Clipping blog

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• Clearing the Browser Tabs – Yet Another DC Mayor Locked Up Tuesday Edition
• The President’s Budget: A Metaphor, Not A Scary Serial Killer Weapon.
• Tax the Rich? Well, Okay. Let’s Start with Peter Orszag and His Revolving Door Friends

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Yet Another DC Mayor Locked Up Tuesday Edition Posted: 12 Apr 2011 03:10 AM PDT At the very top of the list of reasons I could never live in Washington, DC is the mind-boggling dysfunction of its government. Crime is rampant, the school system is an utter failure, its subway system is a national joke, yet Mayor Vincent Gray and members of the City Council found plenty of time in their busy schedules to get themselves arrested at a protest. Now this wasn’t any normal protest. He was there to protest that, thanks to the Boehner budget deal, the city will no longer be able to spend our tax money on abortions. City Council member Kwame Brown, another one of the public officials who decided it was better to spend his day on a useless gesture than it was to do actual city business, had the quote of the article. Click the link and see if you can find the same utter cluelessness I did. Don’t forget The Delivery live show tonight at 9:30 P.M. Eastern. I’ll have special guest James Pethokoukis tonight and we might just flip halves to make things fit in the time we have allotted. Come and see how the podcasting magic happens. And now, links! Thank goodness WalMart is going back to what it does best. Let us hope the company never listens to a mush-headed progressive again. Yet another reason we need to crush public sector unions. It’s a good day when Stephen Green breaks out the whupping stick. You’d think that real public servants would care about what Congress said. Then again, the folks running our government these days aren’t too keen on the “servant” part of their job descriptions. “A Massachusetts Miracle in Wisconsin” It would be a better world if folks referred to me as Jimmie the Bold. Kurt Schlichter lists his ten favorite movie openings. It’s a very solid list, but how Raiders of the Lost Ark isn’t there is beyond me. If you made a list of disasters that give me the heebie-jeebies, a tornado strike at night is pretty much at the top of the list. I can not imagine what it must have been like to survive this twin tornado strike in Iowa.

The President’s Budget: A Metaphor, Not A Scary Serial Killer Weapon. Posted: 11 Apr 2011 12:13 PM PDT Here come the President’s budget plan and — surprise! — its chief weapon will be an overused scary metaphor. President Obama this week will lay out a new approach to reducing the nation's soaring debt, proposing reductions in spending on entitlements such as Medicare and Medicaid and renewing his call for tax increases on the rich. In an effort to go on the offensive in the battle over government spending, Obama will look for cuts in "all corners of government," senior adviser David Plouffe said on several Sunday talk shows. [...] Contrasting the president's approach with what Republican leaders have put forward, Plouffe said Obama will use a "scalpel" and not a "machete" as he seeks to preserve funding for education and other areas he considers crucial to the country's long-term economic success. The last time the President employed his vorpal scalpel, he sent it forth to snicker-snack $100 million from a budget of over $3.4 trillion, so we obviously shouldn’t expect too much from his proposal. What we can expect, however, is the return of one of his very favorite rhetorical weapons. The Scalpel of Budget Shaving has been an Obama mainstay since he first employed it against John McCain’s budget hatchet in the third Presidential debate two and a half years ago. Since then, he’s compared his weapon of choice to the Republicans’ far more brutish chainsaw and machete (twice). Hmm…but wait. A thought occurs to me. What do hatchets, chainsaws, and machetes have in common? More specifically, when we think of someone who might swing a hatchet, chainsaw, and machete, what image comes to mind? Gosh! Could it be that the President has been subtly comparing his calm, scientific, healing way of handling the budget to the Republican’s homicidal and maniacal predilections? Is he saying not just that Republicans want to kill old people but that they want to brutalize them in the most gore-spattered manner possible? And when they’re done with the old people, who will be next? The children? You? Me?? Goodness! That’s a fine use of the new rhetorical tone in politics, wouldn’t you say? Nothing screams “civility” like an overwrought metaphor that slyly compares your opponents to Jason Voorees or Michael Myers. Of course, when all he has to give is more spending, bigger government dysfunction, and higher debt, it’s hard to see what else he could do.

Tax the Rich? Well, Okay. Let’s Start with Peter Orszag and His Revolving Door Friends Posted: 11 Apr 2011 10:55 AM PDT I’m not fan of tax increases, but I think I can get behind Glenn Reynolds’ plan. A 50% surtax on anything earned within five years after leaving the federal government, above whatever the federal salary was. Leave a $150K job at the White House, take a $1M job with Goldman, Sachs, pay a $425K surtax. Some House Republican should add this to a bill and watch the Dems react. I say we apply this immediately to everyone named in this profile of Barack Obama’s former budget director Peter Orszag. It is a Who’s Who of people who went to Washington, bent the Federal government to their whims, then hared-off to Wall Street to make hundreds of millions of dollars off the inside knowledge and the vast influence they gained while they were playing hairy mountain man to the people’s Ned Beatty. All that money and influence-trading didn’t necessarily make them smart, though. Witness the closing paragraphs. One cost of the vast disparity between the pay on Wall Street and everywhere else is that, all other things being equal, Wall Street gets more than its share of the good minds, and many of those it doesn't control outright, it manages to influence—that's the American system. Orszag told me he doesn't know yet how the system could change. His tenure at Citi, he said, may give answers. "Look, there is an ongoing debate. I don't have the answer," he said. "I'm going to exercise some modesty in terms of knowing exactly what to do about it. Over the next few years, I'll have a better sense of how these incentives work." Even a man as smart as Peter Orszag may find it hard to learn that lesson in his current classroom. Gee. Whatever could we do to ensure that people couldn’t leverage a small amount of money into an outsized amount of return money and power from the Federal government? That’s a stumper. Gosh, let me think on that a moment. Well maybe — and I admit this is a crazy idea that certainly would never occur to the crazy-smart people like Orszag and his revolving-door buddies — we could take large chunks of the power the Federal government currently weilds and send it back to state and local governments. That way, a company like Citi or Goldman Sachs wouldn’t be able to target tens of millions of dollars and all its lobbying attention on only a few members of Congress or White House staffers. Those companies would have to spread things around 50 state houses and a few dozen city councils. And, as a bonus, all the smart people wouldn’t simply run into the lucrative, good-old-boy revolving doors between Washington and Wall Street/K Street. You’d find them in Sacramento and Frankfort and Annapolis and Albany and in increasing numbers in the private sector, which would be more powerful and vibrant as it regained the primacy it once had when the public sector didn’t take such a large chunk of our money and time. It’s an idea so crazy it just might work.

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