Clipping blog

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• Clearing the Browser Tabs – Fun-Seeking Friday Edition
• When It Comes to CBO Reports, Trust but Verify
• What Do You Know? Nancy Pelosi Was A Historic Speaker!
• Thanks to The Constitution, The Progressives of Vanity Fair Have Suddenly Discovered Fiscal Discipline

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Fun-Seeking Friday Edition Posted: 07 Jan 2011 03:10 AM PST It’s been a truly long week and I, for one, am glad the weekend is here. I don’t have anything more pithy to add, except that I hope you find some fun over the next couple of days. And now, links! The cost to repeal Obamacare is entirely predicated on the scoring done by the Congressional Budget Office, but that scoring is entirely predicated on the assumptions forced upon the CBO by the Democrats in Congress. I explain how that works in this post. Twitter for Mac is out and the early reviews I’ve read among the tech bloggers are quite good (via Techmeme). You can only get it from the new Mac App Store (on machine running Snow Leopard). I don’t have Snow Leopard yet, so I’m out of luck for the time being (though it’s on my list!). Have you ever wondered why businesses are so eager to work with government on new regulations? Here’s your answer. Heritage has an interesting piece on how conservatives can take back popular culture. The returns on the Winter Classic are in and NBC scored a ratings jackpot. I hope this means that future Winter Classics will also get prime time slots. If you own a Kindle, you can now lend some of your books to other Kindle (or Kindle app) users. There are a ton of caveats, most of which I hope disappear very soon, but it’s doable, which is a good thing.

When It Comes to CBO Reports, Trust but Verify Posted: 06 Jan 2011 07:43 PM PST It’s not secret that the first big target on the new Republican majority’s hit list is Obamacare. The Democrats who passed it have already begun their defense in the form of a report from the Congressional Budget Office that says an Obamacare repeal will add $145 billion dollars to the deficit over the next eight years. Rep. Paul Ryan, the Chair of the House Budget Committee has countered with a report of his own, using the Democrats’ own CBO report, that says Obamacare, if left alone, will add over $700 billion to the deficit over the next ten years. Obviously, they both can’t be right. Obamacare will either reduce the deficit or add to it, but who is correct? As it happens, what it obvious is not actually so. The CBO report is correct and Paul Ryan’s estimate is also correct. Confusing, no? The secret to understanding why this is so lies in understanding how the CBO generates its scoring reports. To do that, we should start with an analogy. Imagine you wanted to invent a new diet — call it the “Eat All the Big Macs You Want, Exercise Ten Minutes A Day, and 100 Pounds A Year” diet. You’re going to need a medical professional or two to stand up your plan, so you grab a couple physicians and ask them to review your diet. But as part of their review, you give them a couple strict instructions they have to follow. 1) Big Macs only contain 100 calories. 2) Exercising ten minutes a day will burn off 1000 calories. 3) No other food will count as part of the calculations. Now, given those instructions, it’s very likely that your two doctors are going to want to argue with you. There’s no way a Big Mac contains 100 calories. exercise doesn’t work that way, and you can’t simply ignore anything else your dieters might eat. That’s not the way a diet works. they’d be exactly right, too. In fact, their final report would likely call you an idiot for making those assumptions and they’d probably say that you diet would cause people to blow up like Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade floats. And they’d be right. But, what if they had to accept your instructions? What if they had to use only the data you gave them? Well, then they’d give your miracle diet a big, fat thumbs-up and you could wave their report around like it was gospel truth. This is how the CBO works. Though it is nonpartisan, that is to say that it can’t favor one party over the other, it is also not allowed to think for itself.  When Congress asks the CBO to score the cost of a bill, it can only use the assumptions given to it. Even though, for example, we know Obamacare double-counts potential savings from Medicare and there’s no way one dollar can be spent here and there, the CBO has to work as if that contradiction doesn’t exist. It has no choice. Like your doctors, it has to use bad data and, like your doctors, it’s going to produce a bogus report with a patina of legitimacy. So when Harry Reid hauls out that CBO report and talks about deficit savings, he’s not wrong. The bill, as presented to the CBO will save billions of dollars…on paper. But as often happens when progressives come up with another utopian scheme, we didn’t get the whole truth. The whole truth is as Rep. Ryan has said today. Obamacare is loaded with tricks and impossibilities put there on purpose to drive down the CBO score. The report was rigged and not one of their deceptions will survive contact with the real world. Now, the CBO can’t say that because it is nonpartisan. But you can look at it for yourself and see how the Democrats have loaded with 100-calorie Big Macs and miraculous exercise regimes. So when you hear another Democrat, or Republian for that matter, talk about a CBO report — and it’s a mortal lock that you will — ask yourself if the CBO got fair and accurate data or if their were handed a pile of crazy assumptions designed to make the final score look far, far better than it actually is.

What Do You Know? Nancy Pelosi Was A Historic Speaker! Posted: 06 Jan 2011 11:54 AM PST This seems like the perfect punctuation mark to close out the reign of the hands-wodn worst Speaker of the House in our nation’s history. With 19 Democrats withholding support from Nancy Pelosi for House speaker on Wednesday, it represented the largest defection from a party’s speaker nominee in nearly a century. The resistance in the Democratic Party to back now-former Speaker Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the ceremonial first vote of the 112th Congress registered higher than at any point since 1913, according to data from the Congressional Research Service. That year, which happens to be the last year for which records are available, featured 23 votes for Republicans other than that party’s speaker nominee. Of the 19 Democrats who didn’t support Pelosi on Wednesday, 18 voted for other Democrats and one voted “present.” On one hand, ex-Speaker Pelosi hay have gotten the biggest diss to a siting Speaker in 98 years. On the other hand, it may be the biggest defection EVAH! Now that’s historic. UPDATE: Thank goodness we still have Harry Reid to kick around, huh? His latest ahistorical pronouncement that “The American people love government” will not get the press of Pelosi’s hand full of blather or Steny Hoyer’s attempt at Tea Party psychoanalysis, but it certainly is an early contender for the Quote of the Year.

Thanks to The Constitution, The Progressives of Vanity Fair Have Suddenly Discovered Fiscal Discipline Posted: 06 Jan 2011 08:25 AM PST This story in Vanity Fair absolutely flabbergasted me when it popped up in my RSS feed this morning. If progressives have developed such an aversion to the United States Constitution that they will unashamedly argue that reading it in the House today will cost too much money, they have utterly surrendered the issue entirely. At this point, we can now safely question whether progressives have any regard for the Constitution at all (via memeorandum). As we reported this morning, House Republicans will kick-start the 112th Congress tomorrow with a spirited recitation of the Constitution, a document whose recent relevance is due largely to the ideological and sartorial interests of the Tea Party. It's an opening act designed to herald the arrival of a new season of checks, balances, and financial cutbacks. As Politico's nocturnal prophet Mike Allen reported, House Republicans plan to reduce Congress's budget by $32.5 million—a savings reaped from cutting "the amount authorized for salaries and expenses of Member, committee, and leadership offices in 2011 and 2012." It would seem that in an era of Fiscal Responsibility™, a performative rendition of the Constitution might have been one such eliminated endeavor. The magazine then goes on to quote their in-house “expert on Congressional wastefulness” who says that today’s reading will “conservatively” cost $1.1 million dollars. He gets that from calculating how much it will cost to pay everyone to be there today, including members of Congress and their staffs, and for operational costs like running the heaters (because when the House isn’t in session, they turn the heat off completely, don’t you know!). Whether or not this “expert” is correct (and he’s not), the point is utterly ridiculous even by Vanity Fair standards. Ed Morrissey heaped the appropriate amount of ridicule on the magazine and its “expert”, but this bit is especially biting. How do VF and Keating reach their conclusions?  They take the cost-per-minute of the House being in session, complete apparently to the cost of cleaning staffs, and apply that to the time needed to read the Constitution.  Of course, this is simply bunk.  The House did not come to session to read the Constitution, so those fixed costs — including salaries — would have been spent already regardless of whatever gets said on the floor. The cost doesn't come from the reading; it comes from the existence of Congress itself. There isn't even any opportunity cost involved, since the reading of the Constitution won't prevent any other business from being conducted.  It will take much less time to read the Constitution than to, say, name post offices and hear debate over whether to designate February as National Toothpick Month, complete with testimonials to the toothpick industry and how it contributed to the greatness of America by removing the remains of porkchops from the teeth of red-blooded Americans. Of course Vanity Fair doesn’t care how much it costs to read the Constitution. If anyone there cared about the cost of government they’d be Tea Partiers, and that silly little blog post would never have seen the light of day. That progressives are reduced to such a spectacular shark-jump says a lot more about their desperate desire for “because I said so” government than it does the Constitution or the Republican Party. UPDATE: If you want to read a serious post about the Constitution and its limits on the power of our federal government, you should start with this Roger Pilon piece at Cato.

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