Thursday, March 04, 2004
HOPE LEADS TO CLOUDED ANALYSIS
Reading Andrew Sullivan on the issue of gay marriage is beginning to make me cringe. His well-honed critical acumen has become dull on this issue, and he is increasingly given to flights of fancy. Case in point was a post on his website from yesterday:
WHAT BUSH HAS ACHIEVED: I've been following same-sex marriage developments for fifteen years, and I keep getting surprised. The groundswell of support - in San Francisco, New Mexico, New Paltz, and now Portland, Oregon - has stunned me.
Clicking on the “groundswell of support” link leads to an article about Eliot Spitzer saying that New York law doesn’t authorize the issuing of marriage licenses to same-sex couples. How, exactly, is that a “groundswell of support”? And is Sullivan really sincere when he lists those cities? Surely he sees what’s going on: a bunch of city officials who want to make a name for themselves. Anyone who wants to make a wager that within a few months the most dangerous place to be in San Francisco won’t be between Gavin Newsom and a TV camera, let me know and I’ll take you up on it.
What I didn't anticipate is how empowering this issue has become for gay people and how energizing it has been for their heterosexual peers. We keep seeing straight people under a certain age seeing this as their generation's civil rights movement.
Yep, those young people are taking to the streets, manning the barricades like they did during the 1960s! “Down with the Amendment!” is the cry heard at huge rallies on college campuses around the nation! Okay, okay. Seriously: does Sullivan have any poll data on young folks’ attitudes toward gay marriage, or is it just the anecdotal evidence that he gets from the emails he receives?
Now we see black legislators in Georgia putting aside religious objections to stop what they recognize as an attack on a small minority by forces of exclusion and intolerance they have been attacked by in the past.
Sullivan gives no consideration to how that stance by black legislators will play with their constituents in the fall. My guess is most blacks won’t appreciate the civil rights struggle being compared to gay marriage.
Bush's religious right amendment has also united Democrats behind this issue in ways they never were before. Attacking the amendment is now an applause line in John Kerry's election speech - and he will get every gay vote and every vote from their families and friends.
You mean the Democrats like hearing rhetoric about how them mean ‘Publicans are discriminating against gays?! Wow! You don’t say! I honestly thought John Kerry would get booed when he used that line. Really.
As for getting every gay vote and every vote from their family and friends, I have gay friends and lost a gay uncle to aids last year. I won’t be voting for Kerry. So much for the term “every”. It seems fantastic to the point of arrogance for Sullivan to assume, as he does, that every homosexual and every family and friend of a homosexual views this issue the way that he does.
Meanwhile, key Republicans, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, have come out and opposed this unnecessary meddling with the Constitution. Even the vice-president cannot manage to explicitly endorse such graffiti on the founding document of this country. What the religious right amendment is doing is splitting the Republican coalition and uniting the Democrats. What the religious right did to destroy the Republican Party in a state like California, they are now trying to do across the country as a whole.
Does Sullivan really think that a whole host of Republicans will abandon Bush because they disagree with him over the marriage amendment? Who does he think Schwarzenegger will be voting for in November? Clearly he’s mistaking GOP unease with amending the constitution for a comfort with gay marriage. Oh, and for the record, it wasn’t the religious right that destroyed the Republican Party in California. It was a mushy moderate named Pete Wilson who raised taxes and then cynically glommed onto the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 to win reelection in 1994 who killed the Golden State GOP.
They are not only on the wrong side of history; and on the wrong side of morality; they are putting the Republican Party on the losing side of politics. They must and will be stopped.
Oh please, spare me the hyperbole. Next thing you know he’ll start comparing the Christian Coalition to the Taliban. As for putting the GOP on the losing side of this issue, does Sullivan really think that all of those blue collar workers in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana will be running away from Bush this fall because he opposes gay marriage?
Either Sullivan believes that, or he has failed to take it into consideration. Whichever it is, it goes to show just how much the gay marriage issue has clouded his judgement.
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HOW IS THAT RANKING CONSTRUCTED?
In rankings recently released by the National Journal, Senator John Kerry was one of the most liberal in the Senate, and Tom Harkin was not far behind. No surprise there.
But here is what took me aback:
Charles Grassley, on the other hand, had a liberal score of 14, the lowest in the Senate and shared with 12 other Republican senators.
In other words, Grassley is tied for the most conservative member of the Senate.
I really would like to see the votes used to construct that ranking. Somehow I suspect that they didn’t include the vote on the Omnibus Appropriations Bill. You know, the one that gave $50 million to that coming Iowa fiasco attraction.
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Wednesday, March 03, 2004
NICE GUYS FINISH SECOND
My new column at the Spectator.
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WHY JOHN KERRY IS A BUM
Jeff at Tusk and Talon has the latest in his on-going series.
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SOCIAL SECURITY IS IN CRISIS—NO IT ISN’T
Don Luskin has the goods on you-know-who…
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Tuesday, March 02, 2004
THE WRONG SOLUTION
The Register editorialists write about a young child, William Breshears, who needs therapy for a stroke he had as a baby:
Though the family has good health insurance, the coverage limits therapy visits for patients to 60 each year.
William needs 190 visits a year.
Then, in their usual manipulative fashion, they use this tear-jerker to advocate guess what?
The solution, of course, is for this country to finally get serious about creating a health-care system that doesn't leave families like the Breshears scrambling to help their 3-year-old son. A real solution is one that takes a comprehensive approach to universal health care rather than the current hodgepodge of thousands of different insurance plans, various gap-riddled government programs and 43 million uninsured.
Does it ever occur to folks at the Register that under a universal health-care system, William Breshears might still only get 60 visits a year? That the rationing that would have to be done by the government would result in exactly the scenarios that the Register so laments?
Alas, those are rhetorical questions.
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LIPSTICK ON THE PIG
The Des Moines Register editorial page notes that the State Legislature doesn’t seem to impressed by the recent Des Moines Register poll:
There's a curious disconnect between the Legislature and the public on the matter of raising taxes to support education. The Register's Iowa Poll found that Iowans by landslide proportions favor raising the cigarette tax and expanding the sales tax to certain services not now taxed. Yet leaders of the Legislature remain adamantly opposed to tax increases of any kind.
Fair enough. But then look a the spin they put on it:
But in this case the public's wishes ought to at least be given more respect than they're getting. People are expressing a willingness to make personal sacrifices in order to provide better support for Iowa schools. That's an admirable impulse, but state lawmakers are essentially saying, "No, we're not going to allow you to tax yourselves. We know better than you what's good for you." [Italics mine]
A willingness to make personal sacrifices? Nonsense! The majority is willing to make other people sacrifice. The vast majority of people don’t smoke, so the cigarette tax increase won’t affect them. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if the people who supported a hike in the cigarette tax tended to be non-smokers. Nor would I be surprised that those who supported expanding the sales tax aren’t the ones who use the services that would be subject to the expansion (that, or they don’t realize that the service(s) they use would be subject to the expansion.)
I could go on, but after reading that editorial I need to go find a shovel.
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HOLY COW!
Jeff Cordts notices that Rekha Basu actually got something right!
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Monday, March 01, 2004
YEP
Well, surprise, surprise. From one of Saturday’s Des Moines Register editorials:
It's unfortunate Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's comments on the dangers of budget deficits got mixed in with his suggestion that Social Security benefits be cut. The implication was that balancing the budget is somehow linked to cutting Social Security.
Like I suggested, liberal editorial pages were not going to be too thrilled with Alan Greenspan’s remarks.
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PULLING ANOTHER SOCIAL SECURITY FAST ONE
As usual, the Register can’t get through the editorial without pulling some sleight of hand in explaining the Social Security system:
The deficits in the operating budgets are actually worse than they appear, because an accounting trick involving Social Security is used. On the government's balance sheets, the surplus in Social Security revenue is used to partly mask the shortfall in general revenue…
Social Security is expected to continue taking in more revenue than it pays out until 2018. At that point, the system will begin paying out more than it brings in, but the level of benefits can be maintained by drawing down the surplus.
Wait a minute, where did the “surplus” come from? I think what the Register means by surplus is the government bonds that are in the Social Security Trust Fund (SSTF). Each year the federal government “borrows” the excess revenue from the Social Security system to spend on other programs. In exchange, the government puts bonds equal to the amount that it borrowed into the SSTF.
Unfortunately, the bonds in an SSTF are only a claim on future tax revenue. That is, when the Social Security system starts redeeming those bonds to pay for Social Security benefits, the federal government will have to come up with the taxes from somewhere to pay for them. What the Register would like you to believe is that those bonds represent something more, that they are real assets that can be redeemed without any cost to the American taxpayer.
Sorry, but this isn’t the land of make-believe.
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…AND ANOTHER ONE
The Register then goes on to disparage the option of reforming Social Security with personal accounts:
Aside from doubt about whether private accounts would live up to their billing, there is one nearly insurmountable problem with that approach: It comes with huge transition costs.
Everyone promises that benefits would not be cut for present retirees or those near retirement (who wouldn't have enough time to build adequate private accounts). But there wouldn't be enough money coming into the system to maintain those benefits, because younger workers would be diverting their payroll taxes into private accounts. During the transition to private accounts, extra money would have to be pumped into the Social Security system to make up for the taxes not being paid by younger workers.
Those transition costs have been estimated to be as much as $2 trillion.
And that's where Social Security and the budget deficits do intersect. The transition costs would have to come from general revenues, but there isn't enough general revenue coming in now to even balance the budget, let alone provide an extra $2 trillion. In short, there appears to be no way the private accounts could be instituted without doing the thing the president hates most - raising taxes to cover the transition costs.
Why would the transition costs have to come from general revenues? They could be borrowed (i.e., debt), like Representative Nick Smith suggested in his plan. Eventually, once the Social Security system is returned to a surplus, the excess revenue would then be used to pay back the debt.
One other thing: The transition costs may be $2 trillion (although that may be on the high side). But the amount of bonds that the Social Security Trust Fund will have in it when the system starts running deficits in 2018 will be $4-$5 trillion. Ask yourself: which of those two amounts is harder to pay back?
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...FINALLY
The Register is also backtracking on some of its previous editorials. In Sunday's editorial, it called for the following solutions to stabilize Social Security:
Some combination of raising the retirement age, changing the inflation index for benefit increases and modestly boosting payroll taxes would seem logical.
But back June of last year it griped:
...if Congress is so concerned about tax fairness, how about some attention to the double tax burden borne by ordinary working folks? The incomes of most American workers are taxed twice - once for payroll taxes and again for the income tax.
So back then the payroll tax represented unfair double taxation on working folks. But now it is okay to increase that unfair double taxation to preserve Social Security. Would I be too crass in suggesting that contradiction stems from the Register's desire to score some political points against Bush in both cases?
Also, the Register now states that:
Aside from doubt about whether private accounts would live up to their billing, there is one nearly insurmountable problem with that approach: It comes with huge transition costs. [Italics mine]
But in another Social Security related editorial from last December, the Register urges readers:
do worry that you might not be saving enough for retirement. Social Security, after all, was never intended to be the sole source of retirement income. It supplements two other sources - personal savings and pensions.
What, exactly, is the difference between "private accounts" and "personal savings and pensions"? Not much. But in one instance there is "doubt" about them, in the other you are encouraged to put more money in them.
I don't know about you, but I'm getting dizzy.
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