tomllewis

Wow. Another MSM reporter speaks the obvious.

Newt Gingrich weighs in on the ‘fiscal cliff’

via The Right Scoop

It’s easy to blame progressives for their spending spree (GWB certainly did it). But I’ve often said that it’s really the majority of the American people who are responsible. They keep electing people to Congress who will not face up to responsible action, for fear of being voted out of office. There was a time that I, and many others, believed that if we just keep cutting taxes, we would limit the out of control spending.

Andrew Ferguson’s article in The Weekly Standard Gorging The Beast makes a very reasoned case that “Tax cuts didn’t starve big government.”

He cites Milton Friedman who wrote.

I believe there is one and only one way: the way parents control spendthrift children, by cutting their allowance.

But there’s a big difference, between a kid on an allowance and the federal government: The government has a credit card with no debt limit.

As long as a majority of the people who get benefits from the Government don’t feel the pain of higher taxes, there’s no cry out there to reduce money spent on “free stuff.”

So it may be that the only way to really reduce the spending is to raise taxes on the vast middle class. Then, and only then, might they start getting serious about living on less.

Here are the 2 key paragraphs:

Reagan, Friedman had counted on something that never materialized. They had assumed that as the debt piled up to finance annual budget deficits caused by free-flowing benefits, public outrage would force politicians to restrain spending without raising taxes. Yet we’ve had the deficits and the borrowing, in amounts that would have left Friedman and Reagan agog; what’s been missing is the outrage.

As compelling as Niskanen’s critique is, he was less persuasive in explaining the flip side of his findings. Why do tax increases lead to decreased spending? “Demand by current voters for federal spending,” he explained, “declines with the amount of this spending that is financed by current taxes.” When you make them pay for government benefits out of their own pockets, in other words, voters will want fewer of them. The journalist Jonathan Rauch put Niskanen’s point more pithily: “Voters will not shrink Big Government until they feel the pinch of its true cost.”

The best person in Congress.

via Reason TV

Best quote:

Instead of changing the Bush policies of more spending and more regulation Obama just stepped on the accelerator and is going in the same direction of bigger government.

via Political Math

My new find from CPAC12 was Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP (Member European Union) from England:

via The Right Scoop

via Monte Pelerin’s World.

From a Mark Steyn article: Committee Finds Savings By… Adding To Deficit?

The following quote just struck me as such a good example of foolishness. The article’s main point is the grotesque way that Obama claims to justify new spending from money saved.

Last year, Marjorie Cook of Michigan, a food inspector with the Department of Agriculture, noted that every year USDA inspectors ship 125,000 food samples to its analysis labs by “next day” express delivery, and that a day or two later the labs ship the empty containers back to the inspectors using the very same “next day” service.

Marjorie suggested that, as the containers are empty, they can’t be all that urgent, and should be mailed back at regular old ground delivery rates.

But this reform was way too radical, so it didn’t win. And happily, even as we speak, mail couriers are rushing empty containers back and forth across the USDA-inspected fruited plain at your expense.

Good article by Ross Douthat:

The story of the last three decades, in other words, is not the story of a benevolent government starved of funds by selfish rich people and fanatical Republicans. It’s a story of a public sector that has consistently done less with more, and a liberalism that has often defended the interests of narrow constituencies — public-employee unions, affluent seniors, the education bureaucracy — rather than the broader middle class.

I’m glad this resurfaced on Gateway Pundit.

Despite GWB and the Republican controlled Congress profligate spending, I was impressed that Bush was willing to spend a large amount of political capital when he began his second term. Unfortunately he also got very little support from Republicans who were afraid to touch that third rail.

Check out the two times the camera pans to Hillary Clinton

Obama Bundler George Kaiser in 2009: It’s Time to Cash in on the Mother of All Government Handouts.

What a great quote:

There’s never been more money shoved out the government’s door in world history… and our selfish goal is to get as much of it as we can.

via Verum Serum

also a posting on NRO.

Can we learn from history?

via Reason.com