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• Clearing the Browser Tabs – The New Newsletter Hotness Wednesday Edition
• Ezra Klein’s “Let It Ride” Plan is A Quick Trip to Cloud Cuckoo Land
• Fifty Years in Space, But Will We See More?

Clearing the Browser Tabs – The New Newsletter Hotness Wednesday Edition Posted: 13 Apr 2011 03:10 AM PDT I’m not going to say that an e-mail newsletter can change your life, but in rare cases they can just make the internet more useful and cool. Melissa Clouthier, who is slowly taking over social media one platform at a time, has launched a newsletter that does both of those things. It’s special for two reasons. For one, if you sign up, you’ll get an e-mail written by Melissa Clouthier, which is like getting your own personal love song sung to you every day by Barry White. More importantly, though, is that it’s not one of those carbon-copy “here’s all the stuff we think is super-important” newsletters that get to you before you’ve had your morning cup of coffee. Melissa’s newsletter arrives in the evening, usually not long after dinner, so you can catch up on the happenings of the day as seen by someone who observes the universe of social media as keenly as Uatu the Watcher. So, do sign up. You’ll like what you get. And now, links! Jim Pethokoukis has been all over the coming budget battle the last few days. You can’t go wrong if you read everything he’s written the past three days, but I recommend you start with this post on the Simpson-Bowles plan then follow that up with this post on the Democratic alternative to the Ryan plan, “The People’s Budget”. Jim Geraghty notes that state taxes and fees have increased more in the past couple of years than they ever have. This post came up in the discussion on this week’s The Delivery. On a related note, I believe we can declare Keynesian economics well and truly dead. It doesn’t take a genius to look at the mounting stack of dead bodies in Britain and see what our fate could be under Obamacare. NSFW, but hilarious: “5 Lovable Animals You Didn’t Know Are Secretly Terrifying” The NHL Playoffs start tonight. Here is a schedule for all the first-round series. The only other thing I’d add is, LETS GO CAPS! I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or sign these guys to a reality television show contract.

Ezra Klein’s “Let It Ride” Plan is A Quick Trip to Cloud Cuckoo Land Posted: 12 Apr 2011 12:59 PM PDT I can not imagine a blogger that does less with more than the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. All he has to do is occasionally put up a random chart with nice pretty lines that end right about where he wants them to end and write a few paragraphs that sound like serious policy proposals and, hey presto, in comes another paycheck. Here is his latest pretty chart and the introduction thereof. That's Austin Frakt's graph, which uses the Congressional Budget Office's September numbers, and it shows what happens if we do … nothing. The answer, as you can see, is that the budget comes roughly into balance. Our problems are solved! But nothing is hard to do. This nothing, for instance, includes three crucial elements: (1) All the Bush tax cuts expire, as they're currently scheduled to do; (2) The Medicare doc fix is either implemented or its repeal is paid for over the next 70 years; and (3) the Affordable Care Act is implemented, and all of its spending targets are met and all of its taxes are collected. Klein’s notion, borrowed from the CBO’s June 2010 budget outlook, is that we pony up several trillion more dollars in the “doc fix”, jack up taxes, and implement Obamacare, and all will be well. See how the dotten line meets up nicely with that rising mountain of spending on the right side of the chart? That’s utopia right there — the magic land where revenue rises to 30 percent of GDP and covers all the spending and taxes on the rich that the progressives really want. Philip Klein (no relation) calls it the “Do Nothing” plan, for that’s truly what the younger Klein claims we should do to reach the promised land. Except there’s a problem. Actually, there are three problems, one for each point in Klein’s plan, but we don’t need to go past the first one. Let’s start with how the CBO describes that dotted line marked “Revenues”. Under this scenario, the expiration of most of the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003, the growing reach of the alternative minimum tax, and the way in which the tax system interacts with economic growth would result in steadily higher average tax rates. Those rising rates, combined with the tax provisions of the recent health care legislation, would push total revenues to 23 percent of GDP by 2035–much higher than has typically been seen in recent decades–and to larger percentages thereafter. There’s a bit of an understatement in there that blows a rather gaping hole in the entire plan. When the CBO says that a revenue figure of 23 percent of GDP would be “much higher than has typically been seen in recent decades” it fails to note that we have never seen a revenue figure larger than 20.9 percent of GDP. Furthermore, even when the top marginal tax rate was over 90 percent, we still didn’t crack a 60-year average of 19.5 percent of GDP. In other words, the CBO’s alternative plan on which Klein pins his hopes assumes that the government will take in at least 3 percentage points more of all the goods and services we create in a year than we’ve ever taken and that we’ll keep taking at least that much for the next 80 years. Oh, and if you’re wondering how revenues have been looking lately, what with all the new taxes and fees rolled out by the Democrats over the last two years, you can find that here in Table 2.3. We took in 14.9 percent of GDP in 2009 and 2010, down over 2.5 percentage points from the year before. In fact, we haven’t hit that 19.5 percent average since 2001. I can’t find a single reason to expect that we’ll take in even 19 percent over the next few years (the President’s budget projections notwithstanding) much less 23 percent or more. Neither can I find a reason to believe that consumers won’t react to the far higher levels of taxation that Klein’s idea will require with much less economic activity. That will drive the GDP down (and it’s not doing particularly well right now), which will also drive down the amount of money our government gets, which will push that magic dotted line way down into the light blue morass of big government and relentlessly-growing entitlements. So much for Klein’s utopia. In the end, the political battle over the 2012 budget will pit utopians like Klein, who believe sheer fantasy will save us all, against grown ups who can do math and understand how human beings work. Kevin Williamson, who may well be psychic, anticipated Klein’s “let it ride” budget idea and pointed out the very clear battle lines for the coming debate. Ryan and the Republicans will accept the strongest deficit deal they can get; Obama and the Democrats will accept the strongest deficit deal they are forced to: That's the basic dynamic that shapes this debate between now and November 2012. They have no credible budget plan — they didn't even pass a budget last time around. Welcome to the Party of No, Mr. President; Mrs. Pelosi will show you the secret handshake. The Democrats want 2012 to be about anything other than deficit-reduction. The left will do everything they can to keep things just the way they are. They will — and you can bet your paycheck on this — throw every conceivable issue at Republicans over the next few months to distract them from what must be done. Klein’s nonsensical notion is only the beginning. Expect the arguments to move away from the budget entirely and into hot-button issues that have nothing to do with money at all. We can’t let ourselves get distracted and we can’t let arguments like Klein’s go without dispensing a harsh dose of reality. Like it or not, we’re in a desperate place right now, and we’re going to need a real solution. Klein could help if he wanted to. It seems, though, that his only real interest is in trudging relentlessly toward the cloud cuckoo land of progressive fantasy. (Cross-posted at The Greenroom) UPDATE: Fixed one paragraph to make the rates of increase more clear (from a suggestion in the comments).

Fifty Years in Space, But Will We See More? Posted: 12 Apr 2011 11:34 AM PDT I find it amazing that the entire history of manned spaceflight can very nearly fit within my own lifetime. Today marks two important anniversaries in mankind’s attempt to explore the vast universe outside our own world. Rand Simberg gives us the details. Tomorrow will be the fiftieth anniversary of the first time a human orbited the earth, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin rocketed into space, made almost a complete circuit around the planet, entered the atmosphere, and returned to terra firma. By international standards in place at the time, his flight didn’t meet the technical requirements for human spaceflight, which demanded that he return to the planet with his spacecraft (he ejected and parachuted down separately), but no one knew this at the time, and it was another great propaganda victory for the Soviets in the space race with the Americans, who were still reeling from the Sputnik surprise three and a half years earlier. It’s another human spaceflight anniversary as well. It will have been exactly thirty years since the first flight of a Space Shuttle (Columbia), on April 12th, 1981. The program is scheduled to be retired this year after three decades of service (including two periods of almost three years each when it was shut down as a result of the Challenger andColumbia losses, in 1986 and 2003, respectively). That the date is the same is a coincidence — NASA had originally scheduled the first flight for April 10th, but a computer timing glitch delayed it for two days, serendipitously resulting in the inaugural launch occurring exactly two decades after the first human spaceflight. Since the first shuttle launch, our achievements have come fewer and fewer and our vision for exploring the vastness of space has shrunk so far that it can barely contain a series of small unmanned vehicles and a single station in low Earth orbit. The reasons we have dared little and achieved even less are complicated but they essentially come down to politics, as most decisions placed in the hands of government do. One day, America may send brave explorers out into space once more, but I’m skeptical. It may be that our most ambitious and bravest days are behind us. Or, perhaps, the truly courageous and visionary among us will simply step around the timidity of our government and get out there on their own. I would hope that is the latter is the case, we are bold enough to support their efforts and resolute enough to help shove the sclerotic bureaucracy that could not “win the future” out of the way. I’ll have more to say on our space program and how it can kickstart far more than we imagine on The Delivery tonight. If you can’t make the live show at 9:30 P.M. Eastern, be sure to subscribe to the podcast.

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