Is it possible these days to be a new, active conservative running for Congress for the first time and not know who Andrew Breitbart is? Me, I’d reckon that an in-the-know, new candidate who claims to be conservative and a spokesman for Tea Partiers could not possibly be so isolated that he is unaware of conservative media-crusader Andrew Breitbart. But there is a candidate in Ohio who displayed right on his own campaign website just such a display of ignorance on Breitbartania, Breitbartism, or Breitbartness… whatever you want to call it, it just appears that this guy is stone-cold out of touch with the current conservative movement not to know thing one about Andrew Breitbart.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am sure there are plenty of 90-year-old, Brahmin conservatives who get flummoxed at “the Facebookings.” I am sure there still exist out-of-touch, elder statesmen of the movement that just haven’t caught up with those newfangled Internet tubes that our friend Al Gore created. I am sure that there are more than a handful of aged establishment types shaking their fist at the Fox News and those darn websheets positive that they’ll never catch on, just as they were sure rock-n-roll was a passing fad. But can you be an up and comer in the conservative movement and be wholly unaware of one of the newest icons of conservatives everywhere?

I am here at CPAC this week and just ran into Joe “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher who was telling me about his run for Congress in the 9th Congressional District. Joe made me aware of a hilarious little example of the abject cluelessness of his opponent. So let me introduce to you one Mr. Steve Kruas. Professional auctioneer actually licensed with the Ohio State Ag Department with well over 300 “successful” auctions under his belt. I guess you don’t need the Internets, talk radio and TV news shows to sell used farm equipment.

Anyhoo, the “strong fiscal conservative” is running in the 9th Congressional District GOP Primary against Wurzelbacher both of whom are vying to face Marcy Kaptur (D, OH) in the general election this year. Steve is a bit miffed that Joe isn’t giving him much notice at this point in the campaign.

Certainly, Kraus is happy to link himself with the Tea Party and even helped put on an event in Sandusky, Ohio where he set himself up as a spokesman for those venerable homegrown activists.

But it’s Kraus’ website where all the action is. There Kraus attacks Joe as a scurrilous sort of scoundrel. Why? Well, because Joe claims to be a limited government guy but he and all his friends work for BIG Government, darn it!

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When Ronald Reagan said that big government undermined the economy, some people dismissed his comments because of his philosophical belief in liberty.

And when I discuss my work on the economic impact of government spending, I often get the same reaction.

This is why it’s important that a growing number of establishment outfits are slowly but surely coming around to the same point of view.

• The European Central Bank published a study showing “…a significant negative effect of the size of government on growth.”
• A study by two Harvard economists found that “large adjustments in fiscal policy, if based on well-targeted spending cuts, have often led to expansions.”
• The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development noted in recent research that welfare programs are economically destructive because they lure people into dependency because “net disposable income would increase despite putting in fewer hours.”
• A study from the International Monetary Fund concluded that “Cuts to pension and health entitlements had the most beneficial effect on economic growth.”

This is remarkable. It’s beginning to look like the entire world has figured out that there’s an inverse relationship between big government and economic performance. (more…)

Is it April Fool’s Day? Has somebody in Paris hacked the website at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development? Have we been transported to a parallel dimension where up is down and black is white?

Please forgive all these questions. I’m trying to figure out why any organization – even a leftist bureaucracy such as the OECD – would send out a press release entitled, “Rising tax revenues: a key to economic development in Latin American countries.”

Not even Keynesians, after all, think higher taxes are a recipe for growth.

Ah, never mind. I just remembered that the OECD is a hotbed of statism, so the press release makes perfect sense. After all, the US-taxpayer-funded organization has become infamous for reflexively advocating big government.

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Shame on Big Labor Bosses! For years they have used the tactic of “shame” in an effort to pressure, bully and demonize employers who might stand against their efforts. They have used “shame” in their efforts to misinform the public – to create a misperception that their target is guilty of an unconscionable act and should bear the scarlet letter of these acts. These attacks have been not just against the targeted employer, but against anyone who might oppose them, including the employer’s customers and advertisers, non-union employees, even their own membership if it suits their purposes. Recently, Big Labor has taken the weapon of “shame” to the political arena, both in Wisconsin and now in Indiana.

“Shame” was the word of the day when the SEIU ran one of its Corporate Campaigns against EMS across the Midwest in 2005-2007. The Big Labor bosses never shirked from using the phrase to intimidate loyal EMS employees and customers as they attempted to cross SEIU picket lines. With banners in hand they would publicly attack EMS with incorrect statements and half-truths.

“Shame” was on display constantly last year when Big Labor bosses poured millions of dollars and thousands of foot soldiers into Madison, Wisconsin in an attempt to intimidate Governor Walker and the General Assembly into withdrawing the needed measures to restore fiscal responsibility to a state deeply in debt (see America at a Crossroads! As Wisconsin Goes, So Goes America!). Now, as we approach The Most Important Non-Presidential Election of the Decade, Big Labor bosses are at it again, attempting to “shame” the electorate into replacing Governor Walker via a recall election and then reversing the bills that have arguably put Wisconsin on a path to solvency.

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What’s the worst policy idea that would cause the most damage to society?

I’m tempted to say the value-added tax since our hopes of restraining the federal government will be greatly undermined if we give the buffoons in Washington a new source of revenue. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why Mitt Romney may be an ever greater long-term threat to American exceptionalism than Barack Obama.

But even though the VAT is fiscal poison, it’s not the most dangerous policy proposal.

At the top of my list is global taxation.

I wrote in 2010 about some of the awful global tax schemes being pushed by the United Nations. And I also noted that unrepentant statists such as George Soros are pimping for global taxation.

I even wrote a paper back in 2001 to explain why global taxes are such a bad idea.

The details of the tax don’t matter. It’s the principle.

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Charles Sykes is a longtime Milwaukee talk-radio host and the prolific author of a number of books that helped to shape my personal political worldview, including 1988’s eye-opening “Profscam,” and 1993’s “A Nation of Victims,’ two works as timely today as they were decades ago.

“A Nation of Moochers: America’s Addiction to Getting Something for Nothing” (St. Martin’s Press) was just released, and the fact that I’m writing this at the very moment President Barack Obama is announcing yet another government plan (his fourth, I think) to “bail out” those “victims” who bought homes they couldn’t afford, makes this informative and engaging page-turner feel about as urgent and timely as any author could hope for.

What you need to know up front is that “Moochers” isn’t an attack on the poor or needy or, for that matter, a specific political party. In fact, from beginning to end, Sykes makes clear that as a country we have an obligation to feed the hungry and offer shelter to the homeless. Moreover, he isn’t even targeting a particular group, which would be impossible without a sawed-off shotgun anyway, because America’s moochers come from every level of our society.

What Sykes is targeting is a mentality, a dangerous and un-American mentality that infects almost every aspect of our culture, and one that is currently being bred into our children by those on both the left and right who are empowered by fomenting and excusing the dependence, greed, and selfishness of others. From corporate welfare to school lunches for the well-to-do to Wall Street bailouts to paying millionaires not to grow crops to tax breaks for Hollywood gajillionires to unending unemployment benefits to disaster relief for those who haven’t suffered disasters to TARP, and finally, to the shameless who walk away from mortgages they can afford to pay — what Sykes is exposing is that we are on the march to becoming Greece. Not just a European welfare state, but the kind of welfare state where the populace has been engineered by a nanny state to riot at the very thought of not being able to mooch the life to which they have become accustomed.

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Back in 2010, I crunched the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office and reported that the budget could be balanced in just 10 years if politicians exercised a modicum of fiscal discipline and limited annual spending increases to about 2 percent yearly.

When CBO issued new numbers early last year, I repeated the exercise and again found that the same modest level of budgetary restraint would eliminate red ink in about 10 years.

And when CBO issued their update last summer, I did the same thing and once again confirmed that deficits would disappear in a decade if politicians didn’t let the overall budget rise by faster than 2 percent each year.

Well, the new CBO 10-year forecast was released this morning. I’m going to give you three guesses about what I discovered when I looked at the numbers, and the first two don’t count.

Yes, you guessed it. As the chart illustrates (click to enlarge), balancing the budget doesn’t require any tax increases. Not does it require big spending cuts (though that would be a very good idea).

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Leftists want higher tax rates and they want greater tax compliance. But they have a hard time understanding that those goals are inconsistent.

Simply stated, people respond to incentives. When tax rates are punitive, folks earn and report less taxable income, and vice-versa.

• When tax rates increase, sometimes they engage in tax avoidance, lowering their tax liabilities legally.
• When tax rates change, sometimes they choose to alter their levels of work, saving, and investment.
• And when tax rates go up, sometimes they resort to illegal steps to protect themselves from the tax authority.

In a previous post, I quoted an article from the International Monetary Fund, which unambiguously concluded that high tax burdens are the main reason people don’t fully comply with tax regimes:
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I’ve written a couple of times about the Food Stamp program, citing ridiculous examples of waste, fraud, and abuse. These include:

• Using food stamps to buy luxury coffee at Starbucks.
• Buying steaks and lobster with food stamps.
• The Obama Administration rewarding states that sign up more food stamp recipients.
• Proposals to make it easier to use food stamps at fast food restaurants.
• College kids scamming the program for handouts.
• New York City giving food stamps to newly released prisoners and running foreign-language ads encouraging more people to sign up for the program.

As a taxpayer, I get upset about these examples. But as a public policy economist, I’m much more worried about the fiscal and economic impact of the program.

As a human being, though, my primary concern is the way redistribution saps the spirit of self reliance and traps people into lives of dependency. That’s the very first point I make in this debate on CNBC.

By the way, my opponent in the debate is Jared Bernstein, who is infamous for being the co-author of the Obama Administration claim that enacting the s0-called stimulus would keep the unemployment rate from rising above 8 percent.

I’ve had lots of fun mocking that claim. Every couple of months I post Jared’s predictions and compare them to the real-world results.

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Labor union membership continues to be blind to the fact that the support of its “leadership” to President Obama and his political allies is coming at the cost of the members. Big Labor bosses and their political allies are happy to continue to throw the membership under the bus for their own personal gain. For President Obama, this is the prospect of re-election; for the labor bosses, this is the survival of their “way of life.” This can be seen through the President’s actions and comments over the past three years.

Early in his presidency, President Obama made disparaging remarks about business owners whose companies had corporate jets. This was done in a blatant attempt to incite class warfare, despite the fact that the country was in a deep recession. By his words, the President willingly sacrificed the jobs of the very people who supported him through union dues. He knew the liberal media would not expose the tragic result his words would have on the private jet and airplane manufacturing industry.

In Wichita, Kansas, the home of private aircraft manufacturing has suffered tremendously, as thousands of union employees employed by Cessna and Beechcraft have been laid off, not to mention the thousands of jobs affiliated with general aviation lost across the country including manufacturers, part suppliers, fuel, pilots, mechanics, FBO services and insurance providers. Additionally, due to the loss of significant sales, use, income environmental and aviation tax revenues, thousands of local, state and federal employee positions, many of which were union jobs, have disappeared.

Adding insult to injury now the White House Defends User Fees of $100/flight on general aviation and corporate aviation to raise revenues in Obama’s continued class warfare and redistribution of wealth scheme in his effort to bring down America. Ironically this will cost more jobs, many of them union, as revenues ultimately will be reduced as fewer aircraft are purchased and general aviation travel is curtailed due to the added expense. The vicious cycle will continue to perpetuate itself at the expense of American jobs!

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The German Chancellor and French President have put together a plan to boost growth. Sounds like a good goal, but what specifically are they proposing?

Some of the obvious ideas include:

• Lowering tax rates to boost incentives for productive behavior.
• Reducing the burden of government spending to allow more efficient allocation of labor and capital.
• Cutting back regulation and red tape to boost market efficiency.

But those are only obvious ideas if you want a growth plan that actually leads to…(drum roll, please)…more growth.

Merkel and Sarkozy must have some other objective in mind, because they’ve proposed a plan comprised of new taxes, higher taxes, and tax harmonization.

This is beyond satire. Even if I was trying to make fun of the French and Germans (perish the thought), I wouldn’t be able to make up something this absurd.

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University of Wisconsin Professor Joel Rogers wants to build a lefty alternative to the ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. He recently hit up some of his students for help with the project, while they were waiting for their grades in his class.

This from our first article in an ongoing investigation conducted by the MacIver News Service. Future stories will focus on any official reaction we receive from the University and an indepth look at Rogers’ Center on Wisconsin Strategy.

Joel Rogers Says College Credits May Be Available to Those Who Help Build Liberal Alternative to ALEC

[Madison, Wisc…] One of the University of Wisconsin’s most renowned liberal professors attempted to recruit his students to work on an elaborate private political project while final grades in their class were pending, the MacIver News Service has learned.

At the conclusion of his end-of-the-year email to his UW Law School students, Professor Joel Rogers wrote: “I think I mentioned a little project I’m doing now — which thus far involves professors from such crummy law schools as Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, Virgina [sic] and elsewhere, but thus far, beyond your lonesome, NOBODY from UW — to build a partial counter to ALEC. It’s going to involve a lot of law students. If you’re interested in helping out with that (no money, but possible credit), or know of somebody else who might be, please let me, or even better, “Nate Ela” <nela@cows.org>, a lawyer and now sociology grad student, know. Project description attached.“

Rogers is the Director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan, educational, and charitable organization. COWS was founded in 1992 by Rogers, a professor of Law, Political Science, and Sociology at UW-Madison and a longtime commentator on economic development and democratic institutions. COWS is based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the Social Science Building.

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An e-mail exchange detailing a conference call between members of the Occupy Wall Street media team exposes the level of coordination happening to attempt to save face over a recent New York Post story that exposed how Occupy had taken over a foreclosed home despite the owner’s wishes. Almost concurrently with Big Government’s report on the story yesterday, the #Occupy media team was having a confab in crisis management that would make any Fortune 500 company blush.

The media team takes a smart strategy and realizes that attacking the owner of the house directly is probably a bad move. However, behind the scenes they can’t help trashing him and calling him dishonest…

“Post story, owner made several claims, most of them false.  Says OWS won’t let him into his house.”

Despite this insult, the back-and-forth reveals that there are actually negotiations going on back-and-forth between Wide’s attorney and Occupy Wall Street.

1.  Premo: one question – meghan hasn’t been able to get in touch with Wise’s lawyer since the new year?  El: don’t think she’s been trying actively to get in touch with him.  Now that the article has come out that changes the negotiation.

2. [ed note: this line blank in original email]

3.  El: the last meeting did go well, Wise wasn’t there but his lawyer was.  Lawyer agreed to speak with Wise about working with us, agreed that the best solution would be to work with us to transition it to a community land trust, and fight the banks to reduce his debt so that he can become a home owner again.

Will the public and the lenders be made aware that there is a behind the scenes shakedown via media exposure being worked out here? The homeowner is trying to play on sympathy to get back his foreclosed property and Occupy Wall Street wants to gain positive media exposure, even though they were squatting in someone else’s private property.

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In a recent column for the Wall Street Journal, I explained why Mitt Romney’s interest in a value-added tax is deeply troubling.

One of my key points was that the VAT is a money machine for big government.

But don’t believe me. Look at Japan, where the politicians see increases in the VAT as a way of financing a much larger burden of government spending. Here’s some of what is being reported by Bloomberg.

Noda reshuffled his cabinet last week, aiming to win support for doubling Japan’s 5 percent national sales tax by 2015… Japan’s finances are “getting worse and worse every day, every second,” Takahira Ogawa, Singapore-based director of sovereign ratings at S&P… Japan’s aging population is also weighing on Noda’s struggle to achieve fiscal health. Social-security expenses have more than doubled in two decades and will account for 52 percent of general spending for the year starting in April, according to a budget proposal the cabinet approved last month.

The key point in this excerpt is that the VAT is a substitute for entitlement reform. Without the VAT, politicians might actually reform the welfare state. But because of the VAT, they want to take the easy (but extremely destructive) route and boost the tax burden.

This is why I get so agitated about the threat of a VAT in America, as illustrated by this recent appearance on Larry Kudlow’s show.

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Newt Gingrich has had his ups and downs lately in the Republican Presidential primary. Though much of the setback has been due to his own miscues, he recently hit the nail on the proverbial head when he proclaimed that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) should be defunded. There is no doubt that Obama’s recent recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were motivated by his desire to bring Big Labor on board for the 2012 Election run as recounted in last week’s blog Will the NLRB Decide the 2012 Presidential Election. Newt was correct in stating that defunding the NLRB is the right response to an imperialistic President who intentionally circumvented the spirit of the law for personal gain and philosophical ideology.

Besides legal measures, the only current means to defeat The Cold War Within: The Fight for America’s Future is for the Republican dominated congress to utilize its budgetary power and defund the Rogue NLRB. Such action is even more imperative now, according to Phil Wilson in his latest issue of Union Bailout Update, where he expresses that the two new Democratic appointees, Sharon Block and Richard Griffin, are even more radical than Craig Becker, which is unimaginable. Additionally, Mr. Wilson expressed that Board Chairman Mark Pearce is the true engine behind achieving Card Check, and that the recent appointments provide Pierce the radical majority he needs to achieve Obama’s and Big Labor’s coveted goal of an Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) style regulatory scheme, aka “EFCA Through the Backdoor,” in time to support Obama’s 2012 Presidential run.

The goal is to implement new regulations such as the “Persuader Rule,” “quickie elections,” and the Posting Rule,  as described in Phil Wilson’s 2012 Predictions that will allow Big Labor to utilize the Persuasion of Power to prosecute brutal Corporate Campaigns against employees and employers in time to raise money, register voters and put union foot soldiers on the ground for the 2012 Election. The frightening political machines behind them are recounted in my new book The Devil at Our Doorstep.

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I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I write about insanely stupid government policies. But I know I get more motivated to fight big government.

How can anyone want to give more money and power to politicians, for instance, after reading these comparisons of dumb government policy in the United States and United Kingdom? Or how can anyone think it’s a good idea to expand the public sector after reading these examples of bureaucratic incompetence?

But now I’ve come across something even more amazing, a story of government stupidity that trumps these other examples. And this is not satire. It is not from The Onion.

Believe it or not, the Greek government has decided that pedophiles are “disabled” and therefore deserve money from the government.

And what really makes this boondoggle remarkable is that you’re helping to pay for it thanks to the IMF bailout of Greece. Here’s the link to the AP story, and here are the relevant passages.

…a government decision to expand a list of state-recognized disability categories to include pedophiles, exhibitionists and kleptomaniacs. …The Labor Ministry said categories added to the expanded list – that also includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists – were included for purposes of medical assessment and used as a gauge for allocating financial assistance. …The new list gives pyromaniacs and pedophiles disability pay up to 35 percent.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but my first reaction to this story is that child molesters should be in jail, not getting taxpayer-funded handouts.

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With the Iowa caucuses kicking off the primary season to decide the Republican presidential challenger, it is important to reflect on what President Obama will be doing to secure a second term, as he has no Democratic challenger. As Obama basks in the warmth of Hawaii for 19 days after three years of failed leadership, political game playing, lack of work ethic and historical divisiveness, he must use this down time to repair strained relations with big labor and pull some magic rabbits out of the hat to have a chance at re-election.

Enter the National Labor Relations Board and its radical Obama appointees Craig Becker and Mark Pierce, as well as proposed appointees Sharon Block, a former liberal NLRB attorney, and Richard Griffin, General Counsel for the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) and a member of the AFL-CIO Lawyer Coordinating Committee. The Senate has declined to vote on approval of the two appointees or on the reappointment of Craig Becker, whose term mercifully ended December 31, 2011. However, it remains to be seen if Obama will use his Rule by Fiat mentality in an attempt to recess appoint them as he did with Craig Becker during a Senate recess in the spring of 2009. If he does, it will be obvious payback to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and former SEIU President Andy Stern, both Obama cronies and admitted frequent White House visitors.

Under the regime of Becker and Pierce, the NLRB wreaked havoc on the business community in 2011, as highlighted in The Cold War Within: The Fight for America’s Future. The fallout is still being felt as two of the principal regulations implemented by the Becker-Pierce NLRB are set to take effect in 2012. The first of these, the “Posting” rule, requires employers to post information apprising employees of their right to organize in accordance with the National Labor Relations Act.  Implementation has been delayed until April 30th, 2012 due to legal challenges, while the even more controversial “Quickie Elections” are also scheduled to go into effect April 30, 2011 (see NLRB Adopts Quickie Election Procedure, Sets Start Date). (more…)

It’s hardly a secret that the 2012 election is shaping up as a contest between free markets and big government.  And while the choice seems clear in the current political environment, it’s important to recall that government does play a critical role in the development and maintenance of functioning markets.  Yet, as Tea Partiers, Occupiers, and Ron Paul acolytes all note, government has both abdicated that critical role and inserted itself where it does not belong.

If markets were magical places that flourished whenever government disappeared, Somalia would be the world’s leading economy.  Markets are sophisticated mechanisms that enable informed parties to exchange resources, voluntarily, to mutual benefit.  There’s a lot packed into that sentence.  For markets to work, participants must trust the system.  They must believe that they have—or least can access—the information they need to make informed decisions.  They must feel free from coercion—both explicit coercion and unacceptable take-it-or-leave-it offers.  They must trust the inherent fairness of the system, and they must believe that it is possible to enforce the rules of the marketplace by sanctioning cheaters.  The closer an actual market comes to meeting these needs, the better it will function.  The further a market drifts from these goals, the more likely it is to fail.  It is thus absolutely critical that someone—presumably the government—serve as the market referee and the guarantor of market enforcement.

First and foremost, market participants must believe that courts will honor contracts and property rights fairly, dispassionately, and smoothly.  Contracts allow strangers to exchange promises; property allows people to focus on matters in front of them without worrying about possessions that may be out of sight.  In the absence of enforceable contracts and property rights, people could never travel far from home, leverage their assets, or exchange current payment or performance for a promise of future delivery with anyone unfamiliar.  In short, a society that distrusts its courts cannot progress beyond a tribal or a village economy—even if it employs tribal or village markets.

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My Iowa caucus predictions from yesterday were hopelessly wrong, probably because I was picking with my heart rather than my head. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, Mitt Romney’s openness to a value-added tax makes him a dangerously flawed candidate, and I hoped Iowa voters shared my concern.

In a column for today’s Wall Street Journal, I elaborated on those concerns, explaining why a VAT is bad fiscal policy. I had three main points. First, I noted that the big spenders need a VAT in order to achieve a European-sized welfare state in America.

… the left needs a VAT. It is the only realistic way to collect the huge amount of revenue that will be necessary to finance the mountainous benefits promised by our entitlement programs. Which is exactly what happened in Europe, where welfare-state policies only became feasible after VATs were adopted, beginning in the late 1960s.

Second, I explained that the left favors this giant tax on the middle class because they want more money and soak-the-rich taxes don’t generate much revenue.

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Last year, I came up with a saying that “Bad Government Policy Begets More Bad Government Policy” and labeled it “Mitchell’s Law” during a bout of narcissism.

There are lots of examples of this phenomenon, such as the misguided War on Drugs being a precursor to intrusive, costly, and ineffective money laundering policies.

Or how about government healthcare subsidies driving up the price of healthcare, which then leads politicians to decide that there should be even more subsidies because healthcare has become more expensive.

But if you want a really stark example of Mitchell’s Law, the internal revenue code is littered with examples.

The politicians created a nightmarishly complex tax system, for instance, and then decided that enforcing the wretched system required the erosion of civil liberties and constitutional freedoms.

The latest example of this process involves the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, a piece of legislation that was imposed in 2010 because politicians assumed they could collect lots of tax revenue every single year by getting money from so-called tax havens.

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