Columnist.
It's Christmas time again, and with it come the dreams of better times. Families struggling with the consequences of the most recent recession will be happy to know that there is a simple way to improve their lives and keep or make more money in the process. It's called economic freedom, and the United States used to be very good at maintaining it. Economic freedom is measured by, among other things, levels of personal choice, the ability to enter markets and the security of privately owned property. According to the Fraser Institute's annual Economic Freedom of the World report, the United States ranks 16th in terms of being an economically free country. It is a significant fall from its second-place status in 2000.
After allowing the Export-Import Bank of the United States' charter to lapse June 30, Congress voted to revive it this month on the back of an expensive highway bill. The agency is the modern iteration of a New Deal-era program that mostly extends loans and loan guarantees to foreign companies to buy U.S. goods and services, backed by your hard-earned tax dollars. It's an outrageous example of corporate welfare for companies with no need of government subsidies, and its reauthorization is yet another sign of how much power the business lobby and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce hold.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has a plan to jump-start the economy. It would require an additional $250 billion in federal infrastructure spending over five years — on top of the $250 billion over the next five years that Congress already wants to spend — along with the creation of a $25 billion federal infrastructure bank.
An office manager in Louisiana who billed Medicare for services that weren't needed or even provided was recently sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to pay $14.1 million in restitution. Twelve other defendants are awaiting sentencing for their roles in the $50 million scheme to defraud Medicare. The next day, a Detroit-area physician was sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to pay $2 million in restitution for his role in a $4.2 million Medicare fraud scheme.
There's no choosing between guns and butter in Washington. With virtually no limit on what the federal government can spend other people's money on, policymakers have been loading up on both for decades, and they aren't about to let limits that they themselves created get in the way. The pesky budget caps that were accidentally installed in 2011 put a modest brake on spending, but the recent passage of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 increased allowable funding under those caps — for the second time. And sure enough, the deal promises more guns and more butter.
One need not be intricately familiar with the tale of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" to appreciate that the federal budget process has similarly become an alternate reality replete with sketchy characters, peril and the absurd. In the latest trip down the Beltway rabbit hole, a Republican-led Congress relied on Democratic votes to produce a two-year budget agreement that removed the limit on Uncle Sam's credit card and increased spending now in exchange for offsetting spending cuts and revenue increases that will mostly occur 10 years from now. Well, that's if future Congresses stick to the offsets.
Little common ground exists between the left wing and right wing these days. One exception found in the emergence of the tea party and Occupy Wall Street movements is a healthy distrust in the motives of politicians and government regulators. These concerns are vindicated when officials are caught teaming up with the super rich to abuse political power.
When both liberals and conservatives like a government program, it usually means that it is expensive and expands the scope of government without delivering on its promises. The bipartisan support of the earned income tax credit is no exception. The EITC is best described as an anti-poverty program that encourages people to work. In a new study published by the Cato Institute, Chris Edwards and I explain that based on a deep dive into the economic literature and the budgetary impact of the program, conservatives and liberals alike underestimate its cost while overselling its benefits.
Combating bad ideas would be much easier if they were all backed by ill intent. More often than not, however, the opposite is true, and the worst government policies are enacted with the intention to help. Such is apparently the case with the aggressive campaign by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to eliminate the payday lending industry.
Those who take a principled stand in our nation's capital often find themselves alone with the crickets. Unless you're the latest cause celebre of the left (see Sen. Elizabeth Warren), taking a stand against business-as-usual big government on Capitol Hill typically means being labeled a radical extremist who is out of touch with the rest of the country. Look no further than the "far-right extremists" in the House who were voted into power several years ago, thanks in large part to the tea party movement, which — albeit imperfectly — recognized that the federal government needs to be corralled before it goes awry.
The House of Representatives is looking for a new speaker. Such times of change present a perfect opportunity for Congress to reflect on what it should aspire to achieve. On top of the list is getting control of our fiscal situation by restraining government spending in ways that are consistent with a healthy and vibrant private sector. This will also make better tax policy more likely and help restrain debt levels.
Donald Trump is the most recent Republican presidential candidate to release a plan to reform our burdensome tax code. Though all the proposals are different, they share common characteristics. They would cut income tax rates on households, lower the tax code's bias against savings and investment, close some loopholes, and reform America's anti-competitive corporate income tax system. Now all they need to be politically credible are sister plans to produce concomitant levels of spending restraint. According to the Tax Foundation, none of these plans would be revenue-neutral. Contrary to what you hear, that's a good thing, because it means they would reduce the amount of money the government collects from us. Using a static model that assumes people do not change their behavior much, over 10 years government revenues would shrink by $2.97 trillion under Rand Paul's plan, by $4 trillion under Marco Rubio and Mike Lee's plan, by $3.6 trillion under Jeb Bush's plan, and by $11.98 trillion under Trump's plan.
Merriam-Webster's definition of a bully is: "a blustering browbeating person; especially one habitually cruel to others who are weaker." Sound familiar, Congress? That's because this is what General Electric's Jeffrey Immelt has been doing to you for months, first by threatening to leave the country and withhold contributions and now by threatening to move jobs overseas as retaliation for the end of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. In June, a revolt against the unhealthy marriage between the government and large corporations put the mother of all crony programs, the Ex-Im Bank, in liquidation. Being the second-largest beneficiary of the bank's largesse and one of the 10 mega-corporations collecting 64 percent of its overall activities, GE is upset. It wasted millions of dollars in lobbying, yet Congress still cut off its access to cheap loans.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker just proposed a plan to overhaul the country's labor laws, called "My Plan to Give Power to the People, Not the Union Bosses." It would do that by expanding employee choice and holding unions accountable to their members. One of the main underlying themes of the Republican presidential hopeful's private-sector reforms is transferring power and decision-making from unions to their members. For instance, the plan would guarantee employees' rights by strengthening secret-ballot elections. Under current law, unions have ways to work around the protections, making such elections less than secret. The change would protect workers from retaliation by not disclosing their choices to unions during workplace elections.
If you want to know how serious Republican presidential candidates are about fiscal responsibility, just look at their positions on the spending caps put into place by the Budget Control Act of 2011. The caps, which largely cover domestic discretionary programs and the defense budget, brought a modicum of restraint to the federal spending train that careened out of control under the Bush and Obama administrations. But for the special interests that live off the largesse — particularly weapons manufacturers and lobbies for foreign governments that don't mind U.S. taxpayers footing the bill for their defense needs — restraint on the Pentagon's war chest is unacceptable.
Have you ever wondered why your television screen is often filled with advertisements from law firms touting their ability to land money for the disabled? It's because helping people obtain federal Social Security disability benefits has become a lucrative industry in the past decade. But it would be a mistake to only blame the legal profession. After all, lawyers are only taking advantage of a program that frequently encourages people with dubious disability claims to seek benefits, especially when the economy is down. According to the Social Security trustees report released at the end of July, the disability insurance trust fund will run out of money by the end of 2016. Without reforms, millions of Americans will receive an automatic 19 percent reduction in their Social Security Disability Insurance benefits.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker recently released his replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act and jump-started the presidential debate about how to wind down Obamacare. In his book "Overcoming Obamacare," The Washington Examiner's Philip Klein catalogs the three main schools of thought regarding post-ACA policy: reform, replace and restart. The restart school needs a little explaining. It would repeal the ACA and implement reforms as lawmakers would have at 2009 spending levels, had they a chance.
Death focuses the mind. The recent passing of my dear friend Whitney Ball, who devoted her professional life to making it easier for people to support civil society, inspired this column. Whitney founded Donors Trust, an organization that, as its mission details, "encourages philanthropy and individual giving and responsibility, as opposed to governmental involvement, as an answer to society's needs." Her death comes near the 10th anniversary of the deaths of some 1,833 people as the result of Hurricane Katrina, a tragic event that showcased government failures at every level.
How would you feel if the government could access a trove of information about who you are, what you do, who your friends are and what they do by collecting it from email and cellphone providers, search engines, social networking sites, and other websites every day? If you'd be outraged, hold on to that feeling. Back in 1986 — in a bygone era before email, the modern Internet, Facebook, the widespread use of cellphones and sharing economy sites — the government passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. And believe it or not, this is still the law that protects the privacy of your electronic life in 2015.
Candidates running for president should take the following warning seriously: Years of bad government policies catering to interest groups have created a generation of young people facing tremendous challenges in the labor market and little chance to experience the good old American dream. We can hope that someone will put this government-created generation of disinherited at the center of his or her platform. The challenge faced by young Americans and the root cause of their tragic situation are perfectly described in a recent book by two scholars at the Manhattan Institute, Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Jared Meyer, called "Disinherited: How Washington Is Betraying America's Young." If you aren't convinced that millennials, unlike past generations, are in a bad way, they have a few facts for you.
