At the Volokh Conspiracy, my occasional co-author Jonathan Adler dresses down PolitiFact-Georgia for declaring “false” my claim that Georgia law prohibits state employees from implementing an ObamaCare Exchange. If you place faith in “fact checkers,” you might not want to read it. My response to PolitiFact-Georgia is here.

Conservatives are hammering House Speaker John Boehner over the purging of reliably limited government Republicans who weren’t afraid to buck the GOP leadership. But what about Paul Ryan?

There were two Republicans on the House Budget Committee – chaired by Ryan – who voted against Ryan’s budget last spring: Rep. Justin Amash and Rep. Tim Huelskamp. Amash and Huelskamp were just kicked off the Budget Committee, which Ryan is going to continue to chair.

Now consider this quote from an unnamed House GOP leadership aid as reported by The Hill: “Changes are made for a variety of reasons, most often at the request of committee chairs.” That makes it pretty clear that Ryan played a role – if not the role – in getting rid of Amash and Huelskamp. Yet – to my knowledge – conservatives haven’t trained any of their fire on Ryan.

How come?

I’ve repeatedly tried to expose pervasive fiscal dishonesty in Washington.

In these John Stossel and Judge Napolitano interviews, for instance, I explain that the crooks in DC have created a system that allows them to claim they’re cutting the budget when the burden of government spending actually is rising.

This sleazy system is designed in part to deceive the American people, and the current squabbling over the fiscal cliff is a good example. The President claims he has a “balanced approach” that involves budget cuts, but look at the second chart at this link and you will see that he’s really proposing bigger government.

This dishonest approach also was used by the President’s Fiscal Commission and last year’s crummy debt limit deal was based on this form of fiscal prevarication.

Here are some key excerpts from a Wall Street Journal editorial exposing this scam.

…President Obama and John Boehner are playing by the dysfunctional Beltway rules. The rules work if you like bigger government, but Republicans need a new strategy, which starts by exposing the rigged game of “baseline budgeting.” …numbers have no real meaning because they are conjured in the wilderness of mirrors that is the federal budget process. Since 1974, Capitol Hill’s “baseline” has automatically increased spending every year according to Congressional Budget Office projections, which means before anyone has submitted a budget or cast a single vote. Tax and spending changes are then measured off that inflated baseline, not in absolute terms. …Democrats designed this system to make it easier to defend annual spending increases and to portray any reduction in the baseline as a spending “cut.” Chris Wallace called Timothy Geithner on this “gimmick” on “Fox News Sunday” this week, only to have the Treasury Secretary insist it’s real. …in the current debate the GOP is putting itself at a major disadvantage by negotiating off the phony baseline. …If Republicans really want to slow the growth in spending, they need to stop playing by Beltway rules and start explaining to America why Mr. Obama keeps saying he’s cutting spending even as spending and deficits keep going up and up and up.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that other nations rely on this crooked system, most notably the United Kingdom, which supposedly is imposing “savage” cuts even though government spending keeps rising (and they fooled Paul Krugman, though he seems to make a habit of misreading foreign fiscal and economic data).

But let’s return to the American fiscal situation. Republicans almost certainly will lose the battle over the fiscal cliff because they meekly are playing cards with a rigged deck controlled by the other side.

They should expose this scam by using nominal numbers and looking at year-over-year changes in both taxes and spending. I did that last year and showed how simple it is to balance the budget in a short period of time.

They key thing to understand is that (barring a recession) tax revenues rise every year. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office projects that tax revenue will climb by an average of more than 6 percent annually over the next 10 years — even if the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are made permanent.

So all that’s really needed to bring red ink under control is a modest bit of spending restraint. This video is from 2010, but the analysis is still completely relevant today.

It’s amazing how good things happen when you follow the Golden Rule of fiscal policy.

The invaluable Robert Laszweski:

The Affordable Care Act: Ten Months to Launch “Obamacare”––Get Ready for Some Startling Rate Increases

[…]

I conducted an informal survey of a number of insurers…None of the people I talked to are academics or work for a think tank. None of them are in the spin business inside the Beltway. Every one of them has the responsibility for coming up with the correct rates their companies will have to charge…

On average, expect a 30% to 40% increase in the baseline cost of individual health insurance to account for the new premium taxes, reinsurance costs, benefit mandate increases, and underwriting reforms…

In states with the least mandates or for health insurance companies with the tightest underwriting now, the increase could be a lot more…

[E]xpect individual health insurance rates for people in their 20s and early 30s to about double…

Will the feds be ready to provide an insurance exchange in all of the states that don’t have one on October 1, 2013?

I have no idea. And neither does anyone else I talk to inside the Beltway. We only hear vague reports that parts of the new federal exchange information systems are in testing.

The former CIA director couldn’t get away with an affair in this town but the Obama administration has a complete lid on just where they are on health insurance exchanges and haven’t shown any willingness to want to talk about their progress toward launching on time––except to tell us all not to worry.

We are all worried. I would not want to be responsible for the work that remains and only have ten months to do it…

The Republicans said this would not work. If it does not launch on time, or does with serious problems, I would not want to be an incumbent Democrat.

I told them not to call this the “Affordable Care Act.”

Three years ago the climate world was set ablaze by the release of thousands of “Climategate” emails from the server at the University of East Anglia. The ruling climate establishment, which I now call “hotheads”, showed itself threatening editors of journals who dared publish my papers, and engaged in a wide variety of other shady and nefarious practices.

I didn’t realize until the Climategate circus that my view on climate change had generated a moniker. I was branded—accurately—a “lukewarmer”, meaning that my synthesis of climate behavior is that global warming is real, and caused in part by people. It is also exaggerated, both in magnitude and effect. My new Center studies why this occurs, and finds similar dynamics operating across many fields of federally-sponsored science.

Apparently this view is getting, as is said here in Swamp-By-the-Potomac, “traction”.

My evidence comes from no less a media icon than Bill Maher, writing about me and my sidekick Chip Knappenberger here at Cato, specifically concluding, “they are winning”.

Thank you Bill, and no I won’t go on your show.

Fact check: Maher doesn’t realize that my company is closed and World Climate Report has migrated and evolved into Global Science Report, featured weekly on this blog.

Today is a great day for freedom. On this day in 1933, the 21st Amendment was ratified, thus repealing Prohibition. My former colleague Brandon Arnold wrote about it a few years ago:

Prohibition isn’t a subject that should be studied by historians alone, as this failed experiment continues to have a significant impact on our nation.

Groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a key force in the passage of Prohibition, survive to this day and continue to insist that Prohibition was a success and advocate for dry laws.

Prohibition-era state laws, many of which are still on the books today, created government-protected monopolies for alcohol distributors. These laws have survived for three-quarters of a century because of powerful, rent-seeking interest groups, despite the fact that they significantly raise costs and limit consumer options. And because of these distribution laws, it is illegal for millions of Americans to have wine shipped directly to their door.

To learn more about the history and legacy of Prohibition, check out my podcast and watch the live webcast of Cato’s policy forum, “Free to Booze: the 75th Anniversary of the Repeal of Prohibition.”

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Photo Credit: Skeptical Libertarian[/caption]

A meme that is floating around the interwebs claims that Finland’s education system outperforms the United States because “We pay teachers like doctors, students enjoy over an hour of recess, and there’s no mandatory testing – the opposite of what America does.”

That all sounds great … it just isn’t true.

In Finland general practitioners earn, on average, about $70,000 per year, which is less than half of what doctors earn in the United States. The average salary for primary education teachers with 15 years experience in Finland is about $37,500, compared to $45,225 in the United States. Moreover, the cost of living in Finland is about 30% higher.

In short: higher teacher salaries are not what make Finland’s education system better than ours. And I suspect it isn’t recess either.

And, of course, having a curriculum that is more closely aligned with the PISA (the metric by which people judge Finland to be better) than almost any other industrialized nation may exaggerate Finland’s superiority significantly.