Horowitz: Saving the Tea Party-GOP Marriage

"Can the marriage between the Tea Party and the GOP survive," asks David Horowitz. His answer is, "It better." In a thought-provoking article at National Review Online, Horowitz argues that the grass-roots Tea Party movement is an essential "equal and opposite force" that the GOP needs to be effective against the Left.
 
Noting "that the basic difference between the Tea Party and the Republican party is a matter of tactics and temperament, not policy and ideology," Horowitz asserts that "a tactical difference is no grounds for divorce."  He urges both sides to understand that "the Republican Party—like conservatives generally—is guided by a business mentality, whereas the Left's mentality is missionary, and that is where the Tea Party can prove most valuable.

A business approach is fundamentally positive. ... Where possible it wants to avoid conflict and the alienation of others; it is looking to maximize customers and expand markets, and therefore to make deals. A businessman would rather buy you out or merge with you than crush you. When obstacles present themselves, it is cheaper, and in the long run more productive, to compromise and find a way around them.

This is the mentality of our Washington insiders. A way of looking at the schism between the Tea Party and the Republican party is that the Tea Party, which is an upstart, is driven more by the missionary mentality, while the Republican party is more of a business establishment with a business temperament and approach. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are dealmakers, not game-changers.

The catch is that this is probably not the best mentality to hold when the opposition is a missionary party that views politics as war and that is out for your blood. In these circumstances, an equal and opposite force — a missionary force — may be required to defeat it. The grassroots understands this, which is why and how the Tea Party was born ...

The very fact that the Tea Party is missionary, that it is organized as a cause, makes its demands and actions seem impractical and even extreme to business-as-usual Republicans. This is inevitable. In order to change things you have to take positions that seem unrealistic and may even seem extreme. It’s the nature of change, and the Tea Party is about change. ... Without the Tea Party, there would be no Ted Cruz, no Rand Paul, no Mike Lee.

Horowitz believes "Cruz's stand on the Senate floor," far from hurting the GOP's 2014 prospects, "lit a fire in the Republican base and showed the rank and file that there are Republicans ready to fight." For their long-term success, though, he argues that both parties in the marriage must remember to focus their efforts on the Left rather than each other:

What would have happened if the Republican party and the Tea Party and the big PACs run by Rove and Koch had funded a $30 million campaign to put the blame [for the government shutdown] on Obama and Reid, where it belonged? There was no such campaign. All the parties on our side failed to take the fight to the enemy camp. The finger-pointing that followed is just another example of the circular firing squad that we on the right are so good at and that continually sets us back."

Read the full article, Why Republicans Need the Tea Party.

IBD: Shale Boom is Major Job Creator

IBD Enlarged Version

"The oil and gas boom is producing millions of jobs, and not just where you might expect," writes Mark Mills, author of a new Manhattan Institute report, Where the Jobs Are.

Employment is up 40% in the oil and gas fields since the recession began in late 2007. But in every one of the 10 states where hydrocarbon production is on the rise, overall employment growth has outperformed the nation. These jobs, moreover, are "sticky" — anchored in the local economy and ranging from information services to training, health care, housing, education and related manufacturing.

The gains have emerged from a profound change in the energy landscape. Since the recession officially ended in mid-2009, U.S. oil production has risen 60%, bringing about a 50% collapse in oil imports. Besides reducing the GDP-robbing trade deficit, this has had the immediate impact of creating hundreds of billions of dollars in new economic value.

The boom has also attracted a similar scale of new foreign direct investment. Because of low-cost energy abundance, 100 factories are set to come on line by 2017. When all are up and running, another $300 billion will be pumped into GDP and 1 million more jobs created.

This is proof that economic stimulus — of the right kind — works. ...

Mills argues that four strategies would ignite economic growth and jobs in the US: make sure new regulatory burdens don't throw a wet blanket over the industry; open up new markets by encouraging gas and oil exports; lower the business-tax rate to accelerate the flow of foreign investment into energy-inspired factories; and open more federal land to production.

"Constitutional Tipping Point"

From the Washington Free Beacon, reporting on House Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday that "focused on the multiple areas President Barack Obama has bypassed Congress, ranging from healthcare and immigration to marriage and welfare rules:

Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, testified that the expansion of executive power is happening so fast that America is at a “constitutional tipping point.”

“My view [is] that the president, has in fact, exceeded his authority in a way that is creating a destabilizing influence in a three branch system,” he said. “I want to emphasize, of course, this problem didn’t begin with President Obama, I was critical of his predecessor President Bush as well, but the rate at which executive power has been concentrated in our system is accelerating. And frankly, I am very alarmed by the implications of that aggregation of power.”

“What also alarms me, however, is that the two other branches appear not just simply passive, but inert in the face of this concentration of authority,” Turley said.

While Turley agrees with many of Obama’s policy positions, he steadfastly opposes the method he goes about enforcing them.

Read the rest of  'The Imperial Presidency'.

Will: Perfect Climate for Liberals

George Will on Obama's $1 billion "Climate Resilience Fund:

Viewed through the proper prism, most liberal policies succeed because they can hardly fail. Each achieves one or both of two objectives — making liberals feel good about themselves and being good to liberal candidates.

Consider Barack Obama’s renewed anxiety about global warming, increasingly called “climate change” during the approximately 15 years warming has become annoyingly difficult to detect. Obama says “the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.”  ...

When a politician says, concerning an issue involving science, that the debate is over, you may be sure the debate is rolling on and not going swimmingly for his side. Obama is, however, quite right that climate change is a fact. The climate is always changing: It is not what it was during the Medieval Warm Period (ninth to 13th centuries) or the Little Ice Age (about 1500-1850). ...

Climate alarmism validates the progressive impulse to micromanage others’ lives — their light bulbs, showerheads, toilets, appliances, automobiles, etc. Although this is a nuisance, it distracts liberals from more serious mischief. And conservatives incensed about Obama’s proposed $1 billion “climate resilience fund” — enough for nearly two Solyndra-scale crony capitalism debacles — should welcome an Obama brainstorm that costs only a single billion.

Read Perfect Climate for Liberals.

Social Justice vs Justice

What began as a short blog post has become a mini-debate on social justice vs justice between Peter Wehner @ Commentary and Paul Mirengoff @ Powerline. All four short posts are well worth reading to understand how the Left has corrupted a long-standing Catholic spiritual teaching to its faithful and twisted it into a moral political mandate on all citizens. Steve Hayward joins the debate at the close with "I prefer my Justice, like my single-malt scotch, neat and straight up, with no modifiers before it."

Wehner: In Defense of Social Justice

Acknowledging that social justice is not a term conservatives use, in part, due to Friedrich Hayek's criticism of it as a mirage, an "empty formula" and "hollow incantation," Peter Wehner argues that social justice is "a term conservatives should not only refuse to cede to the left but one they should embrace." He cites ethical and Biblical scholars to buttress his case that "to do justice and to love mercy is what is required of us, as individuals and as a society."

Mirengoff: "Social Justice," A Nonsensical Concept

Justice has always been understood in our tradition as justice for the individual, qua individual. When a person goes to court, either in a criminal or a civil case, our system strives to provide him with a result that is fair given what he has done or failed to do. This is what we understand justice to be. Thus, when we say that justice should be blind, we mean that it should be rendered without regard to a person’s social status and without regard to the demands of this or that social agenda.

Mirengoff argues that the pursuit of social justice may lead to actions consistent with justice, but it ...

...may also lead to action that is inconsistent with justice, such as granting racial preferences or expropriating someone’s property for “the greater good.” Such action is not justice, but rather justice’s antithesis. Thus, we should object when it is marketed “social justice.”

In sum, the concept of social justice has no value. In the first scenario, it is superfluous; in the second, it is false advertising. ... When it travels under the banner of social justice, it gains extra moral authority that it does not deserve.

Wehner: More on Social Justice

What I have in mind with the term is what we believe a society owes to others; the belief that living in a human society entitles our fellow human beings to some degree of sympathy and solicitude–and that a failure to grant these things is a failure of social justice. ...

Why wouldn’t taking a stand against state-enforced apartheid or Uganda’s harsh anti-gay laws or North Korea’s persecution of Christians qualify as standing up for social justice–that is, insisting that a society’s laws and institutions be more just?

My view has long been that conservatives ought to claim the term, since conservatism, in concrete ways, improves the lives of our fellow citizens, including and often especially the poor and most vulnerable members of society.

[T]he left already uses the term “social justice” with some effectiveness precisely because it does carry moral authority. The differences Mirengoff and I have are more about semantics than about ends; but in politics and political philosophy, semantics matter.

Mirengoff: On "Social Justice"—a Reply to Peter Wehner (With Comment from Steve [Hayward])

I believe the examples Pete cites as worthwhile stands for social justice support my point that the concept is superfluous when it comes to arguing for causes that are truly just. Apartheid, harsh anti-gay laws, and persecution of Christians can all be opposed based on simple justice for the victims as individuals. The fact that there are many such individuals does not require us to invoke “social justice.”

Which causes might require us to invoke social justice because individual justice will not support them? Causes like amnesty for an enormous class of lawbreakers (individual justice militates in favor of punishing law breakers, not rewarding them), preferential treatment for certain classes (it is unjust to favor one individual over another due to, say, race), and the redistribution of income by the government (what just claim does a person have on a stranger’s money?).

Do these causes deserve to be couched in the language of justice, “social” or otherwise? No. There are respectable arguments to be made for each cause, but they are arguments based on compassion (e.g., we want to help the poor), or aesthetics (e.g., we like some racial diversity), or pragmatism (e.g., conservatives need to stop alienating Hispanics and anyway, we can’t deport millions of illegal immigrants).

I agree with Wehner that our disagreement is more about semantics (or packaging) than about ends. And I agree that semantics matter. That’s why the left pushes the concept of social justice — it enables leftists to claim that what seems unjust actually constitutes a form of justice. Then, a cause can be pitched not as a reasonable tempering of justice — something we might choose do, but only reluctantly and on a small scale — but as something demanded by justice, a near-imperative.

Steve Hayward comments:

The Roman Catholic tradition has a very rich original teaching on social justice that goes back 1,000 years, based, needless to say, on very different grounds than the Left today.  It is this that Pete chiefly draws from I think, and as such he’s on substantively solid ground, Hayek’s important caveats (which I mostly agree with) notwithstanding.  I have found it useful, when confronted with Leftist “social justice” mongers spouting the contemporary meaning, to lay down that the Catholic teaching is the only species of the idea that is respectable.  This is great fun to do, because Leftists hate the Catholic Church, and this attack confounds them greatly.

Otherwise, I’m with Paul on the semantic/rhetorical problem.  To employ the term “social justice” is to play in the Left’s sandbox I think.  I prefer my Justice, like my single-malt scotch, neat and straight up, with no modifiers before it. 

Henninger: OCare and the Liberal Brand

"As American voters watch ObamaCare continue its Godzilla-like rampage across the national health-care landscape," writes Daniel Henninger @ WSJ, "it's worth considering the collateral damage this political monster may be doing to the Democratic brand itself."

Not everyone deserves a gold badge from J.D. Power, but by and large it has become very difficult to sustain a shoddy product in the marketplace anymore.

Except the government. And the Democratic Party is nothing if not the party whose identity is bound up with government services and the public unions that deliver those services.

Good enough for government work was once just a joke. ...For decades, voters have passed off this mediocrity as the sometimes maddening bureaucratic price for living in a large, complex country. No longer.

Klein: OCare's Insurance Tax on Individuals and Families

The 'taxes' Chief Justice Roberts found acceptable in Obamacare just keep coming. This from Philip Klein:

A multibillion-dollar tax that President Obama's health care law imposes on the insurance industry will be passed onto consumers, according to a new study by American Action Forum, costing individuals and families hundreds of dollars annually starting this year. [snip]

The report estimates that in 2014, individuals with employer sponsored insurance would have to pay $77 extra as a result of the tax and those with family coverage through their employers would have to pay an extra $266. By 2018, that will increase to $139 for individuals and $476 for those with family coverage.

Overall, the fees are projected to raise $8 billion in 2014 and a total of $58.8 billion through 2018.

Ashton Kutcher on Kimmel Live

Via Heritage's Foundry, a video of Ashton Kutcher on Jimmy Kimmel Live discussing government's regulatory burden that stops entrepreneurial businesses like Uber

Kutcher is a managing partner of the investment fund A-Grade Investments. One company his fund has invested in is Uber, the app-based service that connects drivers with passengers. Uber is rapidly expanding to cities across the U.S. and is in over 24 countries worldwide. But Kutcher is experiencing firsthand some of the roadblocks many businesses have endured.

Kutcher noted that “old-school monopolies and incumbents and old-school governments” are interfering with the transportation market, picking the winners and losers, and barring innovation.

Time to Overhaul Washington's Agencies and Programs

When will Congress stop legislating new federal programs such as Obamacare and focus on overhauling the messes of the existing ones? It might go a long way to reinstating public trust in government and Congress.

Latest case of government waste from Veronique de Rugy:

I explained earlier in the week that the federal government makes around $100 billion a year in improper welfare payments — a large portion of which is fraud in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a program administered by the IRS. Almost a quarter of the EITC’s cost in 2012 – $12.6 billion — was due to improper payments, making it the worst of the programs examined.

A 2013 report on the issue from a Treasury Department inspector general has some pretty striking numbers about the scale of the problem. According to their data, between 2003 and 2012, the amount of improper payments for the EITC alone is over $100 billion – somewhere between $110.8 billion and $132.6 billion.

The EITC is a single program by one government agency. Multiply its waste, fraud and abuse by all programs of all the alphabet soup of government agencies — IRS, NSA, EPA, DOE, FBI, FCC, FEMA, SSA, etc — and it's easy to see how out-of-control government bureaucracies are driving the largest national debt in history and increasingly depriving citizens of liberty, property and privacy.


An October 2013 Gallup poll on the public's attitude toward government found that only "19% say that they trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time" (graphic above). In the same poll, 23% had a favorable opinion of Congress, while 73% had an unfavorable view. 

Congress has oversight of agencies, their programs and their funding. Logic suggests that both political parties would benefit from overhauling government agencies and programs: the Democratic Party to prove its claim that the federal government can be streamlined and improved to the benefit of citizens; the Republican Party to prove its claim that the federal government can be limited while providing essential services to citizens.

Obamacare Alternative to Pave Way for Full Repeal

"Last month, a group of Republican senators unveiled a health care plan that grappled with how to create an alternative to President Obama's health care law as part of a strategy to repeal it," writes Philip Klein @ the Washington Examiner.

A conservative group known as the 2017 Project, headed by Jeffrey Anderson, has released another proposal rooted in the following premise: "The common formulation is that we need to 'repeal and replace' Obamacare. The truth is more nearly the reverse: We need to advance a winning alternative to pave the way to full repeal."

Under the 2017 Project proposal, all individuals who are either uninsured or currently insured on the individual market would be offered a tax credit, ranging from $1,200 for those younger than 35 to $3,000 for those older than 50. The value of the credits would not vary by income level, and would be scheduled to grow at 3 percent a year. Any money not spent on premiums could be put in a health savings account.

To address the issue of individuals with pre-existing conditions, the plan would require insurers to continue offering coverage to those with pre-existing conditions who are covered at the time of the enactment of the proposal, including those who obtained insurance through Obamacare.

Read the full article for more details.

The Value of Stay at Home Moms

"Salary.com recently calculated that, in 2013, a stay-at-home mom in the United States was worth about $114,000 per year," writes Dr. Susan Berry.

While that six-figure salary may sound good, in order to earn it, Mom put in a 94-hour work week.

If a full-time job is 40 hours per week, this outcome means that Mom’s base salary is $37,549. With 54 hours of overtime, worth $76,037, Mom’s total salary is thus $113,586.

These just-for-fun results were obtained by asking thousands of parents the amount of time they spend doing various domestic tasks or jobs. The researchers then calculated what the same amount of time spent in a workplace doing the same job would be worth.

For example, according to the study, per week Moms spend 14 hours as a Cook, 14.4 hours as a Maid, 8 hours as a Taxi Driver, 7.8 hours as a Janitor, 3.3 hours as a CEO, 7.3 hours as a Psychologist, 8.9 hours as a Computer Operator, 6.2 hours as a Laundry Operator, 10.8 hours as a Facilities Manager, and 13.3 hours as a Day Care Teacher.

The income Mom would earn performing these jobs in their environments for the given time periods amounts to nearly $114,000 per year.

If you’d like to calculate the value of the time you dedicate to your family, you can visit Salary.com’s MomSalaryWizard, which allows you to personalize the calculations for moms and dads when you provide the number of hours per week spent on cleaning, cooking, shopping, and driving to basketball practice, ballet, and piano lessons. Homeschooling moms need to be creative in how to fit educating children into the “mom” calculator.

In addition, Salary.com found that working moms who spend 40 hours per week at their jobs, come home to perform an average of 58 hours per week on household and childcare duties, amounting to a total “mom" salary of $67,436. Calculate mom’s full salary by adding in compensation for her job outside the home.

Interestingly, while Salary.com found that the stay-at-home mom’s average “work time” spent is 94 hours per week each week, the stay-at-home dad’s average is just 55.7 hours for the same number of children.

College Administrative Bloat & Soaring Tuitions

Many young grads are shackled with exorbitant student debt today, and a lot of that debt paid administrators rather than instructors.

"Administrative bloat at American colleges and universities is out of hand, and it's probably the biggest cause of the skyrocketing tuitions that afflict students and parents today," writes law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds @ USAToday.

Everyone knows that tuitions have skyrocketed, though many may not appreciate the full extent of the problem. As University of Michigan economics and finance professor Mark Perry has calculated, college tuition increased from 1978 to 2011 at an annual rate of 7.45%. That far outpaced health-care costs, which increased by 5.8%, and housing, which, notwithstanding the bubble, increased at 4.3%. Family incomes, on the other hand, barely kept up with the Consumer Price Index, which grew at an annual rate of 3.8%.

In another article on the same subject, Benjamin Ginsberg asks "can we curtail administrative bloat on campus?" and argues that "legions of administrators" are wasting time and taking money from instruction.

[Richard] Vedder, one of America's most distinguished educational economists, shows that in 2010-11, less than 30 percent of the $449 billion spent by American colleges and universities was spent on actual instruction. Indeed, for every $1 spent on instruction, $1.82 was spent on non-instructional matters including "institutional support," i.e. the care and feeding of deanlets. [emphasis added]

In yet another article, Walter Russell Mead describes the administrative glut at public and private colleges over the past 25 years this way:

Overall, the industry has added an average of 87 administrative positions per day, a rate has scarcely slowed since the economic downturn, despite tuition increases. Even more surprising, academic institutions have added more administrative employees despite part-time faculty taking on more teaching duties than full-time professors. [emphasis added]

Johnson: Proposed IRS Regs Fracture Liberals

"The proposed Internal Revenue Service regulations governing political activity by nonprofits that have united the Right in opposition are now fracturing the Left," writes Eliana Johnson. Labor unions, the ACLU, and other liberals are joining conservatives in opposing the regs.

The proposed changes, which were unveiled in late November, would classify much of the day-to-day activity of 501(c)(4) social-welfare groups, including voter education and registration, as political, thereby endangering their tax-exempt status. They would also prohibit public communication 60 days before a general election or 30 days before a primary election that identifies a political candidate — that is, nearly every advertisement aired by groups such as the conservative Americans for Prosperity or the liberal League of Conservation Voters — during the period when they are most effective.

Labor unions worry that 501(c)4 regulations aimed at silencing conservative voices will easily be applied to 501(c)5 non-profits and used to silence liberal union voices. 

The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, submitted a 26-page comment to IRS commissioner John Koskinen slamming the proposed regulations. “Social welfare organizations praise or criticize candidates for public office on the issues and they should be able to do so freely, without fear of losing or being denied tax-exempt status, even if doing so could influence a citizen’s vote,” the group wrote, calling such advocacy “the heart of our representative democracy.” The ACLU argued that, if the advocacy of social-welfare groups influences voting, it does so only by “promoting an informed citizenry.”

Poll: 71% "Regret" Backing Obama

"Over 7 in 10 Obama voters, and 55 percent of Democrats, regret voting for President Obama's reelection in 2012, according to a new Economist/YouGov.com poll," writes Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner.

Conducted to test the media hype about a comeback by 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, the new poll found voters still uninspired by Romney, but also deeply dissatisfied with Obama who has so far failed to capitalize on his victory over 15 months ago.

The poll asked those who voted for Obama's reelection a simple question: “Do you regret voting for Barack Obama?”

• Overall, 71 percent said yes, 26 percent no. 
• 80 percent of whites said yes, 61 percent of blacks said no and 100 percent of Hispanics said yes.
• 84 percent of women said yes, and just 61 percent of men agreed. 
• 55 percent of Democrats said yes, as did 71 percent of independents.

Barone: Progressivism's Discredited Conceit

"The roots of American liberalism are not compassion, but snobbery," writes Michael Barone. "That’s the thesis of Fred Siegel’s revealing new book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class."  The article highlights how the liberal elite's claim that they are uniquely fit to govern has been discredited by their policies — from prohibition to Obamacare.

[Siegel] depicts the Progressives as Protestant reformers, determined to professionalize institutions and tame the immigrant and industrial masses. Progressive projects included women’s suffrage and the prohibition of alcohol.

But the many pro-German Progressives were appalled when Woodrow Wilson led America into World War I and by Wilson’s brutal suppression of civil liberties.

Progressivism was repudiated in the landslide election of Warren Harding in 1920, at which point disenchanted liberal thinkers turned their ire against middle-class Americans who, in the “Roaring ’20s,” were happily buying automobiles, refrigerators, radios, and tickets to the movies. [snip]

Liberals since the 1920s have claimed to be guided by the laws of science, but often it was crackpot science, like the eugenics movement that sought forced sterilizations.

Other social-science theories proved unreliable in practice. Keynesian economics crashed and burned in the stagflation of the 1970s.

Predictions that the world would run out of food and resources turned out to be wrong. In the 1970s, people were told global cooling was inevitable. Now it’s global warming.

Needham: A Vision to Unite America

"Most of the political world’s attention this week was focused on Speaker John Boehner’s decision to let President Obama continue borrowing without limit until next March," writes Michael Needham at NRO. "Speaker Boehner’s decision to break with his conference — and break with his own dollar-for-dollar rule in raising the debt limit — shows that the House GOP conference is without leadership today."

Heritage Action’s Conservative Policy Summit showed that there is a path out of the wilderness, if only Washington’s political class can find the courage to walk on it.

We owe it to the American people to show them how we would govern as conservatives. The best way to do that is to legislate in the House.

This week, up-and-coming conservatives in the House demonstrated that they are determined to do just that. At the Conservative Policy Summit, ten members of Congress presented big, bold ideas to lead the GOP back to relevance. It is precisely this kind of agenda that can produce a mandate by capturing the hearts and minds of the American people. Far away from the messaging consultants, pollsters, and other preservers of the status quo, these members unapologetically presented an agenda that would unite America behind a vision of a better life.

Among the legislative ideas presented:

• Replacing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ("two institutions that played starring roles in the financial collapse") and encouraging private investment and innovation -- Rep Jeb Hensarling;
• Several bills to replace Obamacare — Rep Tom Price, Rep Phil Roe, Rep Paul Broun;
• Higher education reform package — Sen Mike Lee
• Energy package — Sen Ted Cruz
• School choice package — Sen Tim Scott
• Welfare reform — Rep Jim Jordan

A Vision to Unite America: Beyond the party's tired leaders, Republican innovators show the way forward, Michael Needham, NRO

Rubin: OCare Lawlessness Charge Sticks

Noting that liberals are joining the chorus complaining of Obama's lawless changes to Obamacare (Wash Post editorial board and Ron Fournier the latest), Jennifer Rubin argues "it would be wise for Democrats, while they still have the Senate, to clear away the president's lawless fiats."

When the press, political partisans and elected officials ignore the abuse of power because it is for a “good cause,” they encourage more and more abuse. The “good for the gander, good for the goose” realization, if nothing else, should convince Dems to rein in the White House. You’d think that simple fidelity to the Constitution would be enough, but at this point the motive is less important than ending the practice. I fear, however, that Obama’s noxious overreach will simply commence a downward spiral of power grabs in which each Congress and president attempts to rig the system its way, citing the other party’s precedent. Maybe, just maybe, if Democrats policed their own president, we’d nip this in the bud.

Obamacare Lawlessness Charge Sticks, Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post
The Obama Administration Has a Mandate on the Health-Care Law, Too, Editors, Washington Post
Why I'm Getting Sick of Defending Obamacare, Ron Fournier, National Journal
Kirsten Powers: I'm Tired of "Having to Defend This President" and Obamacare [video], Real Clear Politics

OCare Insurance Company Bailouts Begin

"Humana announced that it expects to tap the three risk adjustment mechanisms in Obamacare for between $250 and $450 million in 2014," writes Dr. Scott Gottlieb at AEI. "This amounts to about 25 percent of the insurer’s expected exchange revenue. This money is needed to offset losses that the insurer will take as a result of slower enrollment in its Obamacare plans..."

The company blamed the Obama Administration’s decision late last year to extend grandfathering of individual market plans for the overall deterioration in the risk pool. That means that Humana (like other insurers) was counting on people from the individual market being forced to transition into Obamacare plans. It’s widely perceived that the Obama Administration counted on that migration as well. But Humana’s statement was a very clear expression of this expectation.

How ironic that large insurance companies are among the few winners of liberals' Obamacare law.

Is Unemployment Rate Really 37.2%?

"Don't believe the happy talk coming out of the White House, Federal Reserve and Treasury Department when it comes to the real unemployment rate and the true 'Misery Index'," writes Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner.

In a memo to clients provided to Secrets, David John Marotta calculates the actual unemployment rate of those not working at a sky-high 37.2 percent, not the 6.7 percent advertised by the Fed, and the Misery Index at over 14, not the 8 claimed by the government. ...

“The unemployment rate only describes people who are currently working or looking for work,” he said. That leaves out a ton more.

“Unemployment in its truest definition, meaning the portion of people who do not have any job, is 37.2 percent. This number obviously includes some people who are not or never plan to seek employment. But it does describe how many people are not able to, do not want to or cannot find a way to work. ..."

...if calculations tabulating the full national unemployment including discouraged workers, which is 10.2 percent, and the historical method of calculating inflation, which is now 4.5 percent, ‘the current misery index is closer to 14.7, worse even than during the Ford administration.”

No doubt contributing to the misery index is the nation's overall full-time job loss, as AEI's James Pethokoukis puts into perspective:

Here is a stat, reflected in the above chart, to think about: Before the Great Recession, there were 122 million full-time jobs in America. Now 4 1/2 years after its end, there are still just 118 million full-time jobs in America despite a labor force that is 1.6 million larger and a nonjailed, nonmilitary adult working-age population that is 14 million larger.

Stopping Warrantless Data Gathering on Citizens

Sen. Rand Paul will argue in a lawsuit to be filed today that warrantless data gathering of citizens' information is a 4th Amendment violation, reports Bridget Johnson @ pjmedia.com. In an unrelated article at USA Today, law professor Glenn Reynolds argues that it is also a serious threat to constitutional government and separation of powers.

Joined by former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe, "Paul will file his lawsuit on Wednesday morning at the U.S. District Court in D.C. ... against Obama, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Director of the National Security Agency Keith Alexander and FBI Director James Comey."

“This class action suit isn’t about Republican versus Democrat, or progressive versus conservative. This is about defending the basic civil liberties of every American from a government that has crossed the line. FreedomWorks is participating in this suit on behalf of our community of 6 million citizens nationwide, along with any American who has a phone,” Kibbe said. “If you use a phone, you should care about this case. Never in American history has there been such a warrantless gathering of citizens information. We believe it is time to put this before the courts. ”

Paul, Cuccinelli and Kibbe are expected to discuss their case in greater detail on the steps of the courthouse tomorrow after filing the lawsuit.

Under the subtitle, "the program makes it easy for the president to spy on and blackmail his enemies," University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes that "the ability of the executive branch to snoop on the phone calls of people in the other branches isn't just a threat to privacy, but a threat to the separation of powers and the Constitution." He argues that strong measures should be put into place to prevent these abuses.

Rather than counting on leakers to protect us, we need strong structural controls that don't depend on people being heroically honest or unusually immune to political temptation, two characteristics not in oversupply among our political class. That means that the government shouldn't be able to spy on Americans without a warrant — a warrant that comes from a different branch of government, and requires probable cause. The government should also have to keep a clear record of who was spied on, and why, and of exactly who had access to the information once it was gathered. We need the kind of extensive audit trails for access to information that, as the Edward Snowden experience clearly illustrates, don't currently exist.

In addition, we need civil damages — with, perhaps, a waiver of governmental immunities — for abuse of power here. Perhaps we should have bounties for whistleblowers, too, to help encourage wrongdoing to be aired.

Is this strong medicine? Yes. But widespread spying on Americans is a threat to constitutional government. That is a serious disease, one that demands the strongest of medicines.

Rand Paul Suing President Obama, Bridget Johnson, PJMedia.com, 2/11/14
NSA Spying Undermines Separation of Powers, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, USA Today, 2/11/14

Epstein: Rethinking the Contraceptive Mandate

Legal scholar Richard Epstein thoughtfully presents the legal rationale for his assertion that the entire Obamacare contraceptive mandate "should be struck down root and branch," based not on religious liberty, but on classical "principles of freedom of association."

One depressing feature of the misguided constitutional debate over Obamacare was that it started from the common assumption that any general “freedom of contract” objection to the statute was dead-on-arrival. This dubious premise warps the entire constitutional discourse. A robust interpretation of freedom of association blocks the contraceptive mandate, not just for religious organizations, however defined, but for every group, regardless of its purposes or members. Any group that wants to supply contraceptive services is, of course, free to do so. But any group that opposes the mandate is free to go its separate way. Civil peace is preserved because no one faction or interest group can out-muscle any other. ...

Freedom of association ends wars; it does not start them. The correct baseline does not guarantee any package of healthcare benefits to any person, but leaves that topic to negotiation between parties. In a competitive world, firms can compete by offering or denying particular benefits, without the state having to second-guess its choices. ...

...once all individuals have equal rights of association across the entire range of human endeavors, the establishment issue disappears. It should be flatly unconstitutional for the state to force these mandates on any private organization period. If so, then there is no illicit preference for religious groups when they receive the same protection for their organizations that are given to other groups. But there is a manifest intrusion into ordinary religious liberties by forcing them to bear these costs.

The moral of the story should be clear. It is not possible to deviate in part from the classical liberal principles of freedom of association and hope that the resulting confusion will be ironed out down the road. The key defect in the central premise leads to indefensible distinctions and to second-best solutions, all of which should be rejected out of hand. In this context, religious liberty is lost by the imposition of an employer mandate. The entire mandate should be struck down root and branch.

Read his full argument.

Best Description of Modern Feminists Yet

This may be the most accurate description of modern feminists ever. From Kevin D. Williamson @ NRO:

Feminism is not an idea or a collection of ideas but a collection of appetites wriggling queasily together like a bag of snakes. ... A useful definition [today] is this: “Feminism is the words ‘I Want!’ in the mouths of three or more women, provided they’re the right kind of women.”

Feminism began as a simple grievance, mutated into a kind of conspiracy theory (with “patriarchy” filling in for the Jews/Freemasons/Illuminati/Bohemian Grove/reptilian shape-shifters/the fiendish plot of Dr. Fu Manchu/etc.), spent the 1980s in grad school congealing into a ridiculous jargon, and with the booming economy of the 1990s was once again reinvented, this time as a career path. 

Williamson offers 30-year-old law student Sandra Fluke as exhibit A:

For what is she known? For standing in front of a group of legislators saying “I Want!” It is worth remembering that Miss Fluke’s “I Want!” heard ’round the world was a demand for birth-control subsidies at a Catholic institution: What’s a few thousand years of practice and the most highly developed body of moral philosophy in the Western world compared with a callow young law student’s “I Want!”?

Public policy can be complicated, but “I Want!” is simple. In the world of responsible politics, there are sometimes conflicts between competing legitimate goods, and there are occasions upon which the necessities of governance run up against the limitations our constitutional order puts upon the political enterprise. Miss Fluke spoke many, many words on the subject but, defying probability, never managed to stumble upon any interesting ones. She ended where she began: “I Want!”

Read more: The Feminist Mystique.

Pullman: Common Core's Bait-and-Switch

"Common Core supporters know many voters and politicians dislike federal meddling with education," writes Joy Pullman of School Reform News.

That's why they insist Common Core is “state-led” and “voluntary” even though the evidence shows these descriptions are deceptions. The Obama administration already has proved this by, at the repeated request of those who created Common Core, requiring states to adopt it in exchange for a chance at federal grants and to receive much-desired No Child Left Behind waivers. But these public relations pushes also disprove the “state-led” and “voluntary” promise, for how “voluntary” is a public policy instituted under the influence of federally funded advertising and with little open debate?

In short, federal funds are being used to convince the people the government forced to provide those funds that unelected bureaucrats and private nonprofit employees did the right thing with their money before the people got wind of the scheme.

Isn’t that a little backwards? A self-governing republic means lawmakers carry out the will of the people after judicious reflection and under the rule of law, instead of retroactively attempting to convince citizens we should want what unelected bureaucrats already did without the public’s knowledge or consent.

Common Core has leaders, all right, but they don’t govern by consent.

 For more discussion on the K-12 Common Core scheme, watch the discussion, Stopping Common Core National Standards and Testing, with researchers Joy Pullman and Lindsey Burke.

Atlantic: Today's 27 Yr Olds, in Charts

"What are today's young adults really like?" asks Jordan Weissman @ the Atlantic.

In the spring of 2002, the government's researchers began tracking a group of roughly 15,000 high school sophomores—most of whom would be roughly age 27 today—with the intention of following them through early adulthood.

In 2012, the government’s researchers handed their subjects an enormous survey about their lives in the real world. Here, I've pulled together the most interesting findings. (One important note: I've shorthanded this group as "today's 27-year-olds." But again, not all of the study participants are precisely that age.)

Below are a few of the charts Weissman developed from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002.

For more, see Highly Educated, Highly Indebted: The Lives of Today's 27-Year-Olds, in Charts.

The Gender Wage Gap is a Myth

Liberals are once again repeating the women earn only 77 cents for every dollar a man earns, so once again we turn to the brilliant Christina Hoff Sommers, AEI resident scholar, to set the record straight in under 2.5 minutes:

Planned Parenthood: So Classy!

Planned Parenthood has erected this billboard, along with a picture of a condom, in a South Memphis neighborhood next to an elementary school crosswalk and a church.

WREG-TV Memphis reports that the neighborhood is not pleased!

Goldman: Understanding the Exhausted US Economy

The dreadful jobs number in December was the first signal that the U.S. economy is dead in the water, argues David Goldman @ PJMedia. The second signal came this week when "the Institute for Supply Management reported the steepest drop in manufacturing orders since December 1980." A Republican, Goldman presents some unusual ideas to resuscitate the exhausted economy. He begins by showing "two disastrous underlying trends."

One is the decline of real median household income.

The other is the collapse of the labor force participation rate, which is the flip side of the coin: if fewer adults are working, median household income will be lower.

Then there are the problems of business and the Fed:

CBO: Obamacare To Destroy 2.5 Million More Jobs

"The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just released its latest analysis of the country's economic and budget outlook, and it's a doozy," writes Sean Davis @ The Federalist.

If you're a Denver Broncos fan who watched in horror as your team disintegrated during the Super Bowl on Sunday, then you'll have some idea of how Obamacare's proponents will feel as they read this report. Yes, it's that bad. ...

As predicted by its conservative opponents, Obamacare has indeed destroyed jobs, increased spending, and made health care less accessible.

Here are 5 facts from CBO’s report that illustrate how the [Affordable Care Act] law’s effects bear no resemblance whatsoever to its namesake’s promises.

1. Obamacare will destroy 2.5 million jobs by 2024 — Report: "The reduction in CBO's projections of hours worked represents a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2 million in 2017, rising to 2.5 million in 2024." 
2. In 2024, there will still be 31 million people in the U.S. without health insurance — Report: "Still, according to estimates by CBO and JCT, about 31 million nonelderly residents of the United States are likely to be without health insurance in 2024, roughly one out of every nine such residents."
3. Millions of people who liked their health plan will lose their health plan — Report: "CBO and JCT project that, as a result of the ACA, between 6 million and 7 million fewer people will have employment-based insurance coverage each year from 2016 through 2024 than would be the case in the absence of the ACA."
4. Obamacare reduces the incentive to find and keep a job — Report: "By providing subsidies that decline with rising income (and increase with falling income) and by making some people financially better off, the ACA will create an incentive for some people to work less."
5. Your paycheck will be smaller thanks to Obamacare — Report: "In addition, beginning in 2018, the ACA imposes an excise tax on certain high-cost health insurance plans. CBO expects that the burden of that tax will, over time, be borne primarily by workers in the form of smaller after-tax compensation ... After-tax compensation will thus fall ..."

Read more:
The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2014 to 2024, CBO
Five Devastating Obamacare Facts from CBO's Latest Economic Report, Sean Davis, The Federalist
CBO Nearly Triples Estimate of Working Hours Lost by 2021 Due to Affordable Care Act, CNBC
Obamacare Will Push 2 Million Workers Out of Labor Market: CBO, Stephen Dinan, Washington Times

Schlafly: The Liberal Newcomers

"By itself," writes Phyllis Schlafly, attorney and author of a new report on the effects of the current mass legal immigration system in the U.S., "the annual flow of 1.1 million legal immigrants under the current system will create more than 5 million new potential voters by 2024 and more than 8 million by 2028." And that's before the current proposals of legislation to give legal status/amnesty to millions more immigrants currently residing in the U.S.

The problem for a nation founded on the unique principles of  constrained government power, individual liberty and free-markets is that these prospective new voters do not share America's long-standing principles. Cautions the report:

Immigration is creating both an enormous new clientele for government programs and also a voting block to support it.

The report includes several charts and graphics, including the two posted here, showing the gulf between recent immigrants and the general American public. Other graphics relate to immigrant views on capitalism, environmentalism and gun control.

Schlafly looks at previous immigrant populations, their assimilation over time and their impact on the nation; and she cautions that immigration transforms society, but American society does not always transform immigrants.

"The generally liberal views of today's immigrants do not mean they are bad people. Most immigrants are hard working and love their families, and many are religious. Many hard-working Americans not of recent-immigrant origin who are devoted to their families also want to expand government. Nevertheless, platitudes about immigrants' being hard working does not make them conservatives when it comes to the size and scope of government."

Nor, it turns out, do the platitudes suggest new immigrant voters will likely become small-government conservatives any time in the near future.

Barone: How ObamaCare Misreads America

"The evidence is not all in," writes Michael Barone. "But it seems that Americans are not behaving as ObamaCare's architects—and many critics—expected." He notes three key assumptions embodied in the law that have proven to be mistakes:

• Everyone wants health insurance, and the uninsured will flock to buy it, especially if they qualify for a subsidy. It didn't happen. Moreover, recent polls show only 24% of the uninsured has a favorable view of Obamacare.
• Having health insurance will make people healthier.  It didn't. Based on a two-year randomized study done in Oregon and reported in the May 2013 New England Journal of Medicine, "... after two years there was no significant difference between insured and uninsured in blood-sugar level, blood pressure and cholesterol levels..."
• Having health insurance will reduce costly emergency room visits. The opposite has happened. The Oregon study also found that those with insurance coverage were 40% more likely to go to emergency rooms than those without coverage.

This disconnect between expectations and reality, Barone writes, "reminds me of the divide described in Charles Murray's 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010."

Mr. Murray, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, documents the sharp differences in behavior between the upper (in education and income) 20% and the bottom 30% of white Americans.

The upper group has low rates of divorce and single parenthood and high rates of what Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam calls social connectedness. They belong to voluntary associations and churches; they vote and follow public-policy debates. They tend to be connected, engaged and conscientious. The lower (income and education) group has high rates of divorce and single parenthood and low rates of social connectedness. They tend to be disconnected and disengaged, and sometimes heedless. It should not be surprising that they may not respond to the same health-care mandates, incentives and nudges that policy makers and others in the upper group do. ...

Arguing that an ObamaCare law might work for "homogeneous populations with high levels of trust, conscientiousness and social connectedness," it doesn't work well in larger populations "where a much larger proportion of people are socially disconnected."

ObamaCare cuts against this grain. The trouble that has resulted—from the architects' apparent failures to anticipate the behavior of fellow citizens who don't share their approach to the world, and the architects' determination to impose their mores, such as contraception coverage, on a multicultural nation—is a lesson to national policy makers, conservative as well as liberal.

Govern lightly if you want to govern this culturally diverse nation well.

WSJ: Are Obama's IRS Denials Credible?

In the pre-Super Bowl interview, President Obama claimed there was "not a smidgen of corruption" in the IRS actions against conservative groups. Wall Street Journal's Mary Kissel asks Cleta Mitchell, an attorney representing several conservative groups, if the claim is credible: