At Last, We Get Some Fight out of David Brooks

David Brooks is a nice guy, and that is a nice thing to be. What frustrates me about him is the fact that his nice guy nature seems to compel him to refrain from arguing forcefully for his position when it comes to political/policy debates. I don’t imagine that the New York Times actually wants its conservative columnist to be a compelling debater for the starboard side of the political divide, but unless Brooks’s job at the Paper of Record requires him to be a milquetoast fellow, I don’t see why he should assume the role. One can be a nice guy while also being an able and formidable advocate, and while Brooks has mastered being a nice guy, formidable advocacy is not something that comes easily to him.

It’s not that Brooks isn’t smart—he is. It’s not that he doesn’t know the arguments—he does. It’s not that he’s not well-informed in general—he clearly is. But he perpetually seems to be in search of some kind of Grand Compromise even while his debating opponents are busy kicking him in the teeth. Try listening to NPR’s All Things Considered on Friday afternoons, when Brooks appears alongside E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post. To his credit, Dionne is a very good debater who also gives the impression of being a nice guy (I am sure he is a gentleman—I’ve certainly heard nothing about Dionne being a terror to puppies and/or kittens, or anything like that), but being a nice guy doesn’t keep Dionne from making his case. Anytime he is able to advance liberal arguments and Democratic talking points (but I repeat myself), he does so, and he does so very competently. Brooks, meanwhile, acts as though he expects the debates to be The Grand Moment Of Both Sides Coming Together And Singing In Harmony, and fails to push conservative arguments with the same passion that Dionne displays in putting forth liberal arguments. At the end of the segment, Dionne regularly pwns Brooks, who usually tries to laugh the whole thing off—frustrating anyone and everyone (like me) who hopes that Brooks will do a number on Dionne just one time.

So, these are my complaints about David Brooks’s argument style. I am sure that I shall have occasion to repeat them sometime, but credit where it is due—in his latest column, Brooks shows that he’s eaten his spinach:

There is a statue outside the Federal Trade Commission of a powerful, rambunctious horse being reined in by an extremely muscular man. This used to be a metaphor for liberalism. The horse was capitalism. The man was government, which was needed sometimes to restrain capitalism’s excesses.

Today, liberalism seems to have changed. Today, many progressives seem to believe that government is the horse, the source of growth, job creation and prosperity. Capitalism is just a feeding trough that government can use to fuel its expansion.

For an example of this new worldview, look at the budget produced by the Congressional Progressive Caucus last week. These Democrats try to boost economic growth with a gigantic $2.1 trillion increase in government spending — including a $450 billion public works initiative, a similar-size infrastructure program and $179 billion so states, too, can hire more government workers.

Now, of course, liberals have always believed in Keynesian countercyclical deficit spending. But that was borrowing to brake against a downturn when certain conditions prevail: when the economy is shrinking; when debt levels are low; when there are plenty of shovel-ready projects waiting to be enacted; when there is a large and growing gap between the economy’s current output and what it is capable of producing.

Today, House progressives are calling for a huge increase in government taxing and spending when none of those conditions apply. Today, progressives are calling on government to be the growth engine in all circumstances. In this phase of the recovery, just as the economy is finally beginning to take off, these Democrats want to take an astounding $4.2 trillion out of the private sector and put it into government where they believe it can be used more efficiently.

How do the House Democrats want to get this money? The top tax rate would shoot up to 49 percent. There’d be new taxes on investment, inheritance, corporate income, financial transactions, banking activity and on and on.

Now, of course, there have been times, like, say, the Eisenhower administration, when top tax rates were very high. But the total tax burden was lower since so few people paid the top rate and there were so many ways to avoid it. Government was smaller.

Today, especially after the recent tax increases, the total tax burden is already at historic highs. If you combine federal, state, sales and other taxes, rich people in places like California and New York are seeing the government take 60 cents or more out of their last dollar earned.

Read the whole thing, and kudos to Brooks for punching back on this issue. Incidentally, isn’t it interesting that modern day Keynesians think that temporary government spending on public works is just the thing that the doctor ordered when it comes to revving up a sluggish economy, but public spending on tax cuts is somehow a bad thing? And isn’t it equally interesting that modern day Keynesians think that if we scale back public works spending, there will be terrible economic consequences, but if we engage in nuclear class warfare via the tax code, nothing bad will happen to the economy?

Internet Access in North Korea

As with anything involving the Hermit Kingdom, there is a great deal of craziness attached to this issue. Prepare to be smacked by gob as a consequence of reading the following:

  • As the article’s title indicates, at the most, a grand total of 1,000 people would be affected by a cyber blackout in North Korea. And perhaps the number of people in the country with “unrestricted access” numbers only “a few dozen families — most directly related to Kim Jong-un himself.”
  • North Korea’s mobile Internet service does not cover people who actually live in North Korea.
  • North Korea’s intranet prevents the country’s citizens from getting anything resembling an honest glimpse of the World Wide Web—and of the larger world, to boot. Additionally, if you are a journalist and there is but a small typo in your article, you can be sent to a “revolutionisation” camp. I’m pretty sure the experience is less lovely than it sounds, and the experience doesn’t sound all that lovely to begin with.

Other than the foregoing, of course, we can bet our bottom dollars that everything is fine in North Korea, and everyone living there thanks his/her lucky stars on an hourly basis for the good fortune that placed them on the septentrional side of the 38th parallel. I mean, who would want to live with those pesky South Koreans and their significantly larger number of political liberties, their wealth, their much higher standard of living, and their plentiful food options—options which don’t involve eating grass and/or cannibalism?

Why Hugo Chavez Won’t Be Missed

Now that Hugo Chavez has gone to meet the arch-enemy of his Maker, it’s time to remind all and sundry just how dreadful a legacy he has left behind.

First, let’s take account of the purblind:

US filmmaker and long-time Hugo Chavez supporter Oliver Stone hailed the late Venezuelan leader as a “great hero” on Tuesday, saying he will “live forever in history.”

Actor and activist Sean Penn, another Hollywood friend to Chavez, also paid tribute saying the world’s poor had lost a “champion” and America had also lost “a friend it never knew it had.”

“JFK” and “Natural Born Killers” director Stone said: “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place.

“Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chavez will live forever in history,” he added in a statement released by his publicist, adding: “My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.”

Stone has regularly praised Chavez, whom he interviewed for a 2009 documentary “South of the Border,” exploring the outspoken Venezuelan leader’s role in bottom-up change sweeping South America.

Penn, in a statement reacting to Chavez’s death aged 58, added: “Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of Vice President (Nicolas) Maduro.

“Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion. I lost a friend I was blessed to have.

“My thoughts are with the family of President Chavez and the people of Venezuela,” he added.

Uh-huh. Let’s consider just how good Chavez has been to the people of Venezuela.

We’ll start with the fact Chavez left Venezuela in terrible shape:

Dead at 58, Hugo Chávez leaves behind a country in far worse condition than it was when he became president, its future clouded by rivals for succession in a constitutional crisis of his Bolivarian party’s making and an economy in chaos.

A former paratrooper, Mr. Chávez had a radical vision for “21st Century Socialism,” which was never fully explained. His skillful rhetoric, which filled supporters with utopian dreams, was used to justify the methodical destruction of Venezuela’s democratic institutions and the free market.

Shortly after coming to office, he rewrote the constitution to his liking and aggressively set out to rig elections and stifle adversaries in the legislative branch and the courts. Unable to brook criticism, he turned his fire on the independent news media, eventually silencing most voices of opposition by bully tactics and economic intimidation.

His Bolivarian regime rewarded supporters and punished opponents, giving rise to enormous corruption and the creation of a new class of greedy oligarchs with political connections. Unfortunately for Venezuela and for all his political skills, the president was both an incompetent executive and a worse economist.

In an energy-rich country that once knew no blackouts, electrical shortages are frequent, the result of Mr. Chávez’s plundering of the country’s public oil company. In a country that once enjoyed a thriving free market, prices are controlled and food items often scarce.

In recent weeks, while Mr. Chávez was hospitalized, Venezuela was once again forced to devalue its currency, this time by one-third. This was the inevitable outcome of a series of disastrous economic decisions that included nationalizing the telephone company and other utilities, which scared off foreign investors and spurred capital flight.

This might help explain why Venezuelans in the United States—who unlike those in Venezuela proper, are free to express their opinions—are so delighted that Chavez is dead:

Venezuelans in the U.S. cheered and expressed cautious optimism that new elections will bring change to their homeland after the death of President Hugo Chavez.

“My hope is that Venezuela will become a free country once again,” said Elizabeth Gonazalez, 52, who wore a smiley face sticker on her sweater with the words, “Venezuela without Chavez.”

A jubilant celebration broke out in the Miami suburb of Doral late Tuesday after word spread of the death of the 58-year-old leftist. Many dressed in caps and T-shirts in Venezuela’s colors of yellow, blue and red.

“He’s gone!” dozens in the largely anti-Chavez community chanted.

And why shouldn’t they be happy?

IN Caracas, Venezuela, you could tell a summit meeting mattered to Hugo Chávez when government workers touched up the city’s rubble. Before dignitaries arrived, teams with buckets and brushes would paint bright yellow lines along the route from the airport into the capital, trying to compensate for the roads’ dilapidation with flashes of color.

For really big events — say, a visit by Russia’s president — workers would make an extra effort, by also painting the rocks and debris that filled potholes.

Seated in their armor-plated cars with tinted windows, the Russians might not have noticed the glistening golden nuggets, but they would surely have recognized the idea of the Potemkin village.

[…]

That same dramatic flair deeply divided Venezuelans as he postured on the world stage and talked of restoring equilibrium between the rich countries and the rest of the world. It now obscures his real legacy, which is far less dramatic than he would have hoped. In fact, it’s mundane. Mr. Chávez, in the final analysis, was an awful manager.

The legacy of his 14-year “socialist revolution” is apparent across Venezuela: the decay, dysfunction and blight that afflict the economy and every state institution.

Read the whole thing, which makes clear that just about everything Chavez touched turned to ashes. More from Michael Moynihan:

Chávez presided over a political epoch flush with money and lorded over a society riven by fear, deep political divisions, and ultraviolence. Consider the latest crime statistics from Observatorio Venezolano de la Violencia, which reckons that 2012 saw an astonishing 21,692 murders in the country—in a population of 29 million. Last year, I accompanied a Venezuelan journalist on his morning rounds at Caracas’s only morgue to count the previous night’s murders. As the number of dead ballooned, the Chávez regime simply stopped releasing murder statistics to the media.

All of this could have been predicted, and wasn’t particularly surprising from a president who believed that one must take the side of any enemy of the “empire.” That Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe was a “freedom fighter,” or that Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko presided over “a model of a social state.” Saddam Hussein was a “brother,” Bashar al-Assad had the “same political vision” as the Bolivarian revolutionaries in Venezuela. He saw in the madness of Col. Gaddafi an often overlooked “brilliance” (“I ask God to protect the life of our brother Muammar Gaddafi”). The brutal terrorist Carlos the Jackal, who praised the 9/11 attacks from his French jail cell, was “a good friend.” He praised and supported FARC, the terrorist organization operating in neighboring Colombia. The list is endless.

His was a poisonous influence on the region, one rah-rahed by radical fools who desired to see a thumb jammed in America’s eye, while not caring a lick for its effect on ordinary Venezuelans. In his terrific new book (fortuitously timed to publish this week) Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s VenezuelaThe Guardian’s Rory Carroll summed up the legacy of Chávez’s Venezuela as “a land of power cuts, broken escalators, shortages, queues, insecurity, bureaucracy, unreturned calls, unfilled holes, uncollected garbage.” One could add to that list grinding poverty, massive corruption, censorship, and intimidation.

This was Chávez’s reign and his legacy; extralegal, vindictive, and interested in the short-term gesture rather than the more difficult, long-term solution. From his revolutionary comrades in Cuba, he borrowed the slogan “patria, socialismo o muerte”—fatherland, socialism or death. The fatherland is a shambles, Bolivarian socialism has failed, and Comandante Chávez is dead. May the “revolution” die with him.

Quite so. It should come as no surprise that the Iranian regime is deeply saddened by Chavez’s death, having lost in Chavez an inspiration for how to annihilate a country’s prospects and oppress its people.

It’s worth noting as well that Chavez left behind a country with an unbelievably dysfunctional political system. Link:

In one neighborhood, Chávez supporters set fire to tents and mattresses used by university students who had chained themselves together in protest several days earlier to demand more information about Mr. Chávez’s condition.

“Are you happy now?” the Chávez supporters shouted as they ran through the streets with sticks. “Chávez is dead! You got what you wanted!”

Let it be noted that in Venezuela, asking for political transparency can leave you vulnerable to mob attack. More:

Shortly before announcing that Hugo Chávez died, Venezuela’s government resorted to one of the late president’s favorite ploys to try to unite his supporters: allege a conspiracy by the U.S. to destabilize the country.

Vice President Nicolás Maduro kicked out two U.S. military attachés for allegedly plotting against Venezuela and even suggested that Washington may have been behind Mr. Chávez’s cancer.

“Behind all of [the plots] are the enemies of the fatherland,” Mr. Maduro said on state television, flanked by the entire cabinet, state governors and Venezuela’s military commanders.

Mr. Maduro said that the U.S. Embassy’s Air Force attaché, Col. David Delmonaco, and another unnamed U.S. military official had approached members of the Venezuelan military and tried to recruit them into plans to “destabilize” the oil-rich South American nation. Mr. Maduro didn’t offer further details on the alleged plot.

Mr. Maduro also suggested that the country’s “historic enemies,” a phrase long used in Venezuela to refer to the U.S. and its allies, may have caused Mr. Chávez’s cancer. He said the country would likely discover in the future that Mr. Chávez “was attacked with this illness.”

This is the response of the government of a country which is going down the tubes?

And let’s remember what the last presidential election was like. Consider this story about Henrique Capriles, who challenged Chavez last year, and who is likely to challenge his successor, Maduro, in upcoming elections. Look at what he had to put up with:

Last year, government supporters threw racist and homophobic taunts at Capriles, who has Jewish roots and lost great-grandparents in the Treblinka concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during World War Two.

One can be certain that these attacks were approved by Chavez, or by people close to him.

This blog post has gone on for a while, so I will close it by recommending this piece by Zack Beauchamp, who is on the other side of me politically, but who is a worthy and interesting interlocutor on Twitter. He urges Democrats not to think fondly of Chavez—and isn’t it sad that some Democrats needed urging? Finally, consider this from the late and missed Christopher Hitchens regarding a 2008 trip to Venezuela:

Recent accounts of Hugo Chávez’s politicized necrophilia may seem almost too lurid to believe, but I can testify from personal experience that they may well be an understatement. In the early hours of July 16—just at the midnight hour, to be precise—Venezuela’s capo officiated at a grisly ceremony. This involved the exhumation of the mortal remains of Simón Bolívar, leader of Latin America’s rebellion against Spain, who died in 1830. According to a vividly written article by Thor Halvorssen in the July 25 Washington Post, the skeleton was picked apart—even as Chávez tweeted the proceedings for his audience—and some teeth and bone fragments were taken away for testing. The residual pieces were placed in a coffin stamped with the Chávez government’s seal. In one of the rather free-associating speeches for which he has become celebrated, Chávez appealed to Jesus Christ to restage the raising of Lazarus and reanimate Bolívar’s constituent parts. He went on:

“I had some doubts, but after seeing his remains, my heart said, ‘Yes, it is me.’ Father, is that you, or who are you? The answer: ‘It is me, but I awaken every hundred years when the people awaken.’ “

As if “channeling” this none-too-subtle identification of Chávez with the national hero, Venezuelan television was compelled to run images of Bolívar, followed by footage of the remains, and then pictures of the boss. The national anthem provided the soundtrack. Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.

If only Hugo Chavez were as obsessed with venerating the living as he was with glorifying the dead, Venezuelans may have done better under his leadership.

I’ve Never Been So Happy to Have Demonstrated Bad Timing in All My Life

So, apparently we won’t put my master plan into effect. Hugo Chavez became … oh, how shall I phrase this? … a victim of sequestration with no possibility of reversal via subsequent legislation. He joined the bleeding choir invisible. His death affords cancer a unique opportunity to improve its PR standing throughout the world.

There is little I need to add to my earlier post regarding Chavez. He was a thug and a tyrant. He violated the political and human rights of his opponents and he drove Venezuela’s economy into the ground. Deep into it. “Oh, but he won elections,” his supporters—yes, there are some—will protest. Well, if you gave control over the Venezuelan state media apparatus to me instead of to Chavez, I might have won those elections. Chavez made sure not to play on a level playing field where his political opponents might have stood a chance of beating him. He rigged the political game in his favor. It’s no wonder he won elections, but the mere winning of elections does not a democracy make. Chavez won by seizing power and resources in order to further his propaganda, and by intimidating and harassing opponents who remained brave enough to defy him. He was a great many things in his life, but “friend of liberty” was not one of those things.

Oh, and I suppose that it’s worth noting that like a great many other tyrants, Hugo Chavez was a rabid anti-Semite:

Venezuela’s Jewish community, amounting to less than 1 percent of the country’s total population of 26 million, is among the oldest in South America, dating back to the early 19th century. During the struggle for independence from Spain, the fugitive revolutionary Simón Bolívar found refuge among a group of Venezuelan Jews, some of whom later went on to fight in the ranks of his liberating army. Today, the majority of the country’s Jewish population is descended from an influx of European and North African immigrants who arrived during the years surrounding World War II. Most reside in the capital city of Caracas, comprising a tightly knit community made up of roughly equal numbers from Ashkenazi and Sephardi countries of origin.

Venezuelans pride themselves on living in an ethnic and religious melting pot. Their homeland, unlike its neighbors Argentina, Paraguay, and Chile, has no history of having harbored Nazi fugitives. Before Chávez came to power, members of the Jewish community reported little animosity from either the government or the populace, and sharply anti-Zionist rhetoric was relatively uncommon. Nor did Venezuela’s fifteen synagogues (all but one of them Orthodox) experience much of the anti-Semitic vandalism common in other Latin American countries with tiny Jewish populations. The Hebraica center—its building functions as a lavish social hub, elementary school, country club, sports facility, and gathering place for Caracas Jewry—was largely left in peace.

No longer. Since Chávez took the oath of office at the beginning of 1999, there has been an unprecedented surge in anti-Semitism throughout Venezuela. Government-owned media outlets have published anti-Semitic tracts with increasing frequency. Pro-Chávez groups have publicly disseminated copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the early-20th-century czarist forgery outlining an alleged worldwide Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world. Prominent Jewish figures have been publicly denounced for supposed disloyalty to the “Bolívarian” cause, and “Semitic banks” have been accused of plotting against the regime. Citing suspicions of such plots, Chávez’s government has gone so far as to stage raids on Jewish elementary schools and other places of meeting. The anti-Zionism expressed by the government is steadily spilling over into street-level anti-Semitism, in which synagogues are vandalized with a frequency and viciousness never before seen in the country.

There is no reason whatsoever that so awful an individual should be missed by any decent person. And yet, some who claim to be decent people make noises vaguely resembling sorrow over Chavez’s death. One such person is Jimmy Carter, who reminds us why Americans were wrong to give him one term in office, and right to deny him a second one:

Rosalynn and I extend our condolences to the family of Hugo Chávez Frías.  We met Hugo Chávez when he was campaigning for president in 1998 and The Carter Center was invited to observe elections for the first time in Venezuela.  We returned often, for the 2000 elections, and then to facilitate dialogue during the political conflict of 2002-2004.  We came to know a man who expressed a vision to bring profound changes to his country to benefit especially those people who had felt neglected and marginalized.  Although we have not agreed with all of the methods followed by his government, we have never doubted Hugo Chávez’s commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.

Not a word spared for the victims of Chavez’s persecution. Also being morally obtuse: Representative Jose Serrano, who needs to soundly lose his next election. How much worse did Chavez have to be for Carter’s and Serrano’s eyes to have been opened?

Thankfully, we will never have to find out. Goodbye, Hugo Chavez. You will not be missed. And if you will be kind enough to indulge me, gentle readers, as a Jew, I would like to offer the following prayer—especially for the Jews in Venezuela who suffered the anti-Semitic lunacy of the Chavez regime:

                                                   .בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הַעוֹלָם שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה

When Your Enemy Is as Good as Dead, Offer to Help Him

Hugo Chavez is in a bad way and might not be long for this world. Only those who approve of Chavez’s particular brand of moral idiocy and his unique capacity to annihilate the Venezuelan economy could possibly feel badly about this, and we know what that makes those people. I suppose that it is worth noting that once upon a time, Michael Moore—who certainly approves of moral idiocy and the destruction of economies via the implementation of socialist economic policies—once made a movie about how Cuban health care might be preferable to the health care found in the United States; Chavez has received lots and lots (and lots) of treatment in Cuba. Maybe future editions of the movie ought to be received with a postscript—Cuban health care appears to have all but killed a head of state who was exceedingly friendly to the Castro brothers. Irony, thou art a cruel mistress.

Chavez may be beyond saving at this point, and is certainly does not deserve to recover from his health woes, but it wouldn’t be the world’s worst idea for the United States to offer to try to help him out via a public statement to the effect that Chavez would be welcome to come to the United States and go to any hospital he wants in order to combat the ailments a just Deity has visited on him. I put forward this idea for the following reasons:

  • It makes the United States look kind and merciful;
  • Looking kind and merciful will do more to improve our soft power than have any number of “resets” the Obama administration has tried;
  • Chavez and his regime will be flummoxed by the offer from a public relations standpoint, and …
  • There is absolutely no way that Chavez will accept the offer.

Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I count this as a win-win. The United States can make it look as though it is willing to help Chavez out, thus winning points for its humanitarian gesture. Chavez will likely refuse the generosity of the United States, look churlish as a consequence, and then will likely soon join the bleeding choir invisible. About the only way that this might—emphasis on the word “might”—go wrong is if Chavez accepts the offer, comes to the United States, kicks the bucket, and then a public relations campaign begins blaming the United States for (perhaps deliberately) causing Hugo Chavez to have an eternal meeting with Beelzebub. But I count the chances of that happening as very low indeed. And even if it does happen, how successful would any such public relations campaign be? I mean, would you buy a story claiming that Hugo Chavez was within kissing distance of Death, so the United States invited him to our shores to make sure that both sides puckered up and smooched? Even some Chavistas might have problems taking such a claim seriously.

So what is the United States waiting for? President Obama should loudly and publicly invite Hugo Chavez to take advantage of our advanced medical care, watch him and his regime sputter out a rejection of the offer, bask in the public relations coup that follows, and then pop popcorn and let nature take its course.

What’s not to love about this plan?

Making Reaganism Relevant

I have written before that instead of asking whether some aspiring political leader is “the next Ronald Reagan,” conservatives, small-government libertarians, and Republicans in general should demand an original leader who is well-equipped to take on current challenges. Ramesh Ponnuru argues—quite properly—that in addition, Reagan’s entire philosophy of government has to be updated to address present day issues:

When Reagan cut rates for everyone, the top tax rate was 70 percent and the income tax was the biggest tax most people paid. Now neither of those things is true: For most of the last decade the top rate has been 35 percent, and the payroll tax is larger than the income tax for most people. Yet Republicans have treated the income tax as the same impediment to economic growth and middle-class millstone that it was in Reagan’s day. House Republicans have repeatedly voted to bring the top rate down still further, to 25 percent.

A Republican Party attentive to today’s problems rather than yesterday’s would work to lighten the burden of the payroll tax, not just the income tax. An expanded child tax credit that offset the burden of both taxes would be the kind of broad-based middle-class tax relief that Reagan delivered. Republicans should make room for this idea in their budgets, even if it means giving up on the idea of a 25 percent top tax rate.

When Reagan took office, he could have confidence in John F. Kennedy’s conviction that a rising tide would lift all boats. In more recent years, though, economic growth hasn’t always raised wages for most people. The rising cost of health insurance has eaten up raises. Controlling the cost of health care has to be a bigger part of the Republican agenda now that it’s a bigger portion of the economy. An important first step would be to change the existing tax break for health insurance so that people would be able to pocket the savings if they chose cheaper plans.

Conservative views of monetary policy are also stuck in the late 1970s. From 1979 to 1981, inflation hit double digits three years in a row. Tighter money was the answer. To judge from the rhetoric of most Republican politicians, you would think we were again suffering from galloping inflation. The average annual inflation rate over the last five years has been just 2 percent. You would have to go back a long time to find the last period of similarly low inflation. Today nominal spending — the total amount of dollars circulating in the economy both for consumption and investment — has fallen well below its path before the financial crisis and the recession. That’s the reverse of the pattern of the late 1970s.

I would add that it should still be possible to have a flatter, lower overall tax system, with the top rate close to 25%, but like Ponnuru, I am surprised that more Republicans haven’t gotten on the bandwagon to lower the payroll tax. I have argued for them to do so in the past. It would be a great way for Republicans to start to win back middle class voters, and it would be very good policy to boot.

Some Facts about Sequestration that the New York Times Fails to Understand

Sequestration, by the Times’s own admission, “will not stop to contemplate whether [the programs it cuts] are the right programs to cut; it is entirely indiscriminate, slashing programs whether they are bloated or essential.” And yet, the Times pretends throughout its unsigned editorial—I wouldn’t want to put my name on it either—that sequestration represents the only pathway by which center-right policymakers want to shrink government, or at least reduce the growth of government.

This, of course, is a silly argument, but one that has great sway in the epistemically closed world in which the Times finds its most ardent fans. Few, if any small-government libertarians and conservatives would propose to shrink government in the manner that sequestration calls for; they would by contrast be more than willing to reduce government “substantially, but thoughtfully, considering the nation’s needs” via regular order as contemplated by the traditional appropriations process. The problem, however, is that it has been nearly four years(!) since Senate Democrats passed a budget—we have been operating on continuing resolutions since then—and there is no Fiscal Grand Bargain in the offing, especially not with a White House that signaled its intention very early after the November elections to make war with Republicans during the president’s second term, and which doubled and tripled down on those intentions in the inaugural and State of the Union addresses. Because the parties don’t appear to be in a mood to deal, and because any further delay in getting our fiscal house in order might further jeopardize our credit rating, we have the sequester to force matters along. Either the parties get their respective acts together, or we get the meat cleaver.

Am I happy about the sequester? Of course not; it’s a dumb way to grapple with fiscal issues. But instruments like the sequester get designed and implemented because national leaders too often become shirkers of responsibility. If elected officials stepped up and did their jobs, we might have nice(r) things.

Would it be too much to ask that the Times remember all of this? Would it be too much to ask that it refrain from implying—and the Times does more than imply—that sequestration has come about because too many representatives and senators have worn out their copies of The Conscience of a Conservative and their DVDs of Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural? Would it be too much to ask that the Times recall in its editorials that Democrats joined Republicans in implementing the sequestration mechanism to force themselves and each other to act And while I am asking questions, would it be too much to ask that the Times remember which president signed the sequester into law? Here’s a hint; he’s the current Democrat-in-Chief.

Some might wonder why I bother asking these questions. After all, the irresponsibility of elected officials is not the only reason why we can’t have nice(r) things. Journalists aren’t exactly setting records these days either.

(Nota bene: Not being the New York Times, I have no problems with my name being associated with this blog post.)