Jim Geraghty must not have required much time to write this:

David Brooks, [Tuesday] morning:

The first and most important of these is basic integrity. The Obama administration has been remarkably scandal-free. Think of the way Iran-contra or the Lewinsky scandals swallowed years from Reagan and Clinton. We’ve had very little of that from Obama. He and his staff have generally behaved with basic rectitude.

“Remarkably scandal-free”? David Brooks works in the news business, right?

Fast and Furious. The IRS scandal. The $2 billion spent buildingHealthcare.gov. The Veterans Administration letting veterans die waiting for care. The Office of Personnel Management hacking. Lying about Bowe Bergdahl. “Companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter, more prosperous future.”

Jonathan Gruber’s declaration that Obamacare depended upon the “stupidity of American voter.”

The NSA and Edward Snowden.

The stimulus “was riddled with a massive labor scheme that harmed workers and cheated unsuspecting American taxpayers.”

Prostitution and incompetence in the U.S. Secret Service.

Hillary and her private e-mail server.

The Department of Justice secretly reviewed the phone records of at least 20 phone lines of Associated Press reporters — their work, home, and cell-phone lines. The Department of Justice’s decision to call Fox News reporter James Rosen a criminal “co-conspirator” in leaking classified information. The Department of Justice punishing whistleblowers.

Benghazi — the failure to provide Chris Stephens with the security he requested, the inability to put together a rescue operation that night, and the false explanation to the public afterwards blaming a video.

I’m sure you can remember others. Just how deep in denial do you have to be to write a sentence like, “The Obama administration has been remarkably scandal-free”?

This list does not include the criminal waste that was Cash for Clunkers, pulling troops from then putting troops back into Afghanistan and Iraq, or Obama’s obscene and unparalled contempt for anyone who doesn’t share his political views.

As a comment on Geraghty’s blog puts it: “The only thing remarkable about the last seven years has been the elite press’ complete abdication of its responsibilities out of political loyalty to Obama.”

InstaPundit Glenn Harlan Reynolds:

As scandals explode across Washington — from the IRS scandals, to the Benghazi scandal, to the HHS donations scandal, to Pigford and more — one thing that I’ve noticed is that the people involved don’t seem to suffer much. There are consequences, but not for them. Likewise, Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., left office in disgrace, but wound up with surprisingly lucrative consulting gigs.

This reminds me of something writer Robert Heinlein once said: “Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not ensure ‘good’ government, it simply ensures that it will work. But such governments are rare — most people want to run things, but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the ‘backseat driver’ syndrome.”

Government officials are happy making and executing plans that affect the lives of millions, but when things go wrong, well … they’re willing to accept the responsibility, but they’re not willing to take the blame. What’s the difference? People who are to blame lose their jobs. People who are “responsible,” do not. The blame, such as it is, winds up deflected on to The System, or something else suitably abstract.

But when you cut the linkage between outcomes and experience, you make learning much more difficult. When you were a toddler learning to walk, you fell down a lot. This was unpleasant: shocking, at least, and often painful. Thus, you learned to fall down a lot less often.

But imagine if falling down didn’t hurt. You wouldn’t have learned not to fall, or at least, you would have accumulated a lot more bruises along the way.

Given the low penalties for failure it faces, our political class is one for whom falling down is usually painless and even — given the surprisingly common tendency of people who have presided over debacles to be given promotions rather than the boot — actually pleasurable. The leaders move society’s arms and legs, but we’re the ones who collect the bruises.

The problem is that they don’t have, in President Obama’s words, “skin in the game.” When it comes to actual wrongdoing, they’re shielded by doctrines of “absolute immunity” (for the president) and “qualified immunity” (for lesser officials). This means that the president can’t be sued for anything he does as president, while lower-ranking officials can’t be sued so long as they can show that they were acting in a “good faith” belief that they were following the law.

Such defenses aren’t available to the rest of us. And they’re not even the product of legislation passed by Congress after considered judgment — they’re judicially created. (Judges gave themselves absolute immunity, too, for good measure.)

Then, of course, there’s the unfortunate fact that the worse the economy does, the more important the government becomes. As Tim Noah pointed out back when the financial crisis was new, “On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.”

Some incentive system. And yet they want us to trust them to “fix the economy.” My worry is that their idea of “fixed” may not be the same as mine.

I’d favor some changes that put accountability back in. First, I’d get rid of judicially created immunities. The Constitution itself creates only one kind of immunity, for members of Congress in speech and debate. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, courts have interpreted this grant of immunity, explicitly in the Constitution, more narrowly than the judicially created ones).

I’d also cut all payments to members of Congress whenever they haven’t passed a budget. If they can’t take care of that basic responsibility, why should they get paid? Likewise, I’d ban presidential travel when there’s not a budget. He can do his job from the White House.

I’m willing to consider other changes: Term limits that kick in whenever there’s a deficit for more than two years in a row. Limitations on civil-service protections to allow wronged citizens to get offending bureaucrats fired. Pay cuts for elected officials whenever inflation or unemployment are above a threshold.

But the real lesson is this: We entrust an inordinate amount of power to people who don’t feel any pain when we fall down. The best solution of all is to take a lot of that power back. When the power is in your hands, it’s in the hands of someone who feels it when you fall down. When it’s in their hands, it’s your pain, their gain. That’s no way to run a country.

Kevin D. Williamson:

Hillary Rodham Clinton is not qualified to be president of the United States of America, because she doesn’t know what the United States of America are.
Terry Shumaker, former U.S. ambassador to Trinidad (I wonder what that gig cost him) and current abject minion in the service of Mrs. Clinton, quotes Herself telling an audience in New Hampshire: “Service is the rent we pay for living in this great country.”
There is a very old English word for people who are required to perform service as a rent for their existence, and that word is serf. Serfdom is a form of bondage.
Americans are not serfs. We are not sharecroppers on Herself’s farm or in vassalage to that smear of thieving nincompoopery in Washington that purports to rule us.
We don’t owe you any damned rent.
The American proposition is precisely the opposite of what Herself imagines: The U.S. government exists at our sufferance, not the other way around. We have governments because there are some things that we as individuals have a hard time doing through private enterprise, and we have a federal government because there are things that the several states cannot manage separately, such as national defense and border security. (And, bang-up job on the latter, Washington.)
A president isn’t a prince, and a citizen isn’t a serf.
Herself’s invocation of serfdom is the logical extension of “You Didn’t Build That”-ism, the backward philosophy under which the free citizen is obliged to justify his life and his prosperity to the state, in order to satisfy the economic self-interest, status-seeking, and power-lust of such lamentable specimens as Elizabeth Warren, a ridiculous little scold who has never done a single useful thing in her entire public life. The American model is precisely the opposite: Government has to justify itself to us. The states created the federal government, not the other way around, and the citizens created the states, not the other way around.
We don’t owe these jackasses any service. They owe us service: services they routinely fail to perform. We’ve got jihadis shooting up California while the government doesn’t even bother to track visa overstays or properly scan entrants from Pakistan by way of Saudi Arabia (because what could possibly go wrong in that scenario?) in spite of being legally obliged to do so. Instead, the powers that be in Washington are literally masturbating the day away when they aren’t busy poisoning veterans to death with dope.
These people—these people—are going to lecture us on citizenship? How about you skip the homilies and do your damned jobs?
Of course Americans perform service: in our families, in our churches, in civic organizations, through charity. We serve because we believe in it, not because we have to justify our consumption of O2 to some despicable low-rent Lady Macbeth who is so keenly aware of her own profiteering and corruption that she violated a stack of federal statutes to keep her work correspondence away from proper oversight. We may be called to justify ourselves before God one day, but not before that.
Herself imagines the United States of America to be a nation of serfs. Whom do you think she imagines as their overlord?
And that is why any sane and self-respecting country would have kept this woman far away from any public office, much less let her flirt with the presidency.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/430898/hillary-talks-about-americans-theyre-peasants

 

Share this on …

• X
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Email
• Print

Like Loading…

Grant Phillips:

Senator Bernie Sanders recently published an op-ed in the Huffington Post where he makes numerous claims about the economy. In typical leftist political theater, his narratives are either grossly misrepresented or outright lies, nor does he include a single citation for his wild claims.

From “stagnant middle class” and “income inequality” to “child poverty” and “evil corporations”, his analysis employs one step thinking and over-generalization to draw incomplete conclusions. I will directly address some of his specific claims.

Income inequality is one of today’s most popular economic myths derived from the misconception that wealth and income are fixed pies. Sanders makes the usual claim of the “1%” having a disproportionate amount of both.

Economic inequality is largely overstated through aggregate statistics, nor is there a connection between inequality levels and overall economic well-being.

In a paper for Columbia University, economists Emmanuel Saez and Wojciech Kopczuk analyzed wealth shares from 1916 to 2000 using more inclusive and exact definitions of income and wealth. They found that “there has been a sharp reduction in wealth concentration throughout the 20^th century”. Around the 1920s, the top 1% held about 40% of wealth, but that has remained about 20% in the last few decades. Saez, who worked with Thomas Piketty at one point, postulates that, in 2004, the top 1% held about 18% of total wealth, which is a historic low.

Robert Haig and Henry Simons developed the Haig-Simon metric. Their measurement includes: wages/salaries, transfer payments (such as employer insurance), gifts of inheritance, income in-kind, and net increases in the real value of assets.

In a 2013 paper, economists found that Haigs-Simon is an attractive standard for calculating wealth and income because of its inclusive definition. By employing Haigs-Simon, observed growth of income inequality within tax brackets is dramatically reduced.

Based on the inclusive metric, top income shares have not significantly increased in the last 20 years, and most income growth has been in the bottom 80% of earners. Also, by incorporating accrued capital gains and not just IRS-realized capital gains, economic inequality quickly dissipates.

Leftists such as Sanders often cite the Gini Coefficient, which is the measure of a country’s inequality. The United States ranks next to African countries, while egalitarian Norway ranks next to Afghanistan. The Gini Coefficient might measure inequality to a degree, but, if anything, it proves that income inequality is not associated with economic well-being.

Bernie Sanders must not care to read further. Instead, he bases his claim off incomplete data by adjusting the CPI for inflation, which overstates it, and then excludes fringe benefits, which have doubled since 1970. Why would you when pandering to the base is more profitable?

“Income inequality” is expectedly followed by claims of a “shrinking middle class”. In reality, however, the middle class has “shrunk” upwards to higher incomes.

According to Census Bureau data compiled by the American Enterprise Institution, 61% of families qualified as middle-class income in 1967. They define “middle class” as $25K to $75K per family per year. In the same year, upper-income families, or over $75K, only made up about 16% of families.

Fast forward to 2009 and things have dramatically changed. We have 43% of families in middle class incomes and 38% of families in the upper class. It’s also worth mentioning that lower incomes declined from 22.8% to 17% in that same time period.

A well-respected paper published by NBER further illustrates the increasing wealth and income going to the middle class. According to their findings: “using our broadest measure of available resources – post-tax, post-transfer size-adjusted household income – median income growth of individual Americans improved to 36.7% from 1979 to 2007”.

In other words, by expanding the definition of “income” and “wealth”, much like in the Haig-Simon metric, the narrative changes dramatically. Such a narrative, however, doesn’t make for vote-inducing rhetoric.

Sanders also claims that alongside the “decline of middle class”, there has been a decline in overall economic mobility. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A recent study published by Harvard measures the long run trend of economic mobility over the last twenty years, which has been difficult to accomplish due to data constraints. Michigan State economist Gary Solon said the Harvard study is the most comprehensive and in-depth research on the subject.

According to their findings, “percentile rank-based measures of intergenerational mobility have remained extreme stable”. They even address income inequality and note that the “top 1% income shares are not strongly associated with mobility”. Measures of social mobility have remained stable in the second half of the 20^th century. The rungs on the ladder have grown further apart (wealth and income have increased), but the chances of climbing the ladder have not changed.

In Sanders’s own words, “children go hungry every day”. We have another misrepresentation of reality.

According to a USDA survey, only 3% of Americans do not have enough food to eat or express concern over their next meal. Interestingly enough, 93% of people living in low-income areas reported taking a car to the grocery store, either as driver of passenger. That, however, does not coincide with the Senator’s narrative.

“Child poverty” is grossly inflated by how it is defined. In 2013, the income threshold for public school lunch programs was $43,567 for a four person family, or 185% above the poverty line. Sanders claims that “children go hungry” when they only appear to be going hungry simply because their families qualify for lunch programs. The details in a Southern Education Foundation study note that the $43,567 income level is used to measure “child poverty” in public schools, thus grossly embellishing the Senator’s rhetoric.

From Bernie Sanders’s article, he finds it “absurd” that, in 1952, corporate taxes were 32% of federal revenue and, in 2013, are only 11%. This, however, only states the share of revenue from corporations and has nothing to do with the actual corporate tax rate. During that time, federal revenue has obviously increased.

By digging further, the amount of corporate tax revenue has increased 46.5% during that time – from $186B to $273B (2013 USD; adjusted for inflation). Furthermore, by imposing such a high rate, the U.S. is really encouraging money to leave for more financially appealing countries. In fact, the worldwide corporate tax system forces corporations to pay twice – first to a foreign country and second to the IRS. If Bernie Sanders wants money to stay home, he should reduce the corporate tax rate and simplify the tax code.

Sanders makes other unsubstantiated claims. He slams student loan practices despite most of it being held by the federal government. He repeats the minimum wage narrative of “fixing poverty” with no regard for the voluminous empirical evidence to the contrary. He fears “seniors cannot afford their medication” when seniors are fourteen times wealthier than the younger generation. He claims the rich don’t pay their “fair share” when, according to the CBO, the highest quintile of income earners pay almost 70% of federal taxes.

Much like Elizabeth Warren, who I have also debunked in the past, Senator Bernie Sanders perpetuates numerous economic myths that are wholly disingenuous. Although observable on the surface, a more in-depth analysis provides substantial evidence that these supposed victimized groups have benefited from economic growth.

 

The Hill reports:

Hillary Clinton agrees there is still a “vast right-wing conspiracy” — and if anything it has only become more richly financed.

During the New Hampshire town hall debate on Wednesday night, CNN host Anderson Cooper asked the presidential hopeful if she still believes there is a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” as she said there was during the late 90s to initially explain the Monica Lewinksy scandal involing her husband.

“Don’t you?” Clinton replied, as the audience laughed. “Yeah. It’s gotten even better funded.”

“They brought in some new multibillionaires to pump the money in. Look, these guys play for keeps.

“They want to control our country.”

Seconds before the conspiracy exchange, a supporter in the audience asked the Democratic front-runner how she would, as nominee and president, defend herself against right-wing attacks.

“I’ve had a lot of practice,” Clinton replied. “I can laugh up here but it’s not easy.

“It is a brutal experience and when it first started happening to me … I was just stunned. I could not understand how they got away with it.

“So now that I’ve been through this for so many years,” the former first lady continued, “my understanding of the political tactics that the other side uses is pretty well versed. They play to keep. They play to destroy.

“I know I have to keep defending against them,” Clinton added. “But I’m the one who has the experience to do that.

“It’s unlike anything you’ve ever gone through, to be the subject of tens of millions of dollars of untrue negative attacks.”

The Clintons have great experience in “they play to destroy” and “tens of millions of dollars of untrue negative attacks,” having instigated the most vicious political machine of someone not named Kennedy. Apparently Hillary isn’t really interested in bridging the partisan and ideological gaps and healing and all that.

That reminds me that about 20 years ago I called a classic rock radio station and dedicated this song to Hillary and Janet Reno:

Meanwhile, the Des Moines Register isn’t done with covering the Iowa caucuses, Politico reports:

In a strongly worded editorial on Thursday, The Des Moines Register called on the Iowa Democratic Party to move quickly to prove that Monday’s results are correct.

The piece titled “Editorial: Something smells in the Democratic Party,” starts out: “Once again the world is laughing at Iowa.”

It gets sharper from there. “What happened Monday night at the Democratic caucuses was a debacle, period. Democracy, particularly at the local party level, can be slow, messy and obscure. But the refusal to undergo scrutiny or allow for an appeal reeks of autocracy,” the DMR reads. “The Iowa Democratic Party must act quickly to assure the accuracy of the caucus results, beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

The editorial cites Clinton’s razor-thin victory as too close “not to do a complete audit of results.”

The newspaper editorial also said there were too many opportunities for error to arise.

“Too many accounts have arisen of inconsistent counts, untrained and overwhelmed volunteers, confused voters, cramped precinct locations, a lack of voter registration forms and other problems,” the editorial reads. “Too many of us, including members of the Register editorial board who were observing caucuses, saw opportunities for error amid Monday night’s chaos.”

The editorial ends by calling on the state’s Democratic Party to “work with all the campaigns to audit results. Break silly party tradition and release the raw vote totals. Provide a list of each precinct coin flip and its outcome, as well as other information sought by the Register. Be transparent.”

I have a better idea: Dump the caucus and create a primary election, and join the 21st century.