South Dakota Politics

The real issue behind the shutdown: Our federal budget process is broken

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal.  Here's a snippet:

We govern by crisis.  Budgeting is supposed to be a deliberative consideration of the nation’s priorities.  Instead, we consistently find ourselves acting out of anxiety due to impending shutdowns or, related but distinct, debt limit ceilings.  The “grand bargains” that result are not really budgeting; they are sloppiness caused by panic.  

In Federalist #1, Alexander Hamilton famously asked whether free government can act out of “reflection and choice” or whether it is doomed to act by “accident and force.”  Our budget process much more resembles “accident and force” than “reflection and choice.”

 

 

The Man Who Wasn't There Part n

Since shortly after Barack Obama entered the White House, I have been pointing out that he seems largely uninterested in doing his job.  Now that he has been safely reelected, even the New York Times is more or less letting the cat out of the bag. 

In describing the incoherence of the White House on Syria, the Times has this:

A close examination of how the Obama administration finds itself at this point — based on interviews with dozens of current and former members of the administration, foreign diplomats and Congressional officials — starts with a deeply ambivalent president who has presided over a far more contentious debate among his advisers than previously known. Those advisers reflected Mr. Obama’s own conflicting impulses on how to respond to the forces unleashed by the Arab Spring: whether to side with those battling authoritarian governments or to avoid the risk of becoming enmeshed in another messy war in the Middle East.

This picture of a President who cannot make up his mind on a vital issue is bad enough.  Making up his Administration’s mind is pretty much a President’s entire job.  The truth, however, seems much worse. 

Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum.

The President wasn’t having a hard time making up his mind.  He was playing Angry Birds. 

However you interpret the fact that the President’s closest aides had to interpret his thinking and level of engagement by his body language, this story leaves no doubt that the President was barely even present at a critical moment.  Meet the man who wasn’t there. 

The Aberdeen American News Sets Us Straight

The Aberdeen American News has lost patience with our lone representative in the U.S. House, Kristi Noem. 

Rep. Kristi Noem, R-S.D., has talked herself into a problem.  She has caught herself between pleas for relief for West River ranchers who lost thousands of cattle and tea party conservatives who want to limit government no matter the cost — even at the expense of relief for ranchers, such as the ones Noem represents…  When Noem could choose — voting for the best interests of South Dakota and the nation, or staying in the good graces of the fringe conservative movement — she voted with the latter.

That is a special kind of reasoning.  If you refuse to vote for all the spending that everyone wants, you are voting against West River ranchers, the nation, mom and apple pie.  If you believe, as Rep. Noem does, that we ought to be concerned about the nation’s $17 trillion dollar debt, that makes you a “fringe conservative”. 

The Obama Administration, much of Congress, and just about all of the media, have been working overtime to convince us that we can’t reduce federal spending by a single penny without triggering the apocalypse.  One way to do that is to talk as if failing to raise the debt limit means that the U.S. Government will automatically default on its debt. 

This is nonsense.  If the spending bumps up against the debt limit, that means that the Treasury could not borrow any additional money.  There is plenty of revenue flowing into federal coffers to cover interest on the national debt and that interest will be paid as the Constitution requires.  What would happen is that we would quickly run out of money for new spending and then Congress and the Administration would have to make some tough choices.  I am not saying that this is a good idea.  A sudden contraction of federal spending would be a serious shock to the national and global economies.  However, Democrats in Congress and luminaries on NPR are constantly telling us that those opposed to raising the debt limit are therefore in favor of defaulting the debt.  That is a gross verbal inexactitude, otherwise known as a big, fat, lie. 

For decades the Federal Government has been making promises it cannot possibly keep and spending money it does not have.  Our fiscal situation is not sustainable over the long run, as anyone who pays attention will be forced to admit.  Yet we are told over and over that only a wild-eyed extremist would be in favor of the smallest reduction in federal spending.  Sooner or later we will find ourselves in the position that we really can’t pay the interest on our debt without borrowing more money.  At that point the United States will have shrunk itself down all the way to Detroit. 

Time to discard some false assumptions about higher ed

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal is here.  A snippet:

We must remember, though, that those who run higher education are not the faculty, but the administrators. Ambitious administrators don’t make their mark by creating a great environment for learning. They make their mark by erecting new buildings, having successful sports teams and securing large research grants. All of this, it should be noted, represents money spent on things only tangentially related to actually educating anyone.

Schools tend to emphasize what is now called the “co-curricular.” This includes things such as how good the student gym is, how nice the dorms are, how many student clubs are there, and which comedians come to campus. Actual education of students takes a back seat. Another thing that drives administrators is enrollment numbers. Higher enrollment is always good and administrators assume that students make their school choice more on what is entertaining than what is educational.