Congress empowered states to block major provisions of ObamaCare, including its subsidies and employer mandate. All states need do to is refuse to create a health insurance “exchange.” (And a whopping 34 states, accounting for two-thirds of the U.S. population, have done just that.)

Supporters of the law are doing their level best to deny what the law says. It has now been one full month since I challenged anyone and everyone to debate with me the powers Congress gave states to block these and other parts of the law. My debate-challenge video (embedded below) has nearly 3,000 views on YouTube. And how many brave ObamaCare supporters have accepted my challenge? Zero.

The latest to deny what the law says is Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, who has issued an opinion that Congress did not give Idaho these powers. So I hereby issue my challenge directly to Wasden, or any member of his staff, or his entire staff: I say you are misreading the law, and doing Idaho legislators, employers, and taxpayers a great disservice. So let’s have a debate over whether Congress allows Idaho to block ObamaCare’s employer mandate, and whether you are accurately portraying the law to Idaho legislators. 

Update: Washington & Lee University law professor Timothy Jost protests that he debated this issue with both Jonathan Adler and me back in October 2012. True enough, Jost is the only person who has agreed to debate this issue with us live. Here’s the video of that debate. Decide for yourself who bested whom. I meant my “zero” count to be prospective, and would be happy to debate Jost again.

Getting past all the politics and rhetoric, Chief Justice Roberts zeroed in on the heart of the case when he noted that the state with the worst ratio of black-to-white turnout and registration is Massachusetts and the best is Mississippi (third-best in registration). This case is not about whether racial discrimination still exists in America or even whether it is disproportionately found in the South (which it isn’t). It simply asks whether the “exceptional conditions” that the Supreme Court found to justify the “extraordinary remedy” of federal intrusion on state election administration in 1965 still exist today. By any measure, they do not — and if they did, Congress didn’t do its homework in 2006 to tailor the application of Section 5’s burdensome requirements to jurisdictions that allegedly engage in this systemic discrimination that is somehow Jim Crow’s equivalent. The justices were starkly divided today, but this case should be much easier than that.

You just know a David Brooks column featuring the refrain, “my dream Obama would…” is going to be exasperating. And it is: especially when he suggests that his “dream Obama” could and should:

… talk obsessively about family structure and social repair. Every week we get another statistic showing how social and income inequality is dividing the nation. .… while childhood obesity is falling among kids whose parents graduated from college, it is still rising among kids whose parents have a high school degree or less.

Because of his upbringing, President Obama is uniquely qualified to talk about family structures. Traditional values are an investment in the young, and he could do what he can to restitch the social fabric.

It’ll be tough to “restitch the social fabric” when you need at least one hand free to bend the arc of history, but no doubt President Obama believes he’s up to the task. Still, why does David Brooks think it would help to have the president “talk obsessively about family structure and social repair”?

Barack Obama has been talking obsessively about capital-‘h’ Hope for nearly a decade, and during his administration, as with his predecessor’s, many more Americans think the country’s on the “wrong track” than think it’s moving in the “right direction.” (.pdf).

The evidence that the presidential “bully pulpit” reliably sways the public’s policy preferences is weak enough, as Ezra Klein documents here. What evidence is there that presidential jawboning about family structures changes anyone’s behavior? Birth rates for unmarried women went down in the era of Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers, resuming their upward trend under family values president George W. Bush. Do people really make their choices about marriage and family under the influence of presidential rhetoric or with an eye toward the example he sets?

The campaign Brooks envisions would be about as effective as Gerald Ford’s little Whip Inflation Now (WIN) buttons. Maybe it’s time for a little less magical thinking about our presidents. 

My long-ago colleague Norman Leahy, once a young research assistant at the Cato Institute, has an op-ed in the Washington Post today. I wonder where he got the idea that an act of the legislature is invalid just because it violates the state constitution.

Those praising the Virginia General Assembly’s transportation compromise may not realize that the bill runs afoul of the plain language in the state’s constitution.

Virginia’s constitution is clear that the General Assembly can impose only uniform taxes across the state for similar activities. But the bill that emerged from the House-Senate conference committee last weekend upsets the historic balance between localities and state government; it contains new provisions about taxation, some of which would effectively set up a two-tier system for residents in certain parts of the state. It’s difficult to see how some of these provisions could survive legal challenge.…

As a constitutional matter, these local tax provisions could probably be struck down without affecting the rest of the legislation.

But few should know better than Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) that state legislators don’t have the power to impose a discriminatory local tax. He was the state’s attorney general when his office defended before the state Supreme Court the General Assembly’s previous attempt at a transportation tax package. The court rejected the argument.

Will sequestration undermine U.S. national security? Hardly. Today, the Cato Institute released a new infographic putting these minor cuts in perspective.

Military spending will remain at roughly 2006 levels—$603 billion, higher than peak U.S. spending during the Cold War. Meanwhile, we live in a safer world. The Soviet Union has been dead for more than two decades; no other nation, or combination of nations, has emerged since that can pose a comparable threat. We should have a defense budget that reflects this reality.

To be clear, sequestration was no one’s first choice. But the alternative—ever-increasing military spending detached from a legitimate debate over strategy—is worse. We should have had such a debate, one over the roles and missions of the U.S. military, long before this day of reckoning. And politicians could have pursued serious proposals to prudently reduce military spending. Instead, they chose the easy way out, avoiding difficult decisions that would have allowed for smarter cuts.

Until now, there have been few constraints on Washington’s ability to spend what it pleases on the military. As my colleagues Benjamin Friedman and Justin Logan put it, Americans “buy defense like rich people shop, ignoring the balances of costs and benefits.”

Policymakers can’t postpone the tradeoffs forever, especially when the public has grown increasingly weary of foreign entanglements. If forced to choose between higher taxes, less military spending, or lower domestic spending, in order to balance the budget, the military fares least well, with solid pluralities favoring cuts in military spending over cuts in other programs.

Which is why it is so important to get the foreign policy debate right. If we are going to give our military less, we need to think about asking it to do less.

A number of experts have done that, rethinking the military’s purpose, and documenting the savings that would flow from a more modest foreign policy. The sequester is a first step, albeit an imperfect one, that could finally compel policymakers to do the same.

Download and share this infographic on your blog, Twitter, or Facebook.

My thanks go out to Harrison Moar and Zach Graves for conceiving this, pulling the data together, and making it look really cool.

Additional Cato resources on sequestration and military spending:

• “Sequestration Is Still Better than the Alternatives,” by Christopher A. Preble
• “Budgetary Savings from Military Restraint,” by Christopher A. Preble and Benjamin H. Friedman
• “Economic Effects of Reductions in Defense Outlays,” by Benjamin Zycher
• Video: “Sequestration Panic!”
• Video: “The Truth about Sequestration”

Infographic sources (in order of figures listed, left to right):

• $6 trillion (current dollars): Congressional Budget Office, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2013 to 2023,” Table 1–5, February 2013, http://​www​.cbo​.gov/​s​i​t​e​s​/​d​e​f​a​u​l​t​/​f​i​l​e​s​/​c​b​o​f​i​l​e​s​/​a​t​t​a​c​h​m​e​n​t​s​/​4​3​9​0​7​-​B​u​d​g​e​t​O​u​t​l​o​o​k.pdf. 
• $500 billion (current dollars): Widely cited approximate figure. See Army Sgt. 1st Class Tyrone C. Marshall, Jr., “Panetta Thanks Congress, Seeks End to Sequestration,” American Forces Press Service, United States Department of Defense, January 2, 2013, http://​www​.defense​.gov/​N​e​w​s​/​n​e​w​s​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​.​a​s​p​x​?​I​D​=​1​18907; and Editorial, “Defense and the Sequester,” New York Times, February 24, 2013, http://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2​0​1​3​/​0​2​/​2​5​/​o​p​i​n​i​o​n​/​d​e​f​e​n​s​e​-​a​n​d​-​t​h​e​-​s​e​q​u​e​s​t​e​r​.​h​t​m​l​?​r​e​f​=​g​l​o​b​a​l​&_r=0.
• $605 billion (constant FY 2012 dollars): Department of Defense, “Fiscal Year 2012 Green Book,” Table 6–8 – Dept. of Defense BA by Title, March 2011, http://​comp​trol​ler​.defense​.gov/​b​u​d​g​e​t​2​0​1​2​.html. War costs totaled $132 billion.
• $603 billion (current dollars): Congressional Research Service, Memorandum from Amy Belasco, “Potential Effects on Defense Spending of a Year-long Continuing Resolution and the March 2013 Sequesters,” Table 1, February 7, 2013, http://​www​.pogoarchives​.org/​s​t​r​a​u​s​/​C​R​S​-​S​e​q​u​e​s​t​e​r​-​2​0​1​3​0​2​0​7.pdf. Figures based on FY 2013 Continuing Resolution. War costs total $82.1 billion.
• $580 billion (constant FY 2012 dollars): Department of Defense, “Fiscal Year 2012 Green Book,” Table 6–8 – Dept. of Defense BA by Title, March 2011, http://​comp​trol​ler​.defense​.gov/​b​u​d​g​e​t​2​0​1​2​.html.
• $560 billion (constant 2012 dollars): State Department,“World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers: 1989,” Table I, Released October, 1990, http://​www​.state​.gov/​t​/​a​v​c​/​r​l​s​/​r​p​t​/​w​m​e​a​t​/​c​5​0​8​3​4.htm. Author’s inflationary calculations.
• $111 billion (2010 estimate): International Institute of Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2012, (London: Routledge, 2012), p.215.
• $65 billion (2010 estimate): International Institute of Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2012, (London: Routledge, 2012), p.192.
• $12 billion (2011 estimate): International Institute of Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2012, (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 323.
• $7 billion (2009 estimate): Approximation based on estimated military expenditure as a percentage of GDP from U.S State Department document and CIA World Factbook. State Department, “North Korea Background Note,” April 4, 2012, http://​www​.state​.gov/​o​u​t​o​f​d​a​t​e​/​b​g​n​/​n​o​r​t​h​k​o​r​e​a​/​2​0​0​9​7​2.htm; and Central Intelligence Agency, “World Factbook: Korea, North,” https://​www​.cia​.gov/​l​i​b​r​a​r​y​/​p​u​b​l​i​c​a​t​i​o​n​s​/​t​h​e​-​w​o​r​l​d​-​f​a​c​t​b​o​o​k​/​g​e​o​s​/​k​n​.html.

Sigh. I feel like a modern-day Sisyphus. Except I’m not pushing a rock up a hill, only to then watch it roll back down.

divCompared to educating journalists about fiscal policy, this is an easy task

I have a far more frustrating job. I have to read the same nonsense day after day about “deep spending cuts” even though I keep explaining to journalists that a sequester merely means that spending climbs by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years rather than $2.5 trillion.

The latest example comes from the New York Times, which just reportedabout “deep automatic spending cuts that will strike hard” without bothering to provide a single concrete number about spending levels in any fiscal year.

Yes, you read correctly. A story about budget cuts did not have any numbers for spending in FY2013, FY2014, or any other fiscal year.

So, for the umpteenth time, here are the actual numbers from the Congressional Budget Office showing what will happen to spending over the next 10 years if we have a sequester.

I don’t mean to pick on the New York Times. Yes, the self-styled paper of record has been guilty in the past of turning budget increases into spending cuts, but the Washington Post is guilty of the same sin, having actually written in 2011that reducing a $3.8 trillion budget by $6 billion would “slash spending.”

And the NYT story actually has some decent reporting on how Republicans so far have (fingers crossed) avoided the tax-increase trap that Obama thought the sequester would create.

But one would still like to think that Journalism 101 teaches reporters to include a few hard facts when writing stories. Particularly if they’re going to use dramatic adjectives to describe what supposedly will happen.

Anyhow, this is just part of a larger problem. As I explained in these John Stossel and Judge Napolitano interviews, the politicians and interest groups have given us a budget process that assumes ever-increasing spending levels, which then allows them to make hysterical claims about “savage” and “draconian” cuts whenever spending doesn’t rise as fast as some hypothetical baseline.

This is why almost nobody understands that it’s actually relatively simple to balance the budget with a modest bit of spending restraint. My goal is reducing the burden of government spending, not fiscal balance, but it’s worth noting that we’d have a balanced budget in just 10 years if spending grew by “only” 3.4 percent annually.

When I write and talk about getting better data about the federal government, its activities, and spending, I mostly have in mind strengthening public oversight by bringing computers to bear on the problem. You don’t have to know much about transparency, organizational management, or computing to understand that having a machine-readable government organization chart is an important start.

There should be a list, that computers can process, showing what agencies, bureaus, programs, and projects exist in the federal government and how they are related. Then budgets, bills in Congress, spending programs and actual outlays, regulations, guidance documents, and much more could be automatically tied to the federal organizational units affected and involved.

But it’s not only public oversight that would benefit from such a list.

Mike Riggs at Reason magazine has found that the Office of Management and Budget’s sequestration report issued last September listed a cut to the National Drug Intelligence Center’s budget even though the NDIC went out of business last June.

The first line item on page 121 of the OMB’s September 2012 report says that under sequestration the National Drug Intelligence Center would lose $2 million of its $20 million budget. While that’s slightly more than 8.2 percent (rounding error or scare tactic?), the bigger problem is that the National Drug Intelligence Center shuttered its doors on June 15, 2012–three months before the OMB issued its report to Congress.

That’s embarrassing for the administration, as it should be. Riggs asks, “Might there be other errors in the OMB’s report?”

Getting organized is not just about public oversight. Another reason to have a machine-readable federal government organization chart is to improve internal management and controls. This kind of mistake should be nearly impossible. People at OMB should be able to download the list of government entities at any time, day or night, and be sure that it is the correct listing that uniquely identifies and distinguishes all the organizational units of the federal government at that moment. We should be able to download it, too.

Unfortunately, OMB controller Danny Werfel has been riding the brake on transparency. He and the Obama administration as a whole should be stepping on the gas. In early February, the Sunlight Foundation found that more than $1.5 trillion in federal spending for fiscal year 2011 was misreported on USASpend​ing​.gov.