The Decline of Unions

By John Fund
http://www.nationalreview.com
January 28, 2013

A couple of network cameras and tripods sat outside the offices of the National Labor Relations Board here on Friday afternoon in the midst of a snowstorm. The NLRB doesn’t usually merit such attention, but it was pushed into the spotlight after Friday’s unanimous decision by a D.C. Court of Appeals panel declaring three of President Obama’s recess appointments to the NLRB unconstitutional.

No one followed the demise of the NLRB appointees with more interest than labor unions. The decision likely means that hundreds of decisions that the five-member board was able to issue only because the unconstitutional members helped meet a quorum requirement are now invalid. Richard Cordray, who was recess-appointed to head the new Consumer Financial Protective Bureau mandated by the Dodd-Frank law, may also now no longer be in office legally and could see all decisions he participated in declared void.
Unions celebrated after helping secure President Obama’s reelection in November, but it’s been all downhill since then. December saw Michigan, the birthplace of industrial unionism in the 1930s, become a right-to-work state, as GOP state legislators became emboldened by the failure of a well-financed union ballot measure that would have cemented pro-union laws into the state’s constitution.
This week the bad news accelerated. On Tuesday, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who had announced her departure on January 9, cleaned out her desk and flew back home to California, leaving the department in the hands of a caretaker deputy — an unusual move, since most cabinet secretaries stay on until a successor is in place.
On Wednesday, the Labor Department reported that during President Obama’s first term, the percentage of workers belonging to unions declined faster than it did during the two terms of President George W. Bush. To be specific, the unionization rate is now 11.2 percent of all workers. Private-sector unionization fell from 6.9 percent to 6.6 percent, and the government unionization rate dropped from 37 percent to 35.9 percent.
On Thursday, Majority Leader Harry Reid gave up on his attempt to gut the Senate’s filibuster. While new rules will mean that some controversial nominees will find it a little easier to be confirmed, the ability of a determined minority to hold up nominations it finds unacceptable has been maintained. “President Obama will find getting new pro-union NLRB appointees confirmed very difficult during his second term,” predicts Mark Mix of the National Right to Work Foundation.
Then came Friday’s court ruling on the recess appointments to the NLRB. Each of the three appointments had been made in January 2012, while the Senate was holding pro forma sessions but still conducting some business, and each was made to fill a vacancy that didn’t occur during a recess.
“With the failure to pass the ‘card-check’ measure to allow unions to organize without secret-ballot elections, the unions were counting on pro-union Obama appointees to do their bidding through administrative rulings and decisions,” a former top official in the Bush Labor Department told me. Now, he says, hundreds of pro-union rulings made over the last year are almost certainly invalid and the board can’t do further business until the Senate confirms new appointees.
Organized labor still holds many political cards, especially the hundreds of millions of dollars they collect through mandatory dues that can be funneled into politics with only sketchy accounting required. But even that advantage can be negated if opponents of union power put a spotlight on its excesses, as Wisconsin governor Scott Walker told the National Review Institute’s Washington meeting this weekend. “Yes, people want a level playing field, and what we found in Wisconsin was that included special privileges union bosses were using to stay and power and remain insulated from their membership,” Walker told me in a recent interview.
Among Walker’s reforms were an end to the mandatory collection of union dues for most public-sector workers and a requirement that public-sector unions be reauthorized every year by a vote of their members. Since the reforms went into effect in early 2011, many union locals have seen their dues income decline by over 50 percent as members decide to give themselves a pay increase by keeping their dues money.
In addition to threats to their political clout, trends in the U.S. economy that are undermining the importance and relevance of unions are continuing. Unions are in an “inexorable decline,”Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer said on Fox News this week. It may be a slow decline, but it seems to be consistent. The last time union membership in the private sector was below the 7 percent it is today was before FDR’s New Deal entrenched mandatory collective bargaining into law through the Wagner Act.
If past giants of labor such as Samuel Gompers, George Meany, and John L. Lewis were alive today, they would no doubt shake their heads at just how much today’s hidebound and short-sighted union leaders have abandoned labor’s traditions and ignored the interests of union members to pursue political influence. Now even that influence appears increasingly shaky and unsustainable in today’s economic and political climate.
— John Fund is national-affairs columnist forNRO.

Phil isn't the one who needs to apologize

By Neal Boortz
http://www.townhall.com
January 23, 2013


Please tell me this is some sort of a sick joke.

Phil Mickelson is a professional golfer. He makes boatloads of money. Millions. What’s more, he makes boatloads of money for a lot of other people in the process, including generating massive contributions to charity. He’s a jobs creator and an engine of economic growth, as are many other pro golfers and athletes.

So Mickelson takes a look at his income tax burden, and is displeased. First we have Obama and the Democrats riding roughshod over the GOP and enacting a 4.6% tax increase on the evil rich. Then we have the voters of California doing what the voters of California have been doing – shooting themselves in the foot – by passing a ballot measure to raise state income taxes on the dastardly rich by another 3.32%. Now Mickelson is facing an income tax burden somewhere between 62 and 63%.

Mickelson is a smart guy, and he hires other smart guys to help him make economic decisions. These other smart guys undoubtedly told Phil to put his clubs in a bag and get the hell out of California. Do what most of the other pro golfers have done, more to Florida. No state income tax. Right there his tax burden goes down by 13.3%, not to mention the advantages in estate taxes and ad valorem property taxes. Trust me. I know.

So Mickelson suggests that he is going to have to make some “drastic changes” due to “what’s gone on in the last few months politically” and being “targeted both federally and by the state.” And now – guess what? Phil Mickelson is the personification of evil for suggesting he’s going to do what tens of thousands of Californians have done … cast his next vote with his feet. Mickelson gets hammered by the ObamaMedia and finally sidles up to the microphone and apologizes. He apologizes --- please sit down for this – to anyone he might have “upset or insulted.”

Whisky Tango Foxtrot!

How upside down can things be in America? Mickelson is being called “greedy.” Really? So now we define “greed” as wanting to keep more of the money you earn? If that’s greed, what do you call the moochers who go to the poll to vote for the politician that’s going to take that money away from you and give it to them? Oh wait! I know! Obama voters!

Well … since the proggies are demanding apologies from Mickelson, I think there are a few people I would like to see apologize my own self!

Let’s start with Angel Adams. Maybe you don’t remember her. The lovely and quite fertile Angel was found living in a motel room in Tampa with 12 of her 15 children by three different fathers. When the child welfare folks showed up with TV news crews in tow, she looked into the camera and announced “Somebody needs to pay for all my children. Somebody needs to be held accountable, and they need to pay!” No … not kidding. Here’s the video. Angel, by the way, has now downloaded No. 16 and was charged last October for battery on a police officer. Maybe Angel should be the one to hold a press conference and apologize to America on behalf of every woman who became pregnant by a man to whom she was not married, and then had a baby she knew she could not afford to raise.

I’d like an apology as well from all of those people who have been studiously avoiding taking a job until their unemployment benefits run completely out. You’re bleeding the system dry. So apologize!
An apology is also due from the leaches who have been scamming the IRS for their Earned Income Tax Credit checks. EITC fraud is the most prevalent type of tax fraud in the US, costing the taxpayers hundreds of millions a year. Just fail to declare all your income and claim some extra dependents and the checks come flowing in! We dare not pursue these cheats, though, because that would be insensitive towards the poor. How about an apology you tax cheats!

While we’re at it, maybe the wizened citizens of Boca Raton, Florida who have been shown to treat their weekly visits to their doctor – paid for by Medicare – as really nothing more than a regular social gathering would like to apologize.

Those of you who chose drugs as your escape from reality … would you like to apologize for what you’ve cost society in terms of crime and social services?
Oh yeah … this list could go on for quite a while. The trouble is, the folks who really should be apologizing are favored constituencies of leftist politicians, while the folks we should apologize TO for plundering their wealth are greedy and the objects of constant derision and ridicule.
So, Phil. You’ve learned your lesson, right? Do what you have to do to escape the moochers, leaches and parasites --- but hush about it. The predators get outraged when the prey escapes. I suspect we’ll be seeing you in Florida real soon.

Fake dead girlfriends and fake debt limits

By MARK STEYN

2013-01-18 12:28:26

The Orange County Register

http://www.ocregister.com

I was out of the country for a few days, and news from this great republic reached me only fitfully. I have learned to be wary of foreign reporting of U.S. events, since America can come off sounding faintly deranged. Much of what reached me didn't sound entirely plausible: Did the entire U.S. media really fall for the imaginary dead girlfriend of a star football player? Did the president of the United States really announce 23 executive orders by reading out the policy views of carefully prescreened grade-schoolers ("I want everybody to be happy and safe")? Clearly, these vicious rumors were merely planted in the foreign press to make the United States appear ridiculous.

And, indeed, upon my return, it seemed to be business as usual. ABC News revealed that, in 2007, President Bush's Secretary of the Interior – oh, come on, it's on the citizenship test: "Name a Secretary of the Interior. Any Secretary of the Interior." Anyway, ABC revealed that Bush's Secretary of the Interior spent 220,000 taxpayer dollars remodeling his (or her, as the case may be) office bathroom. Who knew the gig was really Secretary of the Interior Design? I'll bet the guy who made Saddam's solid-gold toilets was delighted to get a new customer. But what can be done? If we changed the name to Secretary of the Exterior, he'd have blown a quarter-million on a new outhouse.

Meanwhile, hot from the fiscal-cliff fiasco, the media are already eagerly anticipating the next in the series of monthly capitulations by Republicans, this time on the debt ceiling. While I was abroad, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a Harvard professor of constitutional law, a prominent congressman and various other American eminencies apparently had a sober and serious discussion on whether the United States Treasury could circumvent the debt constraints by minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin. Although Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider called the trillion-dollar coin "the most important fiscal policy debate you'll ever see in your life," most Democratic pundits appeared to favor the idea for the more straightforward joy it affords in sticking it to the House Republicans. No more tedious whining about spending from GOP congressmen. Next time Paul Ryan shows up in committee demanding to know about deficit reduction plans, all the Treasury Secretary has to do is pull out a handful of trillion-dollar coins from down the back of the sofa and tell him to keep the change.

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The trillion-dollar groat fever ran a vague bell with me. Way back in 1893, Mark Twain wrote a short story called "The Million Pound Bank Note," which in the 1950s Ronald Neame made into a rather droll film. A penniless American down and out in London (Gregory Peck) is presented by two eccentric Englishmen (Ronald Squire and Wilfrid Hyde-White) with a million-pound note, which they have persuaded the Bank of England to print in order to settle a wager. One of the English chaps believes that simple possession of the note will allow the destitute Yank to live the high life without ever having to spend a shilling. And so it proves. He goes to the pub for lunch, offers the note, and the innkeeper explains that he's unable to make change for a million pounds, but is honored to feed him anyway. He then goes to be fitted for a suit, and again the tailor regrets that he can't provide change for a million pounds but delightedly measures him for dress suits, silk shirts and all the rest. I always liked the line Mark Twain's protagonist uses on a duke's niece he's sweet on: He tells her "I hadn't a cent in the world but just the million pound note."

That's Paul Krugman's solution for America as it prepares to bust through another laughably named "debt limit": We'd be a nation that hasn't a cent in the world but just a trillion-dollar coin – and what more do we need? As with Gregory Peck in the movie, the mere fact of the coin's existence would ensure we could go on living large. Indeed, aside from inflating a million quid to a trillion bucks, Professor Krugman's proposal economically prunes the sprawling cast of the film down to an off-Broadway one-man show with Uncle Sam playing every part: A penniless Yank (Uncle Sam) runs into a wealthy benefactor (Uncle Sam) who has persuaded the banking authorities (Uncle Sam) to mint a trillion-dollar coin that will allow Uncle Sam (played by Uncle Sam) to extend an unending line of credit to Uncle Sam (also played by Uncle Sam).

This seems likely to work. As for the love interest, in the final scene, Paul Krugman takes his fake dead girlfriend (played by Barack Obama's composite girlfriend) to a swank restaurant and buys her the world's most expensive bottle of champagne (played by Lance Armstrong's urine sample).

Do you ever get the feeling America's choo-choo has jumped the tracks? Joe Weisenthal says that the trillion-dollar coin is the most serious adult proposal put forward in our lifetime, "because it gets right to the nature of what is money." As Weisenthal argues, "We're still shackled with a gold-standard mentality where we think of money as a scarce natural resource that we need to husband carefully." Ha! Every time it rains it rains trillion-dollar pennies from heaven. I believe Robert Mugabe made a similar observation on Jan. 16, 2009, when he introduced Zimbabwe's first one hundred-trillion-dollar bank note. In that one dramatic month, the Zimbabwean dollar declined from 0.0000000072 of a U.S. dollar to 0.0000000003 of a U.S. dollar. But that's what's so great about being American. Because, when you're American, one U.S. dollar will always be worth one U.S. dollar, no matter how many trillion-dollar coins you mint. Eat your heart out, you Zimbabwean losers. As Joe Weisenthal asks, what is money? Money is American: everybody knows that.

Whether the world feels this way is another matter. For Paul Krugman, the issue is the insanity of the Republican Party, as manifested in their opposition to automatic debt-ceiling increases. By contrast, the contrarian Democrat Mickey Kaus thinks Republicans ought to be in favor of the trillion-dollar coin as an easy short term-fix to prevent them from getting screwed over by Obama and the media for the second time in a month. But, out there, in what the State Department maps quaintly call the rest of the world, nobody cares about Democrats or Republicans, and the issue is not the debt ceiling but the debt. Forty-four nations voted at Bretton Woods to make the dollar the world's reserve currency. If they were meeting today, I doubt they'd give that status to a nation piling on over a trillion in federal debt per year, 70 percent of which its left hand (the U.S. Treasury) borrows from its right hand (the Federal Reserve) through the Nigerian email equivalent of Paul Krugman's trillion-dollar groat.

Meanwhile, I see the Bundesbank has decided to move 300 tons of German gold from the Federal Reserve in New York back to Frankfurt. It's probably nothing. And what's to stop the Fed replacing it with 300 tons of Boston Cream donuts and declaring them of equivalent value? Or maybe 300 imaginary dead football girlfriends, all platinum blondes.

Memo to John Boehner and Paul Ryan: No one will take you seriously until you find some photogenic second-graders and read out their cute letters. "I want everybody to be happy and safe and fithcally tholvent." They may have to practice.

©MARK STEYN

Top Dems urging Obama to raise debt ceiling all voted against increase in ’06

President Barack Obama gestures as he answers a question during a joint news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Jan. 11, 2013. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Byron York

Chief Political Correspondent

The Washington Examiner

@ByronYork

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On Friday the Democratic leadership of the Senate — Majority Leader Harry Reid, Assistant Majority Leader Richard Durbin, Conference Chair Charles Schumer, and Conference Secretary Patty Murray — wrote to President Obama urging him to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling in the event that Republicans either block such an increase or attempt to pass one “as part of unbalanced or unreasonable legislation.”

“We believe that you must make clear that you will never allow our nation’s economy and reputation to be held hostage,” the Democrats wrote.  “We believe you must be willing to take any lawful steps to ensure that America does not break its promises and trigger a global economic crisis — without congressional approval, if necessary.”

Put aside the picture of leading lawmakers, usually so jealous of their constitutional prerogatives, asking the president to ignore Congress.  What is striking about the letter is that every one of its signers — Reid, Durbin, Schumer, and Murray — voted againstraising the nation’s debt ceiling just seven years ago.

On March 16, 2006, the Senate held a vote on a measure to raise the debt ceiling by $781 billion — the fourth such vote of George W. Bush’s presidency.  Republicans controlled the Senate, and Democrats spent much of the debate railing against Bush’s spending.  “When it comes to deficits, this president owns all the records,” said Reid.  “The three largest deficits in our nation’s history have all occurred under this administration’s watch.”

Declaring themselves outraged by such spending, Reid, Durbin, Schumer, and Murray all voted against raising the debt limit.  So did every other Democrat — including Sen. Barack Obama.  But on Friday, the four lawmakers urged now-President Obama not only to raise the ceiling but to do it in a constitutionally risky fashion by going over the head of Congress.

In the summer of 2011, during the last debt ceiling fight, Reid conceded his ’06 vote was all about politics.  “I shouldn’t have done that,” he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl.  “I’m kind of embarrassed I did. It was a political maneuver by we Democrats.”  But now, Reid and his colleagues have come up with yet another political maneuver — a possibly unconstitutional one — in urging the president to ignore Congress in a matter in which Congress has a critical role to play.

When $16.4 Trillion Isn't Enough: Debt Ceiling Battle is Next

On to the next crisis

By RICH LOWRY

Last Updated:11:12 PM, January 4, 2013

Posted:11:08 PM, January 4, 2013

The budget crisis is over. Long live the budget crisis.

Now that the fiscal cliff has been resolved, we’re on to the fight over raising the debt ceiling. President Obama wants no part of it. Huffing and stomping his feet immediately after Congress passed his tax increases to avoid the cliff, he insisted that there is no way he’ll negotiate over the debt ceiling. That would be so inappropriate.

Cue the hostage-taking analogies, the talk of extremism, the lamentations over a broken Washington. But why is the president outraged that someone would use the leverage of an impending event that everyone wants to avoid and that would damage the economy to his negotiating advantage? It’s precisely how he won on the cliff.

No one called him a hostage taker when he didn’t immediately accept the House Republican extension of all the Bush tax cuts, and instead insisted on forcing a choice between higher tax rates on the wealthy or going off the cliff.

He got his way. Not because Republicans wanted to raise taxes. But because taxes would go up for everyone on Jan. 1, and very few people (and no Republicans) wanted that to happen. Obama used every ounce of his leverage to raise taxes on as many people as he could — and succeeded. Congratulations.

Now that the leverage may work the other way, Obama wants an end to all this crazy talk of negotiating things and compromising. “I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up,” the president bristled.

He has apparently been an innocent bystander while the national debt increased by 60 percent since he took office. It’s just his rotten luck to have to preside over such a profligate country.

We’ve hit the debt limit of $16.4 trillion, and it will need to be extended in a couple of months. When $16.4 trillion in debt isn’t enough, you’ve clearly got a problem. The president always says that we need a “balanced approach” to address it. In the cliff deal, he got one part of the balance.

He increased income-tax rates on the oft-invoked “millionaires and billionaires,” and even all the way down to $400,000-aires. In fact, thanks to the expiration of the payroll tax cut, the deal raised taxes on 77 percent of Americans, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Finally, people making $40,000 a year will pay their “fair share”! The Tax Policy Center calculates that about half the additional revenue from the deal over the next year will come from households making less than $200,000.

So the tax increases — both on the rich and on the middle class — have been gloriously written into law. What about the spending cuts that the president has said in the past should be a disproportionate share of any budget solution? He’s not the least bit interested in those, except as a rhetorical device.

Which is why Republicans are always in the position of trying to force him to accept some sort of spending discipline.

In a better, more rational world, the debt limit wouldn’t be a tool of budgetary policy. But it is one of the few must-pass pieces of legislation that Republicans can use to force spending cuts, and it obviously relates directly to our budget problem. If the president doesn’t want the debate over it to go nerve-wrackingly down to the wire, he can set out a serious offer, now.

Of course, he’s doing the opposite. His refusal to negotiate isn’t sustainable, but he’ll spend precious time trying to sustain it. He’ll finally agree to talk, and then get Republicans to back off whatever their maximal position is — because Republicans will again fear being blamed if there’s no agreement. Another Band-Aid will be applied to the debt, until next time.

In the Age of Obama, the new budget crisis always follows the last.

comments.lowry@nationalreview.com

Read more:Barack Obama & perpetual crisis—Rich Lowry - NYPOST.comhttp://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/on_to_the_next_crisis_0eWDaO8cBANdbDwTCRF6jK#ixzz2H7LTeKdP

Two months of arguing over 10 hours of savings

By MARK STEYN

The Orange County Register

http://www.ocregister.com

2013-01-04 09:47:07

The politics of the "fiscal cliff" deal is debatable: On the one hand, Boehner got the "Bush tax cuts" made permanent for most Americans; Obama was forced to abandon his goal of increasing rates for those earning $250,000. On the other, on taxes Republicans caved to the same class-warfare premises (the rich need to pay their "fair share") they'd successfully fought off a mere two years ago; while on spending the Democrats not only refused to make cuts, they refused to make cuts even part of the discussion.

Which of the above is correct? Who cares? As I said, the politics is debatable. But the reality isn't. I hate to keep plugging my book "After America" in this space, but if you buy multiple copies they'll come in very useful for insulating your cabin after the power grid collapses. At any rate, right up there at the front – page six – I write as follows:

"The prevailing political realities of the United States do not allow for any meaningful course correction. And, without meaningful course correction, America is doomed."

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Washington keeps proving the point. The political class has just spent two months on a down-to-the-wire nail-biting white-knuckle thrill-ride negotiation the result of which is more business as usual. At the end, as always, Dr. Obama and Dr. Boehner emerge in white coats, surgical masks around their necks, bloody scalpels in hand, and announce that it was touch-and-go for awhile but the operation was a complete success – and all they've done is applied another temporary Band-Aid that's peeling off even as they speak. They're already prepping the OR for the next life-or-death surgery on the debt ceiling, tentatively scheduled for next Tuesday or a week on Thursday or the third Sunday after Epiphany.

No epiphanies in Washington: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the latest triumphant deal includes $2 billion of cuts for fiscal year 2013. Wow! That's what the Government of the United States borrows every 10 hours and 38 minutes. Spending two months negotiating 10 hours of savings is like driving to a supermarket three states away to save a nickel on your grocery bill.

A space alien on Planet Zongo whose cable package includes "Meet The Press" could watch 10 minutes of these pseudo-cliffhangers and figure out how they always end, every time: Spending goes up, and the revenue gap widens. This latest painstakingly negotiated bipartisan deal to restore fiscal responsibility actually includes a third of a trillion dollars in new spending. A third of a trillion! $330,000,000,000! Fancy that! In most countries, a third of a trillion would be a lot of money. But in the U.S. it's chump change so footling it's barely mentioned in the news reports. Then there's the usual sweetheart deals for those with Washington's ear: $59 million for algae producers, a $20 million tax break if a Hollywood producer shoots part of a movie in a "depressed area" as opposed to a non-depressed area, like Canada. I'm pitching a script to Paramount called "The Algae That Ate Detroit."

In all the "fiscal cliff" debate, I don't recall a lot of discussion of algae. But apparently it's essential to the deal. And don't worry, it's paid for by all the new revenue – an estimated $620 billion over a decade, or about $62 billion a year, which is what the Government of the United States borrows every 13 days. But don't worry, that's a lot of algae.

We're already broker than anyone has ever been ever. But this is America, where we can always do better – or, anyway, bigger, and broker: Under the "deal," the federal debt of the United States in 2022 is officially projected to be $23.9 trillion. That's in today's dollars, as opposed to whatever we'll be loading up the wheelbarrow with in 2022. With "deals" like this, who needs total societal collapse? By 2050, the federal debt will be $58 trillion. But you won't have to worry about a United States of America by then: it'll just be one big abandoned Chevy Algaerado plant.

Around the world, the only interest of friends and enemies alike in this third-rate Beltway hokum is (to return to the theme of my book) the question of whether America is capable of serious course correction – and, from debt ceiling to supercommittee to fiscal cliff and now back to debt ceiling, the political class keeps sending back the answer: No, we're not. For a good example of how Washington drives even the greatest minds round the bend, consider Charles Krauthammer's analysis on Fox News the other night:

"I would actually commend Boehner and Paul Ryan, who in the end voted 'yes' for a bad deal. But they had to do it."

If courage is the willingness to take a stand and vote for a bad deal because you've been painted into a corner and want Obama to fly back to Hawaii at the cost of another $3 million in public funds that could have gone to algae subsidies so he'll stop tormenting you for a week or two, then truly we are led by giants.

But is that all there is? As the old song says: What's it all about – algae? Is it just for the moment we live? What's it all about when you sort it out – algae? Are we meant to take more than we give?

If you think politics is a make-work project for the otherwise unemployable, then the system worked just fine. And I don't mean only the numbers:

On Monday, 300 million Americans did not know what their tax rates would be on Tuesday. That's ridiculous.

Then, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spent the night alone in a room with Joe Biden (which admittedly few of us would have the stomach for). And when they emerged they informed those 300 million Americans what their tax rates now were. That's unseemly.

Then, in the small hours of the morning, the legislature rubber-stamped it. That's repulsive.

There's a term for societies where power-brokers stitch up the people's business in back rooms and their pseudo-parliaments sign off on it at 3 a.m., and it isn't a "republic of limited government by citizen-representatives."

There are arguments to be made in favor of small government: My comrades and I have done our best over the years, with results that, alas, in November were plain to see. There are arguments to be made in favor of big government: The Scandinavians make them rather well. But there is absolutely nothing to be said for what is now the standard operating procedure of the Brokest Nation in History: a government that spends without limit and makes no good-faith effort even to attempt to balance the books. That's profoundly wicked. At a minimum, the opposition, to use a quaint term, should keep the people's business out in the sunlight and not holed up in a seedy motel room with Joe Biden all night.

The fiscal cliff was a mirage. If Washington was obliged to use the same accounting procedures as your local hardware store, the real national debt would be at least 10 times' greater than the meaningless number they're now going to spend the next two months arguing over. That's to say, we're already over the fiscal cliff but, like Wile E Coyote, haven't yet glanced down at our feet and seen there's nothing holding us up. In a two-party system, there surely ought to be room for one party that still believes in solid ground.

But, hey, maybe we can thread all that algae into a climbing rope ...

©MARK STEYN

© Copyright 2013 Freedom Communications. All Rights Reserved. 

Nothing is certain except more debt and taxes

The Senate fiscal-cliff bill still means higher taxes on every working American.  So much for just going after 'the rich'.

By DAVID MALPASS

The Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com

January 1, 2013

Whatever ultimately emerges from the fiscal-cliff negotiations over the past 48 hours, the country will survive. But the damage can't be undone. Taxes are going up for all working Americans. And so is the size of government.

Businesses have been waiting to see whether a second Obama administration will encourage the economy. During the fiscal-cliff negotiations, however, the president made clear that his goal isn't to get business going again but instead to expand government and redistribute income. He offered no real spending cuts and instead used the year-end deadline to divide America into classes—to the point of campaigning on New Year's Eve against higher earners. Though the president talks about fairness, his policies penalize profit and investment. This hurts aspiring Americans more than it hurts those who have already made it.

The deal that emerged from the Senate early Tuesday morning is being sold as a tax cut for the middle class, but the expiration of the two-percentage-point payroll tax holiday means that working Americans' take-home pay will drop. The bill reduces the value of tax deductions for upper incomes and, with the new open-ended 3.8% Medicare tax that was enacted under ObamaCare, income-tax rates on families and small business owners earning over $450,000 have been pushed above 44%.

Images.com/Corbis

The Senate bill makes the tax code more complex, provides for no spending cuts and creates four deadlines—for the debt-limit increase within weeks, the March 1 automatic spending cuts known as the sequester, a second sequester on March 27 (to make up for overspending since the first sequester) and the March 30 expiration of government spending authority. These deadlines will keep Washington negotiations on the front page for months but with little likelihood that government will cut programs, sell assets or downsize the 1,300 federal agencies and commissions.

No wonder many House Republicans balked at what was presented. The New Year's Day legislation is breathtaking in its largess. The Senate bill extends 52 tax credits, mostly for one year, ensuring huge annual lobbying fees and political contributions. Section 206 provides a juicy capital-gains tax exemption for contributions of property for conservation, meaning wealthy environmentalists with extra acreage will be able to take a tax deduction for the appreciated property and have the environmental organization preserve it, adding to the value of the primary property. Section 312 provides faster tax deductions for "motorsports entertainment complexes." Section 317 allows expensing of film and television productions, meaning lower taxes for Hollywood.

The bill devotes much space to tax credits for government-approved energy schemes, providing taxpayer subsidies for energy-efficient new homes, existing homes, appliances, cellulosic biofuel and "Indian coal facilities." Underscoring the complexity of the tax code, the bill takes seven pages to index the alternative minimum tax for inflation because it takes side trips to curry favor with the owners of plug-in electric vehicles and with first-time home-buyers in the District of Columbia.

The pattern across the developed world is for politicians to negotiate with each other and, after much drama, make the brave decision to downsize jobs through taxes and mandates rather than downsizing government. This country is no different: Whatever tax and spending decisions Washington makes over the next few months, the likelihood is that government will be bigger in 2013 and the fiscal problems even more urgent.

There has emerged from the budget negotiations no process to cut government programs, limit the debt or reform the tax code. Many tax rates have now gone up and almost no spending restraint has been implemented, hurting 2013 investment and hiring. Even if the spending sequester is allowed to proceed on March 1 or substitutes are found, the cuts will be a small fraction of the spending binge in recent years that left a string of $1 trillion deficits.

The Congressional Budget Office scores the Senate bill as adding $4 trillion to the national debt by 2022. That assumes the sequester or equivalent spending cuts are fully implemented in March, which seems unlikely. Some are hoping that during the coming confrontation over the debt-limit increase fiscal conservatives will be able to recover lost ground on spending. That won't work, because the debt limit doesn't provide much leverage.

The debt-limit statute was written specifically to make it easier to increase the debt, not as a way to limit the debt. It should be repealed and replaced with a law that cuts spending when there is too much debt. While Republicans rightly want to stop the unending growth in debt, the current debt-limit statute gives most of the power to the president, allowing him to shut down parts of the government and blame holdouts until he gets enough votes for more debt.

Rather than rejecting an increase in the debt limit, fiscal conservatives should offer a lasting remedy. This would be a debt-to-GDP limit that, when exceeded, would give the president the power to underspend congressional appropriations and to propose fast-track reductions in entitlements—but would also require him to make monthly reports to the public on excess spending and prohibit raises for government employees making over $100,000.

Fighting under the current rules isn't working and leaves government inexorably bigger. The country can't afford this approach. Demographics are making it harder each year to restrain spending or win elections on the platform of limited government. The rules pit fiscal conservatives against themselves, leading to bigger government.

Regardless of how the current crisis is ultimately resolved, there is sure to be another. Republicans and fiscally conservative Democrats should use every opportunity to strengthen the framework for limited government, in order to restrain federal spending and allow the private economy to grow.

Mr. Malpass, a deputy assistant Treasury secretary and legislative manager for the 1986 Tax Reform Act in the Reagan administration, is president of Encima Global LLC.

A version of this article appeared January 2, 2013, on page A17 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Nothing Is Certain Except More Debt and Taxes.

Obama's leadership failure

By Robert J. Samuelson, Published: December 31

The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com

The “fiscal cliff” is a massive failure of presidential leadership. The tedious and technical negotiations are but a subplot in a larger drama. Government can no longer fulfill all the promises it has made to various constituencies. Some promises will be reduced or disavowed. Which ones? Why? Only the president can pose these questions in a way that starts a national conversation over the choices to be made, but doing so requires the president to tell people things they don’t want to hear. That’s his job: to help Americans face unavoidable, if unpleasant, realities. Barack Obama has refused to play this role.
Instead, he has cast the long-term budget problem as a question of whether the richest 1 percent or 2 percent of the population should pay more in taxes. Not only that, but he has insisted that the higher taxes be paid by raising rates, as opposed to reducing various tax breaks (deductions, exemptions, preferential rates) enjoyed heavily by upscale Americans. The obsession with rates is bad policy (higher rates may threaten risk-taking, work effort and hiring) but qualifies as good politics: It signals Obama is macho; he’s tough on the rich, who are implicitly blamed for the nation’s budget and economic woes.
Whatever one thinks about raising taxes at the top (and I have no objection to it as part of comprehensive budget package), it’s not the crux of the problem. The crux of our problem — the problem being the bipartisan and untenable promises made to most Americans of both high government benefits and low taxes — arises from an aging population and high health costs, which cause rapid increases in spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Let me repeat some statistics I’ve often cited. In 2012, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid accounted for 44 percent of non-interest federal spending. As for taxes, the richest 5 percent paid almost 40 percent of federal taxes in 2009 (and within that, the richest 1 percent paid 22 percent of taxes).
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts it this way:
“With the population aging and health care costs per person likely to keep growing faster than the economy [gross domestic product], the United States cannot sustain the federal spending programs that are now in place with the federal taxes (as a share of GDP) that it has been accustomed to paying.”
Until Obama conspicuously and consistently acknowledges these realities in straightforward and unmistakable language — something he hasn’t done and shows no signs of doing — he cannot be said to be dealing honestly with the budget or with the American people. The main reason that we keep having these destructive and inconclusive budget confrontations is not simply that many Republicans have been intransigent on taxes. The larger cause is that Obama refuses to concede that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are driving future spending and deficits. So when Republicans make concessions on taxes (as they have), they get little in return. Naturally, this poisons the negotiating climate.
Of course, Obama would offend many Democrats if he entertained benefit cuts in Social Security and Medicare: higher eligibility ages, higher premiums for affluent elderly, structural changes in the health-care system to reduce costs. Just as many Republicans don’t want taxes raised a penny, many Democrats don’t want benefits cut a penny. Consider the highly technical proposal to shift from the standard consumer price index (CPI) to a “chained” CPI to adjust Social Security benefits. From 2013 to 2022, this change is estimated to reduce Social Security spending by $100 billion. Over that decade, total Social Security benefits are estimated at $10.588 trillion; the cut would be less than 1 percent. Yet, many Democrats reacted in horror, as if hordes of elderly would be impoverished.
Unfortunately, much of the media have accepted the Obama narrative that it’s only Republican rigidity that frustrates negotiations and leads to deadlock. This means, of course, that there’s even less incentive for Obama and congressional Democrats to engage in genuine bargaining.
The result is that we’re not getting the debate we deserve and that budget choices are being made mainly by default. Just as important, the periodic, ugly confrontations over budget policy — the paralysis and bitterness they involve — corrode confidence and weaken the economy. A weak economy creates few new jobs, and the lack of jobs is the nation’s No. 1 social problem. Obama’s abdication of responsibility may be in his political self-interest, but it is profoundly hostile to the national interest.
Read more from Opinions E.J. Dionne: It’s our system on the cliff Ruth Marcus: Making a ‘B’ line to the cliff Michael Gerson: Obama must learn to negotiate Marc Thiessen: Republicans should stand and fight

Death and Taxes

By Daniel Greenfield
http://frontpagemag.com
January 2, 2012

On November 13, 1789, Benjamin Franklin sat down to write a letter to a French scholar and physicist by the name of Jean-Baptiste Leroy, famous for his experiments with electricity. The French Revolution was gathering steam, Versailles and the Bastille had been stormed and Parisians were becoming used to Madame Mob marching through her streets. Franklin had been corresponding with Leroy for a long time and had grown worried about his French colleague after not having heard from him for an entire year.
“Are you still living? Or have the mob of Paris mistaken the head of a monopolizer of knowledge, for a monopolizer of corn, and paraded it about the streets upon a pole?” Franklin enquired, before going on to a brief mention of affairs on the other side of the Atlantic. “Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.”
Death and taxes happen to be the current favorite topics of the mob of Washington, D.C. and the head of the mob who is juggling his demagoguery of those two issues. The situation is not yet so dire that, like Lenin or Chavez, the mob is calling for the heads of the monopolizers of corn. Instead our Foulons are the mythical 1 percent who are hoarding all the wealth that Washington has not yet spent.
In movie theaters, Les Misérables, a tawdry movie based on the tawdry musical based on the tawdry novel, is playing side by side with Django, a black revenge fantasy, and The Hobbit, a bit of conservative escapism from a British author born not long after the death of Victor Hugo bidding farewell to the pleasant way of life of the British countryside.
Cinematically a refried exploitation of the aftermath of the French Revolution is brushing shoulders with a refried exploitation of ’70s black liberation clichés, both of which have been shouldered out of the way by the majority’s longing for the village green and the humble power of the common man who makes no noise at all, but proves surprisingly courageous when the first Nazi bombers begin passing overhead.
In real life, the silent majority of hobbits is often stomped underfoot by revolutionaries and gangbangers. And these days it’s the Django and Les Misérables agenda that is moving forward.
Taxes will of course go up. Unlike the French peasant, the modern beneficiary of these ruinous taxes has never worked a day in his life and would be considered a wealthy man or woman in 95 percent of the world. But revolutions aren’t made for peasants, even if they are allowed to have the occasional bit of fun killing a Foulon or two and then walking around with his head on a pole. Revolutions, like the bad movies filmed about them, are made for the profit of revolutionaries.
The other item on the agenda is death. The death of children always makes for powerful propaganda, and modern propaganda isn’t a matter of a passing out some dirty handbills, but full-blown hysteria broadcast on every channel, printed in every newspaper and shouted from the covers of every magazine. And the purpose of propaganda is the seizure of power.
To impose taxes it helps, as Congressman Nadler said, to act as if the “State ought to have a monopoly on legitimate violence.”  And once there is a state monopoly on legitimate violence, then the state, like all monopolies, loses its last remaining incentive for making any fine distinctions between the legitimate and illegitimate uses of its power.
The next stage of every revolution, once the prisons are stormed and the heads are paraded around on poles, is the monopolization of revolutionary violence by the revolutionary state, protecting its ability to impose taxes through its power to impose death; legitimate death through legitimate violence.
“The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny,” Robespierre said, and his example has since been followed by countless tyrants of liberty and despots of freedom, who are distinguished from their predecessors only by their relentless cruelty and the ideological principles that they use to justify their tyranny.
The new monopolizers of corn, who killed the old monopolizers of corn, must also have a monopoly on violence. The monopolizers of all things, from knowledge to corn to power, begin with a cause, with the bodies of dead children, with the image of assailed women, and then on they go, murdering women and children beyond count in the name of the despotism of liberty and the liberty of despotism.
Some months before Franklin had penned his letter, Madame Mob had stormed the Bastille, leading to the death of several women and children, and freeing a handful of oppressed prisoners who were paraded through the streets. One of those oppressed prisoners was the Comte de Solages, locked up at the request of his family for “monstrous acts” that involved incest, and the Marquis de Sade, a rapist and pedophile, who helped touch off the storming of the Bastille by shouting through a window that the prisoners were being murdered, who became a delegate to the National Convention, and went on being a rapist and a pedophile. And all of it was done for the murdered children at the Bastille.
Our own revolutionary leaders are quite adept at manufacturing and exploiting martyrdom, even if on close inspection the beneficiaries turn out to be our own Marquis de Sades; monsters like Bill Ayers.  The Bastille is stormed over and over again, but there is nothing inside, only more distractions, more empty memorial services full of political rhetoric and promises that if we grant the government a total monopoly on violence then Aurora and Newtown will never happen again.
Franklin understood that death and taxes are constant things, for no matter what happens and whatever principles are articulated, there will be someone coming by to collect the taxes and deal out death if the taxes aren’t paid.
Death and taxes are the secret heart of government. They are the secret heart of all power, from the playground bully offering a choice between your lunch money or a knuckle sandwich, to the government bully offering a sophisticated legalistic version of the same.
In Washington, the talk is of death and taxes again. Given a monopoly on death, the government will keep us from dying with its rationed health care and its even more strictly rationed gun control. And given our taxes, the government will be able to pay for it all. But death is even more inevitable than taxes, the death of men and the death of their ambitions. All systems and ideologies perish. It is the people who live on, generation after generation, outliving the monopolists and tax collectors, the tinpot revolutionaries and the mob leaders who eventually fall victim to their own vices of terror.
The American way of life was not made for kings or revolutionaries, for grand systems and tremendous tyrannies. It was made for the people, for the silent majority that seeks only to keep what it has, rather than steal from others, and when the mobs have moved on, it is the people who will restore America.
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Atlas left...with his cheese!

By Gary Jason
http://www.americanthinker.com
January 1, 2013

One of my favorite French actors is the larger-than-life Epicurean and all-around bon vivant Gerard Depardieu.  His latest role is that of Atlas shrugging -- or, more exactly, taking it on the lam.

It all started with the new French Socialist government's decision to jack up taxes to an historic degree -- in a country already known for its outrageously high taxes.  The Socialists raised the income tax on the wealthy to a stratospheric 75%.  They also raised the rates on middle class incomes, on business, and on capital gains; instituted a "total wealth tax" on all property (including unrealized capital gains); and imposed an "exit" tax on escaping entrepreneurs.

This prompted the sybaritic star to announce that he was putting his Parisian palace up for sale and moving to a Belgium town just across the border to escape the confiscatory taxes.  He first prudently stocked up on cheese, however.

This was hardly a unique event -- plenty of wealthy French have already fled the new Gaullic socialist paradise.  But none of these were as famous -- nay, iconic -- as the delightful Depardieu.

Here is where it gets delicious.

Depardieu's decision to decamp moved Jean-Marc Ayrault, the slimy Socialist French Prime Minister, to call the peripatetic player "pathetic" for moving out.  Another Socialist MP then called for Depardieu to be stripped of his citizenship.

Perhaps the most caustic cut came from the supercilious Socialist "Minister of Culture," Aurelie Filippetti, who said that the acclaimed actor was "deserting the field in the middle of a war against the [economic] crisis[.] ... French citizenship is an honor, and includes rights and duties, which include the ability to pay taxes."

It would appear that French leftists are like their American counterparts: they instantly anger if anyone their patriotism, but they are always the first to attack the patriotism of others.

This was more than the thorny thespian could bear, and he replied with a cri de coeur in a letter to the Journal du Dimanche, in which he said, "I'm leaving because you think success, creation, talent and anything different should be punished. I'm sending you back my passport and social security, which I have never used. We no longer have a homeland; I am a true European, a citizen of the world[.]"

The deeply distressed Depardieu pointed out to his detractors that over the last nearly half-century, he had always paid his taxes in full -- paying a total of 145 million euros (or about $188 million) during his lifetime -- and employs 80 people.  "I am neither worthy of pity nor admirable, but I shall not be called 'pathetic[.]'"

The aggrieved actor added, "You said 'pathetic'? How pathetic...I refuse the word 'pathetic.' Who are you to judge me this way, I ask you, Mr. Ayrault?"  Depardieu's Parthian shot was classic: "Despite my excesses, my appetite and love for life, I am a free being, sir, and will remain polite."

What is especially galling to the Gauls is that Depardieu is following the lead of another French actor, Christian Clavier, who moved to London earlier to escape the new high taxes.  In an irony not lost on the cynical French, both Depardieu and Clavier both starred in three major hit French movies in which they played two Gaullic heroes, Obelix and Asterix.

What has resulted is something of a national "teachable moment."  The leftists in the French media counted on being able to easily demonize Depardieu in the envious eyes of the French.  His public behavior over the years has been...well, noteworthy, including such outré escapades as urinating into a plastic bottle on a French airliner, as well as on a policeman's leg; smacking around a few paparazzi along the way; and sometimes being hard on other actors.

He is also an actor of rare talent.  Even with no formal training , and just a working-class background, he has made 170 movies, giving some legendary performances along the way.  He is not some pampered aristocrat who inherited his wealth.  And his lifestyle is fabulously French -- he owns vineyards and a couple of French restaurants, and he has written a French cookbook.

So while the French left thought it could vilify the pugnacious player, in fact the French public seems to be rallying to his side.  One poll showed that 70% of the public support him.

Mirroring the split in public opinion over Depardieu's decision is a split among his fellow actors.  One of them, Philippe Torreton, said Depardieu was "sulking like a playground creep" and made fun of his portly physiognomy.

This led to two legendary French actresses leaping to his defense.  First was the normally reclusive Brigitte Bardot, who said Torreton should "keep his venom, his mediocrity and his jealousy to insult someone worthy of bother."  She added that Depardieu had been "the victim of extremely unfair persecution."

Also defending Depardieu was Catherine Deneuve, who acidly attacked Torreton by saying that his "anger was borne of your hasty judgments made without thinking and this pettiness. You take aim at his physique! At his talent! This 'mess' that you speak of. What right, what democratic motive do you claim as your dirty condemnation?"

Ironically, more support for the persecuted performer has recently come from another branch of the French government itself.  The French Constitutional Court, its functional equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court, has just ruled that the Socialist tax law is unconstitutional, because it violates taxpayer equality.  It turns out that the law leads to households earning the same amount of income paying different amounts of tax, depending upon how the income is distributed within the household.

Even more challenging for the Socialist government is the Court's decision that other of its recent tax increases were excessive, and -- most interestingly -- that the total wealth tax on unrealized capital games is unfair because it doesn't consider the victim's -- pardon, I mean the taxpayer's -- ability to pay.

The pathetic Socialist Prime Minister Ayrault immediately announced that the pathetic Socialist government will soon present a new pathetic law designed to get around the Court's ruling.  We'll see if the government succeeds.

In the meantime, don't expect the estimable and formidable Mr. Depardieu to consider moving to Hollywood, which would be a wonderful gift to American cinema.  Our country, mais oui, is run by the pathetic neo-socialist Obama, who has made it clear that nothing short of a 100% tax on the wealthy will content him.

And the state in which Hollywood is located is run by the pathetic Democratic Governor Jerry Brown and his now veto-proof Democrat state congress.

Quelle horreur!

Philosopher Gary Jason is a senior editor of Liberty and author of the recent book, Dangerous Thoughts.

The Mega Scandal Everyone Has Forgotten

By John Fund
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 31, 2012

In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi used an old Jedi mind trick on Stormtroopers to deflect them from their real quarry: “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” It worked.

It looks as if another mind trick, well known in the Congress — delay and deflection — will now work to make Americans forget one of the biggest scandals of our time: the housing collapse that triggered the 2008 financial meltdown we are still suffering from. We shouldn’t just gaze over the fiscal cliff everyone else is scrutinizing; we should also examine the droids who helped set in motion our current economic mess.
Last week, over the holidays, the House Ethics Committee quietly joined its Senate counterpart in finding that no members or staffers — or at least any it claimed jurisdiction over — broke congressional rules while obtaining “VIP” mortgages from Countrywide. This failed lender at one time provided a huge share of the questionable subprime mortgages issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage lenders that were some of the first players to fall in the 2008 financial collapse.
Fannie and Freddie scooped up Countrywide loans and pooled them and others into mortgage-backed securities that were sold with an implicit taxpayer guarantee that eventually became explicit. The taxpayer guarantee allowed — indeed, encouraged — the lenders to be reckless, creating a moral hazard. In 2008, this set-up helped bring down the whole house of cards built by subprime mortgages.
But far from being dismantled, Fannie and Freddie have avoided insolvency, thanks to massive taxpayer bailouts. Talk of winding them down has faded on Capitol Hill and is being discouraged by the Obama administration. The two entities, along with the Federal Housing Administration, currently back some 90 percent of new mortgages. Talk about there being no consequences for failure.
At least Countrywide had to be sold to Bank of America in 2008; and two years later, Countrywide’s disgraced CEO, Angelo Mozilo, had to pay a $22.5 million fine, the largest ever at that time for a senior executive of a public company, for insider trading and concealing information on Countrywide’s deteriorating mortgages.
But Mozilo avoided criminal charges and to date has never satisfactorily explained Countrywide’s infamous “Friends of Angelo” program, which provided discount mortgages and other benefits to numerous executives at Fannie and Freddie as well as executive-branch officials and up to 30 members of Congress and their staffers. Countrywide wouldn’t have thrived or been allowed to go off the ethical rails without lots of “friends” in government.
Representative Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, issued a report last July concluding, among other things, that Countrywide lobbyists would frequently refer members of Congress and their staff to the company’s VIP desk so they could receive “enhanced customer service.” E-mail evidence was found showing that specific requests for personal loans were made to the VIP desk and quickly facilitated. Issa’s committee found that more than six current and former lawmakers — including retiring Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, and House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon, a California Republican — obtained mortgages through the Countrywide VIP program.
Countrywide’s most famous client was Democratic senator Chris Dodd, chair of the Financial Services Committee from 2006 to 2010. Although he and Conrad were cleared of ethics violations by the Senate Ethics Committee in 2009, Dodd retired the next year after it became clear that revelations about his involvement with Countrywide had destroyed his political standing in his home state of Connecticut. He was nonetheless able to shepherd the now-infamous Dodd-Frank bill into law before he stepped down. Dodd-Frank is a rat’s nest of new regulations on financial firms, but it goes notably light on regulating the housing industry and its cozy relationship with the federal government.
Despite its explosive findings, Representative Issa’s committee lacked any jurisdiction to suggest punishment for any individuals. The matter was handed off to the secretive House Ethics Committee, which quietly issued a report just two days after Christmas. This report concluded:

While these allegations concern serious matters, almost all of the allegations concerned actions taken outside, or well outside, the jurisdiction of this Committee . . . because they occurred before the third Congress prior to the current Congress. In addition, several of the Members and employees mentioned in the allegations are no longer serving in or employed by the House, and therefore are outside the Committee’s jurisdiction. 

In other words, some of the suspect droids have moved on, so it’s time the rest of us did, too.
Indeed, the name of only one member of Congress or staffer is mentioned in the entire report, that of Representative Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican who took a Countrywide loan but insisted on not getting favorable treatment or terms.
But even while it is maddeningly silent on who was involved in the Countrywide scandal, the House Ethics Committee report does uncover exactly how corrupt the program was. “Countrywide partnered with Fannie Mae in a strategic business alliance that also included joint lobbying efforts,” it concludes. “Countrywide lobbyists and CEO Angelo Mozilo used discounted loans as a tool to ingratiate itself with policymakers in an effort to benefit the company’s business interests,” Issa said in a release about the report. As Politico notes, the report discloses that at least four Capitol Hill staffers in critical positions for Countrywide, including aides on the House Financial Services and Senate Banking panels, obtained VIP loans from the firm. These loans started as early as 1998.
Left unsaid is that Countrywide, Fannie, and Freddie were also able to kill attempts to rein in the subprime-mortgage market while it was pumping up the unsustainable housing bubble, starting in the late 1990s, and peaking between 2004 and 2006.
The Ethics Committee insists that some House members and staffers didn’t know they were receiving favorable treatment; the committee also suggests that the discounts these individuals obtained might have been equal to or less generous than the terms offered by other lenders. The entire culture of Congress was corrupted by the housing government- industrial complex, and the Ethics Committee report only skims over the surface of that scandal.
Representative Hansen Clarke, a Michigan Democrat who will soon retire, was asked by Dave Weigel of Slate this month to name the most important lesson he’d picked up in Congress. His statement is extraordinary:

Everybody in this building knows that the housing market was the root of the financial crisis. Here’s the problem: They’re scared of crossing the financial industry and being defeated with the industry’s money. So they’re silent. Silent. Silent. Silent. Their rationale is: If I get defeated, I’m not going to be able to do anything. That’s what the problem is.

A brand-new Rasmussen poll shows that even though the American people may not know the details of what’s wrong with Congress, they can sure smell the stench. Only 5 percent of those surveyed by Rasmussen rate Congress as doing a good or excellent job. A full 69 percent rate its performance as “poor.” Even if lawmakers temporarily avert the fiscal cliff, our fiscal problems will continue until we address the government-directed crony capitalism that is destroying our ability to end the current economic malaise and reclaim our prosperity.
— John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for NRO.