Here are some of my views on Paul’s Ryan’s fiscal proposals.
His 10/25 tax plan:
His proposed spending reforms:
https://www.cato.org/paul-ryans-spending-plan/
His budget plan discussed at a Cato forum
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Here are some of my views on Paul’s Ryan’s fiscal proposals.
His 10/25 tax plan:
His proposed spending reforms:
https://www.cato.org/paul-ryans-spending-plan/
His budget plan discussed at a Cato forum
From the Miami Herald blog:
Ryan voted at least twice in 2001 and 2004 against the [Cuba] embargo, but since 2007 he has opposed efforts to lift it, said Mauricio Claver-Carone, a conservative blogger and executive director of Cuba Democracy Advocates.
“He needed to be educated about the embargo,” Claver-Carone said. “He’s good on Cuba.”
Still, in 2009, Ryan still seemed opposed to the embargo when he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “If we’re going to have free trade with China, why not Cuba?” Ryan’s philosophical opposition to the embargo is rooted in the politics of the Midwest, which sees trade opportunities with Cuba.
So, the good news is, at some point in time, he had good instincts on this issue. The bad news is, he’s a politician.
With FHFA’s chief Ed DeMarco declaring mass principal write-downs off the table, the attention, has appropriately turned to Congress. First of all, this is really where the debate should have been. DeMarco is an acting director with little, if any, statutory authority to impose potentially large losses on the taxpayer in order to help mortgage borrowers. If we are going to do a massive giveaway to borrowers, the responsibility for such lies with Congress.
One such proposal was been put forth by Sen. Merkley, discussed by Joe Stiglitz and Mark Zandi in today’s New York Times. Stiglitz and Zandi claim that lowering the interest rate on outstanding mortgages would “work like a potent tax cut.” Monthly payments would be reduced, increasing disposable incomes and like magic, turn around the economy. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, however, such a scheme is really just a redistribution of wealth and not wealth creation, as the “savings” comes at the expense of the holders of mortgage assets.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has come up with an interesting argument why such a scheme would not be “zero-sum.” Their argument is that most mortgage assets are held by the government and that the government’s “spending on U.S. goods and services does not depend to any significant degree on their income from the mortgage bonds.” I’d be the first to admit that government spending does not appear to be deterred by massive losses or deficits, however that does ignore the fact that someone else ultimately pays for government.
If some version of Ricardian Equivalence holds, then losses suffered on mortgage securities would be viewed as future tax increases, decreasing current consumption. I applaud the NY Fed for at least attempting to put some numbers behind their already chosen policy, but the fact is I cannot see how anyone, with a straight-face, could claim to know with any certainty whether such a program would be zero, positive or even negative-sum. I can think of all sorts of reasons for such to be a net-loss, like scaring investors away from the mortgage market and hence reducing mortgage credit and weakening housing demand, but I’d be the first to admit I don’t know the net impact with any degree of certainty. If what Stiglitz and Zandi ultimately want to do is provide a tax cut, then call for a tax cut, such would be far more transparent than continuing to use mortgage finance policy as an opaque regressive transfer to well-off homeowners.
This weekend, The New York Times reported that the Transportation Security Administration’s “behavioral detection” program at Logan Airport has devolved into a racial profiling program, according to complaints from 32 federal officers who’ve seen up-close how it works. And yet to my eye, racial profiling isn’t the only constitutionally problematic aspect of the program revealed in the article (emphasis mine below):
In interviews and internal complaints, officers from the Transportation Security Administration’s “behavior detection” program at Logan International Airport in Boston asserted that passengers who fit certain profiles — Hispanics traveling to Miami, for instance, or blacks wearing baseball caps backward — are much more likely to be stopped, searched and questioned for “suspicious” behavior.
“They just pull aside anyone who they don’t like the way they look — if they are black and have expensive clothes or jewelry, or if they are Hispanic,” said one white officer, who along with four others spoke with The New York Times on the condition of anonymity. […]
At a meeting last month with T.S.A. officials, officers at Logan provided written complaints about profiling from 32 officers, some of whom wrote anonymously. Officers said managers’ demands for high numbers of stops, searches and criminal referrals had led co-workers to target minorities in the belief that those stops were more likely to yield drugs, outstanding arrest warrants or immigration problems.
Since everyone seems to be in agreement that the alleged profiling at the focus of the story is grossly unacceptable, I want to focus on what appears to have given rise to it: Managerial pressure to use TSA screenings as a means of enforcing drug laws and other ordinary criminal statutes, apparently resulting in a system of de facto quotas for “criminal referrals.” Even if this goal were being pursued without the use of racial profiling, it would be problematic, because the constitutionality of TSA searches is premised on the idea that they are not conducted for ordinary law enforcement purposes. We now seem to take for granted that narcotics interdiction is a legitimate aim of warrantless TSA searches—even on domestic flights not subject to the Fourth Amendment’s “border search” exception—but if we hew closely to the legal rationale for these searches, it’s not at all clear that ought to be the case.
Thanks to the Fourth Amendment, government agents cannot normally demand that we submit to intrusive, suspicionless searches as a condition of exercising our right to travel. In one 2000 case, the Supreme Court held that a police officer had violated the rights of a bus passenger by merely squeezing the outside of his carry-on bag, never mind conducting one of the “enhanced” pat-downs for which TSA has become infamous. The legal rationale for making an exception for airlines can be traced to a string of cases from the early 1970s, in which courts developed a “special needs” doctrine, largely in response to a string of high-profile plane hijackings in the 60s, creating an exemption from the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement under certain circumstances. Once crucial test was that such warrantless “special needs” searches had to be conducted for the purpose of protecting public safety, not simply for carrying out ordinary criminal investigations or law enforcement functions.
As the 9/11 attacks showed, a hijacked airplane can be transformed into an incredibly destructive weapon. But bulletproof cockpit doors, new training for airline staff, and changed passenger behavior are the most important reasons a 9/11-style hijacking attempt would be extraordinarily unlikely to succeed today. Thus, as a recent House Transportation Committee report noted, “the primary threat is no longer hijacking, but explosives designed to take down an aircraft.” But that’s a problem we had pretty well in hand under the older, less intrusive procedures: No passenger has detonated a smuggled bomb on a U.S.-originating flight since 1962, though given TSA’s consistently lackluster performance in spotting dummy bombs in tests, it’s not clear how far that should be ascribed to gate searches. TSA does seize quite a few guns, mostly from the bags of people who’d forgotten about a legal firearm—along with pocket knives, corkscrews, and other contraband, much of which is later auctioned off. And of course, they turn up narcotics—though occasionally TSA screeners find it more lucrative not to turn them up.
If we take the Fourth Amendment seriously, we should demand strong justifications for departures from its core requirements, and take care to prevent the exceptions from swallowing the rule. We shouldn’t just ask whether there’s some legitimate safety or security purpose that might justify some form of search, but whether the scope and intrusiveness of the search is calibrated to the rationale for the exception. Police officers can pat-down detained persons for weapons to ensure their own safety—but that doesn’t entitle them to search, say, a locked container out of the suspect’s reach. The question, in other words, should be whether the intrusiveness of the search reasonably serves the claimed security purpose, or whether its practical effect is, in reality, to serve ordinary law enforcement purposes with little marginal security benefit. And, indeed, some courts have held airport searches to be unlawful when they strayed too far from legitimate security purposes.
If these officers’ allegations are accurate, the problem with the program they describe is not just that it employed racial profiling, but that it wasn’t limited to profiling for security threats. Rather, it subjected passengers to additional intrusive searches in for the ordinary law enforcement purpose of detecting narcotics. And these were hardly incidental or exceptional: The officers estimated that 80 percent of stops and follow-up searches “focused on stopping minority members in response to pressure from managers to meet certain threshold numbers for referrals to the State Police, federal immigration officials or other agencies. ” Such a program of searches simply cannot reasonably be said to be properly aimed at the purpose of serving the “special needs” of airport security. This kind of systematic exploitation of the security exception as a loophole for law enforcement searches is, perhaps, too routine now to raise an eyebrow—the Times makes no comment on it—but it should.
A Politico article on Paul Ryan’s views on the Pentagon’s budget concludes:
A key question for the coming weeks will be how Ryan, one of Washington’s biggest budget wonks, interprets and explains the Romney campaign’s positions on defense spending. That could be a clue as to how realistic he actually believes they are.
I certainly hope so.
I was among the first to comment on Romney’s plan to spend at least four percent of GDP on the Pentagon’s base budget (war costs would be extra), and have revisited the question several times since. I have separately looked at Paul Ryan’s budget (here and here), and pointed out how military spending increased under his plan, just not as much as Romney.
During a series of lectures over the past several months, and with help from Charles Zakaib and Andy Stravers, I’ve included a variation on the chart at bottom, showing Romney’s four percent plan (achieved within four and eight years); projected Pentagon spending under the Ryan plan; the current baseline per OMB; and the levels called for under sequestration, per CBO’s latest (.pdf). I’ve adjusted these for inflation from DoD’s 2012 Green Book (.pdf) for 2012–2016, and extrapolated over the out years. I’ve estimated Romney’s totals using CBO’s GDP estimates (Romney’s own projections assume higher GDP, and therefore more military spending than shown here).
Here is how the totals shake out relative to the current baseline over the ten-year period, 2013–2022, in constant dollars:
By pledging to increase the military’s budget above the rate of inflation, Ryan’s basic argument is that the Pentagon’s budget should remain near historic highs in real, inflation-adjusted terms. That would mean spending more than we did during much of the Cold War, and much more than we did in the 1990s. I think we are safer now than when we were confronting the Soviet Union, and that we could and should spend less. I hope that reporters and prospective voters will ask Paul Ryan if he thinks we are safer. His budget implies that we are not.
Still, Ryan has not (yet) endorsed the kinds of massive military spending increases that Romney champions. What’s more, the Ryan plan spelled out specific proposals for cutting domestic spending, both discretionary programs and entitlements, that would allow the Pentagon’s budget to grow above the current baseline. Mitt Romney has not.
So how will Paul Ryan help Mitt Romney make up the difference? What additional spending will be cut, taxes raised, or debt increased?
As I explain in today’s Cato Daily Podcast, I anxiously await the answer.
Today POLITICO Arena asks:
Can Ryan boost Romney’s poll numbers?
My response:
Ryan is the shot in the arm that Romney needed. If last night’s “60 Minutes” interview of the two is any indication, Romney is finally focused on the big issues. It’s rare that a vice-presidential pick adds much to a ticket, but this case may be the exception. So, yes, Ryan can boost Romney’s poll numbers. Just look at the weekend crowds.
Ryan put it simply: The country’s going broke. You’d never know that from listening to the Democratic response to the pick. For that side, it’s all about what the Romney-Ryan team will take away from seniors, women, students, and the middle class — as if all of that “stuff” were free from government. They’re counting on seniors being too senile, women being too emotional, young people being too uneducated, and the middle-class being too focused on their mortgages to understand the situation we’re in, where we borrow 40 percent of what we spend and add trillions to the national debt every year. The Ryan budget won’t push Granny over the cliff. The Obama team’s head-in-the-sand will.
And it isn’t as if the Obama team doesn’t know exactly what they’re doing. In Obama’s latest ad, run last night during the Olympics closing ceremonies, he himself states plainly that the nation faces two fundamentally different visions of where we’re going. But he talks only about government benefits, not about costs — the “Life of Julia” nonsense. It’s a cynical view of the American public — a view that this election, more than any in recent memory, will put to the test.
The burden of federal spending in the United States was down to 18.2 percent of gross domestic product when Bill Clinton left office.
But this progress didn’t last long. Thanks to George Bush’s reckless spending policies, the federal budget grew about twice as fast as the economy, jumping by nearly 90 percent in just eight years This pushed federal spending up to about 25 percent of GDP.
President Obama promised hope and change, but he has kept spending at this high level rather than undoing the mistakes of his predecessor.
This new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation uses examples of waste, fraud, and abuse to highlight President Obama’s failed fiscal policy.
Good stuff, though the video actually understates the indictment against Obama. There is no mention, for instance, about all the new spending for Obamacare that will begin to take effect over the next few years.
But not everything can be covered in a 5‑minute video. And I suspect the video is more effective because it closes instead with some discussion of the corrupt insider dealing of Obama’s so-called green energy programs.