Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, February 16, 2010


Get'em while they're hot...!
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16 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703525704575061800639346966.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTSecondBucket

Albany's share of all income taxes paid by New York's wealthiest residents has actually been rising since the 1970s. And it will soon rise to its highest level ever, if President Obama and congressional Democrats have their way. This is bad news for New York's battered economy. Under the circumstances, Albany couldn't have picked a worse time to enact yet another temporary income-tax increase—yet that's precisely what Governor David Paterson and the Legislature agreed to do last spring, as part of the 2009–10 state budget. This hike, twice as large as the one in 2003, has raised the top state rate to 8.97 percent on filers with taxable incomes of over $500,000 (and to 7.85 percent for those starting as low as $200,000).

On the face of it...New York State's jacked-up marginal rate is still much lower than the all-time high of 15.35 percent reached in the mid-1970s. However, after allowing for federal deductibility, the effective state income-tax rate is actually higher now than it was 35 years ago. And current tax trends in Washington will push New York's net income-tax cost - the difference between earning income here and in a no-tax state such as Florida or Texas - further beyond 1970s levels, even if the higher state rate expires on schedule in two years.

If Obama's deduction cap winds up enacted and federal rates in top brackets increase in line with his plan, New York's effective top tax rate will rise to at least 7.3 percent in 2011. That will be its highest level ever—more than half again as high as the effective top rate in the 1970s. The combined federal and state tax bite on salaries, wages, and bonuses of New York State residents in the top bracket will come to just over 48 percent.

February 16, 2010 at 4:27 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704804204575068981162639698.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopBucket

Training the Afghan army is "the most critical part" of America's "long-term strategy" in the country, U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke said Monday. Pakistan agrees, and has suggested it can help, too. Yet the best candidate for the task is the Indian Army.

This million-strong force has had close to 60 years' of intense counterinsurgency experience in a variety of terrains. Indian troops have successfully carried out campaigns in jungles in India's northeast, at high altitudes in Jammu and Kashmir and in the plains in the Punjab. Its officers and enlisted men have counterinsurgency experience in both urban and rural environments.

India already has the capacity to impart this knowledge to friendly forces. The country boasts one of the world's largest military training establishments, with the ability to train officers and men for varying combat duties. Educational facilities include a major counterinsurgency training base—the Counterinsurgency and Jungle Warfare School—and a school focused on urban warfare in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the site of an ongoing insurgency. Both can simulate a variety of combat situations and provide the Afghan Army with training relevant to the terrain and physical conditions that its troops are likely to encounter upon deployment. India's counterinsurgency schools also come complete with firing ranges, obstacle courses and training areas for the detection and handling of improvised explosive devices.

Beyond such infrastructure, however, the Indian Army has at its command significant accumulated knowledge of counterinsurgency operations and techniques. Its substantial cadre of instructors have ample field experience and routinely train India's forces in counterinsurgency operations. The Indian military has formulated a viable, codified doctrine to fight counterinsurgency. This doctrine calls for important restraints on the use of force, highlights the significance of not alienating civilian populations, insists upon respect for local customs and emphasizes the importance of an eventual political solution to all insurgencies. These principles are routinely stressed in the curricula of the counterinsurgency schools and applied to the best extent possible in field operations. There is little reason to believe that within a specified span of time they could not be inculcated into the Afghan Army too.

The Indian Army has other advantages, too. Thanks to its cheap labor costs, it can train Afghan forces at a fraction of the costs of training them in similar duties almost anywhere in the United States or Western Europe. Rank and file Afghan soldiers would feel much more at ease in India than in most other parts of the world. India has cultural bonds with Afghanistan of very long standing and Afghans have over centuries traveled to various parts of northern India. Finally, critics of the Indian Army's counterinsurgency operations notwithstanding, its forces have learned to operate within the scope of the rule of law. Many officers who have exceeded their brief have been subject to court-martial and charges of human-rights violations are not swept under the carpet.

If training the Afghan Army is as important as the U.S.-led coalition says it is, then why not accelerate training in the place that's best served to do it? Not turning to India would amount to a grave strategic error.

February 16, 2010 at 4:28 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704431404575067350881049536.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

The federal deficit this fiscal year will be $1.56 trillion, or about 10.6% of gross domestic product. That is the largest deficit since World War II, and even President Obama's optimistic estimates show our deficits will not return to sustainable levels for at least the next decade.

The administration's projection of total federal spending over those 10 years (2011-20) is $45.8 trillion, while expected taxes and other receipts will be $37.3 trillion. The $8.5 trillion deficit is about 20% of spending. And all of these numbers are based on a full and lasting economic recovery, which, based on current experience, is a pretty optimistic projection.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page did an analysis of the federal government's debt that will be held by the public over the coming decade. When the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007, the debt held by the public was 36.2% of GDP. It rose to 40.2% the next year. This year it will be about 63.6%, next year 68.6%, then 77% of GDP in 2020. And the Obama administration's budget estimates 218% in 2050.

The reason for these rising deficits is the huge increases in federal spending--the intended growth of the federal government--that Congress and the president are pushing. The deficit in 2007 was $160 billion. In the next year the Pelosi-Reid Congress took it up to $458 billion, and when President Obama came into office in 2009 it hit $1.4 trillion. The current 2010 projected deficit is $1.6 trillion, which will lead to a tripling of our national debt from 2008 to 2020.

To the White House and congressional Democrats, these large figures are not a surprise, a mistake or a worry. They part of a strategy to Europeanize America, to make the government larger, broader and in charge of almost everything.

The Washington Post's Robert Samuelson calculated that to fund all the future deficit expenditures would require taxes to increase "by roughly 50 percent from the average 1970-2009 tax burden." A 50% tax increase would become a permanent part of a declining America, just as such tax increases have become a permanent part of declining European countries. Or as Sen. Judd Gregg, top Republican on the Budget Committee, put it the other day, this huge deficit spending "is a death certificate to the American dream for our children. Their lives will be mortgaged by the debt we put on their backs."

President Obama will have added more debt in his first two years in office than George W. Bush did in eight years. In his first 15 months, Mr. Obama will have raised the debt burden as a percentage of GDP by more than President Reagan did in all of his eight years.

This administration wants larger, not smaller government; broader, not lesser regulation; and greater government, not greater individual liberties.

February 16, 2010 at 4:28 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704140104575057551191314276.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Bill Clinton is not a man known for introspection, but looking back at the scandal that nearly destroyed his presidency he does have regrets. It is not his personal conduct that seems to trouble him most, or his misleading statements under oath, or his failure to settle the Paula Jones sexual-harassment lawsuit until it was too late. It is his decision to renew the independent-counsel statute—the law that led to the appointment of Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr. Mr. Clinton calls it "one of the greatest miscalculations" of his presidency. He tells Ken Gormley: "I was as guilty as anybody, I signed [the law]."

Mr. Gormley's "The Death of American Virtue," despite its overwrought title, is a scrupulously even-handed and exhaustively reported book. A law professor with no apparent ax to grind, Mr. Gormley set out a decade ago to write the definitive history of the Clinton independent-counsel investigation and has emerged as one of the few people who seems to admire both Bill Clinton and Ken Starr - even as he documents their failings.

February 16, 2010 at 4:28 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704431404575067720814328754.html

[W]hen [Vice-President Joe] Biden claims success for a victory won by a surge he and Barack Obama opposed, you wonder what he's up to.

Start with Mr. Biden's first whopper: telling CNN's Larry King last week that "one of the great achievements of this administration" may well be a democratic Iraq. "You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government. . . . I've been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences."

Now, many have jumped on Mr. Biden for claiming this as an Obama achievement. Perhaps more striking, however, is that the same Iraqi government that so impresses him today is something he once declared impossible.

That was back during a Democratic presidential debate in 2007, when Mr. Biden told ABC's George Stephanopoulos it was a "fundamental strategic mistake" to believe "there is any possibility in the lifetime of anyone here of having the Iraqis get together, have a unity government in Baghdad that pulls the country together. That will not happen, George."

Look at how Mr. Biden danced around the questions about a civilian trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. On "Meet the Press" and "Face the Nation," Mr. Biden said the president would soon make a decision on what to do - never mind that in November Americans had been led to believe we had a decision when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that KSM and four other operatives would be "brought to New York to answer for their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks from where the twin towers once stood."

Plainly, Mr. Biden's interlocutors did not find his answers persuasive. They were, however, probably the best the vice president could do at a time when the administration is publicly walking back Mr. Holder's decision. In an interview in yesterday's New York Times, Mr. Holder set up the U-turn: "I think that I make the final call," he said, "but if the president is not happy with that final call, he has the ability to reverse it."

Ditto for Mr. Biden's efforts to reassure Americans about the handling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian caught trying to blow up a Northwest flight. Again, he was playing a weak hand.

The same day Mr. Biden's interviews appeared, National Security Adviser James Jones told "Fox News Sunday" the president had not been well served by the Abdulmutallab case, admitting that the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group should have been operational. He promised to "learn from our experiences."

So go ahead and chuckle over Mr. Biden's "gaffes," if you think he was on television to win an argument. But if you think his assignment was to use a Sunday-show duel to deflect attention from the Obama administration's two big backtrackings on terror, you might want to give Joe a little more credit.

February 16, 2010 at 4:28 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703630404575053781465774008.html

It has been a bad - make that dreadful - few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science.

We think the science is still disputable.

[C]limategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC's headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously. Take the rain forest claim. In its 2007 report, the IPCC wrote that "up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state." But as Jonathan Leake of London's Sunday Times reported last month, those claims were based on a report from the World Wildlife Fund, which in turn had fundamentally misrepresented a study in the journal Nature. The Nature study, Mr. Leake writes, "did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning." The IPCC has relied on World Wildlife Fund studies regarding the "transformation of natural coastal areas," the "destruction of more mangroves," "glacial lake outbursts causing mudflows and avalanches," changes in the ecosystem of the "Mesoamerican reef," and so on. The Wildlife Fund is a green lobby that believes in global warming, and its "research" reflects its advocacy, not the scientific method. The IPCC has also cited a study by British climatologist Nigel Arnell claiming that global warming could deplete water resources for as many as 4.5 billion people by the year 2085.

But as our Anne Jolis reported in our European edition, the IPCC neglected to include Mr. Arnell's corollary finding, which is that global warming could also increase water resources for as many as six billion people.

The IPCC report made aggressive claims that "extreme weather-related events" had led to "rapidly rising costs." Never mind that the link between global warming and storms like Hurricane Katrina remains tenuous at best. More astonishing (or, maybe, not so astonishing) is that the IPCC again based its assertion on a single study that was not peer-reviewed!

In fact, nobody can reliably establish a quantifiable connection between global warming and increased disaster-related costs. In Holland, there's even a minor uproar over the report's claim that 55% of the country is below sea level. It's 26%.

(*SNORT*)

Meanwhile, one of the scientists at the center of the climategate fiasco has called into question other issues that the climate lobby has claimed are indisputable. Phil Jones, who stepped down as head of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit amid the climate email scandal, told the BBC that the world may well have been warmer during medieval times than it is now.

This raises doubts about how much our current warming is man-made as opposed to merely another of the natural climate shifts that have taken place over the centuries. Mr. Jones also told the BBC there has been no "statistically significant" warming over the past 15 years...

February 16, 2010 at 4:29 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Foreign-demand-for-Teasury-apf-1402391707.html?x=0&.v=6

The government said Tuesday that foreign demand for U.S. Treasury securities fell by the largest amount on record in December with China reducing its holdings by $34.2 billion.

The reductions in holdings, if they continue, could force the government to make higher interest payments at a time that it is running record federal deficits.

The Treasury Department reported that foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury securities fell by $53 billion in December, surpassing the previous record of a $44.5 billion drop in April 2009.

The big drop in China's holdings meant that it lost the top spot in terms of foreign ownership of U.S. Treasuries, dropping to second place behind Japan.

Japan also reduced its holdings of U.S. Treasuries, cutting them by $11.5 billion to $768.8 billion in December, but that amount was still more than China's December total of $755.4 billion.

The Obama administration on Feb. 1 released a new budget plan which projects that the deficit for this year will total a record $1.56 trillion, surpassing last year's record of $1.4 trillion deficit.

February 16, 2010 at 4:29 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/home_region/20100215_Daniel_Rubin__Another_case_of_TSA_overkill.html

Did you hear about the Camden cop whose disabled son wasn't allowed to pass through airport security unless he took off his leg braces?

Unfortunately, it's no joke. This happened to Bob Thomas, a 53-year-old officer in Camden's emergency crime suppression team, who was flying to Orlando in March with his wife, Leona, and their son, Ryan.

Ryan was taking his first flight, to Walt Disney World, for his fourth birthday.

The boy is developmentally delayed, one of the effects of being born 16 weeks prematurely. His ankles are malformed and his legs have low muscle tone. In March he was just starting to walk.

Mid-morning on March 19, his parents wheeled his stroller to the TSA security point, a couple of hours before their Southwest Airlines flight was to depart.

The boy's father broke down the stroller and put it on the conveyor belt as Leona Thomas walked Ryan through the metal detector.

The alarm went off.

The screener told them to take off the boy's braces.

The Thomases were dumbfounded. "I told them he can't walk without them on his own," Bob Thomas said.

"He said, 'He'll need to take them off.' "

Ryan's mother offered to walk him through the detector after they removed the braces, which are custom-made of metal and hardened plastic.

No, the screener replied. The boy had to walk on his own.

On Friday, TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis said the boy never should have been told to remove his braces.

TSA policy should have allowed the parents to help the boy to a private screening area where he could have been swabbed for traces of explosive materials.

February 16, 2010 at 4:30 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.accuweather.com/news-story.asp?partner=accuweather&traveler=0&article=2

Lake Erie's surface is virtually frozen over for the first time in about 14 years.

February 16, 2010 at 4:30 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Audit-finds-US-census-apf-1237252725.html?x=0&.v=2

The Census Bureau wasted millions of dollars in preparation for its 2010 population count, including thousands of temporary employees who picked up $300 checks without performing work and others who overbilled for travel costs.

Federal investigators caution the excessive charges could multiply once the $15 billion headcount begins in earnest next month...

More than 10,000 census employees were paid over $300 apiece to attend training for the massive address-canvassing effort, but they quit or were otherwise let go before they could perform any work. Another 5,000 employees collected $300 for the same training, and then worked a single day or less.

As to the Super Bowl ads, Republicans including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have questioned the $2.5 million purchase, which included two 30-second pregame spots, on-air mentions and a 30-second ad during the third-quarter. The ads, featuring Ed Begley Jr. humorously extolling a new project called a "Snapshot of America," was widely panned as weak and ineffective by media critics. "There is a general move in the United States toward more government involvement in the economy. Seeing the U.S. Census spot gives us little confidence that this is going to solve our issues," blogged Tim Calkins and Derek Rucker, both marketing professors at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.

February 16, 2010 at 4:30 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4733dd7e-1b23-11df-953f-00144feab49a.html

President Barack Obama redoubled his efforts to promote nuclear power as a clean energy source on Tuesday, saying that $8bn in loan guarantees for the first nuclear power plant to be built in three decades was “only the beginning”.

“On an issue that affects our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, we can’t continue to be mired in the same old stale debates between left and right, between environmentalists and entrepreneurs,” Mr Obama said at job training centre in Maryland.

“See, our competitors are racing to create jobs and command growing energy industries. And nuclear energy is no exception,” he said, pointing to investments in Japan, France, China and South Korea.

Mr Obama’s administration on Tuesday announced it would give $8.3bn in loan guarantees to help Southern Co build two reactors at a plant in Burke, Georgia.

Southern was among four companies named last year as being considered to share $18.5bn in federal loan guarantees to build new nuclear power facilities.

After championing nuclear energy in his State of the Union address last month, Mr Obama included in his 2011 budget request a total of $54bn in loan guarantees — tripling the size of the existing guarantee programme — to encourage the construction of as many as 10 nuclear power plants.

There are now 104 nuclear power plants supplying 20 per cent of the US’s energy, but no nuclear projects have been started since 1977.

Mr Obama said that nuclear energy was nevertheless the US’s largest source of fuel that produced no carbon emissions.

“To meet our growing energy needs and prevent the worst consequences of climate change, we’ll need to increase our supply of nuclear power. It’s that simple,” he said. “This one plant, for example, will cut carbon pollution by 16m tonnes each year when compared to a similar coal plant. That’s like taking 3.5m cars off the road.”

* OK. SO THIS IS MAGIC TO MY EARS. THE QUESTION REMAINS... CAN WE BELIEVE IN THE REALITY AS APART FROM THE RHETORIC? DON'T GET ME WRONG... I DESPARATELY WANT TO BELIEVE! THAT SAID... RE-READ THE PIECE AND THEN FOLLOW ME WITH THESE COMMENTS/QUESTION:

1) $8bn IS FOR ONE NEW PLANT... CORRECT?
2) THIS $8bn IS PART OF THE $18.5bn PREVIOUSLY BUDGETED. SO THERE'S $10.5bn REMAINING... CORRECT? (IF $8bn PAYS FOR ONE NEW PLANT, THE FULL $18.5bn PAYS FOR TWO I'M ASSUMING... THREE AT MOST - CORRECT...???)
3) OBAMA HAS REQUESTED AN ADDITIONAL $54bn - ENOUGH MONEY TO SUPPOSEDLY BUILD 10 NEW PLANTS ALL TOGETHER.
4) NOW... BEAR WITH ME... IF WE NOW HAVE 104 NUCLEAR PLANTS WHICH SUPPLY 20% OF U.S. ENERGY THEN AN ADDITIONAL TEN NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS CAN BE EXPECTED TO GENERATE ANOTHER... 2% OF OUR ENERGY NEEDS...??? (TWO PERCENT...??? RIGHT...???)

AND NONE OF THIS TAKES INTO ACCOUNT GROWING POPULATION AND INCREASED ENERGY USAGE/REQUIRMENTS WHICH WILL EXISTS 7... 10... 12 YEARS INTO THE FUTURE WHEN THE PLANTS *MAY* BE ONLINE ASSUMING THESE TEN PLANTS ARE IN THE BEGINNING STAGES OF CONSTRUCTION BY THE END OF THIS YEAR OR THE BEGINNING OF NEXT YEAR.

SEE MY POINT, FOLKS...??? THAT TALK SOUNDS FINE UNLESS YOU REALLY THINK ABOUT IT. ANYONE WANNA BET MONEY THAT EVEN THIS INITIAL MARYLAND PLANT WILL BE UNDER CONSTRUCTION BY NEXT YEAR, LET ALONE OTHERS...???

ANYWAY... KUDOS TO THE SENTIMENT... I'LL WAIT TO SEE HOW THE EXECUTION COMES.

February 16, 2010 at 4:56 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Tea-Partiers-should-get-serious-84405177.html

To his credit, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., ranking member on the House Budget Committee, has proposed a "Roadmap for America's Future" that makes serious cuts: $650 billion over the next decade -- for starters. After raising the retirement age, voucherizing Medicare and reforming the tax system, Ryan's plan would eliminate the long-term deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Ryan aside, it's pretty clear that the GOP isn't serious about reducing spending. House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, distanced the party from the road map almost as soon as it was released, leaving reporters with the distinct impression that Ryan had soiled the punchbowl.

In the middle of the recent fight against socialized medicine, Republicans fought hard to protect the chunk of our health care system that's already socialized. If there's money to be saved trimming waste from Medicare, "we should spend it on Grandma!" insisted Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. GOP leader Michael Steele proposed a "contract with seniors" insulating Medicare from cuts.

But that's no surprise. Politicians live to get re-elected, and they won't change their behavior unless and until voters force them to. What this country desperately needs is a political movement that will pressure them to change their ways.

The Tea Partiers could become that movement -- if they're serious.

Former Reagan official Bruce Bartlett argues that endorsing Ryan's road map is the "minimum requirement" for anyone serious about cutting spending. But for the middle-class, middle-aged folks leading the Tea Party brigades, some of those cuts could bite pretty hard.

That's why Bartlett doubts many of them have the fortitude to embrace what's necessary to solve the budget crisis without raising taxes. Here's their chance to prove him wrong.

The Tea Partiers -- often thought to be hawks -- might further demonstrate their credibility by calling for cuts in the Pentagon's $663 billion bottom line. As my colleague Ben Friedman likes to point out, we don't really have a "defense" budget: "The adjective is wrong."

We're spending ourselves into bankruptcy to maintain America's Globocop role, to gird for possible war with China (an absurd proposition) and to pursue the profoundly unconservative project of trying to socially engineer failed societies like Afghanistan into modernity.

The threats we face don't require taxpayer enrichment of Northrop-Grumman and General Dynamics. New destroyers and submarines are neat, but when it comes to battling the likes of the underpants bomber, they're about as useful as a wet flounder, and far more expensive.

February 16, 2010 at 10:36 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2010/02/11/forced-unionization/

Michelle Berry runs a day-care business out of her home in Flint, MI. She thought that she owned her own business, but Berry's been told she is now a government employee and union member. It's not voluntary. Suddenly, Berry and 40,000 other Michigan private day-care providers have learned that union dues are being taken out of the child-care subsidies the state sends them. The "union" is a creation of AFSCME, the government workers union, and the United Auto Workers.

This racket means big money to AFSCME, which runs the union, writes the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank.

Today the Department of Human Services siphons about $3.7 million in annual dues to the union….

The money should be going to home-based day-care providers — themselves not on the high end of the income scale. Ms. Berry now sees money once paid to her go to a union that does little for her…

Patrick Wright, a lawyer for the Macknac Center, says the union was forced on the women after a certification election conducted by mail in which only 6,000 day-care providers out of 40,000 voted. Wright told me his clients, like Berry, say they were "shocked" to learn they were suddenly in a union.

They want nothing to do with the union. One of my clients has said, “Look, this is my home, I’m both labor and management here.” They’ve wanted nothing to do with this union and don’t think that it has any purpose besides than to siphon money away from them.

Michigan isn't the only state funding unions this way.

Fourteen states have now enabled home-based day-care providers to be organized into public-employee unions, affecting about 233,000 people.

Mackinac sued Michigan on behalf of the day-care owners, but the case was dismissed. They have appealed. Neither Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, the Department of Human Services, nor the union would talk to me about this. Last month, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash proposed a law that would end "stealth" unionization of private entrepreneurs.

February 16, 2010 at 10:36 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/16/riedl-obama-misdiagnoses-source-of-deficits//print/

During his State of the Union Address, the president asserted: "At the beginning of the last decade, America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription-drug program."

In other words, it's President George W. Bush's fault.

This can't be true. Mr. Bush implemented the three policies mentioned by Mr. Obama in the early 2000s. Yet by 2007 — the last year before the recession — the budget deficit stood at only $161 billion. So how could those policies cause trillion-dollar deficits from 2009 through 2020?

Let's unpack Mr. Obama's claim.

His methodology measures the combined cost of the three policies against a "budget baseline" — a snapshot of what the budget would look like for the next decade if today's tax and spending policies are maintained. Think of the budget baseline as the do-nothing default option.

[T]his baseline contained numerous questionable assumptions. It assumed that spending in Iraq and Afghanistan would continue growing forever, while spending on regular discretionary programs (which has doubled over the past decade) would slow to approximately 2 percent annual growth for most of the decade.

The baseline also incorporated provisions of Mr. Obama's own stimulus bill that had already been enacted — deficit spending that he obviously didn't inherit from his predecessor. Thus, the $8 trillion baseline deficit figure is not credible.

And that's not all. By writing a baseline that assumes spending in Iraq and Afghanistan would continue growing forever (which was never U.S. policy), the president overstates the "inherited cost" of these wars over the next decade by $1 trillion. In reality, troop pullouts will drastically reduce the impact of Iraq and Afghanistan on future budget deficits.

Overall, the president's data contains too many dubious assumptions to be useful.

* To be continued...

February 16, 2010 at 10:37 PM
William R. Barker said...

* Continuing...

So how much of the deficit is really caused by the tax cuts, war spending and Medicare prescription-drug entitlement?

One easy method is to begin with a more realistic budget baseline, using data from the more neutral Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Maintaining today's tax and spending policies (and assuming a gradual troop drawdown in Iraq and Afghanistan) would, using CBO data, bring $13 trillion in deficits over the next decade.

Compare that to the 10-year cost of the tax cuts ($3 trillion), Medicare prescription-drug entitlement ($1 trillion) and Iraq and Afghanistan spending (approximately $600 billion, again assuming a gradual troop drawdown). This adds up to $4.6 trillion, or just over one-third of the $13 trillion in baseline deficits.

This contradicts the president's claim that most of the deficits result from those three policies.

Even this methodology does not tell the whole story. After all, if Washington collects $3 trillion in taxes and spends $4 trillion, who's to say which of the spending programs "caused" the resulting $1 trillion deficit? One could pinpoint any $1 trillion group of spending programs and blame them for the budget deficit.

A better way to diagnose the cause of long-term deficits is to measure taxes and spending against their historical averages. This more comprehensive methodology shows that long-term deficits are overwhelmingly driven by runaway entitlement spending.

By 2020, the CBO-based budget baseline projects that federal spending will reach 26.0 percent of the economy (5.3 percent of the economy above the 40-year spending average). Revenues will settle at 17.7 percent of the economy (just 0.6 percent of the economy below the revenue average) — and even that assumes all tax cuts are extended.

So as deficits expand by 5.9 percent of the economy, nearly 90 percent of the growth will come from higher-than-average spending, and just over 10 percent from lower-than-average revenues.

Virtually all of this new spending will come from surging Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid costs as well as net interest on the national debt. These four expenditures will cost $26 trillion over the next decade — surging from $1.6 trillion this year to $3.6 trillion in 2020. That is causing the massive budget deficits over the next decade — and must be the focus of any serious effort to reduce the budget deficit.

Finally, there is some hypocrisy at work. Mr. Obama criticizes Mr. Bush for "not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription-drug program." Yet he would extend $3.9 trillion of these policies (while repealing $700 billion in tax cuts) without paying for them, either.

February 16, 2010 at 10:37 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/15/hatton_on_hurricanes/

More trouble looms for the IPCC. The body may need to revise statements made in its Fourth Assessment Report on hurricanes and global warming. A statistical analysis of the raw data shows that the claims that global hurricane activity has increased cannot be supported.

The IPCC does indeed conclude that "there is no clear trend in the annual numbers of tropical cyclones." If only the IPCC had stopped there. Yet it goes on to make more claims, and draw conclusions that the data doesn't support.

Thre IPCC's WG1 paper states: "There are also suggestions of increased intense tropical cyclone activity in some other regions where concerns over data quality are greater." Hatton points out the data quality is similar in each area. The IPCC continues: "It is more likely than not (> 50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity."

But... that conclusion comes from computer climate models, not from the observational data, which show no increase.

"The IPCC goes on to make statements that would never pass peer review,"...A more scientifically useful conclusion would have been to ask why there was a disparity. "This differential behaviour to me is very interesting. If it's due to increased warming in one place, and decreased warming in the other - then that's interesting to me."

The IPCC's AR4 chapter lead was Kevin Trenberth, who features prominently in the Climategate emails. In 2005, the National Hurricane Center's chief scientist Chris Landsea resigned his post in protest at the treatment of the subject by Trenberth.

"I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound. As the IPCC leadership has seen no wrong in Dr. Trenberth’s actions and have retained him as a Lead Author for the AR4, I have decided to no longer participate in the IPCC AR4."

Critics point out that an increase in low-intensity storms being recorded is due to better instrumentation. Most are at sea, and thanks to radar and satellites, more are now observed.

February 16, 2010 at 10:38 PM

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