They call it a budget. Last week's budget deal "reinforces the case for Congress to extend the Budget Control Act caps in 2022 and beyond," write Stephen Moore and Christian Andzel:
The Budget Control Act caps are now a victim of their own success. From 2011-2016, the spending caps held discretionary spending increases below the 2 percent level of inflation. For three years, federal spending actually fell, in no small part because of those caps.
But now those tight caps have been evaded four times in six years, and each time the overspending has been larger. The cork has been pulled off the champagne bottle.
The lack of spending restraint and the inability of Congress to keep its past legislative promises not only erodes trust in the political class, but shows a frightening and complete indifference by Washington toward our nation's growing fiscal crisis.
The big question is, where do we go from here on the budget? With neither party at all committed to reducing debt and deficits, our worry is that the budget caps are, for all intents and purposes, gone forever.
The caps after 2020 are still technically in place, but the 2019 levels of spending are going to come in at as much as $200 billion above the 2020 caps. So either we see a massive cut in government spending in the election year of 2020, which would be a wonderful thing to behold—but is as likely as President Donald Trump and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi dancing a tango together—or, Congress throws the caps into the dustbin of history.
[Stephen Moore and Christian Andzel, "Congress Blew Through the Budget Caps, Again. Here's What Needs to Change." The Daily Signal, February 15]
Academic freedom used to be about pursing the truth. Is that still the case? Academic freedom is under attack. Do you know where the idea came from? Do you know how it has evolved over the years? The National Association of Scholars has published a chart comparing 14 major statements on academic freedom published since 1915.
From the introduction:
We publish this chart today because America faces a growing crisis about who can say what on our college campuses. At root this is a crisis of authority. In recent decades university administrators, professors, and student activists have quietly excluded more and more voices from the exchange of views on campus. This has taken shape in several ways, not all of which are reducible to violations of "academic freedom." The narrowing of campus debate by de-selection of conservatives from faculty positions, for example, is not directly a question of academic freedom though it has proven to have dire consequences in various fields where professors have severely limited the range of ideas they present in courses.
This example suggests some of the complications in the concept of academic freedom that were not apparent to the drafters of the 1915 Declaration of Principles. The threats to academic freedom do not always arise from outside the university. Potent threats to academic freedom can arise from the collective will of faculty members themselves.
This is the situation that confronts us today. Decades of progressive orthodoxy in hiring, textbooks, syllabi, student affairs, and public events have created campus cultures where legitimate intellectual debates are stifled and where dissenters, when they do venture forth, are often met with censorious and sometimes violent responses. Student mobs, egged on by professors and administrators, now sometimes riot to prevent such dissent. The idea of "safe spaces" and a new view of academic freedom as a threat to the psychological well-being of disadvantaged minorities have gained astonishing popularity among students.
[David Randall, "Charting Academic Freedom: 103 Years of Debate," National Association of Scholars, January 2018]
The ten worst colleges for free speech. As ranked by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Drexel, Harvard, Los Angeles Community College District, Fordham, Evergreen State, Albion, Northwestern, University of California at Berkeley, and Texas State.
Plus, Depaul wins FIRE's lifetime censorship award.
["The 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech: 2018," Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, February 12]
Jeff Bell, R.I.P. Jeff Bell, who ran on supply-side economic ideas in 1978 to represent New Jersey in the U.S. Senate, died last Saturday at the age of 74. Bell's '78 campaign, in which he defeated the Republican incumbent to win the GOP nomination (but lost in the general election to Bill Bradley), helped demonstrate the political viability of supply-side ideas before Ronald Reagan embraced them as a presidential candidate.
Bell ran two more times for U.S. Senate from New Jersey (1982 and 2014); served as an advisor and speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, both before and after Reagan became President; and wrote two books, Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality (1992), and The Case for Polarized Politics: Why America Needs Social Conservatism (2012). About Populism and Elitism, Ralph Benko writes:
Bell's book propelled a national debate. In important ways, he anticipated politically important movements like the Tea Party. That said, the Tea Party – of which I was a member – and Occupy Wall Street, of which I was a sympathizer, even more so – projected a grotesque caricature of Bell's shrewd insight. Both proto-movements ended up defeating themselves by focusing their rhetorical fire on elites rather than on elitism. Big mistake.
Bell forthrightly observed, in Populism and Elitism, that a healthy society generates lots of elites. That's a sign of success and a desirable thing. Equality implies equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcomes. A Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution designed to punish the successful is mere demagoguery masquerading as populism.
Bell was unashamedly elite, and deservedly so. He, rather, was a genial but trenchant critic of elitism – the attitude that the elites would be better capable of managing our lives for us than we ourselves are. Many failed to recognize the distinction Bell made between being anti-elitist and anti-elite. It's a crucial one. And in passing let it not pass unnoticed that elitism is the poison pill at the core of fascism, communism, socialism (democratic or otherwise), most progressivism, and much snobbish Country Club Republicanism.
[Ralph Benko, "How the Dow Went from 814 to 26,000 and How's Bell's Populist Postulate Could Top That," Forbes February 16; Also, check out Bell's 1992 interview on C-SPAN's Book Notes with Brian Lamb about his book.]
How the United States hurts itself with a law that protects American shipping. Keli'I Akina writes:
[W]hy did LNG [liquid natural gas] that arrived in Boston at the end of January come from Russia — and in violation of Obama-era sanctions against Russia?
As The New York Times explained, some fancy footwork in the transfer of the gas between international terminals helped it sidestep the law that would block Russian gas from being imported. But why did Boston bring in LNG from Russia instead of Louisiana?
Because of the Jones Act, that's why.
This outmoded federal law forces goods traveling between U.S. ports to do so on ships constructed and flagged in America, with primarily U.S. crews. This certainly would add to the cost of shipping LNG from one U.S. port to another — except that there aren't any Jones Act-compliant U.S. vessels that can carry LNG to begin with!
In fact, an American shipyard hasn't constructed an LNG carrier in nearly four decades.
It's a problem that Hawaii knows all too well, as America's noncontiguous jurisdictions (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Alaska) are especially hard hit by this Jones Act/LNG conundrum.
And so it becomes more economically feasible to send American LNG abroad. According to Forbes, by 2022, the U.S. will produce 20 percent of global LNG. However, half of the increase in production will be exported.
Could there be a stronger argument to modernize the Jones Act?
[Keli'I Akina, "LNG Episode Exposes Feeble Jones Act Argument," Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, February 16]
-
Comments
Post a Comment