President Barack Obama will deliver his fourth State of the Union address on Tuesday, January 24th–the very day that marks the 1,000th day since the Democrat-controlled United States Senate last bothered to pass a budget.

On Monday, the Ranking Republican of the Senate Budget Committee Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and the Chairman of the House Budget Committee Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) released a joint statement blasting Democrats for their budgetary inaction and contrasting it with Republican efforts:

Senate Democrats abandoned their official duty to prioritize Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars and tackle our nation’s most pressing economic challenges—dealing a painful blow to fiscal progress that may be felt for some time.  This contrasts sharply with the record of the House Republicans. Last spring, the new House Majority publicly produced a budget plan before the nation, brought it forward in committee, and passed it on the floor. The budget’s principled solutions honestly confront our nation’s most difficult challenges, putting the budget on a path to balance and the country on a path to prosperity.

To mark the inauspicious 1,000-day anniversary, the Heritage Foundation released a series of budget facts and urged the Senate to meet its Constitution requirements for fiscal stewardship:

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From time immemorial—from Etienne de la Boitie to David Hume to Ludwig von Mises—political analysts have noted that because the number of those in the ruling elite amounts to only a small fraction of the number in the ruled masses, every regime lives or dies in accordance with “public opinion.” Unless the mass of the people, no matter how objectively abused and plundered they may appear to be, believe that the existing rulers are legitimate, the masses will not tolerate the regime’s continuation in power. Nor need they tolerate it, because they greatly outnumber the rulers, and hence whenever they become subjectively fed up, they have the power—which is to say, the overwhelming advantage of superior numbers—to oust the regime. Even if the regime possesses a great advantage of coercive power, its employment avails the rulers nothing if they must kill or imprison 90 percent of the population, because such massive violence would reduce them to the status of parasites without hosts.

This consideration long seemed to make sense as a critical element of political analysis, and even today one often encounters it. Something akin to it seems to motivate the current Occupy Wall Street movement and its spin-offs in other venues when they represent themselves as members of the (exploited) 99 percent, in opposition to the (exploiting) 1 percent.

Certain long-established trends in the welfare state, however, have progressively weakened the force of this analysis. The main element of these trends is the tremendous growth in the number of people (and in their proportion in the population) who are directly dependent on government benefits to a substantial degree. Researchers at the Heritage Foundation have been tracking this development for several years and have pushed their analysis back for several decades. An index of dependency based on this research increases from 19 in fiscal year 1962 to 272 in fiscal year 2009.

The Heritage index uses information on almost three dozen important federal programs on which Americans depend for cash income and other support—including housing assistance, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance benefits, educational benefits, and farm-income supports—but it is scarcely a comprehensive measure, inasmuch as the total number of federal programs with dependents is gigantic at present. Of course, each such program has government employees and contractors who run it and hence depend on it to earn much, if not all, of their income. Government civilian and military retirees add millions more to the ranks.

The Heritage researchers found that in 1962, 21.7 million persons depended on the programs they included in their index for benefits. By 2009, the corresponding number of dependents had grown to 64.3 million. Adding dependents not included in the Heritage study might easily increase the number to more than 100 million, or to more than a third of the entire population. Thus, the parasites verge ever closer to outnumbering their hosts.

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A recap of the Republican debate on national security and foreign policy, as seen through its best and worst moments.

Worst gaffe of the night: CNN, which mis-identified former Democratic presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark as a Republican in its pre-debate analysis.

Best comeback: Newt Gingrich to Ron Paul, on the need for the Patriot Act: “Timothy McVeigh succeeded. That’s the whole point.”

Worst neo-colonialism: Mitt Romney, channeling his inner Kipling by suggesting that we have to bring Afghanistan and Pakistan into “modernity.”

Best follow-up answer: (Tie) Michele Bachmann on the Patriot Act, who focused on Barack Obama’s eagerness to grant rights to terrorists, rather than taking the bait to attack fellow Republicans (that time, anyway); and Ron Paul, who highlighted problems with immigration and the war on drugs in answering a question about border security.

Worst attempted dodge: Rick Santorum, allowing Wolf Blitzer to back him into saying that Muslims should be profiled at airports.

Best nickname: Herman Cain wins for calling Wolf Blitzer, “Blitz.” Somehow, I think that’s going to stick.

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Tonight’s debate among the Republican presidential contenders, co-hosted by the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and CNN, will feature the candidates’ views on foreign policy.

By now, Republican voters are used to the clash between the hawkish approach favored by the party mainstream and the isolationist posture championed by Rep. Ron Paul–a confrontation that has been a feature of GOP presidential debates since the 2008 election.

Yet the events of the past year–especially the upheaval of the Arab Spring–have generated real debates among conservatives about how the United States should respond to a rapidly changing Middle East, an ambitious China, and a disintegrating European Union. Those new fault lines within the party will likely make their appearance on the stage tonight.

Though it is certain that each of the Republican candidates on stage tonight will criticize President Barack Obama’s record, each will find something different to criticize–not just because of their own divergent views, but also because of Obama’s incoherent policy. (more…)

Tonight, eight Republican presidential candidates will take the stage at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., to share their foreign policy and national security views with the American people. The debate, hosted by The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, will be broadcast on CNN at 8PM ET.

The debate will focus on a number of crucial national security and foreign policy questions that will undoubtedly reach the President’s desk in the coming years. Ensuring our country’s defense is a fundamental responsibility of the federal government, as set forth in the Constitution. And it is up to the President to take the lead in crafting American foreign policy while also serving as commander in chief of the armed forces.

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In an interview at The Heritage Foundation, Texas Senator John Cornyn had strong words for President Obama. “Unfortunately the President is already out complaining trying to channel Harry Truman, railing against a “Do Nothing Congress”, when he has apparently given up on governing and has decided to campaign full-time and he’s not really contributing towards the solution.”

Cornyn (R-TX) was at Heritage to stress the importance of enacting the strongest possible Balanced Budget Amendment, one that caps federal spending at 18 percent of the economy and requires a super-majority vote in Congress to increase taxes.

During his interview, Cornyn gave a brief overview of that fight:

Starting in the House this week they will vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment. And then before the end of the year, we are guaranteed by the provisions of the Budget Control Act a vote in the Senate. I expect there will be two votes. One on what I call the “strong” version that 47 Republicans have co-sponsored and another on one that will, honestly, be more in the nature of a cover vote.for Democrats up for election in 2012.

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The current administration’s controversial federal regulatory policies (the US Treasury Department’s stunningly bad bet on Solyndra, the NLRB’s tone death sanction against Boeing, the EPA’s onerous new rules imposed on, well, everything) place heavy-handed bureaucrats in Washington squarely behind the wheel on the road to America’s economic future.  In each of these cases, the White House has empowered federal regulators to decide outcomes best left to the free market.  Washington, it seems, knows best. Against this backdrop of regulatory overreach, we await another major decision – the approval by the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission of the potential merger between AT&T and T-Mobile.

Of economic concern, however, is not the Federal government’s decision to approve or reject the deal, but whether the FCC will use its responsibility and power to approve the deal to also impose new regulations on the entire telecom industry. Doug Holtz-Eakin warns, “already we are seeing calls for a presumptive regulatory response.” He worries that “the U.S. will continue down an overly regulatory, prescriptive approach to competition that is doomed to fail.”

The greatest risk to a free, wide-open Internet is that overreaching regulators are using the merger review process to mandate new policy – circumventing the congressional review process to impose regulatory restrictions such as the controversial “net-neutrality” rules. “The job of regulators should not be to choose the best market strategy,” wrote James Gattuso, a Senior Research Fellow with The Heritage Foundation in a May report.  “It should be simply to make sure that the marketplace itself is working. In wireless, it’s working remarkably well, and there is every reason to believe it will continue to do so after the acquisition is completed.”

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Lachlan Markay, investigative reporter for the Heritage Foundation to discuss the ever evolving Solyndra scandal, the President’s insistence that is was a good investment of taxpayer money, and which green-energy company may be the next Solyndra.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

White House Knew Solyndra Was In Trouble, Emails Indicate
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Emails Show White House Officials Said “Oblivious” Department of Energy Meant “Bad Days Are Coming”
Is Harry Reid-Backed Nevada Geothermal the Next Solyndra?
Lachlan Markay at Heritage Foundation

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Elizabeth Blackney are joined by Hans von Spakovsky from the Heritage Foundation to discuss the 11th Circuit case against Obamacare that is now headed to the Supreme Court, why this is the most important of the legal challenges, and how the court may rule.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

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Hans von Spakovsky at the Heritage Foundation

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By refusing to set up a health care insurance exchange system that could be used to advance ObamaCare regulations, Gov. Bobby Jindal has cut a path that other state officials should follow, argue analysts with the Cato Institute.

However, other leading figures within Gov. Jindal’s own Republican Party remain divided on this question. Governors Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Scott Parnell (R-Alaska), Susana Martinez (R-N.M.) and Rick Perry (R-Texas) have all expressed opposition to an exchange system in their states. But Gov. CL “Butch” Otter of Idaho, Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), and other GOP officials, disagree.

They view the exchange system as a viable tool for advancing patient-centered, market-friendly health care reforms that can lower costs and expand consumer choice. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a set of proposed rules that “set minimum standards” for the exchanges.

But the suggested guidelines are so incomplete and uncertain that states cannot make an informed decision on whether they should participate, said Bruce Greenstein, Louisiana’s secretary for the Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH).

Greenstein supports Gov. Jindal in his decision to remain outside of the exchange system. “This is very good policy on the part of Gov. Jindal for today, and tomorrow it will be seen by the rest of the market as very forward thinking, and very savvy in terms of the way we move forward and protect the market of health insurance in Louisiana; we need to be able to access high quality insurance products at a good cost,” Greenstein said. “We continue to be very prudent in our approach.”

However, Cassidy, who is a medical doctor and a vocal opponent of the federal health care law, said in an interview that it may be advantageous for states to put their own “imprimatur” on a health care exchange before federal officials advance new regulations.  He cited the Utah system, which is already up and running, as a model for what might work in Louisiana and other states.

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Maine Governor Paul LePage is no stranger to hard times. He left home at 11 after a rough childhood, spending time on the streets, yet managed to finish both high school and college. He later went on to work as a Pepsi-Cola truck driver, at a meat-packing plant and as a short-order cook.

This is the story of Gov. Paul LePage, who, in a little more than six months, has ushered in sweeping reforms for Maine — a record of accomplishments it might take other governors years to achieve. What’s even more remarkable is that LePage is a tea party-backed conservative making significant strides in supposedly hostile New England.

LePage visited Heritage recently and shared the piece of advice that have inspired him throughout his life — just 10 two-letter words: “If it is to be, it is up to me.”

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Ten oil rigs have left the Gulf of Mexico since the Obama Administration imposed a moratorium on deepwater oil and gas drilling in May 2010, according to documentation the Pelican Institute obtained from Sen. David Vitter’s (R-La.) office.

The ten rigs named in the document are: Marinas, Discover Americas, Ocean Endeavor, Ocean Confidence, Stena Forth, Clyde Bourdeaux, Ensco 8503, Deep Ocean Clarion, Discover Spirit, and Amirante. The rigs have left the Gulf for locations in Egypt, Congo, French Guiana, Liberia, Nigeria and Brazil.

“This highlights the problem we have with losing domestic energy production as a result of the drilling moratorium and the slow permitting,” David Kreutzer, a research fellow in Energy Economics and Climate Change at the Heritage Foundation, said. “We must also keep in mind that the impacts are not instantaneous, the rigs may be idle for a while, but once they move it’s going to be difficult to move them back once they are drilling in say Nigeria or Brazil.  The oil companies must have confidence they can move forward with their drilling plans and to know these plans won’t be revoked. Only certainty will bring them back.”

Although federal officials announced they were lifting the restrictions last October, a “de-facto moratorium” remains in effect that stifles energy production and undermines large and small businesses in the Gulf region, industry officials have argued. (more…)

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) is no stranger to fights with party leadership. And he’s not holding back in his criticism of the so-called “Plan B” that’s being developed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). In an exclusive interview with The Heritage Foundation this afternoon, DeMint didn’t hold back:

It seems to be a cover-up to me. It’s like I’ve said, it’s like leaving the door to the federal vault open, looking the other way, and saying we had nothing to do with the robbery. The debt limit is set up to keep us from increasing our debt without Congressional action—hopefully to reform the spending process.

He blamed President Obama for politicizing the debt-limit debate rather than seeking a consensus.

“I’m convinced the president has not been negotiating in good faith. He’s got a bad economy. His policies have made it worse. And he’s hoping this debt-limit debate will allow him to blame Republicans.”

The interview runs about 4 minutes. Hosted by Rob Bluey and produced by Brandon Stewart, with help from Hannah Sternberg.

Republican lawmakers who have expressed concern over the power and influence of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have offered up some compelling proposals. Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), the chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, has for example, said that he considering legislation that would block President Obama’s team of unelected lawyers from revamping union election rules.

That’s a good start, but Congress as a whole must move decisively to reclaim constitutional authority that was surrendered during the “Progressive Era” of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Matthew Spalding, a particularly astute legal scholar with the Heritage Foundation, has testified at some length on the use of czars within the Obama Administration and how this relates back to progressive ambitions. In many respects, the NLRB fits with extra-constitutional schemes the disadvantage the free market and dilute the policy making authority of elected officials.

In June, the three Democrats who sit on the Board proposed rule changes that would curtail the amount of time for private union elections. Brian Hayes, the only Republican member of the board, has been sharply critical of the proposal, but his input has been limited.

If the rule changes go into effect, they would set elections from a current median time of 37 days to as little as 10 days from the filing of an election petition. They would also set pre-election hearings for 7 days after a petition is filed; the rules would also require the employer to respond to a pre-hearing questionnaire raising any legal issues or waive its right to do so. And finally, the new rules would defer a decision on the issues raised at the hearing till after the election, putting an employer at risk if the decision is challenged.

But free market groups have made a concerted effort push back and this is cause for encouragement.

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Gary Sinise is best known for his role as Lt. Dan Taylor in the 1994 blockbuster movie “Forrest Gump.” It earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor and a starring role on “CSI: NY.” Now the actor is using his fame to celebrate America’s heroes on the battlefield.

This week marked the debut of a documentary about Sinise’s role with the Lt. Dan Band. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Sinise formed the band — named after his character from “Forrest Gump” — to perform for servicemen and women. Sinise was in Washington last week and visited Heritage to talk about the military and how 9/11 changed his outlook on life.

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Andrew Breitbart was in Washington last week to promote his new book, “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!” He visited The Heritage Foundation to talk about the Democrat-Media Complex, his conversion to conservatism, how the Clarence Thomas hearings changed his life, and his future plans. Here’s the full video of his speech (approximately 30 minutes).

Before his speech at The Heritage Foundation last week to discuss his new book, Andrew Breitbart sat down with us to discuss the power of the media and the continued influence of the Tea Party. Throughout the book, Breitbart relays his experiences dealing with a largely hostile media, something he discussed in the interview. “I have friends at ABC, and CBS, and NBC. Some of them are conservatives, some of them are just decent people and they tell me it’s impossible to pitch an idea that goes against [the network's] view. It’s impossible.”

When asked about his optimism for conservatism in the future, Breitbart said he was “beyond optimistic.”

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Rory Cooper to discus a possible deal in the House to avoid a government shutdown. Then Pejman Yousefzadeh talks about what a shutdown could mean politically.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:
Budget Negotiators Reach Tentative Deal To Avert Government Shutdown
Heritage: Freshman Lawmakers Make the Case for Government Spending Cuts
Understanding the numbers in budget talks
Lots of Talk, But Shutdown Still Looming
Howard Dean: Democrats Should Be ‘Quietly Rooting’ for Shutdown

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Over the past month, Google made waves with the announcement that it has tweaked its search algorithms to penalize ‘content farms.’ These are “low quality sites whose main goal is to attract search traffic by piling up (mostly) useless content.” The lesson from Google is simple: no system devised by the mind of man is immune to being gamed by other men. Google’s merit is that it can respond quickly to thwart the gaming. That will, in turn, breed more gaming, but Google will, if it is attentive, not fall too far behind. If it slacks off, it will quickly be overtaken by a more nimble rival.

The same, unfortunately, is not true of society as a whole. J.E. Dyer argued in Commentary that the battle in Wisconsin represented the crisis of progressivism. But that is not all it represented. It also represented a shot in the battle against the problem that Mancur Olsen identified in his remarkable 1982 work on The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities: the tendency of stable societies to build up special interest groups (or distributional coalitions) that frequently fortify their position with government recognition or funding, and in turn reduce the flexibility and growth of the economy as a whole. Dyer refers to this as the problem of “special-interest activism,” but its implications are broader than the problem of over-spending.

Olsen offered his theory, in part, to explain Britain’s economic underperformance from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries. In my judgment, it remains the single most persuasive work on the subject, superior to several better-known books. But it now seems particularly applicable to the United States, which has over the past 65 years — except during a few interludes — been gamed ever more intensely. The entitlements burden, in Olsen’s terms, is the result of the Baby Boomers — who have become a distributional coalition if there ever was one — defending benefits that, because the costs fall on younger, less attentive, and less numerous voters, for many years raised no outcry.

But precisely because the U.S. has been so stable, we are burdened with many more such coalitions, most of them not explicitly centered on spending, and some supported only indirectly by the state. In academia, the professoriate defends the traditional apprentice system, even though that system is profoundly dysfunctional for the younger generation. In higher education, the elite design the admissions systems at which their children excel, which must over time reduce social mobility. In arms control, as Richard Pearle noted at The Heritage Foundation the week before last, we have an activist cottage industry that appears to be incapable of recognizing how much times have changed since its so-called glory days of the 1970s.

It is not surprising that all of these groups pose as liberal — even radical — while being at the same time deeply conservative in their attachment to the self-serving status quo.

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Indiana resident Scott Womack understands the effects of Obamacare on small-business better than most. As the owner of 12 IHOP restaurants in Indiana and Ohio, Womack employs nearly 1,000 full- and part-time employees and he already offers health insurance to his management staff.

The Heritage Foundation recently interviewed Womack for the latest installment of our “Impact of Obamacare” series and found what he had to say further evidence that the law won’t fix the problems it’s supposed to solve—but, instead, will create new ones.

Take just one example. The new health care law will require him to provide insurance to all full-time employees beginning in 2014. Womack would like to be able to do that—but he simply doesn’t know how he’ll be able to generate the revenue. He estimates the cost of the law to his company to be 50 percent greater than his company’s earnings—in other words, beyond his ability to pay. That means Womack will have to make other changes to compensate for his increased costs—changes that might affect the number and quality of jobs he’s able to offer.

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