I am now ~70% confident that he will run in 2012. Yet he's still very cheaply priced on Intrade.But in Indiana we think about the next generation. We think about the future. We want this state to be better for our kids than it was for us. We don’t resign ourselves for a second to the idea of any decline. Any step back. And that’s the job that we have taken on as a party. That you have made possible. That you’re making possible by your attendence tonight. I cannot thank you enough for that.
I just want to tell you that we’re not going to default on the burden that falls on the party of hope. I read this great line. It’s been on my mind since I read it. In the book Lee’s Lieutenants, the classic study of Civil War generals under Robert E. Lee, there’s a great line. It’s about Gen. Beauregard, whose best battles were his first ones. Bull Run. Early days of the war. Then he gets cautious. Then he gets timid. Then he’s always looking at the newspapers to see how it’s all playing. Freman, the author, says, “A soldier is on the wane from the moment he begins to think more of reputation than opportunity.” A soldier is on the wane from the moment he begins to think more of reputation than opportunity. He meant if you start thinking more about yourself than the people you’re there to serve, the cause you’re there to serve, if you start worrying more about how it’ll look, how it’ll play, than about what’s the next challenge? What’s the next hill? What’s the next battle? What am I going to do for the benefit of the cause I’m a part of? Then you’re not the soldier you used to be. You’re not the soldier you ought to be.
We have to be soldiers who think always of opportunity, not of reputation. Who think always of the future and tomorrow. Not of things we already did. Not of preserving gains and any credit that might have come from it. I promise you tonight, on behalf of everybody who’s part of our team. On behalf of the Republican Senate majority that is and the Republican House majority that will be, we will think of opportunity, not reputation. We will think of tomorrow, not yesterday. We will think of yes, not no; hope, not memory. And we will create in this state a model of a party and a state that all of America looks to for greatness.
Thank you for your support and for being here tonight.
Showing posts with label mitch daniels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mitch daniels. Show all posts
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Daniels on Running
Strongest wording we've heard yet from Mitch Daniels:
Monday, November 9, 2009
Mitch Daniels for President
As some of you know, I've been a big fan of Mitch Daniels, Governor of Indiana, and think he would make a great Republican Presidential candidate in 2012. The big issue with his campaign, though, has always been that he's been very reticent about running, citing family issues. These can be serious, as we found out with Colin Powell. Still, you don't make it as a two-term Governor without a little bit of political ambition.
He's been playing this very smartly too. He came out against the stimulus, but in a more principled and soft-spoken way than Perry and Sanford and the rest. He's been against the Health Bill, but again on very general grounds. He's been making his media appearances and WSJ op-eds. He already has a compelling story and record; this helps prepare some of the groundwork, much as Romney did his time appealing to evangelicals. But doing so in an off-key manner allows you to come in a little later, with far fewer negatives and with more of a post-partisan Obama feel. Jindal should be taking notes.
Anyway, now you're starting to read stuff like this:
And no; Sarah Palin will not win the nomination. Zero chance.
He's been playing this very smartly too. He came out against the stimulus, but in a more principled and soft-spoken way than Perry and Sanford and the rest. He's been against the Health Bill, but again on very general grounds. He's been making his media appearances and WSJ op-eds. He already has a compelling story and record; this helps prepare some of the groundwork, much as Romney did his time appealing to evangelicals. But doing so in an off-key manner allows you to come in a little later, with far fewer negatives and with more of a post-partisan Obama feel. Jindal should be taking notes.
Anyway, now you're starting to read stuff like this:
Still, despite the dominance of the big three likely presidentials, some in the GOP are hoping for a new conservative face, particularly one being pushed by the activists who attended spring antitax tea parties and flooded summer town halls to demand a halt to government expansion. And for them, insiders say, that could be Daniels, the fiscal conservative and rare Republican governor to win re-election in a state President Obama won in 2008. We hear he's serious about considering a 2012 entry, so much so that he's consulting with some of those who once sat in the White House, like former Vice President Dan Quayle, also a Hoosier.I suppose I should highlight why this is a good idea: Daniels has turned Indiana around; attracting jobs, balancing the budget, and reforming government. He has good ideas on transportation, healthcare, and education. This is exactly the sort of working-class agenda that can appeal to dying rust-belt states. Even if you're not a Republican, you know they have to win at some point, so it's better to have the party be functional. Nominating a no-nonsense technocrat would go a long way towards erasing the stains of fiscal irresponsibility and incompetence after Bush, and frankly would be exactly what the country needs after several rounds of bipartisan binge spending.
And no; Sarah Palin will not win the nomination. Zero chance.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Bruce Bartlett Review
Bruce Bartlett is one of the original architects of Reagan's Supply-Side Revolution. Recently, he's come out with a new book defending that movement, while arguing for higher taxes today in the form of a VAT, or consumption tax.
I don't buy it. I don't think adding extra consumption taxes would further either conservative or liberal goals.
Start with the conservatives. Bruce makes all of the conventional arguments against the Bush tax cuts: they didn't magically boost the economy, etc. etc. From the point of view of a bipartisan, maximize GDP perspective, these are fair points. In many ways, he repeats claims made by Jonathan Chait a few years back, when he denounced the extreme views of supply-siders as crackpot economics. What both miss is that the tax-cutting agenda is not driven purely by a motivation to boost "the economy." Transferring income away from the government towards people doesn't show up in GDP, but has an enormous impact on family welfare and the role of government in a free society.
To a substantial extent, the supply-siders are driven by the genuine desire of ordinary Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money. The rationalizations supply-siders offer for that goal are often dubious. But refuting those claims doesn't answer the broader question of how much government do we want, and what level of taxation would we like. This is very much a political and ideological question; yet Bartlett largely sidesteps that issue in favor of a broadly technocratic lens.
His diagnosis is that government is set to rise due to an entitlement crisis; that current economic problems are now ones of deflation and deficient demand; and that the only contribution of supply-side analysis is to pave the transition towards a larger government as smoothly as possible. His champions the VAT as a relatively efficient way to raise revenue.
Look, it would be one thing if we needed more taxpayer dollars to pay for some sort of Whiggish program of internal improvements, and a VAT was the only way to pay for that. But that's not the case. The long-term drivers of government spending are the entitlement programs--health care and social security--along with defense. Who benefits from these programs?
Social Security is distributed to everyone over 65--a population that has spent a lifetime earning and accumulating assets, and is rather well-off in aggregate. Medicare similarly benefits all the elderly, regardless of wealth, while its reimbursement program is riddled with fraud, and is a major driver of overtreatment and rising medical costs (Contributing 40 percent of the recent rise in medical costs by one estimate). Defense spending post-War on Terror is also insane. The US spends somewhere around $700 billion a year on defense; not only is this substantially more than any other country, it's also about twice what was spent during the 90s. Once Afghanistan and Iraq wind down, military spending could easily be cut in half with no discernible loss in welfare to the ordinary household.
This is to say: The drivers of higher government spending are basically wasteful and unnecessary spending, much of it consisting of transfers to the wealthy. This doesn't strike me as a cause worth funding through burdening the poor and working classes--who would be disproportionately hit by a tax on consumption.
There's an alternative here: slashing payroll taxes for poor workers and instituting flexible wages. Two of the biggest economic problems today are that wages are stagnant for many low-skill workers and unemployment looks to be persistently high. Both of these can be controlled by policy. By cutting regressive taxes on the poor, we can make wages rise as fast as we like--while attacking the real and growing disincentives for work. Bartlett is right to suggest that this may not have much of an impact as a "stimulus" or on economic aggregates. But this is to mistake GDP for human welfare. Families struggling to pay bills benefit tremendously with more after-tax income. It's precisely for this reason that many liberals worry so much about wages, even though the share of labor compensation doesn't have an impact on GDP.
We can cure unemployment as well. Singapore and France, along with other European countries, have implemented Edmund Phelps' policy of flexible wages. The idea is to allow employers to cut back on compensation during downturns, and have the government make up the difference. This allows labor markets to clear while keeping unemployment low. It's hard to think of any government spending that would further family welfare as much as keeping wage growth as high as we like, and unemployment as low as we want. Indeed, it's hard to think of many proposals that do so much to advance liberal goals. But fundamentally, this agenda relies on lowering the tax base and making it more progressive. Bartlett's VAT would move America in the opposite direction on both counts, while doing little to help struggling households.
I'll agree with Bartlett that Republican orthodoxy is sniffling the debate on many of these issues. Treating any defense cuts as tantamount to treason, and any cuts in Medicare as out of bounds entirely, doesn't do much to advance the debate on how to deal with a looming entitlement crisis. Republicans have done little during their time in office to tackle the long-term fiscal situation, and have placed too much emphasis on income tax cuts rather than dealing with chronic economic insecurity. But higher taxes on the poor won't help either.
That's the tradeoff we face. We can continue spending on wasteful and unnecessary transfers and spending, much of it going towards the rich, and balancing the cost on the already-burdened working and middle classes. Or we can solve the central economic problems of the day by addressing ballooning spending front-on. But that will require both more committed conservatives than Bartlett, and more devoted liberals than those in office.
I don't buy it. I don't think adding extra consumption taxes would further either conservative or liberal goals.
Start with the conservatives. Bruce makes all of the conventional arguments against the Bush tax cuts: they didn't magically boost the economy, etc. etc. From the point of view of a bipartisan, maximize GDP perspective, these are fair points. In many ways, he repeats claims made by Jonathan Chait a few years back, when he denounced the extreme views of supply-siders as crackpot economics. What both miss is that the tax-cutting agenda is not driven purely by a motivation to boost "the economy." Transferring income away from the government towards people doesn't show up in GDP, but has an enormous impact on family welfare and the role of government in a free society.
To a substantial extent, the supply-siders are driven by the genuine desire of ordinary Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money. The rationalizations supply-siders offer for that goal are often dubious. But refuting those claims doesn't answer the broader question of how much government do we want, and what level of taxation would we like. This is very much a political and ideological question; yet Bartlett largely sidesteps that issue in favor of a broadly technocratic lens.
His diagnosis is that government is set to rise due to an entitlement crisis; that current economic problems are now ones of deflation and deficient demand; and that the only contribution of supply-side analysis is to pave the transition towards a larger government as smoothly as possible. His champions the VAT as a relatively efficient way to raise revenue.
Look, it would be one thing if we needed more taxpayer dollars to pay for some sort of Whiggish program of internal improvements, and a VAT was the only way to pay for that. But that's not the case. The long-term drivers of government spending are the entitlement programs--health care and social security--along with defense. Who benefits from these programs?
Social Security is distributed to everyone over 65--a population that has spent a lifetime earning and accumulating assets, and is rather well-off in aggregate. Medicare similarly benefits all the elderly, regardless of wealth, while its reimbursement program is riddled with fraud, and is a major driver of overtreatment and rising medical costs (Contributing 40 percent of the recent rise in medical costs by one estimate). Defense spending post-War on Terror is also insane. The US spends somewhere around $700 billion a year on defense; not only is this substantially more than any other country, it's also about twice what was spent during the 90s. Once Afghanistan and Iraq wind down, military spending could easily be cut in half with no discernible loss in welfare to the ordinary household.
This is to say: The drivers of higher government spending are basically wasteful and unnecessary spending, much of it consisting of transfers to the wealthy. This doesn't strike me as a cause worth funding through burdening the poor and working classes--who would be disproportionately hit by a tax on consumption.
There's an alternative here: slashing payroll taxes for poor workers and instituting flexible wages. Two of the biggest economic problems today are that wages are stagnant for many low-skill workers and unemployment looks to be persistently high. Both of these can be controlled by policy. By cutting regressive taxes on the poor, we can make wages rise as fast as we like--while attacking the real and growing disincentives for work. Bartlett is right to suggest that this may not have much of an impact as a "stimulus" or on economic aggregates. But this is to mistake GDP for human welfare. Families struggling to pay bills benefit tremendously with more after-tax income. It's precisely for this reason that many liberals worry so much about wages, even though the share of labor compensation doesn't have an impact on GDP.
We can cure unemployment as well. Singapore and France, along with other European countries, have implemented Edmund Phelps' policy of flexible wages. The idea is to allow employers to cut back on compensation during downturns, and have the government make up the difference. This allows labor markets to clear while keeping unemployment low. It's hard to think of any government spending that would further family welfare as much as keeping wage growth as high as we like, and unemployment as low as we want. Indeed, it's hard to think of many proposals that do so much to advance liberal goals. But fundamentally, this agenda relies on lowering the tax base and making it more progressive. Bartlett's VAT would move America in the opposite direction on both counts, while doing little to help struggling households.
I'll agree with Bartlett that Republican orthodoxy is sniffling the debate on many of these issues. Treating any defense cuts as tantamount to treason, and any cuts in Medicare as out of bounds entirely, doesn't do much to advance the debate on how to deal with a looming entitlement crisis. Republicans have done little during their time in office to tackle the long-term fiscal situation, and have placed too much emphasis on income tax cuts rather than dealing with chronic economic insecurity. But higher taxes on the poor won't help either.
That's the tradeoff we face. We can continue spending on wasteful and unnecessary transfers and spending, much of it going towards the rich, and balancing the cost on the already-burdened working and middle classes. Or we can solve the central economic problems of the day by addressing ballooning spending front-on. But that will require both more committed conservatives than Bartlett, and more devoted liberals than those in office.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Rational Environmentalism
Suppose you really, really care about climate change. You think that global warming is the absolute biggest game changer in the world, one that will cause absolutely horrible damage throughout the world. Florida and Bangladesh will disappear under the seas, Arizona will erupt into flames, Chicago will become livable--Al Gore kind of stuff. What do you do?
You should favor a crash program to build as many nuclear plants as technically feasible to replace all natural gas/coal plants. Then you mandate that all cars be electric, and hook them up to the grid. It looks like that the vast majority of greenhouse gases in the US come from electricity generation or transportation, so at a stroke you could virtually make the entire country emissions-free.
Remember, all you care about is climate change. You know wind and solar can't scale up in time, and electric cars hooked up to coal plants just shift emissions elsewhere. Sure, nuclear waste is an issue, but it pales in comparison as a problem to Africa self-detonating.
This isn't pie-in-the sky--France did it in the 70s, with 70s technology. Today, they don't any fossil fuels for electricity. They didn't even care about the greenhouse gas angle--they just wanted cheap power and energy independence.
With the advances in nuclear power since then, it's even easier to get cheap, clean power for the entire country. Why doesn't anyone talk about that? Why do we keep looking at futuristic technologies that are too expensive or difficult to scale up? Why does energy have become an issue over guilt, rather than a place where we take the most cost-efficient solution and apply it everywhere?
In fact, environmentalists--the people who should be caring about global warming--have been the biggest roadblocks to this happening. This is a perfect example of letting the perfect be an enemy of the good--letting good, safe, clean technology become overlooked because "better" technologies exist. It's also a perfect example of an interest group trying its hardest to work against their own interests.
Environmentalism has always been a torn movement, divided between the sentimentalists (Emerson and company) and the more pragmatic (Teddy Roosevelt). Someday, I hope the latter crowd win and we get hyper-rational, capitalist environmentalists. People who don't just care about the environment for the sake of caring about things, but are actually driven to see improvements. They'll start venture funds, lobby to build nuclear plants, and pore over data. You'll have climate investors demand to see a return on their investment. The environment is too important a cause to be defended by environmentalists. If the Gordon Gekkos and Goldman Sachs of the world decided to care about the environment, you would see improvement very quickly.
This would make for a great political platform too, which could unite business interest (cheap energy) as well people who care about the environment, but don't buy into Greenpeace. It's a no-go area for the Democrats (because of Harry Reid, among other reasons), but some Republicans are talking about it (Mitch Daniels?). China and India realize that nuclear offers a great way to generate cheap, clean, energy and are rapidly building more. Assisting countries like that to make more nuclear power, and then turning all power at home into nuclear, is the only way to seriously cut down greenhouse gasses while keeping energy cheap. That makes for an amazing political platform--but you'll have to plow through the environmentalists first.
You should favor a crash program to build as many nuclear plants as technically feasible to replace all natural gas/coal plants. Then you mandate that all cars be electric, and hook them up to the grid. It looks like that the vast majority of greenhouse gases in the US come from electricity generation or transportation, so at a stroke you could virtually make the entire country emissions-free.
Remember, all you care about is climate change. You know wind and solar can't scale up in time, and electric cars hooked up to coal plants just shift emissions elsewhere. Sure, nuclear waste is an issue, but it pales in comparison as a problem to Africa self-detonating.
This isn't pie-in-the sky--France did it in the 70s, with 70s technology. Today, they don't any fossil fuels for electricity. They didn't even care about the greenhouse gas angle--they just wanted cheap power and energy independence.
With the advances in nuclear power since then, it's even easier to get cheap, clean power for the entire country. Why doesn't anyone talk about that? Why do we keep looking at futuristic technologies that are too expensive or difficult to scale up? Why does energy have become an issue over guilt, rather than a place where we take the most cost-efficient solution and apply it everywhere?
In fact, environmentalists--the people who should be caring about global warming--have been the biggest roadblocks to this happening. This is a perfect example of letting the perfect be an enemy of the good--letting good, safe, clean technology become overlooked because "better" technologies exist. It's also a perfect example of an interest group trying its hardest to work against their own interests.
Environmentalism has always been a torn movement, divided between the sentimentalists (Emerson and company) and the more pragmatic (Teddy Roosevelt). Someday, I hope the latter crowd win and we get hyper-rational, capitalist environmentalists. People who don't just care about the environment for the sake of caring about things, but are actually driven to see improvements. They'll start venture funds, lobby to build nuclear plants, and pore over data. You'll have climate investors demand to see a return on their investment. The environment is too important a cause to be defended by environmentalists. If the Gordon Gekkos and Goldman Sachs of the world decided to care about the environment, you would see improvement very quickly.
This would make for a great political platform too, which could unite business interest (cheap energy) as well people who care about the environment, but don't buy into Greenpeace. It's a no-go area for the Democrats (because of Harry Reid, among other reasons), but some Republicans are talking about it (Mitch Daniels?). China and India realize that nuclear offers a great way to generate cheap, clean, energy and are rapidly building more. Assisting countries like that to make more nuclear power, and then turning all power at home into nuclear, is the only way to seriously cut down greenhouse gasses while keeping energy cheap. That makes for an amazing political platform--but you'll have to plow through the environmentalists first.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)