't be filibustered.
As is always the case with complex legislation, there will be parliamentary debate as to whether the revived Gramm-Rudman process applies to this particular sequester, based on the frivolous argument that the sequester does not require various reports to be filed prior to the cuts going into effect. The old Gramm-Rudman sequesters were triggered by the filing of such reports. Republicans will argue that the reports are a technicality and that the intent of the Budget Control Act in explicitly bringing Gramm-Rudman back to life when it employed the sequester as an enforcement device is clear. Democrats will likely argue that the sequester following the failure of the super committee is so unique that the Gramm-Rudman post-sequester procedures do not apply. But given the clear intent of the Budget Control Act, their argument will be weak.
President Obama insisted that if the super committee failed, the sequester cutting $68 billion in 2013 had to occur after the 2012 election, in the next administration. As written, if a sequester is triggered, it would occur on Jan. 2, 2013. If Republicans win a majority in the House and Senate, they could use the provisions of the revived Gramm-Rudman Act to replace or modify the 2013 sequester with entitlement reforms or other changes in discretionary spending. Their plan could not be filibustered and would pass with a simple majority vote. The savings achieved would be in effect for only one year.
The resulting empowerment of a new Republican Congress and president would be profound. Rather than having to first adopt a budget, delaying real action until the summer or fall of 2013, a new Republican Congress could de-fund ObamaCare immediately and begin to reform entitlements for a year during which they could adopt a budget and use reconciliation to make these and other reforms permanent with a simple majority vote.
In his effort to put off the difficult decisions of governing until after the election, President Obama has made it possible for a new Republican Congress and a new Republican president, not tied to the mistakes of the past, to begin the repeal of ObamaCare and restore fiscal sanity the moment the new president's hand comes off the Bible on Jan. 20, 2013.
The super committee should write a good plan now if it can do so, but it should not take a bad deal that could hurt the economy and further Hellenize America's debt crisis. The committee members should bear in mind that help is just an election away.
Mr. Gramm was co-author of Gramm-Rudman and a U.S. senator from Texas from 1985-2002. Mr. Solon contributed to the passage of Gramm-Rudman as a staffer for the House Republican Study Committee.

Friday, November 18, 2011

Occupy, smaccupy

I am not smart enough to understand how anyone is being helped by this...

(Best of the tube this weekend: Catch us on "The Journal Editorial Report" discussing ObamaCare and Obamaville. Saturday 2 and 11 p.m. ET on Fox News Channel.)

"The Occupy Wall Street protesters had achieved a great deal," the New York Times editorialized on Wednesday. "We worry that [Mayor MIchael Bloomberg's] decision to clear the park of tents could end up quashing the entire protest." The paper claimed that "many of those protesters wanted to stay by obeying laws and respecting the community" and demanded that the mayor "keep his promise to support the protesters' right to speak up about income inequality, especially in the city's financial district."
[botwt1118] WCBS-TV
Schoolchildren run the Obamaville gauntlet.
Yesterday the erstwhile denizens of New York's Obamaville called for a day of rage that included disruptions in the Wall Street area, on the subways and at Foley Square, site of the state and federal courthouses. WCBS-TV reports that "some grade school students were forced to walk a gauntlet of screaming 'Occupy Wall Street' protesters just to get to school."
"In the middle of thousands of protestors yelling and chanting--some kicking and screaming--CBS 2's Emily Smith found little school kids trying to get to class," the report continues. "Nervous parents led them through the barriers on Wall Street. The [New York City Police Department] helped funnel the children, anything to ease their fears while some protestors chanted 'follow those kids!' "
"A big failure? No, quite the opposite," writes the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson. "Lower Manhattan was swarming not just with demonstrators and police but with journalists from around the world--and with tourists who wanted to see what all the fuss was about. A small, nonviolent protest had been amplified into something much bigger and more compelling, not by the strength of its numbers but by the power of its central idea."
As we noted Wednesday, a man who reportedly "spent time blending in" with the Obamaville in the nation's capital, was being sought on suspicion of firing a gun at the White House last week. Police arrested the suspect, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, on Wednesday, and they tell the Washington Post that they "found no connection between him and the Occupy D.C. protest." Although Obama was not in the White House at the time the shots were fired, yesterday Ortega-Hernandez was charged with attempting to assassinate the president.
Opinion Journal columnist James Taranto on the latest developments in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
That didn't stop Obamavillians in San Diego from holding a "moment of silence and solidarity" in the alleged shooter's honor. In case you think we're making this up, it was vidoetaped and is viewable at YouTube.
"The good news is that Occupy Wall Street is not going anywhere," writes Richard Schiffman at the Puffington Host. "It is here to stay. . . . OWS is not about supplying readymade answers and political solutions, but about asking the right questions." Those must be questions like: Hey, wouldn't it be fun to harass little children? Or: Shouldn't we show solidarity with a guy who (allegedly) tried to assassinate the president?
"I call Occupy Wall Street a spiritual rather than a political movement," Schiffman says. That's what they called the People's Temple, too--which, before decamping for Guyana, was also a favorite of the left. Chicago's WMAQ-TV reports that Windy City Obamavillians are getting "advice about non-violent protesting" from none other than 1960s terrorist Bill Ayers. One wonders at what point people like Robinson, Schiffman and the Times's editors will change their tune and start pretending they've never heard of these awful people.

Sympathy for the Devil...

You can't always get what you want!

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Screaming at Bank Walls

"They paused to scream at the walls of a Citibank branch."
To our mind, that sentence more than anything we've read encapsulates the spirit of Obamaville. It originally appeared in a San Francisco Chronicle story about an incident in which "dozens of college students" invaded a Bank of America Branch, "pitching a tent and chanting 'shame, shame' until they were arrested." (The original Web version of the story is available here.)
Associated Press
What do we want? Uh . . .
On the way to B of A, they paused at Citi to scream at the walls. These are college students, acting like 2-year-olds throwing a tantrum. What does that tell you about their critical thinking skills--and about the standards of American higher education? The likes of the New York Times expect us to take such incoherent spasms of rage seriously as a political "movement." What does that tell us about the standards of the liberal media?
At the Puffington Host, Robert Reich, who served as President Clinton's labor secretary and is now a professor of public policy at the University of California's flagship Berkeley campus, issues a preposterous defense of the Obamavillians, allegedly on First Amendment grounds. He begins by rehearsing the standard left-liberal lament that the First Amendment prohibits the government from censoring speech merely because the speakers choose to organize themselves as corporations. That leads to this non sequitur:
This is where the Occupiers come in. If there's a core message to the Occupier movement it's that the increasing concentration of income and wealth poses a grave danger to our democracy.
Yet when Occupiers seek to make their voices heard--in one of the few ways average people can still be heard--they're told their First Amendment rights are limited.
The New York State Court of Appeals [sic; actually a state trial judge] along with many mayors and other officials say [sic] Occupiers can picket--but they can't encamp. Yet it's the encampments themselves that have drawn media attention (along with the police efforts to remove them).
A bunch of people carrying pickets isn't news. When it comes to making views known, picketing is no competition for big money.
In reality, the First Amendment guarantees the right to freedom of speech--to state one's views without government censorship or the fear thereof. It guarantees no one the right to make "news." Nor does it guarantee the right to engage in unlawful behavior with the purpose of "making views known."
It is true that constitutional "speech" goes beyond the exercise of the vocal function and includes symbolic actions. Perhaps the most famous example is the burning of an American flag, which the Supreme Court in 1989 held to be "symbolic" speech. But it is not the act of burning that is protected by the First Amendment. Texas v. Johnson did not strike down fire codes, or even set out an exception to them for expressive purposes. It said the government may not penalize the specific act of burning a flagbecause of that act's symbolic meaning.
Similarly, if, say, the New York City Police Department allowed Tea Partiers but not Obamavillians to camp out for months at Zuccotti Park, that would be a First Amendment problem. But the law, in all its majestic equality, forbids the right, as well as the left, from sleeping in a publicly accessible park. Breaking the law may be an effective way to call attention to one's ideas, but that motive does not confer a right to do so.
On a related note: What ideas? Burning the flag is an act of symbolic speech that carries an easily comprehensible message: "I hate America." By contrast, camping out in a park, or screaming at a bank, is literally unintelligible.
Reich claims to be translating these actions and noises into English when he writes that the "core message" is "that the increasing concentration of income and wealth poses a grave danger to our democracy." That itself is a rather nugatory assertion, but it's also what Reich believes. We suspect he heard it in his own head, not in the screams of the San Francisco college students. There is no basis to credit the screamers with any thought. We assume they are merely stupid, ignorant, immature or all of the above.
The left's embrace of a "movement" based on nonsense is a symptom of its own intellectual bankruptcy. Drew Westen--best known for his massive New York Times op-ed in August calling on President Obama to govern by telling fairy tales, has more comedy gold in an online Times piece in which he puzzles over why Obama has so often delayed the taking of decisions and implementation of policies, ranging from the Keystone XL pipeline to ObamaCare. He toys with the idea that it is a psychological defect:
Decades ago, psychoanalysts identified a particular personality style common among high-achieving men (although not limited to them), and in recent years researchers have been hot on its trail. People with this style (not narcissism, although that would be a good guess) prefer to see themselves as logical and rational, uninfluenced by emotion, and to think in abstract and intellectualized ways, as if emotions were irrelevant or inconsequential to decision making--when in fact they are essential to it. Whether that describes this president I cannot say, although he has been described by a close aide, and similarly by others, as "the most unsentimental man I've ever met."
"A second possibility," he writes, "is that the president either doesn't know or doesn't want anyone else to know what he believes":
During the 2008 election, I remember listening incredulously to focus groups as swing voters would repeatedly say about a man they had watched for two years, "I don't know who he is." Now I understand what they meant. No modern American president has ever managed to make it through nearly three years in the White House with so few people really having any idea what he believes on so many key issues--let alone what his vision for the country is.
Isn't the real explanation pretty obvious? Obama has multiple degrees from Ivy League colleges and spent a good deal of his career as a part-time professor. At Columbia, Harvard and the University of Chicago, he absorbed the politically correct nostrums of the academic left. But he didn't pick up much by way of critical thinking skills (although at least he doesn't scream at banks).
He didn't have to learn how to think, since he was thinking all the "right" thoughts anyway. So he came to office with lots of ideological preconceptions but no ability to adapt or innovate. As a result, he is simply in over his head intellectually--at the mercy of allies, opponents and events.
The other night we happened to catch Harvard's Laurence Tribe, a leading liberal legal scholar, being interviewed on television by Charlie Rose about the ObamaCare cases the Supreme Court had just agreed to take up. It struck us that Tribe, an enthusiastic booster of ObamaCare, seemed a lot less confident that the government would prevail than he was earlier this year.
We went back and read our column on the subject, from Feb. 8, in which we analyzed two op-eds, one by Tribe and one by Yale's Akhil Amar. In response to a Florida trial judge's ruling that ObamaCare was unconstitutional, both professors asserted that he was wrong--but neither bothered to argue his case. Amar was even worse than Tribe: "My students understand the Constitution better than the judge," he scoffed.
Because so many intellectuals are on the left, the intellectual dissolution of the left over the past few decades has been easy to overlook. But really, with the exception of same-sex marriage, can you think of a single new idea that has come out of the left since Lyndon Johnson was president? The ObamaCare case illustrates the point beautifully: The so-called individual mandate was originally a conservative idea--though, to be sure, one of the worst conservative ideas ever. But whereas a progressive of Obama's age is at least capable of borrowing bad ideas from the right, the next generation screams at banks.

It's Working!

You have a right to remain silent. Exercise it!

Tank Man: Genuine Courage v Juvenile Cowardice - Alexander's Essays - PatriotPost.US

3.5 Days

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

The Same Old Obama - Opinion - PatriotPost.US

The Same Old Obama - Opinion - PatriotPost.US

Socialism

Monday, November 14, 2011

Obama's Keystone XL Decision Put Politics Above Jobs

Obama's Keystone XL Decision Put Politics Above Jobs

If Americans needed any further proof that the Obama Administration is one of the most political on record, or that, for all the recent demagoguing, it really cares only about re-election, not about job creation, then you need look no further than its cynical Keystone XL oil pipeline decision last week.

Insane


The Spectacular T.T. :Motorcycle Road Race brought to you by Free Videos

Obama's Oil Abdication

Cuba, Mexico, the Bahamas, Canada and Russia are all moving ahead on projects adjacent to our borders.

 
By LISA MURKOWSKILast week the Obama administration proposed a modest expansion of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico in its first concessions on offshore production since last year's Deepwater Horizon spill. The five-year plan would, however, keep Atlantic and Pacific sites off-limits in order to avoid a controversial decision before the 2012 election.
As we continue our endless debate on whether we should have more Outer Continental Shelf development and where, all our neighbors have chosen to proceed. Cuba, Mexico, the Bahamas, Canada and Russia are all moving ahead on offshore development adjacent to our borders.
Each of those nations has weighed the economic benefits of offshore production against the potential environmental risks. All five have decided it is in their best interest to proceed. This means two things for our nation.
First, we fail to boost our offshore production at our own expense. America's neighbors are not drilling for fun or for sport; they've chosen to proceed to create new jobs, generate new revenues, and increase the energy supply and prosperity of their citizens.
If America pursues greater offshore development—with appropriate safeguards—the same benefits will manifest within our borders. Jobs will be created. Federal and state treasuries will receive a much-needed boost from royalties and leasing revenues. Our tremendously costly and dangerous dependence on foreign oil will be slashed.
Right now, America needs all of the benefits that offshore development provides, and we have more than enough resources to make it happen.
According to the Department of the Interior, our offshore areas hold more than 86 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Arctic Ocean alone is projected to hold 20% of the world's undiscovered oil and gas. Yes, opening up regions in the Arctic and the Gulf of Mexico to leases is a positive step, but it does not nearly go far enough.
If we refuse to produce more of our energy resources, we will lose significant opportunities to rebuild our economy and restore our international competitiveness. But that's not the only looming consequence. Less obvious, but just as real, are the environmental impact that may still result even if we refuse to boost offshore production.
Like it or not, development is now under way in waters all around us. Mexico is advancing on a deepwater well only 22 miles from U.S. waters in the Gulf of Mexico. Before year's end, Cuba is scheduled to drill 60 miles from Key West, and the Bahamas are proceeding with leases not much farther away. Canada is actively drilling projects not far from Maine's coastline and proceeding towards development in the Beaufort Sea, just east of Alaskan waters. Along Alaska's western boundary, Russia is aggressively moving into the Arctic Ocean, with exploration at the very edge of the boundary of Alaskan waters.
In a few years, the U.S. could wind up in a regrettable position—exposed to all of the risks of offshore development but with no control and none of the rewards. Imagine that foreign development is not done to our standards and a spill occurs. Neither geology nor ocean currents will respect our national boundaries. In some areas, like the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, the only way we will have oil-spill response capabilities in place or within a reasonable distance is if we are pursuing our own offshore development.
Sitting on the sidelines will also mean we have minimal influence on the standards and regulations for foreign operations. Regardless of our relations with neighbors, it's not realistic to expect them to match our requirements if we are not demonstrating that they are both workable and profitable.
Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Michael Bromwich recently testified that, while some gaps exist in spill response, the U.S. has "huge advantages based on the number of decades we've been involved in this business of exploring and producing offshore."
He's right. And so today, we face a stark choice. We can sit between active drilling operations in neighboring countries, complaining that it's too risky to develop our own resources while the world around us does exactly that. In this case, we will lose the economic opportunities but still face essentially the same environmental threats. That makes no sense.
Our nation's best option is not to lag but to lead on offshore development—not only so that we can show others how it's done, but also to ensure our own protection and prosperity. The time for that leadership is now, not at some more politically convenient time after next year's election.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Defending Hank

Obama's Christmas Tree Tax

Obama's Christmas Tree Tax/Transparency Test

The only way to stop this crap is vote for every Republican you can on 11/06/2012


Christmas is more than a month away, but the Obama Administration just couldn’t wait to hang a shiny new ornament on every fresh Christmas tree in America: a 15-cent tax to support a new federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees. Following a public outcry, the White House changed course, not a day later.

A Super Offer Rejected

Copied from op-ed in today's WSJ. -drm
Pessimism is growing about the Congressional super committee on deficit reduction, so we were eager to listen yesterday when Pat Toomey called with the latest lowdown. Most notably, the Pennsylvania Senator explained why he and his five fellow Republicans have decided to put new tax revenues on the table.
Steve Moore on the prospects of real reform from the Congressional supercommittee.
The rap from Democrats has been that Republicans refuse to touch revenues, preferring only to cut spending. But Mr. Toomey explained that this week the GOP Six offered to raise revenues by $500 billion over 10 years as part of a tax reform that would lock in lower tax rates in return for giving up deductions. Democrats have rejected it, which is puzzling since it would achieve so many of their stated goals.
The GOP offer would raise about $250 billion over 10 years by using some variation of economist Martin Feldstein's proposal that no combination of deductions could exceed, say, 2% of a taxpayer's adjusted gross income. (See Mr. Feldstein's Journal op-ed, "The Tax Reform Evidence From 1986," Oct. 24.) That's a big revenue hit, especially for earners in the top tax brackets who benefit more from tax breaks. Grover Norquist of tax-pledge fame would probably not be pleased.
In return for these cuts in deductions, Mr. Toomey says the top individual tax rate would fall to 28% from 35%, with the other tax-rate brackets falling by similar proportions. The current top rates for capital gains and dividends (15%) and the estate tax (35%) would remain unchanged. The GOP negotiators agreed to the Democrat request that these tax changes be statically scored—which assumes no revenue gains from economic growth—yet they would still yield $250 billion in additional revenue over a decade even with the lower tax rates.
"It's a bitter pill to accept new statically scored revenue," says Mr. Toomey, "but I think it's justified to prevent the tax increase that's coming" in 2013. Given the history of revenue gains after marginal-rate tax cuts, the tax windfall for the Treasury would likely far exceed $250 billion over a decade.
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Another $40 billion or so in new revenue would come from changing the formula for adjusting tax brackets for inflation. And $200 billion more would come from a variety of asset and spectrum sales, user fees, tax compliance and other things—all scored on a static basis by the Joint Tax Committee. Mr. Toomey says the Members have also made progress on a corporate tax reform that would cut the rate to 25% in return for eliminating deductions, though any agreement would probably have to be done in two stages to work out the details.
As for spending cuts, Democrats would only have to agree to $750 billion over 10 years. About $180 billion of that would come from changing the inflation calculation for benefits, so the other reductions would hardly be extreme. Keep in mind that any changes in ObamaCare (with its 3.8-percentage point payroll tax increase) and major reform of Medicare and Medicaid were long ago ruled out by Democrats.
Despite the modest spending cuts, the deal Mr. Toomey describes would be a big political win for all concerned. It would give the economy a major lift by taking the tax increase now scheduled for 2013 off the table, and it would show that Congress can at least make some progress toward controlling federal spending. With a ratio of $1.50 in spending cuts to $1 in tax increases, the offer is far better for Democrats than the $3 to $1 ratio that President Obama's own Simpson-Bowles deficit commission recommended.
Mr. Toomey says Democrats nonetheless rejected this offer on Tuesday night, a fact that leaves him "enormously frustrated." He says Democrats are insisting on at least $1 trillion in new revenues while refusing to allow any reduction in tax rates or to stop the tax increase that will hit in 2013. The freshman Republican now fears the talks will end with a whimper of small revenue and spending measures that will do little to help the economy or the federal fisc.
We report all this because it's news and because it illustrates the real political obstacles to more sensible economic policy in Washington. In media mythology, the only barrier to a budget deal is conservative opposition to raising taxes. But even when Republicans put $500 billion in statically scored new revenues on the table, at the risk of upsetting their political base, Democrats declare that tax reform without higher tax rates is impossible. So who are the real "ideologues" here?
Democrats must believe they can blame Republicans if the super committee fails, riding their campaign against "millionaires and billionaires" back to complete power in Washington. It's a reckless bet, but the American public may have to call it.