Back in August, Cato adjunct scholar Veronique de Rugy expressed concern about Republican campaign rhetoric on Medicare. As Republicans tell it, they want to “protect” and “strengthen” Medicare, whereas President Obama wants to “cut” and “weaken” it. Veronique thinks that the GOP’s “Mediscare” campaign could end up backfiring by making it harder to reform Medicare if Republicans succeed in taking control of Washington.

What I find irritating is that for all the standard platitudes from Republicans about getting federal spending under control, they’re simultaneously attacking Democrats for allegedly wanting to cut the budget’s big-ticket items like Medicare and military spending. Democrats might deserve it for decades of trying to scare the pants off of seniors, but the GOP’s adoption of their tactics is evidence in support of the view that the parties merely represent two sides of the same coin. (Don’t forget the last big expansion of entitlements came from the Republican-engineered addition of a prescription drug benefit to Medicare in 2004.)

That brings me to the Pennsylvania race for U.S. Senate , where Republican challenger Tom Smith is trying to unseat Democrat Bob Casey. Smith is apparently in striking distance after months of running television ads attacking Casey. However, one particular ad being run by the Smith campaign is a good example of how low Republicans have sunk when it comes to Mediscaring:

At the end of the ad we see Smith sitting with his elderly mother. Smith says, “In the Senate I’ll protect Social Security and Medicare. After all, my own mother receives those benefits and this son would never jeopardize that.” He then turns to his mom, puts his arm on her shoulder, and asks, “Right, mom?” “Right” she replies.

Ugh.

Note to partisan readers: my criticism of the Smith ad does not mean that I support Bob Casey or believe that Casey would be a better senator.

If you’re looking for something scary to do on Halloween, check out Cato senior fellow Johan Norberg’s documentary, “Europe’s Debt: America’s Crisis?” on PBS stations across the country.

It’s been running for awhile, and will be seen in Maryland and Michigan on Sunday night. But it will be seen in many markets, from Tampa to Fairbanks, next Wednesday, October 31.

The Free to Choose Network, which produced the film, describes it this way:

Four investigative reports, shot on location in Greece, Brussels, California and Washington DC, highlight this in depth examination of Europe’s current debt crisis and its connection to the U.S. economy. Narrated by Swedish author Johan Norberg, and George Mason University professor, Don Boudreaux, the investigative reports ask: “Where did Europe go wrong” and “is the United States now repeating the same mistakes?”

Participants include Cato friends Jacob Mchangama and Tanja Stumberger, as well as such key players as former comptroller general David Walker, former European Commissioner Frits Bolkestein, and Ann Johnson, mayor of Stockton, California.

For broadcasts in your area, check the listings here.

For Johan Norberg’s books and articles, click here.

A recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal describes what happens in an industry that suffers from a plethora of subsidies and a dearth of free markets. Water experts Peter Culp and Robert Glennon write:

In 2012, the drought-stricken Western United States will ship more than 50 billion gallons of water to China. This water will leave the country embedded in alfalfa–most of it grown in California–and is destined to feed Chinese cows. The strange situation illustrates what is wrong about how we think, or rather don’t think, about water policy in the U.S.

You can read about the historical background to this “strange situation” in an essay I co-authored with Peter Hill. Basically, irrigation water in the Western states is heavily subsidized and–unlike most commodities–is not easily traded in open markets. The result is a great deal of waste, economic inefficiency, and negative environmental consequences.

Here is some of Culp and Glennon’s discussion of the perverse results of big government water policies. (Keep in mind that “water rights” for farmers has come to mean “rights” to hugely subsidized water).

Alfalfa is a water-guzzling crop and the water embedded in the alfalfa that the U.S. will export to China in 2012 is enough to supply the annual needs of roughly 500,000 families.

Southern California’s Imperial Irrigation District gets its water from the Colorado River, 82 miles to the east. Alfalfa farmers in the district use as much as 50% more water than growers in other areas of the state due to scorching heat, salty soil and, perhaps most important, their legal rights to an enormous quantity of cheap water. This single irrigation district controls more than 20% of the total annual flow of the Colorado River. Remarkably, the district’s water rights are 10 times higher than that of the entire state of Nevada.

The perversity of a situation in which California taxpayers must spend tens of billions to protect the water supplies of vital farms and cities even as California farmers convert tens of thousands of irrigated acres to feed cows in China reflects the growing incoherence of domestic water and agricultural policy. Antiquated Western water laws often block intrastate or interstate water transfers that could satisfy changing domestic urban, agricultural and environmental needs.

In many Western states, moreover, farmers who conserve water by modernizing their irrigation systems don’t get to use, lease or sell the water they save … Even when a transfer is possible, complicated regulatory procedures mean that final approvals can take years. Interstate transfers typically fare even worse.

The American Soybean Association (ASA) recently asked each of the presidential candidates to respond to a series of questions about agricultural policy issues. The questions covered farm bill and crop insurance, estate tax, biodiesel, biotechnology, trade, research, regulations, and transportation and infrastructure. The candidates’ responses (full text here) were not exactly models of courageous and principled policymaking.

I won’t parse the entire thing, as it is just too depressing and some of the issues (e.g., the estate tax) fall outside my area of research. But I will comment on a couple of the topics.

On subsidies and crop insurance, both candidates pledged to support passage of the farm bill, and the crop insurance and disaster provisions it contains. Mr Romney—no Senator John McCain in this area, at least—went on to make a broader statement about his philosophy on farm supports:

On the broader question of farm programs, we must be cognizant that our agricultural producers are competing with other nations around the world. Other nations subsidize their farmers, so we must be careful not to unilaterally change our policies in a way that would disadvantage agriculture here in our country. In addition, we want to make sure that we don’t ever find ourselves in a circumstance where we depend on foreign nations for our food the way we do with energy. Ultimately, it is in everyone’s interest is achieve [sic] a level playing field on which American farmers can compete.

Ugh. That is a monumentally awful statement. First, not all nations subsidize their farmers. New Zealand and (not to brag) Australia, for example, subsidize their farmers very little, and in very minimally distorting ways, and yet their agricultural exports generally are thriving. They compete with other agricultural exporters because they try to be the best they can be given their natural resource endowments, research, experience, and human capital. Second, the caution against unilaterally changing policies is, of course, ubiquitous in many trade policy statements (see, e.g., Ex-Im Bank, manufacturing, reducing tariffs generally). It is also economically insane to enact bad policies because other countries do so. Especially when it is becoming clear that other large agricultural subsidizers (e.g., Japan and the EU) are not exactly thriving, many and varied though their problems may be.

Third, as for the importance of farm supports in maintaining food independence, that’s also nonsense. As I’ve argued ad nauseum, (e.g., here), subsidies aren’t keeping us well-fed: if food abundance depended on government support, we’d see nothing but so-called program crops (soybeans, wheat, corn, cotton, and rice) on supermarket shelves. Judging by the size of my fellow Australians on my last visit home, no-one is starving there despite very little government support for agriculture. By the way, if you want to read some comments from a president who actually knows what he is talking about, read Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s comments in this article, where he calls for lower trade barriers around the world, particularly for food security reasons.

Mr. Romney’s support for the Senate-passed farm bill also is at odds with his statement to the ASA about the importance of open trade. Even putting aside Mr Romney’s typical mercantilist obsession with exports, I wonder if he realizes that the changes proposed in the Senate farm bill would increase the amount of subsidies deemed trade-distorting by the World Trade Organization, putting trade liberalization at risk? U.S. government spending on trade-distorting support, the “worst” kind, is at record lows right now, mainly thanks to higher commodity prices. But even a senior United States Department of Agriculture official admits (paywall) that the proposed changes to farm policy—including a move towards revenue insurance—would likely see that progress eroded:

But Joseph Glauber, chief economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), said in an interview with Inside U.S. Trade that if either the Senate-passed farm bill or the version approved by the House Agriculture Committee were enacted, that would likely increase the level of U.S. trade-distorting payments.

While stressing that his assessment is preliminary in light of the fact that no legislation has been finalized, Glauber said it is fairly apparent that cutting direct payments and replacing them with either a revenue guarantee program or a price-loss program, as the two legislative proposals envision, would lead to an increase in amber box payments.

In fact, Glauber argued that changing U.S. farm policy along the lines of either of the farm bill proposals could make it more likely that the U.S. exceeds the $7.6 billion cap to which the U.S. informally agreed in the Doha round, especially in those years where commodity prices dip down and subsidy payouts increase.

Pass the farm bill, in other words, and multilateral liberalization efforts get more difficult.

Finally, I note that Mr. Romney also couldn’t resist adding his standard, wrongheaded, and increasingly prominent talking point about “vigorously enforcing” U.S. trade law, and catching cheaters (plenty of blog posts by my colleagues on this topic can be viewed on this blog). I wonder if he realizes that the United States itself has been caught breaking the rules of agricultural trade, and how hypocritical his statements about farm subsidies and trade are in that context? Plenty of damage, and retaliation, has been unleashed because of various ways the U.S. government conducts its affairs in agriculture.

So, in short, there is not much to like in either candidate’s statements, with Mr. Romney deserving special opprobrium because of his professed free-market, limited government principles. But we knew that.

Sometimes it’s no fun to be an economist. Or, to be more specific, it’s rather frustrating to understand Bastiat’s insight about the “seen” and the “unseen” and to always be asking “at what cost?” and “to what effect?” when politicians make inane statements.

The GM bailout is a good example. Politicians want us to believe that it was a success because the company is still in business. Heck, the Vice President’s favorite campaign statement is that “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive”

But if you’re the type of person who recognizes the importance of tradeoffs and incentives, then it’s easy to see how a political success can be an economic failure. Which is the message of this new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation.

This is music to my ears. I’ve been saying for years that any company can be kept afloat indefinitely with taxpayers subsidies. So if that’s the definition of success, we can party until we hit the fiscal brick wall. But that wall won’t feel good, as we can see from the fiscal chaos in Greece and other European welfare states.

But this issue involves more than just inefficient subsidies. I’m also concerned about the corruption that inevitably exists when cronyism replaces capitalism.

It’s quite likely, after all, that GM is spending lots of money on the Chevy Volt because of pressure from Washington rather than demand from consumers. And when you have a car company executive endorsing higher gas taxes, it’s reasonable to think that he’s currying favor with the political masters in DC rather than looking out for the best interests of drivers.

The GM bailout may be a win-win situation for politicians and lobbyists, but it’s a lose-lose proposition for taxpayers and the economy.

P.S. If you want some auto bailout humor, here’s a spoof on the Chevy Volt, an advertisement for the new GM Obummer, a couple of good political cartoons, and a very funny video on the Pelosi GTxi SS/RT.

I’ve explained on many occasions that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was bad news for the economy. The same can be said of Herbert Hoover’s policies, since he also expanded the burden of federal spending, raised tax rates, and increased government intervention.

So when I was specifically asked to take part in a symposium on Barack Obama, Franklin Roosevelt, and the New Deal, I quickly said yes.

I was asked to respond to this question: “Was that an FDR-Sized Stimulus?” Here’s some of what I wrote.

President Obama probably wants to be another FDR, and his policies share an ideological kinship with those that were imposed during the New Deal. But there’s really no comparing the 1930s and today. And that’s a good thing. As explained by Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, President Roosevelt’s policies are increasingly understood to have had a negative impact on the American economy. …[W]hat should have been a routine or even serious recession became the Great Depression.

In other words, my assessment is that Obama is a Mini-Me version of FDR, which is a lot better (or, to be more accurate, less worse) than the real thing.

To be sure, Obama wants higher tax rates, and he has expanded government control over the economy. And the main achievement of his first year was the so-called stimulus, which was based on the same Keynesian theory that a nation can become richer by switching money from one pocket to another. …Obama did get his health plan through Congress, but its costs, fortunately, pale in comparison to Social Security and its $30 trillion long-run deficit. And the Dodd-Frank bailout bill is peanuts compared to all the intervention of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In other words, Obama’s policies have nudged the nation in the wrong direction and slowed economic growth. FDR, by contrast, dramatically expanded the burden of government and managed to keep us in a depression for a decade. So thank goodness Barack Obama is no Franklin Roosevelt.

The last sentence of the excerpt is a perfect summary of my remarks. I think Obama’s policies have been bad for the economy, but he has done far less damage than FDR because his policy mistakes have been much smaller.

Moreover, Obama has never proposed anything as crazy as FDR’s “Economic Bill of Rights.” As I pointed out in my article, this “would have created a massive entitlement state—putting America on a path to becoming a failed European welfare state a couple of decades before European governments made the same mistake.”

On the other hand, subsequent presidents did create that massive entitlement state and Obama added another straw to the camel’s back with Obamacare. And he is rigidly opposed to the entitlement reforms that would save America from becoming another Greece. So maybe I didn’t give him enough credit for being as bad as FDR.

P.S.: Here’s some 1930s economic humor, and it still applies today.

P.P.S.: The symposium also features an excellent contribution from Professor Lee Ohanian of UCLA.

And from the left, it’s interesting to see that Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research basically agrees with me. But only in the sense that he also says Obama is a junior-sized version of FDR. Dean actually thinks Obama should have embraced his inner-FDR and wasted even more money on an even bigger so-called stimulus.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was campaigning in Iowa yesterday and, inevitably, went native. He—oh, hey, what a coincidence!—also released a 16-page white paper outlining his plan for rural America, which consists of four main ideas:

• Implement effective tax policies to support family farms and strong agribusiness.
• Pursue trade policies that expand upon the success of the agriculture sector, not limit it.
• Create a regulatory environment that is commonsense and cost-effective.
• Achieve energy independence on this continent by 2020.

These aren’t the typical subsidize-and-control policies that are usually associated with agricultural policy in the United States (which is not to say they are good ideas). But Mr. Romney betrayed his bias towards managing things—in a “commonsense” and “cost-effective” way, of course—in his remarks to the crowd. Politico reports:

“The big difference between the president and me, he has no plan for rural America, no plan for agriculture, no plan for getting America back to work,” Romney said. “I’m going to make sure I help the American people, and the American farmer, and get America working again.”

A quick fact-check: Obama does have a plan for agriculture. He endorsed the Senate-passed farm bill, and he (and his wife) have meddled plenty in agriculture and food policy in this country. But that’s not the point I am trying to make here.

Instead of launching and bragging about his “plan,” Mr. Romney would better serve the American people by giving them a clear alternative to current farm policy: an alternative that consists of no plan for agriculture, or rural America generally, at all. Let those folks get on with the business of farming, and give American taxpayers and consumers a break.