THE NATIONAL DEBT IS NOT $17 TRILLION, IT IS MORE LIKE $205 TRILLION

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HALLOWEEN 2013



Night of the Living Debt.
 

Is America Really $17 Trillion in Debt?

 

By JAMES FREEMAN

Recent headlines say that President Obama succeeded in breaking the debt limit to allow federal borrowing beyond $17 trillion. But Stanley Druckenmiller, one of the most successful money managers of all time, says "there's just one little problem" with Washington's math. "Everyone's running around saying the debt is $17 trillion," notes Mr. Druckenmiller. But the government can acknowledge that titanic burden on future generations only by ignoring even larger obligations.

"If you borrow money from an individual with the agreement to pay them back in benefit payments in Social Security and Medicare after the age of 65, in their brilliance the United States accounting experts call that revenues," says Mr. Druckenmiller. "But in any corporation in America—other than maybe Enron—if you borrow money from someone with the agreement to pay it back in the future, that's called a debt." And these future commitments don't appear on Uncle Sam's balance sheet.

What's the real burden when you count these promises? Taking the "alternative fiscal scenario" from the Congressional Budget Office, which still understates the problem but is the closest Washington gets to reality, Mr. Druckenmiller calculates the net present value of Beltway commitments. He concludes that "the future liabilities are $205 trillion, not 17." It's a staggering sum, roughly 12 times the size of the U.S. economy.

Mr. Druckenmiller notes that he's counting up all the federal promises from here to eternity, while others prefer to focus on shorter time horizons. And to be sure, investors in U.S. Treasury debt have a legal claim to repayment whereas future retirees have only promises from politicians. But that doesn't make the need for reform any less urgent.

WHAT? ME WORRY? NO WAY! JUST KEEP RAISING THE CEILING! - Barack Hussein Obama

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The problem is the debt, not the debt ceiling

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
October 16, 2013

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/13923/the-problem-is-the-debt-not-the-debt-ceiling

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FOR WEEKS we've been told that if Congress doesn't raise the federal debt ceiling by Thursday, the government will go into default and the world as we know it will spin out of control.
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The predictions of doom have been hysterical. Bloomberg reported that a US default would be the first by a major Western government "since Nazi Germany 80 years ago." Warren Buffett compared debt-ceiling politics to weapons of mass destruction — "like nuclear bombs, basically too horrible to use." President Obama, saying he was quoting "CEOs and economists," told a White House news conference that failing to raise the debt ceiling would be "insane, catastrophic, chaos." And the Treasury Department issued a grim warning that a default could prove calamitous: "Credit markets could freeze, the value of the dollar could plummet … and there might be a financial crisis and recession that could echo the events of 2008 or worse."
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For more than 30 years, under Republicans and Democrats alike, Congress has repeatedly chosen to lift the federal debt limit rather than control spending and decrease the national debt. (Graphic: Veronique de Rugy, Mercatus Center at George Mason University).

Call me a Pollyanna, but I'm quite sure none of that will happen. Whether or not a debt-ceiling deal is finalized this week, the government of the United States isn't going to default on its debt. For all the scaremongering, the stock market doesn't seem to be panicking: The Dow rose smartly last week, and closed up again on Monday. An Associated Press story was headlined: "As US default nears, investors shrug off threat." Maybe that's because investors — or for that matter anyone with a Mastercard or a home-equity line of credit — know perfectly well that the Treasury is not going to welsh on its debt obligations.
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Hitting a credit-card limit doesn't mean a borrower has become a deadbeat; it means he has to pay down some of the principal before making new charges on that card. The more of his debt he pays off, the more his credit score improves. In similar fashion, the federal government will not be forced to stiff its bondholders if Congress doesn't raise the statutory debt limit this week. Granted, it will only be able to spend what it collects in taxes. But the IRS takes in around $2.3 trillion per year, or about 10 times the amount needed to service the nation's nearly $17 trillion national debt.
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No wonder Moody's hasn't been spooked by Washington's debt-ceiling soap opera. "We believe the government would continue to pay interest and principal on its debt even in the event that the debt limit is not raised, leaving its creditworthiness intact," the credit-rating agency serenely forecast last week. "The debt limit restricts government expenditures to the amount of its incoming revenues; it does not prohibit the government from servicing its debt. There is no direct connection between the debt limit … and a default."
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The real threat to America's national interest isn't a debt ceiling that won't go up. It's a national debt that won't stop going up.
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In recent weeks the president has been shamelessly hyping the horrors that will supposedly ensue if he doesn't get his way on raising the debt ceiling. He was on stronger ground as a presidential candidate in 2008, when he condemned George W. Bush for "driving up our national debt from $5 trillion … [to] over $9 trillion." Such a deluge of red ink was "irresponsible" and "unpatriotic," Obama said; as president he vowed to stem it. One month into his first term, convening a White House summit on fiscal responsibility, he delivered a message any Tea Party conservative could have applauded:
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"Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Washington these past few years, we cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences," the new president insisted. "I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay."
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But the prevailing wisdom prevailed.
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In the nearly five years since Obama took office, the national debt has soared to $17 trillion, a sum that would have been unfathomable as recently as a decade ago. Federal debt in public hands now equals nearly three-fourths of GDP. Except for World War II, that is higher than it has ever been.
We are up to our nostrils in debt, struggling to keep our heads above water, and all the while Washington heaps scorn on those who suggest that authorizing still more debt, to finance even more spending, will only make things worse.
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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HAVE A LOOK AT THE FUTURE

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http://www.cbn.com/tv/1509282970001

OBAMA CONFESSES: HE DELIBERATELY HURTS AMERICAN CITIZENS TO GAIN POLITICAL ADVANTAGE OVER REPUBLICAN LAWMAKERS

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October 11, 2013 12:00 AM

Obama’s Confession of Indifference
The president has admitted that his strategy is to punish the innocent to score partisan points.

By Jonah Goldberg

THE NATIONAL REVIEW 

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Jonah Goldberg

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Last week I wrote a column accusing the president of having a vindictive streak — of deliberately trying to make the lives of average Americans worse just so he could score ideological and political points.
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We already knew from how he handled the budget sequester that Obama liked this approach. He ordered Cabinet secretaries not to do their jobs — i.e., to manage as best they could under spending restraints — but instead to find ways to make the cuts needlessly painful for innocents caught in the Beltway crossfire.
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They dusted off the same playbook for the shutdown. As one park ranger told the Washington Times, “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can.”

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Admittedly, the case was circumstantial. There was no smoking gun. What was really needed was a confession.
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Obama delivered. On October 8, Obama was asked by Mark Knoller of CBS if he was “tempted” to sign the numerous funding bills passed by the GOP-controlled House that would greatly alleviate the pain of the shutdown. Republicans have voted to reopen parks, fund cancer trials for children at the NIH, and to keep FEMA and the FDA going through this partial shutdown. But Obama has threatened to veto any such efforts, effectively keeping the Senate from considering the legislation.
“Of course I’m tempted” to sign those bills, Obama explained. “But here’s the problem. What you’ve seen are bills that come up wherever Republicans are feeling political pressure, they put a bill forward. And if there’s no political heat, if there’s no television story on it, then nothing happens.”
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Obama’s answer dragged on, as all of Obama’s answers do. But the point was made. For the first time in American history, a president confessed to deliberately hurting his country to score points against his enemies.
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Which brings us to the national disgrace this week in which the Department of Defense denied death benefits to the families of fallen service members.
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White House press secretary Jay Carney insists, with operatic righteousness, that Obama never intended for the 26 families of the fallen to be denied this aid or to be hindered from retrieving their beloveds’ remains from Dover Air Force Base.
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But Carney is surely lying — and the evidence isn’t simply that his lips are moving.
Carney defends the administration by noting that the Pentagon warned Congress in late September that the shutdown would prevent the payments from going out.
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But Congress passed the Pay Our Military Act to fund the military through the shutdown. Administration officials first stonewalled Congress’s efforts for clarity on the issue, then the lawyers eventually determined that because the act didn’t specifically include the word “benefits,” they couldn’t err on the side of helping grieving families.
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In other words, when asked to make a judgment call, and knowing that Congress wanted the benefits paid, this administration still claimed its hands were tied by the fine print. Given how often the White House routinely ignores the plain meaning of the law — and the will of Congress — when it suits its political agenda, logic dictates that it denied the benefits on purpose.
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Moreover, by its own account, the White House says it knew for weeks this would happen. During all the back-and-forth, the White House did nothing to remedy the situation. It only sprang into outraged action when suddenly faced with a PR nightmare.
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“The president was very disturbed to learn of this problem,” Carney told the press Wednesday. And once he did learn of it, Carney insisted, he ordered the Defense Department and the Office of Management and Budget to fix the problem “today.”
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When Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry asked Carney when the president found out, Carney indignantly refused to answer. It’s not hard to guess why: because the president either knew all along, or his underlings believed they were following his plan.
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Let me say it again. The president confessed. It’s his express policy to punish innocent bystanders in order to score partisan points. That order has gone forth like a fatwa to the bureaucracy. And it is only when that policy blows up in his face that Obama becomes “very disturbed.”
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When terrible things happened on George W. Bush’s watch — Katrina, Abu Ghraib, etc. — the immediate liberal response was to insist that Bush had in fact ordered or wanted the terrible things to happen.
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Now we have a president openly admitting it — and no one seems to care.
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— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

DO YOU STILL NOT BELIEVE THAT WE HAVE A DICTATOR (KING/EMPEROR/MONARCH) IN THE WHITEHOUSE?

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OCTOBER 11, 2013 8:00 PM
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Park Service Paramilitaries
The government has King John’s idea of public lands.

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By Mark Steyn

NATIONAL REVIEW 

Park Ranger setting up barricades at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

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Mark Steyn

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If a government shuts down in the forest and nobody hears it, that’s the sound of liberty dying. The so-called shutdown is, as noted last week, mostly baloney: Eighty-three percent of the supposedly defunded government is carrying on as usual, impervious to whatever restraints the people’s representatives might wish to impose, and the 800,000 soi-disant “non-essential” workers have been assured that, as soon as the government is once again lawfully funded, they will be paid in full for all the days they’ve had at home.
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But the one place where a full-scale shutdown is being enforced is in America’s alleged “National Park Service,” a term of art that covers everything from canyons and glaciers to war memorials and historic taverns. The NPS has spent the last two weeks behaving as the paramilitary wing of the DNC, expending more resources in trying to close down open-air, unfenced areas than it would normally do in keeping them open. It began with the war memorials on the National Mall — that’s to say, stone monuments on pieces of grass under blue sky. It’s the equivalent of my New Hampshire town government shutting down and deciding therefore to ring the Civil War statue on the village common with yellow police tape and barricades.
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Still, the NPS could at least argue that these monuments were within their jurisdiction — although they shouldn’t be. Not content with that, the NPS shock troops then moved on to insisting that privately run sites such as the Claude Moore Colonial Farm and privately owned sites such as Mount Vernon were also required to shut. When the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway declined to comply with the government’s order to close (an entirely illegal order, by the way), the “shut down” Park Service sent armed agents and vehicles to blockade the hotel’s driveway.

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Even then, the problem with a lot of America’s scenic wonders is that, although they sit on National Park Service land, they’re visible from some distance. So, in South Dakota, having closed Mount Rushmore the NPS storm troopers additionally attempted to close the view of Mount Rushmore — that’s to say a stretch of the highway, where the shoulder widens and you can pull over and admire the stony visages of America’s presidents. Maybe it’s time to blow up Washington, Jefferson & Co. and replace them with a giant, granite sign rising into the heavens bearing the chiseled inscription
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 “DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING DOWN THERE.”
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But perhaps the most extraordinary story to emerge from the NPS is that of the tour group of foreign seniors whose bus was trapped in Yellowstone Park on the day the shutdown began. They were pulled over photographing a herd of bison when an armed ranger informed them, with the insouciant ad-hoc unilateral lawmaking to which the armed bureaucrat is distressingly prone, that taking photographs counts as illegal “recreation.” “Sir, you are recreating,” the ranger informed the tour guide. And we can’t have that, can we? They were ordered back to the Old Faithful Inn, next to the geyser of the same name, but forbidden to leave said inn to look at said geyser. Armed rangers were posted at the doors, and, just in case one of the wily Japanese or Aussies managed to outwit his captors by escaping through one of the inn’s air ducts and down to the geyser, a fleet of NPS SUVs showed up every hour and a half throughout the day, ten minutes before Old Faithful was due to blow, to surround the geyser and additionally ensure that any of America’s foreign visitors trying to photograph the impressive natural phenomenon from a second-floor hotel window would still wind up with a picture full of government officials. The following morning the bus made the two-and-a-half-hour journey to the park boundary but was prevented from using any of the bathrooms en route, including at a private dude ranch whose owner was threatened with the loss of his license if he allowed any tourist to use the facilities.
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At the same time as the National Park Service was holding legal foreign visitors under house arrest, it was also allowing illegal immigrants to hold a rally on the supposedly closed National Mall. At this bipartisan amnesty bash, the Democrat House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said she wanted to “thank the president for enabling us to gather here” and Republican congressman Mario Diaz-Balart also expressed his gratitude to the administration for “allowing us to be here.”
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Is this for real? It’s not King Barack’s land; it’s supposed to be the people’s land, and his most groveling and unworthy subjects shouldn’t require a dispensation by His Benign Majesty to set foot on it. It is disturbing how easily large numbers of Americans lapse into a neo-monarchical prostration that few subjects of actual monarchies would be comfortable with these days. But then in actual monarchies the king takes a more generous view of “public lands.” Two years after Magna Carta, in 1217, King Henry III signed the Charter of the Forest, which despite various amendments and replacement statutes remained in force in Britain for some three-quarters of a millennium, until the early Seventies. If Magna Carta is a landmark in its concept of individual rights, the Forest Charter played an equivalent role in advancing the concept of the commons, the public space. Repealing various restrictions by his predecessors, Henry III opened the royal forests to the freemen of England, granted extensive grazing and hunting rights, and eliminated the somewhat severe penalty of death for taking the king’s venison. The NPS have not yet fried anyone for taking King Barack’s deer, but it is somewhat sobering to reflect that an English peasant enjoyed more freedom on the sovereign’s land in the 13th century than a freeborn American does on “the people’s land” in the 21st century.
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And we’re talking about a lot more acreage: Forty percent of the state of California is supposedly federal land, and thus officially closed to the people of the state. The geyser stasi of the National Park Service have in effect repealed the Charter of the Forest. President Obama and his enforcers have the same concept of the royal forest that King John did. The government does not own this land; the Park Service are merely the janitorial staff of “we the people” (to revive an obsolescent concept). No harm will befall the rocks and rivers by posting a sign at the entrance saying “No park ranger on duty during government shutdown. Proceed beyond this point at your own risk.” And, at the urban monuments, you don’t even need that: It is disturbing that minor state officials even presume to have the right to prevent the citizenry walking past the Vietnam Wall.

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I wonder what those Japanese and Australian tourists prevented from photographing bison or admiring a geyser make of U.S. claims to be “the land of the free.” When a government shutdown falls in the forest, Americans should listen very carefully. The government is telling you something profound and important about how it understands the power relationship between them and you.
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The National Park Service should be out of the business of urban landmarks, and the vast majority of our “national” parks should be returned to the states. After the usurpation of the people’s sovereignty this month, the next president might usefully propose a new Charter of the Forest.
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— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

editor’s note: This article has been amended since its initial publication.

SENATOR JIM DeMINT WRITES A LETTER TO BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA

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A Letter to President Obama

Jim DeMint

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October 10, 2013 at 6:30 am

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http://blog.heritage.org/2013/10/10/jim-demint-letter-to-president-obama-about-obamacare/

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Dear Mr. President:
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As the temporary slowdown in government operations enters its second week, I write to explain why conservatives have insisted on making the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act the prime source of contention. Speaking for our organization, I can tell you we’re in this fight because of the harm the law is inflicting on Americans across the country.
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We are fighting for people like Michael Cerpok, a leukemia patient in Arizona, who recently learned he will lose his current health insurance due to this misguided law. He notes that “my $4,500 out-of-pocket [expense] is going to turn into a minimum of $26,000 out-of-pocket to see the doctor that I’ve been seeing the last seven years,” and he worries that he and his wife might need to take second jobs to stay afloat.
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We are fighting for people like California resident Tom Waschura, who voted for you twice, yet was shocked by the higher premium bill he recently received in the mail. Tom’s insurance rates will go up by almost $10,000 for him and his family. He fears that these higher premiums will harm his family, and jobs in his area: “When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.”
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We are fighting for people like Rod Coons and Florence Peace, a retired Indiana couple satisfied with their current coverage. “I’d prefer to stay with our current plan because it meets our needs,” says Rod. But their plan isn’t government-approved under Obamacare’s new rules, so Rod and Florence are losing their health insurance plan at the end of this year.
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You have claimed that Obamacare has nothing to do with the budget. But over the next decade, this widely unpopular program will add nearly $1.8 trillion in new federal spending—and will cost taxpayers trillions more beyond that, making it nearly impossible to balance the federal budget. What’s more, for millions of struggling Americans, the law will crush their family budgets due to fewer work hours, lost jobs, and higher premiums. With the economy still mired in a scattered and sluggish recovery, these people deserve relief from Obamacare—and they deserve it now.
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Your Administration has already granted numerous waivers and exemptions during the three years since the law was passed. Millions of union members received temporary waivers from the law’s costly benefit requirements. Big businesses have received a one-year delay from the onerous employer mandate—a delay your Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, struggled to defend in an interview earlier this week. And Members of Congress have obtained special treatment for themselves and their staffs—illegally—that allows them to continue to receive taxpayer-funded insurance subsidies.
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At a time when so many Americans are suffering because of the rollout of this new law, I remain puzzled by your failure to acknowledge the faults caused by this unfair, unworkable, and unpopular measure. We believe the law should be fully repealed, but at minimum, both sides should agree not to fund the law for one year—a “time-out” that would halt the law’s most harmful effects before they start.
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Even though Democrats have thus far refused to negotiate on anything related to the current government slowdown, millions of citizens need relief from this law. I encourage you and your Administration to work with Congress on ways to stop Obamacare from harming the American people and the American economy.
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All the best,

Senator Jim DeMint

WATCHING FLOOR SPEECHES IN CONGRESS IS LIKE WATCHING BEYONCE LIP-SYNCH THE NATIONAL ANTHEM

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Published: Oct. 4, 2013 Updated: 11:55 a.m.

Mark Steyn: Manning the Barrycades of punitive liberalism

       MARK STEYN

Syndicated columnist

letters@ocregister.com

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Way back in January, when it emerged that Beyoncé had treated us to the first-ever lip-synched national anthem at a presidential inauguration, I suggested in this space that this strange pseudo-performance embodied the decay of America’s political institutions from the real thing into mere simulacrum. But that applies to government “crises,” too – such as the Obamacare “rollout,” the debt “ceiling,” and the federal “shutdown,” to name only the three current railroad tracks to which the virtuous damsel of Big Government has been simultaneously tied by evil mustache-twirling Republicans.
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This week’s “shutdown” of government, for example, suffers (at least for those of us curious to see it reduced to Somali levels) from the awkward fact that the overwhelming majority of the government is not shut down at all. Indeed, much of it cannot be shut down. Which is the real problem facing America. “Mandatory spending” (Social Security, Medicare, et al) is authorized in perpetuity – or, at any rate, until total societal collapse. If you throw in the interest payments on the debt, that means two-thirds of the federal budget is beyond the control of Congress’s so-called federal budget process. That’s why you’re reading government “shutdown” stories about the Panda Cam at the Washington Zoo and the first lady’s ghost-Tweeters being furloughed.
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Nevertheless, just because it’s a phony crisis doesn’t mean it can’t be made even phonier. The perfect symbol of the shutdown-simulacrum so far has been the World War II Memorial. This is an open-air facility on the National Mall – that’s to say, an area of grass with a monument at the center. By comparison with, say, the IRS, the National Parks Service is not usually one of the more controversial government agencies. But, come “shutdown,” they’re reborn as the shock troops of the punitive bureaucracy. Thus, they decided to close down an unfenced open-air site – which, oddly enough, requires more personnel to shut than it would to keep it open.

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 So the Parks Service dispatched their own vast army to the World War II Memorial to ring it with barricades and yellow “Police Line – Do Not Cross” tape strung out like the world’s longest “We Support Our Troops” ribbon. For good measure, they issued a warning that anybody crossing the yellow line would be liable to arrest – or presumably, in extreme circumstances, the same multibullet ventilation that that mentally ill woman from Connecticut wound up getting from the coppers. In a heartening sign that the American spirit is not entirely dead, at least among a small percentage of nonagenarians, a visiting party of veterans pushed through the barricades and went to honor their fallen comrades, mordantly noting for reporters that, after all, when they’d shown up on the beach at Normandy, it, too, had not been officially open.

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 One would not be altogether surprised to find the feds stringing yellow police tape along the Rio Grande, the 49th Parallel and the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, if only to keep Americans in, rather than anybody else out. Still, I would like to have been privy to the high-level discussions at which the government took the decision to install its Barrycades on open parkland. For anyone with a modicum of self-respect, it’s difficult to imagine how even the twerpiest of twerp bureaucrats would consent to stand at a crowd barrier and tell a group of elderly soldiers who’ve flown in from across the country that they’re forbidden to walk across a piece of grass and pay their respects. Yet, if any National Parks Service employee retained enough sense of his own humanity to balk at these instructions or other spiteful, petty closures of semiwilderness fishing holes and the like, we’ve yet to hear about it.

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 The World War II Memorial exists thanks to some $200 million in private donations – plus $15 million or so from Washington: In other words, the feds paid for the grass. But the thug usurpers of the bureaucracy want to send a message: In today’s America, everything is the gift of the government, and exists only at the government’s pleasure, whether it’s your health insurance, your religious liberty, or the monument to your fallen comrades. The Barrycades are such a perfect embodiment of what James Piereson calls “punitive liberalism” they should be tied round Obama’s neck forever, in the way that “ketchup is a vegetable” got hung around Reagan-era Republicans. Alas, the court eunuchs of the Obama media cannot rouse themselves even on behalf of the nation’s elderly warriors.

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 Meanwhile, Republicans offered a bill to prevent the shutdown affecting experimental cancer trials for children. The Democrats rejected it. “But if you can help one child who has cancer,” CNN’s Dana Bash asked Harry Reid, “why wouldn’t you do it?”

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 “Why would we want to do that?” replied the Senate Majority Leader, denouncing Miss Bash’s question as “irresponsible.” For Democrats, the budget is all or nothing. Republican bills to fund this or that individual program have to be rejected out of hand as an affront to the apparent constitutional inviolability of the “continuing resolution.” In fact, government by “continuing resolution” is a sleazy racket: The legislative branch is supposed to legislate. Instead, they’re presented with a yea-or-nay vote on a single all-or-nothing multitrillion-dollar band-aid stitched together behind closed doors to hold the federal leviathan together while it belches its way through to the next budget cycle. As Professor Angelo Codevilla of Boston University put it, “This turns democracy into a choice between tyranny and anarchy.” It’s certainly a perversion of responsible government: Congress has less say over specific federal expenditures than the citizens of my New Hampshire backwater do at Town Meeting over the budget for a new fence at the town dump. Pace Sen. Reid, Republican proposals to allocate spending through targeted, mere multibillion-dollar appropriations is not only not “irresponsible” but, in fact, a vast improvement over the “continuing resolution”: To modify Lord Acton, power corrupts, but continuing power corrupts continually.

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 America has no budget process. That’s why it’s the brokest nation in history. So a budgeting process that can’t control the budget in a legislature that can’t legislate leads to a government shutdown that shuts down open areas of grassland and the unmanned boat launch on the Bighorn River in Montana. Up next: the debt ceiling showdown, in which we argue over everything except the debt. The conventional wisdom of the U.S. media is that Republicans are being grossly irresponsible not just to wave through another couple trillion or so on Washington’s overdraft facility. Really? Other countries are actually reducing debt: New Zealand, for example, has a real budget that diminishes net debt from 26 percent of GDP to 17 percent by 2020. By comparison, America’s net debt is currently about 88 percent of GDP, and we’re debating only whether to increase it automatically or with a few ineffectual strings attached.

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 My favorite book of the moment is “The Liberty Amendments,” the new bestseller by Mark Levin – not because I agree with all his proposed constitutional amendments, and certainly not because I think they represent the views of a majority of Americans, but because he’s fighting on the right battleground. A century of remorseless expansion by the “federal” government has tortured the constitutional order beyond meaning. America was never intended to be a homogenized one-size-fits-all nation of 300 million people run by a government as centralized as France’s. It’s no surprise that, when it tries to be one, it doesn’t work terribly well.

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©MARK STEYN

WHAT'S WITH THE JEWS AND AMERICAN POLITICS

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Rabbi Pruzansky's Blog

A compilation of the Rabbi's recent thoughts and ideas..

http://rabbipruzansky.com/

Jewish and Republican

Posted on October 4, 2013 

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    Is there any hope for increasing the participation of Jews in the Republican Party? Should there be?

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    The Pew Research Study on American Jews released this week presents a stark view of the spiritual lives of our community today. The intermarriage rate is up to 58% and secularism is rampant – all worthy of attention in its time. Politically, 70% of Jews are or lean to the Democrats, while 22% of Jews are or lean to the Republicans. That is completely out of sync with the rest of America, which favors Democrats 49-36%, although other studies show a much closer tally. The Pew findings mirror the election results from 2012, in which Jews favored Obama over Romney by 69-30%.
The gap is enormous.
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At a Republican Jewish Coalition forum I moderated last night, two Republicans of note – Ari Fleischer (former Press Secretary to President Bush) and Matt Brooks (longtime head of the RJC) shared their views on the past and future of the Republican Party and its search for support in the Jewish community. Both are seasoned, articulate political professionals, and both defy the media stereotype of Republicans as greedy, heartless oligarchs.
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The Jewish vote has not been in play for Republicans for almost a century. Abraham Lincoln was greatly admired by Jews; many actually called him Father Abraham, and some assumed he was Jewish. His greatness and decency steered Jewish votes to his Republican Party. For a half-century after Lincoln’s assassination, the Jewish vote was evenly split, similar to other ethnic groups. That changed abruptly.
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The last Republican president who won a majority of the Jewish vote was Warren Gamaliel Harding in the election of 1920. (Actually, a plurality; Harding won 43% of the Jewish vote, to the Democrat James Davis’ 19%. The balance went to the Socialist Eugene V. Debs, who garnered 38% of the Jewish vote while running his campaign from a prison cell.) Debs’ success augured a seismic shift to the far left in Jewish political attitudes and voting patterns. Since then, the Jewish vote for the Democratic candidate has never fallen below 60% and has reached as high as 90%, averaging 79%, with the one outlier the Reagan defeat of Carter in 1980. Even then, Carter received 45% of the Jewish vote to Reagan’s 39%.
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The other outlier in the Pew data is the Orthodox support of  the Republican Party. Orthodox Jews are or lean to the Republicans over the Democrats by 57-36% (!), signifying not only a greater identification with the ideas and values of the GOP but also an ever-growing chasm between the Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish communities in lifestyle, attitudes and Jewish identification. As the Orthodox proportion of the Jewish population increases (both through natural growth and through the attrition wrought by the assimilation and intermarriage of the non-Orthodox), the best hope for Republican growth lies in the ongoing secularization of the Jewish people that is robbing the Jewish world of thinking, breathing, practicing and committed Jews. Sadly, what is good for the Republicans is a catastrophe for the Jewish world as a whole.
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That point was not raised at last night’s forum, which focused on an analysis of past and future trends as well as current events. Both men decried the inability of the recent Republican nominees to connect with people, real people. Policies that work well in the abstract have to be presented in a way in which real people understand how they will benefit (e.g., from a job rather than a handout), just like failed policies have to be exposed because of their harmful effects to real people and not just as violations of the theories of the Austrian School of Economics. As interesting as those are – all due respect to Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises – most people don’t relate to it, but they do relate to the stories about real people.
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That failing is on display now – and one other, see below – in the showdown in DC. The Democrats and mainstream media are skilled at portraying the hardships caused to people by the partial shutdown of the government. Offices closed, workers unemployed and tourists inconvenienced at the national parks and monuments are the staples of news coverage. Interestingly, I polled last night’s audience of hundreds and asked how many of them are affected by the government shutdown? Five hands went up. Certainly, we grieve for anyone out of work even temporarily, although that effect will be ameliorated, as in the past, when the workers return to their offices and are reimbursed with all their back pay. Even temporary unemployment is unsettling, as is the need to access some legitimate function of government and to be turned away. It was shocking, though, how few people in that audience felt any effect at all from the government shutdown, ample testimony to the virtues of limited government and the vices of a bloated bureaucracy. Alas, in the Pew survey, Jews prefer a bigger government with more services over a smaller government with fewer services by 54-38%.
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Both men emphasized the traditional American values that have always been embraced by the Republicans, and some that have dissipated that must be revived if the Republican Party will continue to be viable. The values of hard work, self-help and personal responsibility have taken a hit in recent years. By the same token, Republicans have to shed the label of being anti-immigrant, an accusation with which they have been bludgeoned for years, and in part of the party, with some justification. Romney’s missteps in this area cost him; the fact that Democrats tarred him unfairly with being a ruthless tycoon who relishes firing people, murdered a woman with cancer, and throws elderly women over cliffs, didn’t help his cause either.
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Both recognized that the past emphasis on social issues served more to alienate potential supporters than to attract them, especially among young people. The unresolved problem is that a good segment of the party is motivated by the social issues, and tends to sit out elections rather than vote for a less-than perfect nominee, even though that is a foolish, counterproductive and self-defeating strategy.
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Not unexpectedly, the audience was largely disappointed with the Obama presidency, and not only for its failures of policy. The President does not know how to lead – only to criticize and to decree. He feels that he was elected dictator, not president, and so need not negotiate with Republicans on anything. “I won,” period, oblivious to the reality that the Republicans in the House also won, and with a greater share of the vote that Obama received. And the poor messaging of the Republicans fails to educate the public, as in the inability to counter the President’s repeated assertion that the debt ceiling must be raised so “we can pay our bills,” as if borrowing money to pay bills is actually paying bills.
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Ronald Reagan negotiated and compromised with Tip O’Neill like Bill Clinton negotiated and compromised with Newt Gingrich in a way that Obama refuses to with John Boehner. In effect, he has drawn a red line; fortunately, Obama’s red lines have been known to fade in the past.
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Asked by an audience member about Obama’s attitudes towards Israel, Ari Fleischer replied, incisively, that in contrast to President Bush, Obama does not perceive Israel “as a friend to be supported but as a problem to be managed.” That is why the body language, the earlier iciness, the bad optics and the policies have tended to the negative –and why the fears in Israel are growing of a bogus US-Iran agreement that echoes the failed agreements between the US and North Korea that simply bought time for the North Koreans to complete their nuclear program.
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Is there a path to victory for the Republican Party, and a mechanism to increase Jewish support? Parties out of power tend to look more fractious and unruly. It was Will Rogers who said, back when the Democrats were on the presidential outs, “I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat.”
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Today’s Republicans can relate. The cacophony of voices, disparate ideas and solutions, and the multiplicity of wings and factions make the party seem as ungovernable as the nation. But that rowdiness can also be a sign of vitality and vigorous debate. A core remains that should appeal to traditional Jews: personal responsibility, individual liberty, limited government, public assistance not as an entitlement for all eternity but to help the needy become independent and self-sufficient, and a strong, respected America across the globe.
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Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel

ROME BURNS AND THE OLIGARCHY PARTIES ON

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Party Politics

National Review's Happy Warrior
September 17, 2013

EX UN-AMBASSADOR SUSAN RICE WITH SOME OLD ACTOR
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Prowling my hotel room the other night, I discovered a copy of the latest Vogue, kindly provided by the management. So, after bringing myself up to speed on Jennifer Lawrence — a "girl on fire," apparently — I turned to a profile of Susan Rice.
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 She was the girl sent to put out the fire, dispatched by the Obama administration to slog through all the Sunday talk shows the weekend after Benghazi and blame it on some video. In Sir Henry Wotton's famous formulation, an ambassador is a man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. In the case of Susan Rice, a U.N. ambassador is a broad sent to lie to her country for the good of her man — viz., Barack Obama. Happily, it worked. A year on, the director of the video is still in custody, and Miss Rice is now national-security adviser.
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 So she and Vogue were in party mood:
"It's a warm evening in June, and guests are assembling for a party she's throwing in honor of LGBT Pride Month at the penthouse of the Waldorf Towers, the official residence of the U.N. Ambassador. Actress turned humanitarian activist Mia Farrow, wearing blue tinted glasses, is one of the first to arrive. Within minutes she's joined by The New York Times's executive editor, Jill Abramson . . ." And soon things are swinging: "They mingle and sip sparkling wine in the elegant living room next to a framed portrait of Oprah Winfrey and First Lady Michelle Obama resting their heads on Rice's shoulders . . ."
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Presumably Vogue subscribers are impressed by this sort of thing, but it would seem an odd opening paragraph for a profile of even recent U.N. ambassadors. Hey, maybe I'm wrong; maybe Vogue profiled cocktail soirées chez John Bolton attended by Andie MacDowell or Valerie Bertinelli, and with the great man photographed between Phil Donahue and Barbara Bush, or Merv Griffin and Mamie Eisenhower. Who knows? Out there, in a ramshackle outpost somewhere on the fringes of the map, brave Americans abandoned by their government are dying on a rooftop. But here in the metropolis the dazzling klieg-light luster of Mia Farrow and Jill Abramson plunges all else into shadow.
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If you're not looking at the world through Mia Farrow's blue-tinted glasses, if you're in Beijing or Moscow, Ankara or Canberra, it's the shadow that everyone sees, very clearly — the sepulchral Habsburgian twilight of a dimming power enjoying its last waltz. Like Vienna exactly a century ago, America retains a certain creative energy, if you're willing to put Jay-Z up there with Franz Lehár. It is at the forefront of therapeutic culture: If Freud had thought to stick his couch on a TV set, he might have made as much dough as Oprah, or at least Dr. Phil. As Vienna sat on an underground "river of sex" (as William Boyd calls it in his recent novel Waiting for Sunrise), so in America the river is overground and its Niagara-like roar the unceasing background din of daily life: A New York mayoral candidate twitpics his penis. A putative successor to San Diego's grope-fiend mayor is caught masturbating in a city-hall men's room. Miley Cyrus in her scanties "twerks" — or is twerked upon (I'm not sure I can reliably say which) — live on TV. Yawn. Next . . .
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No one could be further from the octogenarian Franz Josef than our young emperor, but even hip courtiers draw the line at lèse majesté, and so rodeo clowns who disrespect the sovereign are banned for life. On the distant horizon, the contours of the post-American world begin to rise, but the preoccupations of our ruling class grow ever more myopic. One of the world's richest women flies all the way to Switzerland in order to confuse a Zurich boutique selling $38,000 handbags with an Alabama lunch counter 60 years ago, to the consternation of the poor shopgirl who knows nothing of America's peculiar parochial obsessions, has never heard of Trayvon Martin, and lives in a city where pretty much the only black women around are the more fashion-conscious African dictators' consorts in town to visit their safe-deposit boxes. But, as at the Hofbau, the ancient social rituals of our own court permit no diversion from the program: If it's Tuesday, it must be racism.
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Alas, in the world beyond the penthouse of the Waldorf Towers, it's harder to tell whom the A-list invites should go to: From Afghanistan to Egypt, a debt-ridden America bankrolls its own eclipse, betraying friends, promoting enemies, despised by both. In the dog days of summer, the new national-security adviser tweets it in from her pad in the Hamptons or wherever, even as the hyperpower readies for its next unwon war: After America's slo-mo defeat in the Hindu Kush, and its ineffectual leading-from-behind in Libya, and its thwarted Muslim Brotherhood outreach in Cairo, Obama is confidently dispatching the gunboats to Syria. If you're Bashar Assad, you must be as befuddled as that Zurich handbag clerk: Hillary hailed you as a "reformer"; no senatorial frequent flyer courted you more assiduously than John Kerry; the guys trying to depose you hate the Great Satan far more than you do, and are the local branch office of the fellows who turned lower Manhattan into a big smoking hole. Yet Washington is readying to take you out — or at any rate, in George W. Bush's unimprovable summation of desultory Clinton-style warmongering, readying to fire a $2 million cruise missile through a tent and hit a camel in the butt. The only novelty with this latest of ineptly rattled sabers is whether Tsar Putin will stand by and let Obama knock off a Russian client.*
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Putin, Assad, General Sisi in Cairo, and many others think they have the measure of Obama, Kerry, and Rice. Poor deluded fools. If only, like Mia, they could see them through blue-tinted glasses . . .
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*I wrote this piece for the last issue of National Review. Re Putin, we now know the answer.

HARRY REID HAS USURPED JOHN BOEHNER'S ROLE CONTRA THE CONSTITUTION

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October 3, 2013 4:00 AM The Origins of the Origination Clause
The House’s power of the purse includes spending bills.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE 

Statue of James Madison at his Monteplier home.

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Andrew C. McCarthy

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In a Bench Memos post, my friend Matt Franck objects to the contention in my column for last weekend that the Constitution’s Origination Clause (Art. I, Sec. 7) gives the House of Representatives primacy over spending as well as taxing. Matt claims that my interpretation is bereft of historical support, a defect I’m said to camouflage by an extravagant reading of an “at best . . . ambiguous” passage in Madison’s Federalist No. 58.
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It is Matt’s history, though, that is incomplete. As Mark Steyn observes, there is a rich Anglo-American tradition of vesting authority over not merely taxing but also spending in the legislative body closest to the people. This tradition, stretching back nearly to the Magna Carta, inspired the Origination Clause. It also informed Madison, whose ruminations, besides being far from ambiguous on the House’s power of the purse, are entitled to great weight — not only because he was among the Constitution’s chief architects but also because his explication of the Framers’ design helped induce skeptics of centralized government and its tyrannical proclivities to adopt the Constitution.
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Plainly, Matt is correct that the Origination Clause refers to “bills for raising revenue.” From the time it was debated at the Philadelphia convention, however, the concept at issue clearly referred to more than tax bills. It was about reposing in the people, through their most immediately accountable representatives, the power of the purse. Indeed, the term persistently used throughout the Framers’ debates was “money bills” — the phrase used by Elbridge Gerry, perhaps the principal advocate of the Origination Clause, when (as the debate records recount) he “moved to restrain the Senatorial branch from originating money bills. The other branch [i.e., the House] was more immediately the representatives of the people, and it was a maxim that the people ought to hold the purse-strings.”
Matt portrays my position as eccentric. Nevertheless, the belief that the Origination Clause conveys the House’s holding of the purse strings — i.e., that it refers to the output as well as the intake of government revenue — is hardly unique to me. The Heritage Foundation’s Guide to the Constitution, for example, notes that the clause was meant to be “consistent with the English requirement that money bills must commence in the House of Commons.” Traditionally, that requirement aggregated taxing with spending — the “power over the purse” — which the Framers sought to repose “with the legislative body closer to the people.”
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Similarly, the Annenberg Institute for Civics, in its series on the Constitution, instructs students that the Clause means “the House of Representatives must begin the process when it comes to raising and spending money. It is the chamber where all taxing and spending bills start” (emphasis added). To be sure, the lesson goes on to state that “only the House may introduce a bill that involves taxes.” Yet this obviously would not suffice to explain the conclusion that the House must “begin the process” when “spending money” — as well as raising money — is involved. That conclusion, like Madison’s, draws on the fact that the Framers intended to mirror the venerable English tradition of vesting the all-important power of the purse in the people’s direct representatives.
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Mark Steyn recounts the Westminster practice, since the mid-17th-century reign of Charles II, that the Commons would not permit the Lords to alter “money bills.” In tracing the practice back much further, I am indebted to Nicholas Schmitz, a Rhodes scholar and Marine veteran who has studied the ancient Anglo roots of the Origination Clause. From his work I’ve learned that it was already solidified custom by the reign of Richard II (1377–99) that “grants” were the province of Commons, albeit, back then, “with the assent of the Lords.”
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“Grants” did not refer merely to the extraction of assets by taxation; the term is also concerned with the purpose to which these funds were to be put. England’s 1689 Bill of Rights thus specified that a “grant of Parliament” was a necessary precondition to “levying money for or to the use of the crown.” Such grants were, in essence, appropriations. As the process evolved, the House of Commons structured taxes strictly in accordance with the specific purposes cited by the crown. It was very much a two-sided ledger, with Commons jealously guarding its oversight of both money in and money out.
As a number of the Framers were admirers of Locke, it is also worth remembering Locke’s teaching that governments are formed to protect private property. The concept stems, in part, from the (by then) established understanding that the state could legitimately extract the citizen’s property only by the consent of the people’s representatives for a proper public purpose. That is the foundation of the Origination Clause.
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Given these roots, it should come as no surprise that, at the time of the Founding, several of the state constitutions vested in their lower legislative houses the prerogative of, in the words of Georgia’s constitution, initiating “bills for raising revenue or appropriating moneys.” Indeed, in famously supporting colonial opposition to the Stamp Act in 1765, William Pitt observed, “The Commons of America, represented in their several assemblies, have ever been in possession of the exercise of this their constitutional right of giving and granting their own money. They would have been slaves if they had not enjoyed it” (emphasis added).
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Maryland’s lower house, to take one example, was responsible for initiating “money bills,” which were defined as “every bill, assessing, levying, or applying taxes or supplies, for the support of government, or the current expenses of the State, or appropriating money in the treasury” (emphasis added). In Massachusetts, the home of Elbridge Gerry, colonial practice was that taxes and “money bills” were the privilege of the House of Representatives, with the upper house empowered only to concur or not concur. The Commonwealth’s 1780 constitution, adumbrating the federal Constitution’s Origination Clause, mandated that “money bills shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments, as on other bills.”
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Let’s move directly to the 1787 convention in Philadelphia.
One of the major challenges confronting the delegates was to broker the competing claims of small and large states. As Franklin summarized, “If a proportional representation takes place, the small States contend that their liberties will be in danger. If an equality of votes is to be put in its place, the large States say their money will be in danger.” This resulted, of course, in the great compromise: equality among states in the Senate and proportional representation (by population) in the House. But this arrangement was inadequate to quell the large states’ fears; it was also necessary to tinker with the powers assigned to the two chambers. As Franklin put it, the Senate would be restricted

generally in all appropriations & dispositions of money to be drawn out of the General Treasury; and in all laws for supplying that Treasury, the Delegates of the several States shall have suffrage in proportion to the Sums which their respective States do actually contribute to the Treasury [emphasis added].

When the Origination Clause was specifically taken up, a spirited debate ensued, with some delegates protesting against restrictions on the Senate. According to Madison’s records, however, what “generally prevailed” was the argument of George Mason:

The consideration which weighed with the Committee was that the 1st branch [i.e., the House of Representatives] would be the immediate representatives of the people, the 2nd [the Senate] would not. Should the latter have the power of giving away the people’s money, they might soon forget the source from whence they received it [emphasis added]. We might soon have an Aristocracy.

Mason’s concerns seem prescient in our era of mammoth national government presided over by an entrenched ruling class of professional politicians. He worried that

the Senate is not like the H. of Representatives chosen frequently and obliged to return frequently among the people. They are chosen by the Sts for 6 years, will probably settle themselves at the seat of Government, will pursue schemes for their aggrandizement. . . . If the Senate can originate, they will in the recess of the Legislative Sessions, hatch their mischievous projects, for their own purposes, and have their money bills ready cut & dried, (to use a common phrase) for the meeting of the H. of Representatives. . . . The purse strings should be in the hands of the Representatives of the people.

Yes, the purse strings, not just the power to tax. Concededly, the Origination Clause speaks of bills “for raising revenue.” In selling the Constitution to the nation, though, it was portrayed as securing in the hands of the people’s representatives the power of the purse. It is an empty power if spending is not included.
The relevant paragraph in Madison’s Federalist No. 58 is worth quoting in full (all italics mine):

A constitutional and infallible resource still remains with the larger states by which they will be able at all times to accomplish their just purposes. The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse — that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government. This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.

To my mind, what Madison describes unquestionably transcends taxing authority. I believe a “complete and effectual weapon . . . for obtaining a redress of every grievance” must give “the immediate representatives of the people” the power to block funding for a government takeover of health care that was enacted by fraud and strong-arming; that was adamantly represented not to be the tax that the Supreme Court later found it to be; and that is substantially opposed by the people, and has been since its enactment.
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Matt begs to differ, relying on the text of the Origination Clause, the reductive construction of “revenue” as mere “taxation,” and Joseph Story’s Commentaries. This is reasonable, and — as Matt has emphasized — it certainly reflects conventional Washington wisdom. But I do not think it gets to the power of the purse that the Framers — and Madison, quite explicitly — were driving at.
In fact, Story’s conclusion that the origination power “has been confined to bills to levy taxes in the strict sense of the word,” and not to ordinary legislation “which may incidentally create revenue,” is an overly narrow interpretation of the clause’s meaning, arrived at by taking out of context a portion of the delegates’ debate that related to two tangential concerns about potential abuse of the origination power. Specifically, Madison worried that the Origination Clause could be read too broadly, thus hampering the Senate’s ability to originate any legislation — since most federal legislation would surely have some conceivable economic consequence. Relatedly, other delegates worried that the House could abuse its origination power by tacking non-revenue legislation onto money bills in order to frustrate the Senate’s ability to make amendments.
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The Framers wanted to endow the House with the power of the purse, but did not want to open the door to such shenanigans. Thus the fleeting focus on “incidental” levies: The debates fleshed out the principle that the Origination Clause was intended to apply to bills the patent purpose of which involved public money. That hardly meant, as Story inferred, that the Clause would only ever apply to “bills to levy taxes in the strict sense.” It meant that, in the peculiar situation of ordinary legislation that only incidentally raised money, the Senate would not be impeded by the clause from either initiating or amending such a bill.
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I would also note that constricting the House’s Origination Clause power to taxation would render it a nullity — which, admittedly, is how modern Washington treats it. If the Senate is freely permitted to originate appropriations that increase our already olympian debt through more borrowing, it is effectively originating taxation every bit as much as if it forthrightly branded as “taxation” the bills thus initiated.
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Two final points.
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 First, I have no illusions that, at this late hour, the Senate would passively accept the premise that the House holds the full power of the purse, or that somewhere down the road the courts would enforce this principle. But each component of our government has the power and, I’d submit, the duty to construe its own constitutional authority in good faith. I am saying that if Republicans truly want to make good on a pledge to reinvigorate originalism, the House should be guided by Madison in its dealings with the Senate. That would make for some contentious times (similar to what we are witnessing now), but so what? Our system is based on the expectation that officials will vigorously exercise their quite intentionally separate and competing powers. The resolution of the inevitable collisions should be more a political process guided by constitutional principles than a legal process determined by courts. The former is how compromise and consensus properly emerge.
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Second, there is some very interesting Origination Clause litigation ongoing against Obamacare, and it involves a construction of the clause that both Matt and I would probably find legitimate. Representative Trent Franks (R., Ariz.) and other House conservatives claim that the so-called Affordable Care Act violates the clause because it was a tax-hiking bill (as the Supreme Court has held) that originated in the Senate.
There will be much more to say about this legal challenge. I believe it will be less abstract and less contentious than our debate over the theoretical extent to which the Origination Clause reposes in the House the power of the purse.
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— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.