Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli reviewed the evidence and concluded that one Thomas Haynesworth had been wrongly imprisoned–so he persuaded Governor Robert McDonnell to grant him parole. Not a full vindication, because Haynesworth still has a felony record, but freedom. Remarkably, Cuccinelli went still further and added Haynesworth to his staff while promising to work to clear his name and wipe his record clean. David Keene has the full story here.
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Close My Post Office
The USPS is proposing to close 3,700 post office locations across the country, as mail volume falls and the agency is losing billions of dollars.
Kudos to Postmaster Patrick Donahoe for cutting costs, but he missed at least one location. He should add to his list one of the two offices in my neighborhood, which are only a mile apart.
For its story today, the Washington Post went looking for citizens who would complain about the reform, and they found some. One lady in Chevy Chase, Maryland, groused that the post office near her is “part of the culture of the town.” Boy, does that town’s culture ever need help if a sterile government office plays a key role!
Anyway, my neighborhood lost its “culture” when the Borders book store closed last weekend. But that’s life; things change. Maybe a cool new café will open up in the Chevy Chase post office location. I don’t know why people take for granted the huge dynamism we have in arts, society, and the business world, yet they want the government to be a fossilized dinosaur.
Donahoe is trying to cut post office costs, but he does need to expand his horizons to consider more fundamental reforms. On Larry Kudlow’s TV show last night, I pointed to privatized European post offices and expanding postal competition as a good model for the United States, but Donahoe was dismissive. Meanwhile, Susan Collins, who oversees the USPS in the Senate, is even grumbling about Donahoe’s limited reforms.
Will we have to wait until mail volume plummets another 20 percent for U.S. policymakers to get serious about postal reforms?
For more information, see www.downsizinggovernment.org/usps.
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NYT Magazine: ‘Surprising…How Willingly’ Medicaid Officials Enable Fraud
The New York Times Magazine has a lengthy (and not entirely unflattering) feature on James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas. Here’s what the profile says about Project Veritas’s ongoing string of Medicaid-fraud sting videos:
It isn’t exactly a secret that some Medicaid money winds up in unqualified hands, but it was surprising to see how willingly minor officials turned a blind eye and, in some cases, even offered advice on how to game the system.
Actually, it’s not just minor officials. And when one understands Medicaid, it’s not surprising either.
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‘What Would Jesus Cut?’ — Debt Ceiling Version
Encouraging President Obama to play Robin Hood—as if he needed encouragement—a group of religious leaders met with the president at the White House last week where they admonished him “to protect Medicaid, food stamps, aid to poor women with infant children, international development aid and other programs specifically targeted to the poor,” the Washington Post reports. Led by the progressive evangelical group Sojourners, and joined by other Christian organizations from across the political spectrum, these are the folks about whom I wrote in the Wall Street Journal last April after they ran ads with the headline, “What Would Jesus Cut?”
Now that they’re using not simply the budget debates but the debt ceiling battle to promote their agenda, two points are worth noting. First, we need to remember that “helping the poor” is what got us into our recent mess to begin with: the Community Reinvestment Act, which promoted mortgages for people who couldn’t afford them; the Fed’s inordinately low interest rates, which gave further encouragement; Freddie and Fanny—all leading to the housing bubble that precipitated the Great Recession.
Second, the implicit message—made explicit with Obama’s obsession over “corporate jets”—is that if we can’t cut spending, we’ve got to raise taxes on the rich. Never mind that the top 1 percent pay more in federal income taxes than the bottom 95 percent. Far more telling, federal tax revenues, AEI’s Philip I. Levy reports, “have steadfastly remained at or below 20 percent of GDP for decades, through periods of high marginal tax rates and low.” Tax the rich into poverty, you won’t solve the problem, which is rooted in spending. But you will feel better—if equality is your aim. That too, over the longer haul, is what got us into this mess. There’s nothing wrong with inequality: it’s what lifts a thousand boats, including those of the people the Sojourners want to help.
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Boehner Plan Doesn’t Cut Spending
House Speaker John Boehner is scrambling to revise his budget plan after the CBO found that it would only cut spending by $850 billion, not the $1.2 trillion promised.
However, the Boehner plan doesn’t actually cut spending at all. The chart shows the discretionary spending caps in the Boehner plan. Spending increases every year—from $1.043 trillion in 2012 to $1.234 trillion in 2021. (This category of spending excludes the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).
The “cuts” in the Boehner plan are only cuts from the CBO baseline, which is an imaginary path of future spending designed as a planning tool for Congress. Boehner can propose to spend any amount in any future year he wants, and in this plan he choose to have a steadily rising spending path.
The Boehner plan also doesn’t cut spending in a more fundamental way. It doesn’t lay out any particular programs or agencies to terminate. I’m in favor of spending caps as a secondary enforcement mechanism, but actual cuts have to come first. A caps-only plan like Boehner’s just kicks the can down the road. At best, it simply nudges future legislators to actually cut something specific.
Why doesn’t the House leadership propose real cuts? They’ve certainly got the resources and expertise to do the job. A single senator — Tom Coburn — produced a 620-page report last week detailing hundreds of programs to cut and terminate. Coburn and his staff read through thousands of articles and reports on the real-world performance of federal programs, and they made a good case for each particular cut they proposed.
Republican leaders can’t hide behind baselines forever. If they really want a smaller government as they keep claiming, they’ve got to target particular programs and agencies and begin a national debate about terminating them.
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Bill Daley on When It’s Okay to Impeach Obama
On NPR this morning, I heard White House chief of staff Bill Daley say, “The president cannot usurp the power that’s in the Congress.” What a relief! Also, this:
I don’t think the American people would find it appropriate for the president of the United States to defy the laws of the nation and its Constitution, without their belief that that president should be impeached. And this president isn’t going to do anything against the Constitution, against the laws of the United States of America.
So if the president were to defy, say, the War Powers Resolution by ridiculously redefining “hostilities,” or if he were to defy the Constitution by signing a law that claims for Congress a power the Constitution does not grant (say, ObamaCare), we should impeach him. Got it.
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The Federal Government Is So Big, It Even Takes the Washington Post’s Breath Away
On the front page of today’s Washington Post, above the fold, a news story begins:
If nothing else, the crisis over the debt ceiling is reminding the country of the astonishing reach of the federal spigot, encapsulated by a figure that President Obama tossed out recently: The government sends out “70 million checks” every month.
Reporter Alec MacGillis went on to note that the president underestimated:
The figures used by Obama and Geithner were, if anything, too low. They relied on Treasury Department figures from June that include Social Security (56 million checks that month), veterans benefits (4.5 million checks), and spending on non-defense contractors and vendors (1.8 million checks).
But those numbers do not include reimbursements to Medicare providers and vendors (100 million claims in June), and electronic transfers to the 21 million households receiving food stamps.
Nor do they include most spending by the Defense Department, which has a payroll of 6.4 million active and retired employees and, on average, pays nearly 1 million invoices and 660,000 travel expense claims per month.
However, we should remember that
The mind-boggling number challenges a common critique of the federal government as a creaky apparatus where tax dollars are lost in the bureaucratic cracks. From the vantage point of the 70 million or 80 million checks, the government is a finely tuned machine that brings in revenue and disperses it back out across the country.
Whew. For a minute there I was worried.