David Boaz

A front-page story in Saturday's Washington Post carries the headline, "Ryan's funding requests blur image as deficit hawk" (different online). That is, Rep. Paul Ryan has sought federal funding for projects in his district, even when he has voted against the relevant spending program, such as President Obama's $787 billion "stimulus" bill. But I don't think that's the best way to judge a congressman's fiscal conservatism. The question is, did he vote against excessive spending? Did he work in committee, with his colleagues, and in the national debate to end programs and cut spending? Sure, it might be best if fiscal conservatives crossed their arms and refused to participate in the standard congressional practice of seeking federal funds for one's own district or state. But that's not likely to happen in a political world where members of Congress assume that "bringing home the bacon" is essential to reelection. (Political scientist James L. Payne argued in his book The Culture of Spending that in fact members don't have to do that to get reelected, and he pointed to people like Sen. William Proxmire [D-WI], author of the book Uncle Sam: The Last of the Bigtime Spenders, who made their careers as opponents of pork and waste. But most political consultants would reject such advice.) I recall Sen. Phil Gramm, who actually switched parties and resigned from Congress (and then successfully got his seat back as a Republican) in the pursuit of spending restraint. He said, "If we should vote next week on whether to begin producing cheese in a factory on the moon, I almost certainly would oppose it...On the other hand, if the government decided to institute the policy, it would be my objective to see that a Texas contractor builds this celestial cheese plant, that the milk comes from Texas cows, and that the Earth distribution center is located in Texas." Not exactly a candidate for the next edition of Profiles in Courage, but I understand the realpolitik calculation. Ron Paul puts earmarks for his district in spending bills, then votes against the bills, which nevertheless pass overwhelmingly. Again, not exactly worth a gold star, but he does consistently vote against spending bills. So Paul Ryan voted against the stimulus bill and then sought stimulus funds for his Wisconsin district. I think the more important thing is that he voted, worked, spoke out, and campaigned against a bill that he called a “wasteful spending spree.” Even though he'd have fought Phil Gramm tenaciously about where the milk for that cheese factory on the moon should come from. As I say, the test for a fiscal conservative is how he votes on budget-busting bills. And there, Paul Ryan has a real problem. Consider his votes during his 14 years in Congress and particularly during the 8 years of the Bush administration:

FOR the No Child Left Behind Act (2001) FOR the Iraq war (2002) FOR the Medicare prescription drug entitlement (2003) FOR Head Start reauthorization (2007) FOR Economic Stimulus Act (January 2008) FOR extending unemployment benefits (2008) FOR TARP (2008) FOR GM/Chrysler bailout (2008) FOR $192 billion anti-recession spending bill (2009)

That is the record that could "blur [his] image as deficit hawk." Fiscal conservatives in Congress really ought to refuse to participate in the pork process. But members who have passed one of the few congressional acts to actually push back against spending, used their presidential campaigns to push the Republican party toward fiscal conservatism and inspired the rise of the tea party, or developed a budget plan that would arguably bring the rate of spending increase down from stratospheric to merely exorbitant should get some credit for that.

Zhubin Parang, a writer for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, writes about this year's presidential election:

The match is uneven, to be sure, but the stakes are high. Securing a second Obama victory is the only way we can be assured that our nation will not return to the dark era when it was choked in the grip of an imperial president who executed suspected terrorists with impunity and commanded lawless prison camps while drowning us in debt.

High stakes indeed. Let's hope we can move beyond that dark era. Parang's essay appeared in the Spring 2012 issue of Tunnel Vision, a Vanderbilt University alumni publication that does not promptly post new issues online.

Like a lot of people these days, the actress Kathleen Turner is very concerned about polarization in Washington. She has a special reason to be concerned: She's coming to Washington's Arena Stage to do a one-woman show, "Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins,' based on the life and writings of the sharp-tongued liberal columnist. She tells the Washington Examiner:

"One of these challenges may be getting a wide enough breadth of people to come, you know, because people are so closed-minded now, that if they think it doesn't represent their point of view, they're not interested," she said. "I'm afraid it will be like -- if you're a Republican, don't go to the show -- it's a real shame both artistically and as a reflection of our nation's mentality."

Fortunately, liberals from Hollywood don't have that sort of us-against-them mentality:

But while Ivins became famous for mocking former President George W. Bush, nicknaming him "Shrub" and "Dubya," Turner told us that her approach to dealing with the Bush years was a bit more subtle. "I had to do some real dodging there once in a while, but I pretty much managed it," she said, explaining that she "purposely" never met Bush. "I used to be on the Kennedy Center artistic, you know, selection board and those events are always held at the White House, and so then I had to bow out for a few years, didn't I?"

It's a real shame when Republicans are closed-minded.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) gave a great speech on surveillance last week at FreedomFest. Actually, he gave two good speeches, but the one embedded below is his short 6-minute talk at the Saturday night banquet. He talks about our slide toward state intrusion into our phone calls, our emails, our reading habits and so on. You know how big the surveillance state has gotten? The answer is "a gazillion." Watch the speech—complete with high-falutin' references to Fahrenheit 451 and the martyr Hugh Latimer!

In the 1960s Ayn Rand was becoming a major cultural presence. She drew overflow crowds at colleges from Yale to Wisconsin to Lewis and Clark. She wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times. She was interviewed by Alvin Toffler in Playboy. (The interview can be found in The Libertarian Reader.) She accepted an offer to place her papers in the Library of Congress. And in 1967 her celebrity was officially recognized by an invitation to appear on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Those who remember it say that Carson was so fascinated that he scrapped his other guests and kept her on for the whole show. He invited her back twice more. Alas, many of the early Carson shows were lost in a fire at NBC's archive, and Objectivists have lamented the lost tapes ever since. Now a partial tape of that first Tonight Show appearance has turned up, and Libertarianism.org has it: Visit Libertarianism.org for classic and original videos of Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, Thomas Szasz, Walter Williams, and many more.

Tad DeHaven summed up the congressional report on Countrywide Financial's VIP loan for members of Congress and other Beltway players.           But I was struck by this point in a Bloomberg report, about Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo's close relationship with Fannie Mae chief executive Jim Johnson, former top aide to Vice President Walter Mondale and chairman of both the Brookings Institution and the Kennedy Center. Instructing his staff to give a discount mortgage loan to Johnson, Mozilo wrote in an email:

Jim Johnson continues to be a source of many loans for our company and this is just a small token of appreciation for the business that he sends to us.

Note that Jim Johnson didn't favor Countrywide with his personal business. He didn't invest in Countrywide. He didn't sell houses and send the buyers to Countrywide. No, he sent loans backed by taxpayers' money to Countrywide, and was rewarded with personal benefits. That's crony capitalism. This was kind of a stunning detail:

Jim Johnson, chief executive officer of Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998, earned $100 million during his time at the company. Nonetheless, Countrywide employees expressed concern about giving him a loan because he didn’t pay his bills regularly and had a low credit score, according to e-mails published in Issa’s report.

Given his credit report, Countrywide underwriters didn't want to sign off on a loan to Johnson. But Mozilo, who knew the business Countrywide was really in, told them not only to approve the loan but to give Johnson a discounted rate. And that, kiddies, is how being involved with a highly respected politician can get you a job in Washington that pays $100 million, backed by the full faith and credit of the American taxpayers, as well as extra perks from other companies tied into the crony corporatist state. More on Johnson, Fannie, and Mozilo here.

For those devoted Cato-at-Liberty fans who wouldn't think of visiting any other blogs, here are links to a couple of things I've posted elsewhere this week. In response to a New York Times op-ed deploring excessive freedom on the Fourth of July, I wrote this over at Libertarianism.org:

Where Andersen goes wrong, of course, is in deploring these outcroppings of freedom in American life. When people take seriously the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he calls it “self-gratification” and “every man for himself.” He writes:

But what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967. Thanks to the ’60s, we are all shamelessly selfish....

Americans who actually appreciate the Declaration of Independence call it self-reliance, minding your own business, staying out of unnecessary wars, and raising everyone’s standard of living by pursuing your own profit. Andersen is sort of right: “For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors,” freedom is desired. And freedom works.

And at the HuffingtonPost, on the day that another dismal unemployment report came out, I wrote about some accomplishments the president could boast about in his reelection campaign:

Most deportations. Despite his endorsement of the DREAM Act, President Obama has deported more illegal immigrants than any president in history. He's been deporting about 400,000 people a year, about double the number in the George W. Bush administration. Most leaks prosecutions. The Obama administration has been criticized for leaking classified information in a series of campaigns to portray the president as a tough, engaged commander-in-chief. But meanwhile the administration information has used the 1917 Espionage Act to target suspected leakers in twice as many cases as all previous presidential administrations combined. Most troops in Afghanistan. The United States had about 30,000 troops in Afghanistan during 2008, the last year of President Bush's term. By the end of 2010, President Obama had increased that number to almost 100,000. It's down to about 88,000 now, which still might surprise people who recall candidate Obama's ringing antiwar speeches of 2008.

And more! Read 'em all.

The Washington Post reports:

Lawmakers approved a broad measure Friday that freezes federally subsidized student loan rates for another year, reauthorizes the government flood insurance program and extends federal transportation funding for two more years. The deal resolved months of acrimonious debate on key legislative concerns on the eve of a Fourth of July recess, and offered President Obama an opportunity to claim victory after a high-profile campaign to pressure Congress into action on both the student loan and transportation issues.... The agreement includes the first long-term transportation spending plan agreed to since 2005, replacing a series of short-term extensions. It passed the House 373 to 52 and the Senate by a vote of 74 to 19.

So as George Will and I noted recently, bipartisanship consistently seems to mean the expansion of government and government spending. Democrats and Republicans may fight about abortion and tax cuts, but they can agree on (in Will's words):

No Child Left Behind, a counterproductive federal intrusion in primary and secondary education; the McCain-Feingold speech rationing law (the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act); an unfunded prescription drug entitlement; troublemaking by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; government-directed capitalism from the Export-Import Bank; crony capitalism from energy subsidies; unseemly agriculture and transportation bills; continuous bailouts of an unreformed Postal Service; housing subsidies; subsidies for state and local governments; and many other bipartisan deeds, including most appropriations bills.

Talking to Marketplace Radio, former Senate Majority Leader turned lobbyist Tom Daschle is candid about the attractions of political office:

Hobson: What do you miss about your time in the public sector, if anything at this point? You've been in the private sector for a while. Daschle: Well, to be honest, I miss the power. The senators have an enormous amount of power, probably second only to the president of the United States.

He's doing OK in what Marketplace laughingly calls "the private sector" -- they mean "the rent-seeking sector" -- having made some $5.3 million in his first two years for "providing strategic advice" at a lobbying/law firm. But he still misses the power.

NPR has a story on Mitt Romney's hopes to win back some of the youth vote that went so heavily for Barack Obama in 2008, and today's Diane Rehm show is looking at the politics of the generation gap. I wrote about the youth vote earlier this month for the Huffington Post. I argued that Obama's Bush-retread policies on Afghanistan, Iraq, and the war on drugs would reduce his appeal to young voters. And most importantly, I said:

Debt. And finally, perhaps the longest-term impact President Obama will have on today's young people. The national debt has increased by $5 trillion, about 50 percent, during Obama's 3-1/2 years in office. As a percentage of GDP, it's the highest since World War II. The average amount of student loan debt is $25,000, but each American owes about $45,000 for the national debt. Worse, the unfunded liabilities of Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements programs are estimated anywhere from $62 trillion to twice that much. That amounts to $500,000 to as much as a million dollars for every American household. The promises that government has made are unsustainable, and it's today's young workers who will end up holding the bag when the money runs out.

It's not like Romney has any serious plan to reduce the debt burden on today's young people, and if they really wanted to end the wars and avoid bankruptcy, they'd probably vote for Gary Johnson. But we can at least hope that in addition to promising college students cheaper loans, Romney and Obama will feel pressed to come up with actual policies that might bring the nation's unfunded liabilities to less-than-Greek levels.