Voters Want Aggressive Government Reform, Not Tinkering Around the Edges
By Charles S. Clark
April 24, 2015
Eroding confidence in government has shrunk the ranks of reinventing government “tinkerers,” providing an opening for a more-aggressive reform platform for the 2016 election, says a new polling analysis released Friday in a Brookings Institution paper.
Government reform themes likely to emerge during the election boil down to whether the next president should “cut federal programs to reduce the power of government, or maintain existing programs to deal with important problems,” wrote Paul C. Light, professor of public service at New York University. A second key question is whether to “winnow the federal agenda to a smaller set of priorities, or accept the current priorities and focus on reducing federal inefficiency.”
In a new analysis of demographic and ideological groupings, Light observed that “Americans are saying there is something wrong with how government works, though they may not know why, and the drivers are largely negative.” The current political campaigns against government now focus on incompetence, not sloth or the size of government as in the past.
BY PAUL BEDARD | APRIL 22, 2015 | 6:11 PM
Legal and illegal immigrants will hit a record high of 51 million in just eight years and eventually account for an astounding 82 percent of all population growth in America, according to new U.S. Census figures.
A report from the Center for Immigration Studies that analyzed the statistics said that by 2023, one in seven U.S. residents will be an immigrant, rising to one in five by 2060 when the immigrant population totals 78 million.
The report was provided to Secrets and released Wednesday evening.
The surge in immigrant population, both legal and illegal, threatens to slam into the presidential campaign as GOP candidates move to figure out what their position is and the president tries to use executive powers to exempt some 5 million illegals from deportation.
Economists have discovered how bad the economy really is
By Matt O’Brien April 21 at 8:00 AM
Unemployment is almost back to normal, but the economy isn’t.
That isn’t because the unemployment rate is a conspiracy to make things look better than they really are. It’s because even though the unemployment rate tells us the most about the labor market, it doesn’t tell us the full story. All it does is show us how many people who are actively looking for work can’t find it. But that leaves out the “shadow unemployed” who want full-time jobs but have either given up looking for them or can only find part-time ones. That usually doesn’t make that big a difference, but it does now, because, even six years after the crisis has ended, there still isn’t much that’s usual about this economy.
Now if you add it all up, this shadow unemployment means our jobs hole is more than three times as big as it looks. That, at least, is what economistsDanny Blanchflower and Andrew Levin found when they looked at how low the unemployment rate is versus how low we think it could go, how high the participation rate is versus how high we think it could go, and how many people can only find part-time jobs. That first part tells us how much further unemployment itself could fall, the second how many discouraged workers could come back, and the last how many people would work more if they could. In other words, it shows us the gap between how many full-time jobs we have and how many full-time jobs we need. The result, as you can see above, is that instead of being a million full-time jobs short, like the unemployment rate says we are, we’re about 3.5 million short.
Pricing yourself out of the market is not so smart
J.D. Tuccille|Apr. 20, 2015 2:04 pm
The Momentum Machines website is low-key right now, but that may have something to do with high-profile arguments in the press and protests in the streets demanding that fast-food chains pay workers $15 an hour to do the job the company’s robots are designed to fill. Even before those placard-wielders decided to raise their costs in terms of dollars and grief, the San Francisco-based start-up announced that they were obsolete.
Momentum Machines’ old, boastier website claimed:
Fast food doesn’t have to have a negative connotation anymore. With our technology, a restaurant can offer gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices.
Our alpha machine replaces all of the hamburger line cooks in a restaurant.
It does everything employees can do except better:
*it slices toppings like tomatoes and pickles only immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible.
*our next revision will offer custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground after you place your order? No problem.
*Also, our next revision will use gourmet cooking techniques never before used in a fast food restaurant, giving the patty the perfect char but keeping in all the juices.
*it’s more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour.
The labor savings allow a restaurant to spend approximately twice as much on high quality ingredients and the gourmet cooking techniques make the ingredients taste that much better.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently appeared on one of the late night talk shows, beating the class warfare drum and arguing for billions of dollars in new social programs paid for with higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires. In recent years, though, blue states such as California, Illinois, Delaware, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland and Minnesota adopted this very strategy, and they raised taxes on their wealthy residents. How did it work out? Almost all of these states lag behind the national average in growth of jobs and incomes.
So, if income redistribution policies are the solution to shrinking the gap between rich and poor, why do they fail so miserably in the states?
Day after day, the middle class keeps leaving California. The wealthy areas such as San Francisco and the Silicon Valley boom. Yet the state has nearly the highest poverty rate in the nation.
The blue states that try to lift up the poor with high taxes, high welfare benefits, high minimum wages and other Robin Hood policies tend to be the places where the rich end up the richest and the poor the poorest.
California is the prototypical example. It has the highest tax rates of any state. It has very generous welfare benefits. Many of its cities have a high minimum wage. But day after day, the middle class keeps leaving. The wealthy areas such as San Francisco and the Silicon Valley boom. Yet the state has nearly the highest poverty rate in the nation. The Golden State, alas, has become the inequality state.
In a new report called “Rich States, Poor States” that I write each year for the American Legislative Exchange Council with Arthur Laffer and Jonathan Williams, we find that five of the highest-tax blue states in the nation—California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Illinois—lost some 4 million more U.S. residents than entered these states over the last decade. Meanwhile, the big low-tax red states—Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia—gained about this many new residents.
So much for liberal policies creating a workers paradise.
One liberal economic think tank—the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy—recently issued a report on the states with the most and least “regressive” tax systems. The conclusion was that states should raise their income taxes on the rich to be more “fair.” Except it turns out that people are leaving the states that the think tank ranks as fair, and they are moving to the states the think tank ranks as economically backward.
The least “regressive” tax states had average population growth from 2003 to 2013 that lagged below the national trend. The 10 most highly “regressive” tax states, including nine with no state income tax, had population growth on average 4 percent above the U.S. average. Why was that? Because states without income taxes have twice the job growth of states with high tax rates. Unlike the experts at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, most Americans think that fairness means having a job.
Ohio University economist Richard Vedder and I compared the income gap in states with higher tax rates, higher minimum wages and more welfare benefits with states on the other side of the policy spectrum. There was no evidence that states with these liberal policies had helped the poor much and, in many cases, these states recorded more income inequality than other states as measured by the left’s favorite statistic called the Gini Coefficient.
The 19 states with minimum wages above the $7.25 per hour federal minimum do not have lower income inequality. States with a super minimum wage—such as Connecticut ($9.15), California ($9.00), New York ($8.75), and Vermont ($9.15)—have significantly wider gaps between rich and poor than states without a super minimum wage.
States are supposed to be laboratories of democracy, right? These laboratories are providing us with concrete evidence that Robin Hood policies don’t help make the poor richer, they make most people poorer. In other words, the blue states have tried the Elizabeth Warren “progressive” agenda and people are voting with their feet by fleeing in droves. The kinds of income redistribution policies that Warren and others endorse can only work by building a Berlin Wall so no one can leave—though I hope I’m not giving them any ideas.
APRIL 19, 2015, 10:36 AM LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, APRIL 19, 2015, 10:36 AM
BY RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — Republican or Democrat, the next president will have the chance to remake the nation’s health care overhaul without fighting Congress.
The law signed by President Barack Obama includes a waiver that, starting in 2017, would let states take federal dollars now invested in the overhaul and use them to redesign their own health care systems.
States could not repeal some things, such as the requirement that insurance companies cover people with health problems. But they could replace the law’s unpopular mandate that virtually everyone in the country has health insurance, provided the alternative worked reasonably well.
A Democrat in the White House probably would use the waiver to build bridges to Republican governors and state legislators opposed to the law. The “state innovation” provision, Section 1332 of the nearly 1,000-page law, has gotten little public attention.
But “you would be hard pressed to find a state that doesn’t know what Section 1332 is,” said Trish Riley, executive director the National Academy for State Health Policy, a nonpartisan forum for state policymakers. “It provides some opportunity for taking the rough edges” off the Affordable Care Act, as the law is known.
For a Republican president, state waivers could be the fallback option to avoid the political cost of dismantling Obama’s law and disrupting or jeopardizing coverage for millions of newly insured people, not to mention the upheaval for insurers, hospitals and doctors.
“If you were a Republican on record as opposing or wanting to repeal the ACA, but really felt deep down that you couldn’t accomplish that even as president, then you could say your second preference would be to use this provision to go down a completely different road,” said Stuart Butler, a health policy expert at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution.
Butler, who was with the conservative Heritage Foundation for 35 years, has long been a voice for Republican thinking on health care policy. “The short answer is, this presents a tremendous opportunity for either party,” he said.
The state waiver was the idea of Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, who has a record of crossing party lines in search of ways to tackle health care costs and coverage.
At Global Economic Gathering, Concerns That U.S. Is Ceding Its Leadership Role
By JONATHAN WEISMANAPRIL 17, 2015
WASHINGTON — As world leaders converge here for their semiannual trek to the capital of what is still the world’s most powerful economy, concern is rising in many quarters that the United States is retreating from global economic leadership just when it is needed most.
The spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have filled Washington with motorcades and traffic jams and loaded the schedules of President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew. But they have also highlighted what some see as a United States government so bitterly divided that it is on the verge of ceding the global economic stage it built at the end of World War II and has largely directed ever since.
Prosecutor: Montvale businessman made “tens of millions” in fraud
APRIL 16, 2015 LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, APRIL 16, 2015, 1:21 AM
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
* Faces up to life in prison and $134.5M in fines for a scheme that bilked the federal government
“April 15, tax day, is a fitting date for Mr. Furando to accept responsibility for his crimes, which defrauded U.S. taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars.”
JOSH J. MINKER, U.S. ATTORNEY FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF INDIANA
A Montvale businessman earned tens of millions of dollars as part of one of the largest frauds in Indiana history, prosecutors said on Wednesday after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy, fraud and other charges.
Joseph Furando, 49, and two companies he owned, Cima Green LLC and the Caravan Trading Co., both in Park Ridge at the time of the crimes, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Indiana to participation in a scheme that prosecutors said fraudulently sold more than 35 million gallons of fuel that cost $145.5 million.
No date was set for Furando’s sentencing.
The pleas, following a guilty plea in August by a Ridgewood businesswoman who worked for Furando, Evelyn Katirina Pattison, also known as Katirina Tracy, leave three Indiana-based defendants to face trial in the case beginning on May 11 in Indianapolis.
“April 15, tax day, is a fitting date for Mr. Furando to accept responsibility for his crimes, which defrauded U.S. taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars that Congress appropriated for energy independence and a cleaner environment for all of us,” said Josh J. Minker, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Indiana.
Furando, who described the scheme to colleagues as “alchemy,” abused a federal program that offered companies a tax break for using environmentally friendly biodiesel, which contains recycled oil, prosecutors said.
Although the program awarded only one tax credit for each gallon used, Furando and his companies bought biodiesel that had already earned the tax credit and sold it to an Indiana company, E-biofuels, as newly produced fuel, prosecutors said.
E-biofuels then sold the fuel and claimed a new tax credit, selling the fuel at an inflated market price because it had the credit attached, prosecutors said.
The scheme realized “huge per gallon profits” for all the conspirators, sometimes more than $12,000 a truckload, prosecutors said.
APRIL 14, 2015, 6:45 PM LAST UPDATED: TUESDAY, APRIL 14, 2015, 6:54 PM
BY HERB JACKSON
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT |
THE RECORD
Facing criminal charges that pushed him into a supporting role instead of a leadership position on the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Menendez still notched a victory Tuesday when the panel unanimously approved a bill he cosponsored dealing with Iran.
And the White House, which had threatened a veto and lobbied Democrats against the bill, signaled that President Obama would be willing to sign it. White House officials cited changes that had been made to the bill, which gives the Senate the power to object before any international agreement lifts economic sanctions that Congress had imposed on Iran.
But Menendez said the administration saw it was going to lose.
“I think that it’s more the administration seeing where the will of the Congress was and coming to that conclusion” that the bill could not be stopped, he said.
Attending his first hearing since stepping aside as the committee’s top Democrat following his indictment April 1, Menendez was praised by both Republicans and Democrats for his efforts.
“I can’t imagine a senator being more constructive,” said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who succeeded Menendez as chairman of the committee in January when Republicans took control of the Senate. “There is no question over the last two years you have helped bring us to this point, where instead of debating things we in fact may well be taking up major legislation that will have a significant impact on security of Middle East.”
“I completely agree with you,” followed Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, who is now the panel’s top Democrat after Menendez ceded that role because of the charges. “Senator Menendez enjoys the strong thanks for the incredible leadership he has given … I hope Senator Menendez’s issues will be resolved quickly.”
IMF CUTS FORECAST FOR US ECONOMY, UPGRADES EUROPE AND JAPAN
Apr 14, 9:47 AM EDT
BY PAUL WISEMAN
AP ECONOMICS WRITER
WASHINGTON (AP) — The International Monetary Fund, citing the consequences of a strong dollar, is downgrading its outlook for the U.S. economy but raising its forecast for Europe and Japan.
The IMF predicted Tuesday that the American economy will grow 3.1 percent this year and next – a performance the fund characterized as “robust.” But the U.S. outlook was down from the IMF’s January forecast of 3.6 percent growth in 2015 and 3.3 percent growth in 2016. The American economy advanced 2.4 percent last year.
The IMF forecast that the 18 European countries that use the euro currency collectively will expand 1.5 percent in 2015 and 1.6 percent in 2016, up from a January forecast of 1.2 percent growth this year and 1.4 percent next. The eurozone grew just 0.9 percent last year.
The fund expects Japan to grow 1 percent this year and 1.2 percent next year, versus an earlier forecast of 0.6 percent this year and 0.8 percent in 2016. The Japanese economy shrank 0.1 percent in 2014.
The IMF expects the world economy to grow 3.5 percent in 2015, barely up from 3.4 percent last year and unchanged for its January forecast. It raised the outlook for global economic growth in 2016 to 3.8 percent, up from a January forecast of 3.7 percent.
The international lending agency also left unchanged its prediction that the Chinese economy will grow 6.8 percent this year and 6.3 percent in 2016. That marks a sharp deceleration from last year’s 7.4 percent expansion, already the slowest for China in two decades. But Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, the IMF’s deputy director for research, told reporters the slowdown in China reflects the country’s transition from growth built on often-wasteful investment in factories and real estate to slower but steadier growth built on spending by Chinese consumers. “We think it is a good slowdown for China,” he said.
(CNSNews.com) – The federal government taxed away more money, spent more money and ran a bigger deficit in the first half of fiscal 2015 than it did in the first half of fiscal 2014, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“The federal government ran a budget deficit of $430 billion for the first half of fiscal year 2015, CBO estimates–$17 billion more than the shortfall recorded in the same span last year,” the CBO said in itsMonthly Budget Review for March 2015, which was published April 8. “Both revenues and outlays were about 7 percent higher than the amounts recorded in the first six months of fiscal year 2014.”
The federal fiscal year begins on Oct. 1 and ends on Sept. 30.
In the first six months of fiscal 2014, the government took in approximately $1,323,000,000,000 in revenue, according to CBO. In the first six months of this fiscal year, it took in approximately $1,420,000,000,000—an increase of $98,000,000,000.
Meanwhile, the federal government spent approximately $1,736,000,000,000 in the first six months of fiscal 2014. It spent approximately $1,851,000,000,000 in the first six months of the fiscal year—an increase of $115,000,000,000 over last year.
Last year, the government ran a deficit of $413 billion in the first six months of the fiscal year. This year, it ran a deficit of $430 billion—a $17 billion increase over last year.
Residents of high-tax states are voting with their feet
By Stephen Moore – – Sunday, April 12, 2015
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren appeared on one of the late night talk shows last week, beating the class warfare drum and arguing for billions of dollars in new social programs paid for with higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires. In recent years, though, blue states such as California, Illinois, Delaware, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland and Minnesota adopted this very strategy, and they raised taxes on their wealthy residents. How did it work out? Almost all of these states lag behind the national average in growth of jobs and incomes.
So, if income redistribution policies are the solution to shrinking the gap between rich and poor, why do they fail so miserably in the states?
The blue states that try to lift up the poor with high taxes, high welfare benefits, high minimum wages and other Robin Hood policies tend to be the places where the rich end up the richest and the poor the poorest.
California is the prototypical example. It has the highest tax rates of any state. It has very generous welfare benefits. Many of its cities have a high minimum wage. But day after day, the middle class keeps leaving. The wealthy areas such as San Francisco and the Silicon Valley boom. Yet the state has nearly the highest poverty rate in the nation. The Golden State, alas, has become the inequality state.
A Wednesday “Good Morning America” piece gave President Barack Obama an open mic to claim that, in ABC’s words, “climate change became a personal issue for him when his older daughter Malia, now 16, was rushed to the emergency room with an asthma attack when she was just a toddler.”
Somehow, ABC managed to avoid another possible contributor — besides the obvious possibility that Malia developed asthma independent of external influences — namely the President’s 30-year smoking habit. He is said to have quit once and for all in 2011. USA Today columnist James S. Robbins wasn’t impressed with the President’s “reasoning,” and with good cause, as he articulated in a Thursday evening column. He even managed to get a “there’s been no warming for a long time” observation past USA Today’s editors (links are in original; bolds are mine):
Global warming didn’t give Malia asthma
President’s smoking more likely to cause daughter’s health problem than climate change.
President Obama blames global warming for his daughter’s asthma. Today that’s politically useful spin, but the science says something different. If you’re looking for a culprit, it just might be Malia’s dad.
… The president connected his daughter’s malady to global climate change. In a discussion Tuesday, he said “all of our families are going to be vulnerable” to global warming-induced health risks because “you can’t cordon yourself off from air or from climate.”
A White House fact sheet connected the dots, saying that asthma rates have more than doubled in the past 30 years, and that “climate change is putting these individuals and many other vulnerable populations at greater risk of landing in the hospital” like Malia.
The good news is that there is less reason for alarm than the White House suggests. The Environmental Protection Agency cautions that “outdoor air pollution and pollen may also worsen chronic respiratory diseases, such as asthma.” Yet the EPA also reports that our air quality has substantially improved; aggregate emissions of common pollutants have decreased 62% between 1980 and 2013. It is unlikely that cleaner air is causing the increase in asthma.
Whether there is a link between asthma and global warming, Malia herself hasn’t really experienced much. The high school junior was born in 1998, when temperatures spiked. By some measurements, the world hasn’t warmed significantly since then.
… Even when smoking is done outside, nicotine in infants’ hair is five times higher for babies with outside smoking parents than non-smoking parents. Smoking-related chemicals in infants’ urine is seven times higher. Other studies have found similar results.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “tobacco smoke is one of the most common asthma triggers,” and “if you have asthma, it’s important that you avoid exposure to secondhand smoke.”
No father wants to feel that his habits might hurt his children. But sometimes you have to look in the mirror to find the guilty party, not search the stratosphere for a hidden culprit.
Russia lifted its ban on the delivery of an anti-missile system to Iran just weeks after negotiators reached a framework agreement over Iran’s nuclear program, Reuters reported on Monday.
The ban on the delivery of the S-300 system and other weapons has been in place since 2010, when the United Nations announced its own ban on selling arms to Iran.
Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly signed off on lifting the ban on providing S-300 anti-missile rocket systems to Iran.
Earlier this month, Western powers and Iran reached a framework agreement to limit Tehran’s nuclear research in return for the lifting of economic sanctions. Russia is a party to the talks.
APRIL 12, 2015, 10:41 PM LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, APRIL 12, 2015, 10:43 PM
BY HERB JACKSON
RECORD COLUMNIST |
THE RECORD
Sen. Bob Menendez frowned Sunday when asked if a 14-count indictment accusing him of bribery and false statements means he betrayed the public trust.
“Absolutely not,” he declared to the “Fox News Sunday” camera, accusing prosecutors of taking “snippets of a story to make their case” and promising the whole story would come out in court.
“When all the facts are known, I know that I will be vindicated,” Menendez said.
In his first television interview since the April 1 indictment, Menendez made no revelations. But he telegraphed what his strategy may be as he returns to Congress this week and faces questions from the media about the case: Profess innocence, denounce prosecutors and leave detailed answers to some future date in court.
“He will not be running from reporters. It’s not his style,” spokeswoman Tricia Enright said last week. “Nevertheless, because this case is now in the courts, he won’t be able to say anything about it more than he has already.”
