This post is in response to the Ezra Klein article in the Washington Post on May 28, 2013. You can also read it here.
I found this to be a very interesting article. It was made even moreso by the
fact that Klein is only telling part of the story. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he is not being intentionally disingenuous. At any rate, I agree with him that
Republicans have narrowed on the policy front, although I don't think I'd agree on the reasons that is so, which you'll see outlined below. In addition, I would disagree that
Democrats have expanded on that front, but rather, that they’ve embraced the full range of
statism rather than simply limiting it to their pet issues. The numbers
show that Democrats and Republicans have both lost party members in the last
several years. The Democrats were always larger and remain so now, but independents
have increased significantly. So much so that they spent some time being a larger voting bloc than either
Democrats or Republicans for the first time since we’ve been keeping track of
these things. This is part of what Klein is missing, that both parties are losing
ground in terms of their appeal to the average American. The Democrats
have lost more registered voters than Republicans to the independents.
Why are both parties losing voters and why the Democrats more than Republicans? Because they don’t really “get” Americans (in my opinion). Democrats have embraced fully the concept of state run everything. That somehow, if
we’d just let them, the government would make all our lives better. Good
intentions aside, I want the government to make my life better about as much as
I’d want a rose bush sprouting from my mouth. It looks pretty, but it
hurts like heck. The Republicans have been fighting a war within their
own party, which has actually driven many to become independents, largely
because their base no longer recognizes the party. They ran, in the
nineties, on fiscal conservatism, shrinking government, and fairer taxes.
We got? Stranger and more complicated taxes, excessive spending, two
wars, and the largest expansion of government since the “Great Society”.
So...we elected Democrats, who proceeded to continue the exact same destructive
policies that the Republicans had become enamored with because, well, that’s what
Democrats have always done (at least in my lifetime).
Is it any wonder that independents are growing at the expense of
the two major parties? So, to address some of Klein’s specific points...The
Affordable Care Act. It is an utter train wreck and was from the
beginning. 54% of Americans want it repealed! Why should the
Republicans help make a bad policy and bad bill less bad simply because a
Republican had the idea 20 years ago. Klein suggests Republicans just
decided it was unconstitutional. In reality, it was unconstitutional 20
years ago when they came up with it and it remains that way today. Also, it
isn’t really the Republican party that finds it unconstitutional, but rather, some Republican
politicians (who are largely supported by independents in their districts rather
than traditional Republicans) that have made that argument (and it is about
time). This is part of the inner fighting within the party. I think
most people now believe the Democrats are a lost cause when it comes to the Constitution. The day they find
something other than marijuana laws to be unconstitutional will be the first
day. The fight within the Republican party is because so many
independents support smaller government, less regulation, fewer entitlements,
less spending, responsible spending, and for the government to pretty much stay
out of their lives. Republicans don’t really support any of these, as
evidenced by the Bush years, but rather pay them lip service to appeal to their
base. It is the growing independent movement that will likely shape the
next several decades and those folks are trying to take over the Republican
party from within. Klein is also missing this phenomena entirely.
I’ve seen him miss this in several of his articles now. Or, he is adept at ignoring it. Back to the
Affordable Care Act then. I find it hilarious that people on the left
consistently say that Republicans should support it because it was a Republican
idea back in 1993, yet when a politicians says they’ve changed their nuanced
position to agree with someone on the left, their opinion from 20 years ago is
washed over, forgotten, ignored, but if they change their position to oppose
them, then they are the devil himself. The Affordable Care Act is like
this. Republicans came up with it to combat single payer. Democrats
finally realized that single payer would never fly with Americans, so they
embraced the idea espoused by Republicans so long ago, yet failed to realize
that Republicans (or at least the more independent wing of the party that is trying to reshape the party based on principles instead of power (at least this is the idealistic viewpoint)) had already moved on to the unconstitutionality of forcing
Americans to do anything.
As for climate change, that anyone outside the Democratic party
still supports anything related to this baffles me. The climate is now
and always has been changing and WE have very little to do with it. To
establish or support policies that would clearly damage our economy just to set
up a system that does nothing to reduce human impact on climate change,
achieves nothing in regards to actually lowering temperatures (and why would we
want to anyway since warmer temperatures mean more food, faster growing crops,
and I can go on), significantly raises energy costs on consumers, and creates a system that gives the central government the
power to interfere in the lives of average Americans on a scale not seen since,
well, Obamacare. This issue is nothing more than a scare tactic used by
politicians to gain power and increase influence. Al Gore’s “consensus”
never existed amongst scientists because his methodology was flawed and
actually juvenile (in the sense that he showed a remarkably juvenile ability to
conduct research). The consensus was based on typing global warming into
a search engine and finding nothing but supportive arguments for man made
climate change. Of course, if you did real research and used more than
one simplistic and unscientific search term, you’d discover a ton of material
challenging the global warming alarmists position, but that would require
actual research, rather than just searching what fits your pre-determined
agenda. In my research on this topic, I’ve discovered three things of
importance.
1. Whenever the media is talking about ice melting, they are
usually talking about calving events creating icebergs. This always gives
me a chuckle because calving is caused when ice becomes so heavy that it breaks
off from the parent glacier. This only occurs with ice growth.
Calving does not occur because of melting. In addition, they talk about
the melting ice in the arctic causing the waters to rise. Again, I just
have to laugh. Almost all of the ice in the arctic is already in the
water creating displacement. If the ice in your water glass melts, does
the water level rise? NO. Why? Because it has already created
the increase in water levels due to displacement. That is the same
phenomena in the north pole. The only significant amount of ice in the north not already in the
water is Greenland and it would cause negligible increases in water if it were to
melt entirely. Finally, regarding Antarctica, they are always talking
about the dangers of it melting. They base this on the very real fact
that most of that ice is continental and so it would cause significant rises in
water levels were it to melt. However, they cite one small section of
Antarctica as melting (which it is) while ignoring the real fact that the
Antarctic ice has been growing in leaps and bounds for decades.
2. They love to
scare us with weather models showing how awful things will be in 500
years. These weather models are the exact same models that meteorologists
use and are only as good as the information input to them. Several
scientists have dismissed these claims for the simple reason that the
information being put into them assumes more water vapor in the air than can be
justified. In other words (as we all should have discovered with the
leaking of the climategate emails), the scientists couldn’t get the result they
wanted, so they manipulated the data to make the models work which required
massive amounts (not of carbon dioxide but) of excess water vapor to exist in the
atmosphere. In other words, the models aren’t showing what might happen
if carbon continues to rise, but instead are showing what might happen if the
world suddenly became a heck of a lot wetter than it is now. At any rate, basically, they are
asking you to believe that they can use weather models to predict doomsday
scenarios 500 years into the future using the exact same weather models that
can’t even get your weather forecast accurate past 3-5 days out.
3. There is a credibility problem developing amongst the global warming alarmists these days. Besides the reality that they have failed to see or demonstrate any warming of global temperatures since 1998, the climategate emails also exposed a certain amount of corruption and disregard for facts. It always
strikes me as convenient that they consistently use
certain date periods to show their numbers. For instance, they like to
ignore anything from before 1960ish when they can. In addition, they like to
ignore the reality that a LOT of the “warming” they are claiming comes from
weather stations that were surrounded by trees in the 1950s and are now
surrounded by concrete buildings. This is a wonderful example of
localized warming, but has zero effect on global temperatures. They like
to ignore the fact that their own theory says that the upper atmosphere should
show significant warming, yet they have no data that supports warming in the
upper atmosphere on a global scale. They like to ignore the little ice
age and the medieval warm period, as evidenced by the so called hockey stick
graph of temperature rises that has been utterly discredited even though it is
still in use today by many media outlets. In other words, the evidence is
far from clear, the science is far from decided, and so the politicians are
asking you to allow them to make unprecedented policy changes that would
greatly increase your electric bill and ability to maintain your current
standard of living while fortifying their political power just because
something might happen to the planet several hundred years after you are
dead. Only a philosophy that believes the government should take care of
us could continue to support that kind of lunacy, so in that sense, I’m glad
the Republicans have rejected climate change.
Regarding the GOPs stimulus initiatives, Klein absolutely
right. They did support a plethora of stimulus activities and now seem entirely opposed to the idea. He seems to have missed the several points here though. 1. Republicans support stimulus through tax cuts, not spending and 2. Republican infighting has resulted in those who supported stimulus, like John McCain, being labeled RINOs, or Republcians in Name Only. Also, part of the
reasons former Republicans give for becoming independents is because they think
Republicans abandoned their principles through all the stimulus efforts under
Bush. So, Klein is using stimulus by Republicans to argue that it is a
Republican position that they should support when the reality is that
Republicans view it as an abandonment of the party’s principles.
Regarding taxes, well, I can’t agree with Klein on his assumption of what is
driving deficits. The U.S. has the largest tax rate in the western world
on corporations at 35%. We sit around and argue that Europe and Canada
should raise their rates. However, our companies are using Europe,
Canada, and many other countries with lower rates to shelter their money.
If Klein is arguing that we should raise our taxes to gain more revenue, he
will find out that raising these rates won’t create more revenue but will
instead drive more corporations to shelter more money thus resulting in even
less tax revenue. Sure, there is a point at which that is no longer true,
but Art Laffer clearly demonstrates that there is a tax burden that causes
greater revenue and a tax burden that actually reduces revenue. That is
somewhere around 19 percent according to his study, meaning that if you tax
above 19 you get less revenue than you do at 19 and if you tax below 19, you
are actually losing revenue you should be getting. Now, we can argue over
a few percentage points in either direction, but this is significantly lower
than the current 35%. Therefore, today’s rates are actually generating LESS
revenue than they would at 20%. This seems counterintuitive, but it
actually works, historically. Austrian economists know this. Republicans are
clueless about it. Keynesian economists find it inconvenient to their
arguments. Democrats simply don’t believe it. It doesn’t really
matter in the end because the argument Klein is making here is not really about
tax rates but that deficits are being driven by lost revenue and not
spending. I assume this is his argument based on the article. While
I’d agree that a portion of the deficit is driven by less revenue, that is only
part of the story. The highest budget under Bush was 2.7 trillion.
The government has spent over 3.2 trillion in each of Obama’s years in
office. Therefore, you can't argue that this 500 billion dollar difference is due to lost revenue. So, to argue that only loss of revenue caused the
deficits is choosing to ignore the increase in spending under Obama. In fact, you
can’t argue loss of revenue is causing anything now. Why not? Because this past year, the
United States gained 2.7 trillion dollars in revenue. The greatest amount of
revenue ever brought in by the U.S. in all its history. Umm…so spending
more than we bring in must be the real culprit if our current revenue is the
greatest it has ever been in history.
Finally, I agree entirely that the way we’re labeling the
political spectrum has gone horribly wrong. The above image is how I
think we should look at the spectrum. The realities as I see it are that
the Republicans are statists on the right, the Democrats are statists on the
left and nobody in this country is looking out for the Constitution.
