Arnold Schwarzenegger’s days as governor of California are almost over—so he made a stop at one of the late nite shows and made news by saying, “You want to smoke pot? Who cares?”

Well, Mr. Governor, as you well know, it is a federal crime to smoke marijuana. People get arrested and jailed for smoking marijuana. And you, Mr. Governor, could have done something about the war against cannabis because there was this ballot initiative called Prop. 19 in your state that would have made it legal for adults to smoke marijuana in private. Instead of fighting for Prop. 19, you opposed it! Apparently, you have decided to place yourself on both sides of the marijuana question—preserve penalties for use, but proclaim your opposition to penalties. Clever. 

For that and his other forgettable deeds as California governor, one can conclude that Schwarzennegger was a political wimp. In sharp contrast, Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico really fights for reform.

I’ve already written about the terrible work of the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO did an awful job on the stimulus, for instance, repeatedly asserting that diverting money from the private sector to government somehow would create jobs. CBO also was a disaster on Obamacare, claiming that a giant new entitlement program would reduce budget deficits. And the legislative bureaucracy even has argued that higher tax rates boost growth.

That sounds absurd (and it is), but CBO is not the only taxpayer-funded bureaucracy on Capitol Hill producing this kind of nonsensical analysis. The Congressional Research Service just published a new report asserting that higher tax rates will boost economic performance. Here’s an excerpt from that CRS publication.

…it is ambiguous whether tax cuts lead to more or less work, saving, and investment. The expiration of the tax cuts would nevertheless reduce the budget deficit, absent other policy changes, which economic theory predicts would have a positive effect on the economy in the long run.

To be fair, CRS doesn’t actually claim higher taxes are good for growth. And neither does CBO. But CRS and CBO both assert that there is no clear evidence that higher taxes hurt growth. Budget deficits, however, supposedly have a very negative impact on economic performance according to these Capitol Hill bureaucrats. More specifically, CRS and CBO believe that government borrowing leads to higher interest rates, and they think that higher interest rates reduce investment. And since investment is a key to long-run growth, this leads them to endorse any policy — including higher taxes — that reduces red ink.

Taking the CRS and CBO analysis to its logical extreme (and neither bureaucracy has stated that there are limits to their methodology), tax rates of 100 percent would be the most effective way of maximizing prosperity.

This video explains that the real problem is spending, and that deficits are just a symptom of a government that is too big. This is not to say that CRS and CBO are completely wrong. We have record budget deficits and very low interest rates today, but it’s possible that interest rates might be even lower without all the red ink. And it’s certainly true that interest rates are one of the many factors that determine investment choices, so there’s nothing wrong with including them in the equation.

But magnitudes matter. For all intents and purposes, CRS and CBO want us to believe that more government borrowing will have a very significant impact on interest rates and that those higher interest rates will have a very negative impact on investment. Yet neither bureaucracy offers any evidence for these linkages, in large part because the academic research shows that the relationships between deficits, interest rates, and investment are weak.

By contrast, CRS and CBO have no problem supporting higher tax rates — including more double taxation of income that is saved and invested. Yet there is considerable evidence that punitive tax rates have a significant impact not only on decisions to earn income and be productive, but also on decisions whether to consume today or to save and invest (and thus consume in the future). CRS and CBO also assume, rather naively, that politicians would use any additional revenue for deficit reduction instead of new spending.

Let’s call this the triumph of left-wing theory over real-world evidence. To add insult to injury, the sloppy analysis at CRS and CBO is financed by our tax dollars. So we pay bureaucrats so they can tell politicians to seize more money from us. Gee, what’s not to love about a scam like that?

P.S. If Republicans are actually serious about restraining government spending, CRS and CBO are target-rich environments. Just saying.

K‑12 school choice programs based on education tax credits are receiving a lot of attention after last week’s Supreme Court oral arguments in the Winn case. SCOTUS is likely to overturn a lower court ruling in Winn that would have hobbled or killed Arizona’s education tax credit program, and that has some folks consternated.

Among the ranks of the tetchy is Kevin Carey of the Quick and the Ed. Jay Greene responds here, and concludes, in essence, that Carey is inconsistently alternating between two criticisms of tax credits whenever one is whacked with a compelling counterargument. Worth a read.

Following last week’s electoral victory, the House Republican leadership has been talking up its pre-election pledge to return federal spending to 2008 levels. As I’ve previously discussed, the Republicans are only talking about non-security, discretionary spending. This category of spending represents a relatively small portion of the overall federal budget, and would only shave about $100 billion off of what the president wants to spend.

A better idea would be to cut total spending to 2008 levels. Excluding interest, the president has proposed spending $853 billion more in fiscal 2011 than the government spent in fiscal 2008. The following table shows the increases by department.

As the chart shows, federal spending for the Pentagon alone is set to increase by $126 billion, or more than the amount that the Republican leadership says it wants to cut. Therefore, if the Republicans want to get serious about cutting spending and reining in the growing federal debt, all categories of spending must be on the table.

Apologists for government spending will complain that returning spending levels to 2008 would be draconian. But compare the percentage increases in spending over three years under the president’s proposed budget.

President Obama and the Democrats told the American people that this spending explosion was needed to fix the economy. Unfortunately, it has only succeeded in transferring a tremendous amount of resources from the private sector to the less efficient government. Republicans were elected, in part, to help put the private sector back in the economic driver’s seat. To do so, Republicans need to be much more ambitious than trimming just $100 billion off of the president’s three-year $853 billion spending increase.

Vice President Joe Biden believes that human progress depends almost entirely on government vision and government incentive. Donald J. Boudreaux, Cato Institute adjunct scholar and George Mason University economics professor, details why Biden is wrong both generally and in the specific case he touts:

Produced by Caleb O. Brown. Shot and edited by Evan Banks.

At the beginning of the Obama administration, I had the audacity to hope that the new president would defy conventional wisdom and become a proponent of trade and a good spokesman for its benefits. Scott Lincicome and I even wrote a 20,000-plus word Cato analysis explaining why the economic, geopolitical, and domestic political environment offered the president a unique opportunity to steer his party back to its pro-trade roots.

The thrust of our analysis was that, despite the campaign rhetoric, the president understood the economic benefits of trade and that he would see it as an escape route from recession and a path to political success; that the president’s visibility and new cache with his trade-skeptical political party—and the fact that he wasn’t George W. Bush—made him well-suited to the task of challenging and extinguishing lingering myths about the alleged ravages of trade, while explaining its many benefits; and, that the president would recognize that pro-trade policies should be part of the current Democratic Party platform, if for no other reason than the fact that restrictions governments place on trade harm lower-income Americans and the world’s poor more than they hurt anyone else. (Protectionism is regressive taxation, which is presumably anathema to Democratic Party creed.)

Alas, our study, “Audaciously Hopeful: How President Obama Can Restore the Pro-Trade Consensus,” was just a little too. It fell on deaf ears. It was ignored. In fact, it’s almost as if the past two years of trade policy were conducted to spite the recommendations in that paper.

From this administration, we’ve seen completed bilateral trade agreements sent to an off-site storage warehouse; the imposition of taxes on imported tires; “Buy American” provisions; prohibitions on Mexican trucks; demonization by the president of companies that outsource; defiance of multilateral rules governing use of the antidumping law; and, a “Boardwalk Empire”-style deal to prospectively compensate Brazilian farmers for the lower revenues they should expect on account of the lavish subsidies bestowed by U.S. taxpayers on U.S. cotton producers in lieu of reducing—or better still, halting—cotton subsidies altogether. Yes, the hallmark accomplishment of this administration’s trade policy so far is a deal that requires American taxpayers to subsidize Brazilian cotton producers for the right to continue subsidizing U.S. cotton producers.

Despite all that, I remained audacious (or gullible) enough to hold a glimmer of hope that the president would finally see the wisdom in our advice—given the new political landscape. That glimmer was snuffed out with publication of an oped in the New York Times this past Saturday, in which President Obama betrays profound misunderstanding of trade and its purpose. The president portrays trade as an enterprise that is won or lost at the negotiating table, where only the most savvy or most committed negotiators can succeed in bringing home the spoils. The president promises to fight hard to get Americans their fair shake from this dog-eat-dog process, while actual producers, consumers, workers, and investors are relegated to tertiary roles.

The central dysfunction between Americans and trade is the assumption—reinforced in the president’s op-ed—that exports are good, imports are bad, the trade account is the scoreboard, and our trade deficit means that we are losing at trade. That dysfunction resides comfortably within a zero-sum worldview, which the president touts in a purposeful cadence throughout the oped. In the penultimate sentence, the president writes:

Finally, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Japan, I will continue seeking new markets in Asia for American exports. We want to expand our trade relationships in the region, including through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to make sure that we’re not ceding markets, exports and the jobs they support to other nations.

By opining about trade without understanding that its real benefits are manifest in imports (here’s Don Boudreax’s elaboration of that process), the president is simply reinforcing myths that will continue to confuse and divide American. As long as politicians insist that our trade account is a scoreboard and that a surplus is a trade policy success metric, Americans will continue to be skeptical about trade.

This Reuters headline says it all: “Cigna CEO: Don’t repeal U.S. health law.”