We’re in deep trouble. There is simply no other conclusion you can take away from yesterday’s CBO Report.

In their “Budget and Economic Outlook,” the CBO said that the 2011 deficit will hit $1.48 trillion – nearly 40% higher than estimates the CBO made earlier in the year. That’s even larger than the $1.41 trillion deficit we racked up in 2009. It also represents the second highest percentage of the nation’s output since World War II, lagging only behind last year in terms of size.

How did we get to this point? As Rep. Paul Ryan explained in the Republican’s Response to the State of the Union:

There is no doubt the president came into office facing a severe fiscal and economic situation.

Unfortunately, instead of restoring the fundamentals of economic growth, he engaged in a stimulus spending spree that not only failed to deliver on its promise to create jobs but also plunged us even deeper into debt.

The facts are clear: Since taking office, President Obama has signed into law spending increases of nearly 25 percent for domestic government agencies – an 84 percent increase when you include the failed stimulus.

All of this new government spending was sold as “investment.”

The CBO’s report and Rep. Ryan’s response, make President Obama’s demands for more “investment” all the more absurd. Our government should not be looking for more ways to spend, it should be looking for ways to save. The CBO has already warned that, “a growing level of federal debt would also increase the probability of a sudden fiscal crisis, during which investors would lose confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget.”

Our growing debt has real consequences. On the one hand, the CBO predicts that large budget deficits would reduce national saving and domestic investment which “would lower income growth in the United States.” On the other hand, as the debt grows, it becomes increasingly more difficult to solve the problem without raising taxes to a level that would substantially harm our economy.

Without immediate action we are approaching a Catch-22 that inevitably leads to dampened economic growth.

So we urge you to call, write, or email your Congressman. Let them know that we cannot afford President Obama’s “investments.” As this year’s $1.5 trillion deficit attests, we simply must stop trying to spend our way out of this recession. It’s time we demand fiscal accountability in Washington, it is clear they are not going to do it on their own.

To find contact information for your Congressman go HERE

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

Crossposted from: http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/01/27/cbo-2011-will-be-another-year-of-record-deficits/

In last night’s State of the Union, president Obama took a page out of the Republican playbook. Obama said , “If a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it.” Seems straightforward enough.

In fact, it is something that Congressional Republicans have been doing since March.  As then-Whip Eric Cantor wrote in an op-ed last October,

“House Republicans took an unprecedented stand in March, imposing an immediate moratorium on earmarks for the remainder of the Congress. Yet, because the governing rules of one Congress cannot bind the next, this moratorium will expire on Jan. 3, 2011. I do not believe that should be allowed to happen.

The next Republican Conference should immediately move to eliminate earmarks. Should Republicans be elected as the majority party, I believe that we should extend the moratorium to the entire House – to Democrats and Republicans alike. And I encourage President Barack Obama and the White House to take a similar step.”

President Obama’s comments in the State of the Union suggest he is ready to do just that as part of a “government that lives within its means.”

Not surprisingly, Democrats were furious. As Politico reported immediately after Obama’s speech,

After Obama surprised lawmakers in his State of the Union address with a bold threat to veto all bills with earmarks, Democrats in the Senate grew visibly frustrated, denouncing the president’s call as a power grab that’ll have little-to-no impact on the federal budget deficit.

Perhaps the most vocal critic of President Obama’s plan was Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. Reid told reporters yesterday, “I think this is an issue that any president would like to have, that takes power away from the legislative branch of government. I think it’s the wrong thing to do. I don’t think it’s helpful. It’s a lot of pretty talk.”

Apparently, the White House couldn’t stand the heat coming from his own party. Just hours after making his no-earmarks pledge, President Obama was already attempting to qualify his statements. As Jim Harper of the Cato Institute just reported ,

A “government reform factsheet” circulated by White House staff says, “The President intends to veto bills with special interest earmarks .” (emphasis added) This appears to create a class of earmarks that will bring the president’s veto, special interest earmarks, and a class that will not—national interest earmarks, one supposes.

This just goes to show that President Obama isn’t truly interested in changing the spending culture of Washington. He’s interested in sounding like a moderate who is willing to follow Republican ideas, but in reality continues to act like a free-spending liberal. Sadly, it appears Harry Reid was right on the money when he said that Obama’s pledge was just “a lot of pretty talk.” Well Mr. President, as the 2012 president elections near, remember that actions speak louder than words.

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/01/26/obama-already-retreating-from-earmarks-promise/

Conservatives have spent much of the past week trying to explain exactly why Obamacare is going to bust the budget. We’ve done our best to highlight the unrealistic assumptions , the budgetary gimmicks , and the downright dirty tricks contained in the bill that make it a sur

But Democrats dogmatically kept pointing to the CBO report, conveniently ignoring Republicans critique of that very score.

Fine. There is more than one way to skin a cat. Okay, with PETA out in force these days, perhaps that’s not the best metaphor. How about, there is more than one way to pet a puppy. There, that works.

It’s time to go with Plan B. And frankly, we didn’t want to have to go there, but Democrats have forced our hand.  Even if you set aside reality and believe that Obamacare doesn’t add to the deficit, let’s look more closely at how it “accomplishes” that feat.

In the words of the CBO ,

CBO anticipates that enacting H.R. 2 would probably yield, for the 2012-2021 period, a reduction in revenues in the neighborhood of $770 billion and a reduction in outlays in the vicinity of $540 billion, plus or minus the effects of forthcoming

CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf is a world-class economist, but he’s not exactly known for readable prose. So what exactly does the above statement mean? It means that Obamacare doesn’t lower the deficit by cutting costs, it lowers the deficit (if you believe the assumptions) by collecting more revenues.

Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw explains how ridiculous this is on his blog:

I have a plan to reduce the budget deficit.  The essence of the plan is the federal government writing me a check for $1 billion.  The plan will be financed by $3 billion of tax increases.  According to my back-of-the envelope calculations, giving me that $1 billion will reduce the budget deficit by $2 billion.

Now, you may be tempted to say that giving me that $1 billion will not really reduce the budget deficit.  Rather, you might say, it is the tax increases, which have nothing to do with my handout, that are reducing the budget deficit.  But if you are tempted by that kind of sloppy thinking, you have not been following the debate over healthcare reform.

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer engages in a similar critique in today’s Washington Post:

Suppose someone – say, the president of United States – proposed the following: We are drowning in debt. More than $14 trillion right now. I’ve got a great idea for deficit reduction. It will yield a savings of $230 billion over the next 10 years: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion.

He’d be laughed out of town. And yet, this is precisely what the Democrats are claiming as a virtue of Obamacare.

Obamacare doesn’t reduce help to reduce the deficit at all. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars and then subsequently taxing Americans hundreds of billions of dollars more, isn’t a plan to reduce the deficit.  It’s a hidden tax being sold on the premise that we’re actually reforming a broken healthcare system.

We’ve long known Obamacare used gimmicks to appear to reduce the deficit, now we know Obamacare itself is a gimmick to raise taxes.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

Crossposted from: http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/01/21/obamacare-a-tax-in-reforms-clothing/

If you read yesterday’s New York Time’s expose on Obama’s economic policy, first off, congratulations on making it through because that thing was longer than the healthcare bill; and second, did you come away feeling like you had just read Soap Opera Digest than the Old Grey Lady?

Good grief. It was seven pages of gossip – not exactly what I’d expected out of the New York Times’ White House correspondent. I went in to the article attempting to understand President Obama’s approach to finding a job creation strategy that worked. I left feeling as if there wasn’t a strategy at all.

Trying to pin down a theme for Obama’s economic strategy is like trying to figure out Jim Carrey’s recent career path. Well, I think I wanna do drama. OK, that flopped, how a return to comedy. No, that’s boring. Now I got it, we’ll do a psychological thriller! By the end we’re left wondering what kind of an actor Carrey is, other than irrelevant?

Obama takes much the same approach “ah, what the hell, let’s try it” approach to the economy. As John Podesta, the former Clinton White House chief of staff said,

“It seemed like they were waking up every day thinking about how to pass more bills. It was like, do something. And if that doesn’t work do something else.”

Of course, the New York Times can’t call it what it is – a schizophrenic approach that had us going in circles rather than making any progress. Instead, they label it “improvisational.”

His approach to economic policy has been as much improvisational as ideological, a blend of Keynesian spending, business tax breaks, bank and auto bailouts, tax cuts for workers — really almost anything he thought could fix the problems.

Except none of it fixed the problems. In case you hadn’t noticed, even after the stimulus and every other piece of craptastic piece of legislation was passed, unemployment is still above 9 percent. The economy still sucks. And Obama apparently has fewer ideas of how to fix it than before.

That hasn’t stopped his current economic team from trying to put something together to please him. Unfortunately, the Times writes,

The ideas presented to him, though, seemed familiar and uninspired. “You know, guys,” he said, according to someone in the room, “I’ve told you before, I want you to come to me with ideas that excite me.” Nothing he was hearing excited him.

This is economics, not the NFL playoffs. Nobody is expecting excitement. We’re expecting a bunch of egg-heads to get in a room, talk about a bunch of numbers, variables, and ratios, and then bang-out a solution.

The fact that his team couldn’t pull a MacGyver (or a MacGruber if you’re too young to remember) and take a coffee mug, a desk set, and some of Reagan’s leftover jellybeans and create some sort of job-creation machine really pissed the big guy off. As one adviser told the New York Times, “He grew frustrated because the economic team didn’t have that magic combination.”

But perhaps this isn’t a problem with Obama so much as it is with the team he surrounded himself with. If we’re picking teams loaded with talent that seriously underachieved, this economic team ranks right up there with the Dallas Cowboys, Minnesota Vikings, and New York Mets. They were all getting their fingers sized for rings before they ever won a game. Turns out they wouldn’t win many.

And to be clear, Obama did assemble a team that would’ve made the Miami Heat blush. Ya had Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and Harvard President, Christina Romer, a UC Berkeley professor with a kick-ass research background, Paul Volcker, a former Federal Reserve Chairman who is known for a historic beat down of inflation in the 80s, and Peter Orszag, who is only 42 but has the intellectual capacity of a moderately sized country.

What appeared to be a dream team ended up like a badly scripted sitcom. Summers was the overbearing boss that apparently makes Meryl Streep’s character in the Devil Wears Prada (yes, I’m a dude and I’ve watched it) easy to work for. As one colleague told the New York Times,

“He’s much better at telling you why you’re stupid than creating a system that can produce usable policy solutions.”

Then there’s Christina Romer, the character who really, really wants to be part of the cool group but just can’t find a way to fit it. I’m envisioning a Saved-By-The-Bell-style-Screech-like-character. As the Times describes one incident,

“Summers skirmished with Romer over a meeting at which she was not included. ‘I didn’t come here to waste my time,” Romer angrily told him.”

This kind of crap is supposed to go on in elementary school playgrounds, not the freakin’ Oval Office

Then there’s Paul Volcker, the down in the dumps “aw-shucks” character that finally gets noticed. I would say this is a dead fit for Rudolph, but one, Christmastime is over and I went way over my holiday-metaphor quota before we even hit Thanksgiving, and two, I’m not sure how a claymation character would fit in my live-action sitcom. So we’ll go with, Ted Williams ! You know, that homeless guy that was recently discovered for having a golden voice.

Volcker was never quite that low, but the Times says that he “felt ignored” and left out of the loop. That is until, the President started using one of his ideas, even throwing him a bone by calling it the “Volcker Rule.” I bet he was insufferable after that. Word is that he goes around introducing himself by saying, “Hey…You know the Volcker Rule? (pause for emphasis) It’s named after me.” OK, I made that last part up, but we all know someone at work who does that.

Finally, you’ve got Orszag. He plays the role of the really smart guy with the really great ideas who gets ignored because he’s too young to know what he’s talking about. It’s like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, except this guy was the director of the CBO, not a janitor. The Times described the situation, saying:

At the heart of the friction was the deficit, which Orszag saw as a priority. Other officials tired of Orzsag’s refrain. “Yes, the deficit’s important, but not this year,” said one official. “I think the deficit for him was always most important. He was not winning the argument.”

We listened to ya Pete! We’ve written extensively on the threat of debt and deficits! Sadly, we’re more ignored than you are. In fact, while I’m at it. Hello? Is anyone reading this? Can you hear us out there in conservative land? No? Ok. We’ll keep writing anyways, perhaps our blog will become well read posthumously.

So there ya have it, four widely disparate characters that wouldn’t make a good sitcom, much less a good economic team. And that’s the problem. We couldn’t stick them on TNT at 9pm on a Friday in hopes they’d go away, these were the people who were entrusted with getting our economy going again. This is the group that millions of people relied on to help them get a job to keep food on the table and a roof over their head.

But as Orszag reflected,

“Unfortunately, I think the environment often brought out the worst in people instead of the best in people. And I’d include myself in that.”

Now the team that was self-described “dysfunctional” is defunct. And while the New York Times “pick[s] through the wreckage of a messy divorce,” let’s hope Obama’s new dream team of economic advisers is busy coming up with solutions that excite him. Or better yet…that actually create a damn job.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/01/20/political-infighting-among-no-drama-obama-economic-team-slowed-our-recovery/

Democrats are apparently itching to get back into the healthcare fight.

Politico reported today,

“We welcome, in a certain sense, their attempt to repeal it because it gives us a second chance to make a first impression,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He said the debate will allow Democrats to talk about “the good things that didn’t get a real airing during the sturm und drang of the debate.”

During floor debate, House Democrats plan to share stories of people who have benefited from the legislation — and issue a warning that those people would be hurt if the law is repealed. Internal polling by pro-reform groups such as Families USA has found that personal stories are more effective than a list of consumer-friendly provisions.

Pardon me if I doubt their sincerity. During the healthcare debate, the more they talked, the more people disliked it. They can try and highlight the good parts of the legislation all they want, but at the end of the day you can’t polish a turd because, as James Carville once said, “…at the end of the day, it’s still a turd.” Or, if you prefer John Boehner metaphors, it’s a “crap sandwich” that is going to require more than fancy plating to make appetizing.

People don’t like it. A recent Gallup poll found that more people supported repeal of the healthcare bill, than supported the idea of letting it stand. Businesses don’t like it. Seventy-four percent of employers said that they expect the healthcare reform law to increase group health plan costs. And doctors don’t like it. A poll by the Physician’s Foundation found, among other things, that 67% said their reaction was “somewhat negative” or “very negative”

So what are they going to do differently this time to convince everyone that the Obamacare bill is somehow less-bad than it was a couple of weeks ago? Well, they’re digging deep in their bag of tricks to trot out…more personal stories!

If that doesn’t sound like an original idea, it’s because its not. Every opportunity they got, Democrats attempted to leverage the emotions of heart wrenching stories to move the weight of public opinion in their favor.

Who could forget the seven hour anecdote-athon, also known as the Health Care Summit, in which Democrat-after-Democrat lined up to tell the story of a person who had been wronged by the current system. They started reasonably, highlighting some real problems with the system. For instance, President Obama recalled his mother’s battle with cancer and her struggle to get insurance. But somewhere along the line the stories veered from “what a tragedy” to “gimme a break.”

Perhaps the worst offender was Louise Slaughter (D-NY) who told the story of a woman whose sister had recently died. The woman had no dentures so “she wore her dead sister’s teeth which of course were uncomfortable and did not fit.” Although the story did nothing to encourage sympathy for reform, it did create perhaps the best Twitter meme of the entire year – #deadsistersteeth.

America can see through this ridiculous strategy. The personal stories they share are the result of flaws in the system that both parties agreed needed fixing. Insurance discrimination of those with pre-existing conditions, being the main one. Even then, the success of the healthcare law will not be judged by its impact on a few individuals, but rather on the impact on the healthcare system as a whole. The point of reform was to “bend the cost curve” to ensure that healthcare remained affordable for Americans. But the law made a feeble attempt at controlling costs, instead focusing on the idea of universal coverage.

So good luck to Democrats as they attempt to re-sell Obamacare to the American people. If they do half the job they did selling themselves to voters in the recent elections maybe we’ll get this bill repealed after all!

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

Crossposted from: http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/01/18/democrats-say-theyre-looking-forward-to-repeal-debate-but-why/

President Obama will soon give his second “State of the Union” speech. Countless newly elected governors have given their “State of the State” addresses. Yesterday the Chamber of Commerce gave their lesser known, but no less important, “State of American Business in 2011.”

Shedding the somber economic mood that has haunted America’s business landscape for much of the past three years, Chamber President Tom Donohue took a more hopeful turn.

I can report that when it comes to the nation’s economy, we begin 2011 in better shape than we found ourselves last year. The state of American business is improving.

Last year, we worried about a double dip recession. Today, we are cautiously optimistic that the recovery will continue and pick up steam as the year progresses.

May graduates everywhere just breathed a sign of relief. An expanding economy, leads to job growth, which means a brighter hiring picture for many college seniors. Time recently noted that, “Already, those on the front lines of the job search – like college career officers – are noticing a difference. For college graduates, 2011 figures to be a much better year than the two that preceded it.” A recent study of employers seems to justify these claims. The survey, conducted by the National Association of College and Employers, found that 48 percent said they expect to hire more college graduates from the Class of 2011 than they did from the Class of 2010.

But as Donohue warned in his speech, “we still face a number of risks that could send us in the wrong direction.” One of the biggest risks arises from the uncertainty among companies due to “unanswered questions about regulations, taxes, and other policies that must be addressed in order to unleash aggressive hiring.”

Aggressive hiring is perhaps an understatement. We need an all-out job creation effort because as Donohue notes, even if we create 2.5 million new jobs this year, that would only drive down unemployment by about one percent! The following chart should give you an idea of just how steep a hill we have to climb if we want to get back to full employment;

The fact is, we’re in an enormous hole that is going to take huge job gains to get out of. One of the best ways to accelerate the hiring market is to get government’s foot off the brake.

In addition to doing counterproductive things like the federal stimulus package, the government has issued a flood of regulations that are holding down businesses ability to hire. As Donohue said in his State of American Business speech, the “regulatory tsunami poses, in our view, the single biggest challenge to jobs, our global competitiveness, and the future of American enterprise.”

Two of the main culprits for the growth in job restricting regulations have been healthcare reform and the Dodd-Frank financial bill. The Obamacare bill creates 159 new agencies, commissions, and panels to carry out the complicated provisions of the new law. This could perhaps be justified if the law was working to control costs. But as we’ve seen, Obamcare does anything but bend the cost curve, and has actually contributed to record premium increases in some states. The regulations and restrictions found in the job-killing healthcare bill have also added to the uncertainty many employers are feeling – in many cases convincing businesses to ride the status quo rather than hire .

The Dodd-Frank reform bill could also have a negative impact on job growth. As Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) wrote in July,

“[While] restructured agencies struggle to organize, hire staff, stake out their jurisdictions and write an estimated minimum of 12 new government reports, 44 studies, and 243 new rulemakings required under the bill. . . banks and investors will sit cautiously on the sidelines waiting out the regulatory uncertainty of Dodd-Frank before they resume lending, Thus hampering our prospects for economic growth.”

Though the economy is slowly beginning to trend the right way, we must ask ourselves if the government couldn’t be doing things to speed it up. New House Majority Leader Eric Cantor promised that in every action they take House Republicans would ask themselves just that. “Are our actions focused on job creation and the economy? Are our actions focused on cutting spending? Are our actions focused on protecting and expanding liberty? If not, why are we doing it?,” said Rep. Cantor.

Hopefully those are three questions everyone in government will be committed to asking themselves. Because while there are reasons for optimism, there is also room for growth. Although June graduates are probably excited to learn that the hiring freeze is beginning to thaw, they should also push for policies that will further improve their prospects.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/01/12/job-growth-is-accelerating-but-burdensome-regulations-keeping-a-foot-on-the-brake/

“The real tension [in the debt limit debate] won’t be between Republicans and Democrats. It’ll be between Republicans and Republicans.”

That was the prescient prediction of Stan Collender, a former staffer for the House and Senate Budget committees and founder of the blog Capital Gains and Games.

Indeed, an intra-party debate is already forming about the wisdom of once-again raising the debt limit. It is lamentable that this has happened.

The reason we are facing the prospect of crashing through yet another debt ceiling is years of fiscal ineptitude from both the President and Congress. We’ve promised well beyond what we can deliver and we’ve spent well more than we can afford.

This spending irresponsibility has put the new Republican majority in the unenviable position of voting to raise the debt limit, or vote against it and risk a default of the national debt.

Some conservative commentators have taken to the blogosphere to ask, well, is a default really that bad? After all, it would absolutely force us to get our books in order.

But to be intellectually honest, it is a terrible idea. When the United States borrows money it uses a variety of debt instruments (for the sake of ease I will generalize all of these instruments by the term “bond”). In general, three types of entities purchase these bonds. On a small scale, individuals own the bonds because they are a safe way to spread out the risk of their investment portfolio or mutual fund. If the federal government doesn’t increase its debt limit, and thus defaults, these government bonds would be worthless. People’s savings, hedge funds, and retirements would be flushed down the drain. Americans, who sense themselves to be immeasurably poorer than they were before a default would immediately save rather than spend. A fall in consumer demand of this scale would make our current economic issues look downright juvenile.

More importantly, in terms of scale, banks and other corporations are the largest investor in government bonds. A default would mean the loss of life insurance policies, pension funds, for workers, and a destabilization of the asset base of many corporations and all banks.

The United States financial markets wouldn’t be the only to suffer. Trillions of dollars in debt is owned by foreign governments. Foreign nations would soon be looking to us to recoup, one way or another, the billions in losses they face from a political decision not to live up to our debts. Of course, as we saw with the recent financial crisis, a United States problem, quickly grows into a world problem. Global financial markets would be rocked and a worldwide credit crunch could take hold.

Our nation must get its fiscal books in order, but as I hope I’ve shown, defaulting on our debt is too high of a cost.

So rather than fighting amongst ourselves over whether we should vote on a debt limit increase we should explain why we must vote for the debt increase – because Democrats’ wasteful spending is essentially holding a gun to our head.

Instead of infighting we should use the debate as a public relations lever to achieve the spending cuts that are necessary to reduce our debt over the medium-term. New Speaker of the House John Boehner has already staked his claim on this position saying ,

“The American people will not stand for such an increase unless it is accompanied by meaningful action by the president and Congress to cut spending and end the job-killing spending binge in Washington. While America cannot default on its debt, we also cannot continue to borrow recklessly, dig ourselves deeper into this hole, and mortgage the future of our children and grandchildren.”

We cannot default, but that doesn’t mean we can’t change our spending habits. In fact, that is exactly what we must do. The vote on the debt limit has put Republicans in a very difficult spot, but it also affords them a wonderful opportunity. We can hold Democrats feet to the fire on spending, but only if we don’t argue amongst ourselves.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/01/07/the-debt-limit-vote-is-a-lever-to-change-spending-in-washington/

Representative Steve Israel (D-NY) and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has set his goal for the next election cycle: make Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House…again.

Apparently Israel missed the recent Gallup poll showing that since 2009 Pelosi’s favorable/unfavorable ratings have diverged faster than the Red Sea.

It would be one thing if those negative feelings were coming solely from the Republican Party. But frankly, we’ve pretty much always disliked her. In fact, since early 2010, her favorability amongst Republicans has inched upwards by 1 percent, but has crashed amongst independents, falling from 32 percent favorable, to a measly 21 percent favorable.

A Wall Street Journal poll in September largely echoed the public’s dislike of Nancy Pelosi. That poll found that 50 percent of the population had a negative view of Pelosi. That’s lower than the Democratic Party, President Obama, and even the polarizing Sarah Palin herself. The only person or entity that equaled people’s negative feelings about Pelosi was BP.

That’s right, people disliked Pelosi just as much as they did a huge corporation, raking in record profits, while dumping millions of gallons of oil into one of the most fragile ecosystems in America.

Truly an accomplishment Ms. Pelosi.

The public rancor over her leadership was so great that in yesterday’s vote counts for Speaker of the House, 19 Democrats voted against her. As noted by Politico, “The roll call resulted in the most votes against a party’s own speaker candidate in nearly 90 years, according to the House historian’s office.” The list of people who voted against her included some names you’d expect, especially the newer or more moderate Democrats. But one name surprised everyone. Fellow Californian Dennis Cardoza who was thought to be a close ally of Pelosi refused to vote for her, instead opting for another Californian congressman Jim Costa.

There was even speculation that the number could have been higher if Committee assignments had already been handed out. Apparently there was fear of retribution if they voted their conscience. In a secret vote of the House Democratic Caucus held this past November, Rep. Health Shuler of North Carolina collected 43 votes, compared to the 11 he received yesterday.

All this is enough to make you wonder: is this really the person you want to throw your weight behind in 2012? Do you really want to sell voters, who overwhelmingly dislike her, on the desire to bring her back? Apparently that’s the DCCC’s plan. Best of luck with that.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/01/06/deja-vu-all-over-again-dems-running-on-pelosi-for-speaker/

Here’s an insider’s tip into most of the articles you read: writers don’t write their headlines. The reasons are simple. The first is an esoteric concept known as SEO – search engine optimization. This is the science of fitting as many buzz words into a headline as is humanly possible. The second is the desperate desire for clicks. Writers, or at least the good ones tend to want to write well-balanced, well-reasoned articles. But in this soundbyte world we live in, getting people to actually click on the article is the real goal. In that regard, controversy and strong opinions do much better than reason and balance. So the headline is there to do just that – suck you in.

This past week one headline did just that: “Default Position: Why We Needn’t Worry Too Much About Municipal Bankruptcy .”

I know what many of you are thinking, municipal bankruptcy? Who would we drawn in by that? A complete nerd like me, that’s who.

The reason I was drawn like a moth to a flame is that it went against everything that I’ve read. Cities are in deep financial doo-doo. How deep? A recent study of the 77 largest municipal pension systems found that the total unfunded liabilities of America’s municipal pension systems is more than $500 billion. That’s just in pensions! Of course, they also owe billions upon billions of dollars for other types of debt – the result of ridiculous spending coupled with a massive decline in tax revenue. Veronique de Rugy, a researcher and economist for the Mercatus Center, estimates that total outstanding municipal bond debt is now $2.8 trillion – doubling in just the past decade.

Read More →

Former Bush advisor and Harvard economics professor Gregory Mankiw has some fantastic advice for President Obama if he wishes to work together with Republicans. He encourages him to focus on marginal tax rates rather than tax credits, to spread opportunity rather than spread the wealth, and to “have a beer with a Republican at least once a week.”

But one recommendation in particular caught my eye: Focus on the long run. In doing so, Mankiw brings up a very interesting piece of history.

“Charles L. Schultze, chief economist for former President Carter had a simple test for telling a conservative economist from a liberal one. Ask each to fill in the blanks in this sentence with the words “long” and “short”: Take care of the ________ run and the _______ run will take care of itself.”

The point is that conservatives tend to focus on the short run, while liberals tend to focus on the short run.

To me this seems like a surprising indictment from a liberal economist like Schultze. Schultze, after all, was one of the architects and directors of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society that gave us Medicaid and Medicare. These two programs are no doubt helpful to current generations – providing healthcare benefits that far exceed the amount an average earner pays into the programs. Yet they are proving disastrous in the long term. The CBO says these two programs will be the primary drivers of our national deficit in the coming decades. The economics behind the two entitlements has become so flawed that it is an inevitability that taxes will have to be raised or benefits lowered in order to keep them afloat.

The history of our federal government is fraught with such stories. So either liberals are wrong, in that taking care of the short run doesn’t mean that the long run will take care of itself. Or our government is not built to understand the short run. That is to say, it is incapable of stopping at the precise point at which economic policy benefits today without hurting tomorrow. The impetus for such overreach has a simple beginning – politicians desire to get reelected. Overpromising benefits to today’s voters at the expense of the next generation makes for an easy cost-benefit analysis if the goal is reelection.

Either outcome – that the liberal economic philosophy is wrong, or simply doesn’t work in practice – leads to some very bad results. Indeed we’re seeing the problems of liberal myopia firsthand. The near-trillion dollar stimulus, designed to boost employment in the short term, has accomplished little else beyond increasing debt in the long term. Healthcare reform, whose goal is to increase insurance coverage in the short term, does nothing to control costs in the long term. Not to mention Democrats’ complete abdication of responsibility for reforming an entitlement system structure that will eventually push our nation towards default.

We, as young adults, must begin to ask ourselves which economic policy we favor. The liberals’ short term approach, or the conservatives’ long term approach. As you make that choice, remember that we are the long term . We are the ones whose future will bear the burden of today’s economic decisions. That can come in many forms – higher taxes, reduced benefits, a higher deficit, and ultimately a smaller economy with fewer opportunities.

The short term has done an exceptionally good job of looking after itself. It’s time we as young adults, begin looking after the long term.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/01/03/young-adults-must-be-the-ones-to-look-after-long-term/