Ezra Klein misses many points on way to justifiably complain about Republicans

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.