CEI Podcast for March 21, 2013: A Rainbow on the Right

Posted on March 21, 2013 | Comments Off on CEI Podcast for March 21, 2013: A Rainbow on the Right

rainbow-ocean
Have a listen here.

CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, is the largest annual event of its kind. It is also one of the most controversial, due to its exclusion of gay conservative groups such as GOProud. CEI hosted a widely publicized panel discussion at CPAC, titled “A Rainbow on the Right: Growing the Coalition, Bringing Tolerance Out of the Closet.” CEI Founder and Chairman Fred Smith, who moderated the panel, reflects on the importance of inclusiveness.

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Posted in CEI Podcast, Political Animals

A Decade in Iraq

Posted on March 19, 2013 | Comments Off on A Decade in Iraq

It was ten years ago today that President Bush, from the oval office, announced the Iraq invasion. Formal hostilities have been over for a while now, but U.S. troops are still there. As with Germany, Korea, and other countries we fought against long ago, they will likely remain there indefinitely. Here’s Gene Healy’s take on this ghoulish anniversary:

In a recent article for the New Republic, “The Eve of Destruction,” TNR’s John B. Judis describes “what it was like to oppose the Iraq War in 2003.” Lonely: “within political Washington, it was difficult to find like-minded” opponents of the war. “Both of the major national dailies — The Washington Post and The New York Times (featuring Judith Miller’s reporting) — were beating the drums for war,” as were most of “Washington’s thinktank honchos.”

Not all of them, however. In a 2001 debate on Iraq with former CIA Director James Woolsey, my Cato Institute colleague, then-Chairman William Niskanen, argued that “an unnecessary war is an unjust war” and one we would come to regret having fought.

Niskanen was right. A new report from the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University tallies up the costs: nearly 4,500 U.S. troop fatalities, an eventual budgetary cost of some $3.9 trillion and more than 130,000 civilians as “collateral damage.”

Read the whole thing. Gene also points to evidence that, partly due to the Iraq quagmire, both politicians and the public are starting to come around on the whole nation-building conceit. This is good news, but what a price to pay.

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Posted in International

CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Posted on March 18, 2013 | Comments Off on CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

deicing plane
This week in the world of regulation:

  • Last week, 60 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is down from 69 new final rules the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 48 minutes — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
  • All in all, 667 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
  • If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,290 new final rules.
  • Last week, 1,323 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 16,574 pages.
  • At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 81,245 pages.
  • Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. No such rules were published last week, for a total of 10 so far in 2013.
  • The total compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $2.632 billion to $4.910 billion.
  • So far, 57 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
  • So far this year, 110 final rules affect small business; 15 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.

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Posted in regulation

Everyone Is an Anarchist, Sometimes

Posted on March 15, 2013 | Comments Off on Everyone Is an Anarchist, Sometimes

Ben Powell makes a great point:

Consider Cambodia in the late 1970s. The Khmer Rouge government intentionally killed more than two million of its own citizens. That’s an average of eight percent of the population killed each year while government simultaneously inflicted countless other horrors. Do you think the Cambodian people, faced with that government, would have been better off with no government at all? Congratulations. You are, sometimes, an anarchist.
When a state is as purely predatory as it was in Cambodia and many other places during the 20th century, even a worst-case Hobbesian war of all against all would seem more humane.

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Posted in Philosophy

Lobbying Can Be a Great Investment

Posted on March 15, 2013 | Comments Off on Lobbying Can Be a Great Investment

Health insurance companies spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying on the health care bill. In return for that investment, they convinced the government to require everyone in the country to buy their products, on pain of a fine. As it turns out, the law has done more than grow their customer base — the Washington Post reports today that those customers will soon be paying through the nose:

Some Americans could see their insurance bills double next year as the health care overhaul law expands coverage to millions of people.

The nation’s big health insurers say they expect premiums — or the cost for insurance coverage — to rise from 20 to 100 percent for millions of people due to changes that will occur when key provisions of the Affordable Care Act roll out in January 2014.

Rent-seeking can be a very lucrative investment. Imagine how many billions of dollars health insurer’s eight-figure million lobbying investment will yield in profit. With a rate of return like that, it’s a wonder that most businessmen are still honest.

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Posted in Economics, Health Care, Public Choice

A Balanced Budget Isn’t the Primary Goal

Posted on March 13, 2013 | Comments Off on A Balanced Budget Isn’t the Primary Goal

Over at the Daily Caller, Wayne Crews and I take a look at Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed budget, the Path to Prosperity. While it would improve on the Bush-Obama status quo, there is room for improvement:

We’re for a balanced budget, and maybe even an amendment. But we’re more for the principle of limited government. The Ryan budget’s main deficit-reducing tactic is to increase federal spending by 3.4 percent per year instead of the currently projected 5 percent. Again, this is certainly an improvement. But after 12 years of breakneck Bush-Obama government growth, it is well past time for actual cuts, in which spending goes down.

Since the Ryan budget relies on economic growth to generate more tax revenue, we also suggest a few reforms that would help make that possible.

Read the whole thing here.

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Posted in Economics, regulation, Spending

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CEi Podcast for March 12, 2013: Sunshine Week

Posted on March 12, 2013 | Comments Off on CEi Podcast for March 12, 2013: Sunshine Week

sunshine_week_logo
Have a listen here.

This week is Sunshine Week. According to its official website, Sunshine Week is “a national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information.” Myron Ebell, Director of CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment, is here to talk about CEI’s efforts to increase government transparency.

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Posted in CEI Podcast, The New Religion

Should Agencies Be Self-Funded?

Posted on March 11, 2013 | Comments Off on Should Agencies Be Self-Funded?

cftc-logo

In Monday’s Politico, the Systemic Risk Council’s Brooksley Born and William Donaldson argue the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) should be self-funded – that is, they should charge enough fees to the entities they regulate to cover their entire budgets.

Current fiscal uncertainty, headlined by the sequester, means these agencies’ missions are potentially at risk if they depend on uncertain Congressional appropriations. “It is both wrong and dangerous to impose funding cuts on these agencies,” they argue.

We will leave aside the fact sequestration means smaller spending increases and not actual cuts, where spending goes down. And I will leave it to my colleague John Berlau to analyze how effectively the SEC and CFTC were pursuing their missions before sequestration.

The point is self-funding is an interesting proposal – closer to the “user pays” principle than the current annual appropriations model. But ultimately, it is still a bad idea. The biggest reason is that it violates the separation of powers. If an agency is doing a poor job pursuing its mission, it needs to be held accountable; there is a reason Congress holds the power of the purse.

Given the amount of wealth in the investment sector, the SEC and CFTC are especially prone to regulatory capture. If those agencies are self-funded, it becomes much more difficult for Congress to discipline them for inevitable misbehavior. Similarly, if an agency engages in regulation without representation and issues regulations without authorizing legislation from Congress, it is much harder to take them to task. Self-funding removes a crucial disincentive to bad regulatory behavior. And as any economist, public choice or otherwise, will tell you, people respond to their incentives.

Born and Donaldson want the SEC and CFTC to become self-funding because the government’s fiscal troubles are putting the agencies at risk of being cut. I propose they treat the root problem of fiscal incontinence rather than its symptoms.

Both legislature and executive should look long and hard for places to cut back unnecessary or low-priority spending. Trillion-dollar budget deficits are simply unacceptable, especially when tax revenues are at record-setting levels. Not only has the Bush-Obama spending binge put future generations at risk, it is also putting some of the government’s highest-priority regulatory initiatives at risk, right now. And symptomatic relief won’t cut it.

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Posted in Economics, Public Choice, regulation, Spending

CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Posted on March 11, 2013 | Comments Off on CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

lost-luggage
This week in the world of regulation:

  • Last week, 69 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is down from 74 new final rules the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 26 minutes — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
  • All in all, 607 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
  • If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,307 new final rules.
  • Last week, 1,275 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 15,251 pages.
  • At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 82,886 pages.
  • Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. One such rule were published last week, for a total of 10 so far in 2013.
  • The total compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $2.632 billion to $4.910 billion.
  • So far, 56 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
  • So far this year, 107 final rules affect small business; 15 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.

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Posted in regulation

CEI Podcast for March 7, 2013: The Three-Sided Immigration Debate

Posted on March 7, 2013 | Comments Off on CEI Podcast for March 7, 2013: The Three-Sided Immigration Debate

immigreat595x2701-300x136
Have a listen here.

There are more combatants in the ongoing immigration debate than the usual progressives and conservatives. Immigration Policy Analyst David Bier recently wrote for USA Today about a third side in the debate: population control advocates who oppose immigration altogether.

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Posted in CEI Podcast, Immigration