Tuesday Links
- Why the line-item veto is no quick fix for massive spending.
- Supreme Court Justice Scalia holds himself out as the patron saint of originalism, but is he abandoning the idea that judges should interpret the Constitution according to its original public meaning?
- Michael Tanner: “In case you lost count, President Obama’s remarks on Wednesday were his 35th major speech on health care reform. The news: this time he really, really, really means it when he says it’s time to act. As for the speech itself, it was virtually indistinguishable from any of the previous 34.”
- Podcast: “Chris Dodd’s Credit Price Controls” featuring Mark A. Calabria.
Poll Suggests Caution on Citizens United Response
The Center for Competitive Politics has just published a new poll measuring public views about the recent Citizens United decision. The poll provides a lot of interesting information.
About one in five said they were aware of the decision. Fully 60 percent of respondents said they were not aware of the case, and it is fair to say that almost all of the other 20 percent who responded “don’t know” or refused to answer were also poorly informed about it.
Congress is now trying to write and enact legislation to overcome the strictures imposed on campaign finance regulation by the Citizens United decision. Members cite surveys supporting such legislation as a justification for the new restrictions.
At best, however, public opinion is immature on this issue. Congress should deliberate and give the public some time to foster a more informed view of this decision. Deliberation is all the more necessary since we are talking about First Amendment rights in this case. Congress itself may wish to know more about the likely consequences of intervening in complex matters like corporate governance.
The CCP poll is worth reading in detail. I don’t remember a poll that asks so many objective and interesting questions about First Amendment issues.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
The Washington Foreign Policy Elite’s Unspoken Assumptions and Norms
In a column for Foreign Policy, James Traub writes
The Powell Doctrine became received wisdom at precisely the moment it was being superseded by events, for the end of the Cold War produced a set of “complex emergencies” in Somalia, Haiti, Kurdistan, and the Balkans that required a combination of force and large-scale civilian presence.
In a better world, the editor of this piece would demand, amid all this “becoming” and “being superseded by” and “producing” and “requiring,” some sort of agency. Active voice! Is it really true that the Powell Doctrine “became received wisdom”? By whom? Is it actually the case that “events” “superseded” the doctrine? Why? How, exactly, did the fact that the Cold War ended produce “complex emergencies” in Somalia, Haiti, or Kurdistan? Why was it that these complex emergencies “required” anything?
The piece has other problems, namely that the author uses the anecdote of the U.S. deploying 500 civilian teachers to support its brutal occupation of the Philippines to make the case for building American nation-building capacity today. (After all, the teachers “offered the most benevolent possible face to America’s colonial enterprise”!) But probably the biggest problem is that the above jumble of slogans and rhetoric is being asked to do a lot of heavy lifting in the piece without offering any clear analysis.
Sen. Schumer’s Immigration Reform Is a National ID
So reports the Wall Street Journal:
Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.
It’s the natural evolution of the policy called “internal enforcement” of immigration law, as I wrote in my paper, “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”
Once in place, watch for this national ID to regulate access to financial services, housing, medical care and prescriptions—and, of course, serve as an internal passport.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy; Trade and Immigration
Reassessing FHA Risk
As the Federal Housing Administration edges closer to a taxpayer bailout due to the large number of risky mortgage loans it has insured, it continues to insist that no such bailout will be required. However, a new study from a group of economists at New York University finds that the FHA’s assurances might not be based in reality.
According to the study, the actuarial analysis FHA used to determine it won’t need a bailout seriously understates its exposure to risk:
- More FHA mortgages are underwater than the FHA’s analysis identifies, and unemployment is naturally particularly high in areas where FHA borrowers are furthest underwater. Therefore, potential default costs are underestimated.
- FHA’s analysis relies on house values that are inaccurate. Overvalued houses means the FHA could end up recouping less than expected on defaults.
- Underwater FHA mortgages that were “streamlined” into new FHA mortgages are not properly accounted for, which further underestimates risk.
- The FHA got clobbered on a previous no-downpayment assistance program. However, the current homebuyer tax credit can effectively eliminate downpayments on FHA loans, but its analysis doesn’t take this into consideration.
One of the study’s authors, Prof. Andrew Caplin, writes the following on his website:
Rather than looking to structure the markets of the future, they [policymakers] have stumbled along in business as usual mode, waiting for kind fate to save them. It may. Then again, it may not. Either way, this is not a good way to run a business, or a government for that matter.
How does he see this story playing out?
My best guess is that it will end with a crash in the housing finance sector, with the federal government forced by popular revulsion at mushrooming losses to remove itself almost entirely from the housing finance equation. The Resolution Trust Corporation will look like an amateur warm-up act…
The bottom line is simple. The continuation of “business as usual” is re-creating the essential problem that made the sub-prime crisis so disastrous. Once again, taxpayers have been forced to subsidize the private purchase of massive amounts of residential housing, and to offer guarantees against future losses, without any effort to reduce costs should their funding help turn some markets around. Warren Buffett made huge profits for his shareholders by investing in under-valued assets. By contrast, our leaders are making massive losses for taxpayers by investing in over-valued assets.
See this essay for more on the problems with housing finance and government intervention.
Filed under: Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Annals of Unhelpful Polling: Internet Access Edition
A new BBC poll is garnering plenty of press attention for its striking finding that 78% of global respondents believe that Internet access “should be a fundamental right of all people.” Fascinating! Except… what exactly does that mean?
The obvious problem here is that, at least as it’s worded in English, the question is ambiguous between two equally plausible readings. Especially when juxtaposed with another question about whether the Internet should be regulated by government, it could be understood as asking whether there’s a fundamental negative right to be free to use the Internet — to read and communicate free of government censorship or other onerous barriers. That’s probably how we’d interpret a parallel question about whether people had a “fundamental right” to “access” information via newspapers or books.
Many folks, though, seem to be reading it as a measure of support for a fundamental positive right to be provided with (broadband?) Internet access. And that just seems a bit silly, frankly. There’s a decent case to be made that it’s desirable for governments that can afford it to make some kind of public Internet access available to citizens who can’t. You can even imagine that, a few years down the line, some states in the developed world might have moved so heavily toward interacting with the public online that it would become more or less necessary for full political equality. But a basic human right? Something that governments are “violating fundamental rights” if they don’t do? It’s not just that I don’t believe this; I have trouble imagining that much of anyone literally thinks so. A few of my friends at Free Press, maybe, but 4/5 of the world’s population? Color me dubious.
I’ll confess being startled at the response to a much less ambiguous question: A global majority agreed that “the Internet should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere.” While I find this pattern of responses congenial enough, I can’t take it much more seriously. After all, what falls under the category of “regulation of the Internet”? Censorship, of course, which I expect is what most people immediately thought of. But in reality, of course, there are a whole panoply of laws and rules that at least arguably “regulate” the Internet in some sense, some of which even I would approve of. I have many, many issues with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for instance, but there’s nothing wrong with the idea that there should be a basic protocol that provides both a safe harbor for service providers hosting user content and a mechanism for complaining about copyright-infringing or libelous or otherwise tortious material. Probably there are other “regulations” I’d approve too, but I’d have to sit and think about it for an hour to even enumerate all the different kinds of rules that might be considered to “regulate the Internet” in one way or another.
Because it’s at least not susceptible to such dramatically divergent readings, this response might be more useful as a kind of big-picture attitude check. But the reality is that almost none of the respondents can really mean it because even someone steeped in tech policy would have to sit and think about the question for a half hour to really get a grip on what it entails. Or might entail. If the BBC were engaged in some kind of serious social science, they probably would have worked up better questions. But of course, that’s not the business they’re in. They’re in the business of asking the sort of question that will let them run exciting headlines that get re-tweeted and drive page views. And 100% of respondents in my poll of myself agree they’ve succeeded.
Question for the President
The rationale for your proposed tax on high-cost health insurance plans is that it would encourage people to purchase less-comprehensive coverage and thereby reduce health care spending.
If that’s a good idea, then why is it bad when insurers raise premiums?
RIP Michael Foot, a Socialist Who Understood What Socialism Was
“Michael Foot, a bookish intellectual and anti-nuclear campaigner who led Britain’s Labour Party to a disastrous defeat in 1983, died [March 3],” reported the Associated Press. He was 96.
Foot personified the socialist tendency in the Labour Party, which Tony Blair successfully erased when he won power at the head of a business-friendly, interventionist “New Labour.” Yet Foot remained a respected, even revered, figure.
“Michael Foot was a giant of the Labour movement, a man of passion, principle and outstanding commitment to the many causes he fought for,” Blair said Wednesday. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Blair’s partner in creating “New Labour,” praised Foot as a “genuine British radical” and a “man of deep principle and passionate idealism.”
Michael Foot may have been the most serious intellectual ever to head a major Western political party. He wrote biographies of Labour politicians Aneurin Bevan and Harold Wilson, and of H.G. Wells, and a 1988 book on Lord Byron, “The Politics of Paradise,” and he edited the “Thomas Paine Reader” in 1987. So when you asked Michael Foot what socialism was, you could expect a deeply informed answer. And that’s what the Washington Post got in 1982, when they asked the Labour Party leader for an example of socialism in practice that could “serve as a model of the Britain you envision.” Foot replied,
The best example that I’ve seen of democratic socialism operating in this country was during the second world war. Then we ran Britain highly efficiently, got everybody a job. . . . The conscription of labor was only a very small element of it. It was a democratic society with a common aim.
Wow. Michael Foot, the great socialist intellectual, a giant of the Labour movement, a man of deep principle and passionate idealism, thought that the best example ever seen of “democratic socialism” was a society organized for total war.
And he wasn’t the only one. The American socialist Michael Harrington wrote, “World War I showed that, despite the claims of free-enterprise ideologues, government could organize the economy effectively.” He hailed World War II as having “justified a truly massive mobilization of otherwise wasted human and material resources” and complained that the War Production Board was “a success the United States was determined to forget as quickly as possible.” He went on, “During World War II, there was probably more of an increase in social justice than at any [other] time in American history. Wage and price controls were used to try to cut the differentials between the social classes. . . . There was also a powerful moral incentive to spur workers on: patriotism.”
Collectivists such as Foot and Harrington don’t relish the killing involved in war, but they love war’s domestic effects: centralization and the growth of government power. They know, as did the libertarian writer Randolph Bourne, that “war is the health of the state”—hence the endless search for a moral equivalent of war.
As Don Lavoie demonstrated in his book National Economic Planning: What Is Left?, modern concepts of economic planning—including “industrial policy” and other euphemisms—stem from the experiences of Germany, Great Britain, and the United States in planning their economies during World War I. The power of the central governments grew dramatically during that war and during World War II, and collectivists have pined for the glory days of the War Industries Board and the War Production Board ever since.
Walter Lippmann was an early critic of the collectivists’ fascination with war planning. He wrote, “A close analysis of its theory and direct observation of its practice will disclose that all collectivism. . . is military in method, in purpose, in spirit, and can be nothing else.” Lippman went on to explain why war—or a moral equivalent—is so congenial to collectivism:
Under the system of centralized control without constitutional checks and balances, the war spirit identifies dissent with treason, the pursuit of private happiness with slackerism and sabotage, and, on the other side, obedience with discipline, conformity with patriotism. Thus at one stroke war extinguishes the difficulties of planning, cutting out from under the individual any moral ground as well as any lawful ground on which he might resist the execution of the official plan.
National service, national industrial policy, national energy policy—all have the same essence, collectivism, and the same model, war. War is sometimes, regrettably, necessary. But why would anyone want its moral equivalent?
Is Europe Irrelevant?
Paul Starobin at the National Journal’s Security Experts Blog has kicked off a spirited debate surrounding Europe’s military capabilities (or lack thereof). The jumping off point in the discussion is Robert Gates’s speech to NATO officers last month, in which Gates lamented that:
“The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.” [Justin Logan blogged about this here.]
Starobin asks: “Can America Count On Europe Anymore?”
Is Gates right? What exactly does “the demilitarization of Europe” mean for U.S. national security interests? Should Americans care if Europe has to live in the shadow of a militarily superior post-Soviet Russia? Is NATO, alas, a lost cause?
[...]
In short, should the U.S. be planning for a post-Europe world? Does Europe still matter? Can we count on Europe any more?
It would be unwise for Americans to write off Europeans as a lost cause, congenitally dependent upon U.S. military power, and unable to contribute either to their own defense or to policing the global commons. We can’t count on Europe — right now — but that doesn’t mean we can never count on Europe in the future.
Americans who complain about Europe’s unwillingness to play a larger role in policing the globe, and who would like them to do more, should start by exploring the many reasons why Europe is so weak militarily.
Consider, for example, Europe’s half-hearted and inconsistent steps to establish a security capacity independent of NATO — and therefore independent of the United States — since the end of the Cold War. Such proposals have failed for many reasons, but we shouldn’t ignore the extent to which Uncle Sam has actively discouraged Europe from playing a more active role. Most recently, Hillary Clinton expressed the U.S. government’s position that political and economic integration would proceed under the EU, but security would continue to be provided by NATO. This echoes similar comments made by the first Bush and Clinton administrations with respect to European defense. (See, for example, Madeleine Albright’s comments regarding European Defence and Security Policy (EDSP) in 1998).
National Standards Coming Soon?
After months of delay, the Common Core State Standards Initiative will soon release draft, grade-by-grade, national curricular standards. According to the CCSSI website, the draft standards will be out this month.
Why the wait? The drafting process has been pretty opaque so outside observers can’t know for certain, but the scuttlebutt is that drafters just haven’t been able to agree on what the standards should contain.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. As Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby explains in a terrific new piece — which draws on my new national-standards analysis — getting very diverse people to agree on a single standard is extremely difficult, especially if the standard is going to be something other than lowest-common-denominator. It’s one of many reasons that having national standards might sound great in the abstract, but is far from fab in reality.
Hopefully, when the draft standards are finally released we will be hearing a lot more about the reasons, most of which are in my report, that national standards can’t possibly live up to the billing supporters give them. If not, our nation and our children will suffer for it.
“I would like to see a higher percentage of children educated in the state sector” –?
The mystery man quoted in the title is none other than David Cameron, head of the British Conservative party.
It isn’t that Cameron likes the ineffeciency, social conflict, and unresponsiveness to parents that often characterize state schooling. It’s that he ”would like to see… choice and autonomy and diversity in the state sector.”
I would like to see winged-gazelles, sunny winters in Seattle, and a brilliant remake of The Thin Man series.
We’ll both be waiting a good long time.
Surely the Conservative party has a competent economist who could explain to Mr. Cameron why state schools tend to lack the features we take for granted in the free enterprise sector, and that by nationalizing more of Britain’s independent schools he would simply shrink the number that enjoy the freedoms and incentives responsible for efficiency, diversity, and responsiveness to families.
Exum’s Perplexing Non-Response
Last week I wrote a blog post criticizing Andrew Exum’s views on the philosophy of science. In fact, I was surprised to see that a doctoral candidate at King’s College held these views at all.
Andrew Exum
Today Exum posts a perplexing non-response, forswearing any interest in getting involved in the debate…that he brought up in his first post. Instead, he accuses his critics of getting their “proverbial panties in a twist” and posts a response from a reader that doesn’t defend the views Exum expressed in his first post.
I’m not quite sure what to say, other than that this isn’t much of a response. Note, though, that he obliquely makes the same argument he made last week, criticizing Dan Drezner’s “willingness to hold forth on the peoples and politics of the Arabic-speaking world and Iran without any time spent in the region or training in its languages.”
Richard Pipes made a similar argument when he argued that despite his lack of expertise in nuclear weapons or security studies he was qualified to lead the Team B project because of his “deep knowledge of the Russian soul.” And we all remember how that turned out.
Even Unpopular Causes Get Full First Amendment Protection
Under Washington’s constitution, a popular vote must be ordered on any bill passed by the legislature if a specified percentage of state voters sign a petition for a referendum. Washington’s Public Records Act makes public records, including such referendum petitions, available for public inspection. In 2009, opponents of same-sex marriage used the referendum procedure to attempt to reverse a state law which expands the rights of state-registered domestic partners. Proponents of the law sought access to the petition and two of the petition signers sought a preliminary injunction to prevent disclosure of their personal information, arguing that the PRA violates their right to speak anonymously.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the right to access trumps the right to anonymity. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to determine whether the First Amendment right to privacy in political speech, association, and belief requires strict scrutiny when a state compels the public release of identifying information about petition signers, and whether compelled disclosure of such information is narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest.
Cato filed a brief supporting the petition signers, in which we argue that the Court should establish a bright-line rule prohibiting laws that mandate the full disclosure of petition signers’ identities and contact information. Public disclosure carries significant burdens and unconstitutionally chills the exercise of First Amendment rights when no compelling government interest is at stake.
If the Court finds that the state has a compelling interest in public disclosure, disclosure exemptions are constitutionally required. Failure to require exemptions would permit the government to suppress the expression of offensive or unpopular ideas and would discourage individuals from associating in the first place.
Finally, our brief argues that even exemptions are not a substitute for strict scrutiny and provide inadequate protection where disclosure is not justified by compelling state interests. Exemption rules still chill speech, by their nature as an ad hoc process without fixed standards; the government is ill-suited to identify which groups should be exempt from disclosure, as is evidenced by their poor track record of erroneously suppressing controversial or unpopular speech.
The case, Doe v. Reed, will be argued in April.
Real World Evidence for the Laffer Curve from the Government of Washington, DC
President Obama is proposing a series of major tax increases. His budget envisions higher tax rates on personal income, increased double taxation of dividends and capital gains, and a big increase in the death tax. And his health care plan includes significant tax hikes, including perhaps the imposition of the Medicare payroll tax on capital income — thus exacerbating the tax code’s bias against saving and investment. It is unclear why the White House is pursuing these punitive policies. The President said during the 2008 campaign that he favored soak-the-rich taxes even if they did not raise revenue, but his budget predicts the proposals will raise lots of money.
Because of the Laffer Curve, it is highly unlikely that all of this additional revenue will materialize if the President’s budget is approved. The core insight of the Laffer Curve is not that all tax increases lose money and that all tax cuts raise revenues. That only happens in rare circumstances. Instead, the Laffer Curve simply reveals that higher tax rates will lead to less taxable income (or that lower tax rates will lead to more taxable income) and that it is an empirical matter to figure out the degree to which the change in tax revenue resulting from the shift in the tax rate is offset by the change in tax revenue caused by the shift in the other direction for taxable income. This should be an uncontroversial proposition, and these three videos explain Laffer Curve theory, evidence, and revenue-estimating issues. Richard Rahn also gives a good explanation in a recent Washington Times column.
Interestingly, the DC government (which certainly is not a bastion of free-market thinking) has just acknowledged the Laffer Curve. As the excerpt below illustrates, an increase in the cigarette tax did not raise the amount of revenue that local politicians expected. The evidence is so strong that the city’s budget experts warn that a further increase will reduce revenue:
One of the gap-closing measures for the FY 2010 budget was an increase in the excise tax on cigarettes from $2.00 to $2.50 per pack. The 50 cent increase in the cigarette tax rate was projected to increase revenue but also reduce volume. Collections year-to-date point to a more severe drop in volumes than projected. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Maryland smokers who were purchasing in DC in FY 2008, because the tax rate in the District was less than the tax rate in Maryland, have shifted purchases back to Maryland now that the tax rate in the District is higher. Virginia analyzed the impact of demand when the federal rate went up by $0.61 in April and has been surprised that demand is much stronger than they had projected–raising the possibility that purchasing in DC has moved across the river. Whatever the actual cause, because of the lower than anticipated collections, the estimate for cigarette tax revenue is revised downwards by $15.4 million in FY 2010 and $15.2 million in FY 2011. Given that cigarette tax rates in neighboring jurisdictions are now lower than that of the District, future increases in the tax rate will likely generate less revenue rather than more.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Sunlight Before Signing Update—and a First!
When I last reported on Sunlight Before Signing—President Obama’s promise to post bills online for five days before signing them—the administration had begun to rack up the wins. Of the 13 bills he signed in December, five had received the Sunlight Before Signing treatment.
Alas, since January, only one of the 18 bills subject to the promise has gotten the online exposure the president promised. (That was H.R. 1377/P.L. 111-137, a bill dealing with reimbursement of veterans for services they receive at non-V.A. facilities.)
It’s an unfortunate slow-down from the heady days when the president’s SBS batting average rocketed from a dismal .009 to .048. The president’s current Sunlight Before Signing average is only slightly improved at .049 (7 for 142).
The average could have risen quite nicely. Eight bills were post office renamings that sat at the White House for more than five days anyway. It was just a matter of posting them on Whitehouse.gov. True: these aren’t important bills, but the Sunlight Before Signing promise was simply to post all bills. The American people could benefit from seeing the “unimportant” work of Congress and the president along with the important.
There was one interesting development in SBS since I last reported: we saw a bill go through that was not subject to the Sunlight Before Signing promise.
S. 2949/P.L. 111-127 provided additional funds to the U.S. Repatriation Program in light of the disaster in Haiti. That money was for getting people out of harm’s way, and waiting five days to release the funds would have kept people in physical peril. It was ”emergency” legislation, which President Obama sensibly excluded from the five-day waiting period of Sunlight Before Signing.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
This Week in Government Failure
Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this week:
- The Department of Homeland Security is a mismanaged mess.
- Federal aid to the states is too popular.
- It’s time to privatize the U.S. Postal Service Monopoly.
- Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood likes to give the gift of other people’s money. Ho, ho, oh no!
- Charles Krauthammer gets nostalgic about the socialist mail monopolist.
Federal Pay Gap Reversed
I’ve long raised concerns about the rapidly rising costs of federal worker pay and benefits. Despite the obvious acceleration of federal compensation above private compensation in recent years, federal unions have continued to claim that federal workers suffer from a giant “pay gap,” which is currently supposed to be 26 percent.
Unfortunately, the pay gap mythology has been spread by Washington Post reporters, one recently writing, “The budget answers critics … who say federal civilians earn much more than private-sector workers… [G]overnment figures indicate that federal employees are underpaid by 26 percent compared with their counterparts in similar position in the business world.”
The Post is generally a great paper, but they seem to have blinders on with respect to federal pay issues. As a result, the USA Today has repeatedly scooped them. USA Today has a groundbreaking piece today revealing that in job-to-job comparisons, federal workers typically have wages 20 percent higher than private-sector workers.
Instead of federal workers suffering from a 26-percent “pay gap,” they actually have a 20-percent advantage over private sector workers. And that doesn’t include benefits, which are four times higher in the federal government than in the private sector, on average.
How could the federal unions get it so wrong? The calculation of the supposed 26-percent pay gap is reported in this annual memo. But the underlying calculations are extremely complex, non-transparent, and subject to a huge degree of statistical modeling.
Weekend Links
- Joe Scarborough speaking at Cato March 18: “Escalate or Withdraw? Conservatives and the War in Afghanistan.” Registration is free and open to the public.
- ObamaCare – Now with GOP sprinkles! “Though mostly not bad, they’re hardly game changing….At its heart, ObamaCare hasn’t changed. It still represents a top-down, centralized, command-and-control approach to reform.”
- More broken promises, PATRIOT Act edition: Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel grants fresh retroactive immunity for Bush-era telecommunication lawbreaking.
- Why the creation of a “consumer financial protection agency” would increase the likelihood of future crises rather than reduce them.
- Podcast: “The Intangible Right of Honest Services” featuring Timothy Sandefur.
Sneaky SAFRA
Great column on the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act by Tim Carney in today’s Washington Examiner. He hits the major points — SAFRA hardly threatens a sudden federal takeover of student lending, but also promises anything but “fiscal reponsibility” — while adding a critical warning: the whole stinkin’ bill could be tacked onto health care reconciliation.
Wow! As if the health care bill isn’t abominable enough on its own…
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Do You or Do You Not Hate America?
Sen. John Kerry (D, MA) made an, er, interesting rhetorical case yesterday (as reported on E2 Wire, The Hill’s Energy and Environment blog) that borrows heavily from the Bush playbook: your patriotism hinges on voting for his favored policy — in this case, a climate change bill. Not that the bill is really about climate change, of course. It’s about a list of goodies completely unrelated to the changing political winds:
What we are talking about is a jobs bill. It is not a climate bill. It is a jobs bill, and it is a clean air bill. It is a national security, energy independence bill,” he told reporters in the Capitol…
“And people are going to have to decide whether they are going to vote for America or against it,” he concluded.
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