Category Archives: Political Animals

CEI Podcast for December 22, 2011: The Keystone XL Pipeline

Posted on December 22, 2011 | Comments Off on CEI Podcast for December 22, 2011: The Keystone XL Pipeline

Have a listen here.

Politicians usually love infrastructure projects. But politics has delayed the privately owned Keystone XL pipeline’s construction for three years now. Research Associate David Bier explains the reasons behind the delay, and points out that the pipeline’s real benefit isn’t the jobs it would create; it’s the wealth and value it would create.

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Posted in CEI Podcast, Political Animals

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Teddy Roosevelt’s Legacy

Posted on December 13, 2011 | Comments Off on Teddy Roosevelt’s Legacy

Gene Healy on presidential candidates’ bipartisan love for Teddy Roosevelt:

Modeling your re-election strategy on an obnoxious authoritarian’s failed third-party run for the presidency a hundred years ago is an interesting choice, but not necessarily a wise one. It’s a move of desperation, unlikely to work.

GOP front-runner Newt Gingrich calls himself “a Theodore Roosevelt Republican.” Despite (or because of?) T.R.’s many flaws, politicians from both parties have long found something irresistible about our pulpit-pounding 26th president.

But T.R.’s enduring appeal is an enduring mystery. What’s so attractive about Roosevelt’s political philosophy? A loudmouthed cult of manliness? A warped belief that war is a good tonic for whatever ails the national spirit? A contemptuous attitude toward limits on presidential power?

John McCain, the 2008 GOP nominee, also suffers from a Teddy Roosevelt complex, as Matt Welch details in his book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick. If there’s any lesson to be learned from presidential candidates’ shared T.R. fetish, it’s that only those truly in love with power can endure the the hell of the campaign trail to acquire it.

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Posted in Elections, Political Animals

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Winning Hearts and Minds on K Street

Posted on December 7, 2011 | Comments Off on Winning Hearts and Minds on K Street

I’m all for the Occupy Wall Street movement going out there and having their say. Many of the activists seem almost completely innocent of economic knowledge, as I’ve written before.

But I do lean left on many issues — I’m against crony capitalism and corporate welfare. It’s time to get out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and our other top-down nation-building adventures in this Hayekian bottom-up world. The PATRIOT Act and the Bush-Obama administrations’ other civil liberties excesses should be repealed outright. I favor LGBT rights and legalizing gay marriage. Drug prohibition is as bad of a policy failure as alcohol prohibition was. I prefer welcoming immigrants to shunning them.

As someone who has studied the economic way of thinking and makes his living looking at the data, obviously my preferred economic policies differ from what most Occupiers want; they haven’t and they don’t. But we share the common aim of helping the poorest of the poor. Means may differ. Ends don’t.

I question their means.

Today in DC, Occupiers occupied a stretch of K Street and snarled up an already-hellish evening commute for thousands of people. Two points:

One, this is not the way to win people over to your side. It is an astounding PR failure. As Rory Cooper tweeted, “Hey OccupyDC – my wife is stuck downtown and my child is trapped at school. You’re doing a heckuva job selling your socialism.”

Not how I would have put it. I prefer tact. But you see his point.

Socialism is also a dead horse; one wonders why Republicans insist on beating a horse that died two decades ago. Cooper may work for the partisan Heritage Foundation, but you also don’t have to be right-wing to resent people who block your way home after a long day at work.

Occupiers have closed a lot of minds that they could have opened instead.

The second point is more subtle, but also more fundamental. They are saying, “I have set up a tent on a busy street. Therefore, your arguments are invalid.”

The shallowness of this kind of thinking speaks for itself. But the real shame is that they have much better arguments to offer. Some of them are right, and some of them are wrong. But they still have substance. They should offer those arguments instead.

My unsolicited advice is to keep saying what they have to say with passion — but also with tact. Again, why close minds that you could open?

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Posted in Political Animals, The Partisan Mind

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The Language of Politics

Posted on December 5, 2011 | Comments Off on The Language of Politics

Yahoo’s Chris Moody has a great piece about how politicians choose their words. Hint: polls are involved.

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Posted in Elections, Political Animals

Sweet, Sweet, Irony

Posted on November 17, 2011 | Comments Off on Sweet, Sweet, Irony

Vice President Biden will attend a meeting today about government transparency.

The meetings are closed to the press.

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Posted in General Foolishness, Political Animals

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Poll: 89 Percent of Americans Distrust Government

Posted on October 26, 2011 | Comments Off on Poll: 89 Percent of Americans Distrust Government

A New York Times/CBS poll finds that a record high 89 percent of Americans don’t trust the government to do the right thing.

Seeing as 26 percent of the workforce makes it living one way or another through the government, at least some of them apparently distrust their colleagues and possibly even themselves.

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Posted in Political Animals

Demagoguing Immigrants Wins No Votes

Posted on October 25, 2011 | Comments Off on Demagoguing Immigrants Wins No Votes

Today’s quote of the day from The Wall Street Journal‘s Political Diary newsletter is good stuff. Here it is in full:

“With Rick Perry suddenly pushing a flat tax and Herman Cain substantively revising his 9-9-9 revenue plan, GOP candidates may finally relinquish their feverish immigration obsession — one that’s destructive, distracting, demented, and downright dumb. Why spend a wildly disproportionate amount of energy exploring an issue that few voters consider a top priority, and where all Republican candidates fundamentally agree, rather than emphasizing real differences on the economic problems that will decide the election?

“Listening to the toxic trash talk at the Las Vegas debate, or watching attack ads that are already polluting the Internet, one might assume that the public viewed illegal immigration as the greatest challenge facing our civilization and believed the fate of the republic hinged on Mitt Romney’s past reliance on a lawn-service company that hired undocumented workers.

“Actually, no major poll of the last year — no, not one of them — showed robust public interest in immigration. This month, CBS News asked respondents to name ‘the most important problem facing this country today.’ Less than 2 percent came up with ‘illegal immigration,’ while a dozen other concerns, led by ‘the economy and jobs,’ of course, finished higher on the list. Over the summer, surveys from Bloomberg and Fox News found 3 percent and 2 percent, respectively, who identified immigration as a priority, with gas prices, the war in Afghanistan, health care, the deficit, education, and even nebulous concerns like ‘partisan politics’ and ‘moral values’ more frequently mentioned by the public” — syndicated columnist Michael Medved writing at thedailybeast.com on Oct. 24.

Republicans are even worse than Democrats on immigration issues. Medved is right. It would be nice if the GOP candidates would just stop talking about it. I don’t care if doing so would help them at the polls or not; I just think that economically illiterate anti-foreign bias is an ugly thing to behold.

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Posted in Elections, Immigration, Political Animals

For the Children

Posted on October 25, 2011 | 1 comment

The people of Illinois don’t expect their government to be corrupt; they insist on it. That’s why nary an eyebrow was raised when it recently came out that two lobbyists for the Illinois Federation of Teachers were able to qualify for generous teachers’ pensions by working as substitute teachers for one day.

One man could receive up to $3.8 million if he lives to age 84. This is in addition to the 401(k) the union gives him as an employee. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Preckwinkle’s one day of subbing qualified him to become a participant in the state teachers pension fund, allowing him to pick up 16 years of previous union work and nearly five more years since he joined. He’s 59, and at age 60 he’ll be eligible for a state pension based on the four-highest consecutive years of his last 10 years of work.

His paycheck fluctuates as a union lobbyist, but pension records show his earnings in the last school year were at least $245,000. Based on his salary history so far, he could earn a pension of about $108,000 a year, more than double what the average teacher receives.

Nationwide spending on K-12 education is around $13,000 per child per year. Not all of that spending is actually for the children, contrary to popular rhetoric. Fortunately, it appears only two people took advantage of this scheme. But the real kicker is that one of the two actually helped write the legislation that made it possible.

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Posted in education, Political Animals, Public Choice, Spending

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Poll: 14 Percent Approval Rating for Congress

Posted on October 5, 2011 | Comments Off on Poll: 14 Percent Approval Rating for Congress

The Washington Post does not paint a pretty picture:

For most it’s not just a casual dislike of Congress: Sixty-two percent say they “strongly disapprove” of congressional job performance. An additional 20 percent “somewhat” disapprove.

Only 3 percent of Americans said they “strongly approve” of the performance of lawmakers on Capitol Hill — essentially as low as possible, given the poll’s margin of error of four percentage points.

Congress is doing all it can to placate people who want it to do something, anything to help the economy. The trouble is that those somethings and anythings have been spectacularly ineffective.

Lawmakers need to do something about their do-something bias. Instead of more bailouts, financial regulations, stimuli, cash-for-clunkers, jobs bills, and the like, Congress should try a deregulatory stimulus. Besides stimulating the economy, it would likely stimulate approval ratings, too.

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Posted in Political Animals

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Penn Jillette on Atheism, Libertarianism

Posted on September 20, 2011 | Comments Off on Penn Jillette on Atheism, Libertarianism

The ever-loquacious Penn Jillette talks to Nick Gillespie about his new book, God, No! He doesn’t know if any gods exist or not, and he doesn’t know what’s best for other people.

His basic philosophical humility is a refreshing departure from right-wing religiosity and left-wing social engineering; they do know what’s best for other people.

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Posted in Political Animals, The Old Religion

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