USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

So far, the lack of daylight between the agendas of the two Democratic contenders for the party’s presidential nomination has kept the focus mostly on experience and campaign tactics. USA Today took a look at the actual economic policies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and especially at the bottom line. They wonder who will pay the bill for the latest Democratic Party giveaway:

In 2009, when the next president takes office, the government is expected to spend $400 billion more than it takes in, adding to a national debt that tops $9 trillion. Yet Clinton and Obama both offer a long list of new spending proposals that suggests a lack of seriousness in confronting the nation’s fiscal condition.
Obama has received more criticism, perhaps deservedly so, because his list is somewhat longer. But Clinton also appears to be overpromising on what she would do and underdelivering on how she would pay for it. …
While it’s hard to come up with a precise price tag given the lack of specifics in many of their proposals, these plans are likely to cost the Treasury well into the hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The National Taxpayers Union, a conservative group that favors lower taxes and smaller government, gives a very rough estimate of $287 billion for Obama and $218 billion for Clinton.
How would the candidates pay for all these new programs without driving the deficit to new heights? Some have specific funding sources; some don’t. The candidates rather vaguely claim that costs would be covered primarily by repealing President Bush’s tax cuts and ending the Iraq war.
This is where the math gets fuzzy.
A rollback of Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans could generate perhaps $75 billion next year. The Iraq war savings are much harder to figure. The war has been costing about $100 billion per year. But a Democratic president, once in office, might decide that national security demands a gradual withdrawal, or a redeployment to Afghanistan. Health care for Iraq war veterans will run into the billions for decades. It’s unlikely that winding down the war will produce a large, quick peace dividend capable of supporting a host of new programs.

The real answer: the taxpayers. Both candidates essentially offer the same discredited statist solutions that now burdens Europe Neither have honestly addressed the costs to taxpayers, nor how it will add to both the deficit spending and the federal intrusion into markets that do better at producing results.
Repealing the Bush tax cuts, both candidates claim, will pay for their fiscal agendas. This assumption is false on two fronts. First, both candidates plan to spend far more than the tax cuts and the war costs, even in static analysis. At best, the income derived from both would cover 75% of Hillary’s plan and 60% of Obama’s.
That doesn’t account for the fact that the so-called war costs also include a lot of normal fixed military costs, and that a withdrawal will actually drive up costs in the short run. Also, the impact of a hefty tax increase — which is the effect of allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire — will be to take capital out of the market, resulting in decreasing revenues, not increasing revenues. Both Hillary and Obama rely on static analyses to hide the true effect of the tax-cut repeal.
That will force both candidates to either increase deficit spending or to hike taxes even further. Both claim they will increase taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, while giving tax breaks to the middle class. That won’t work. The tax increases will have to hit the middle class as well, either directly or indirectly in higher costs associated with heavier burdens on producers — and employers. The gaps are simply too large to be made up by hitting “the rich”, unless one defines “rich” significantly downwards.
Besides, this shouldn’t really take a genius to deduce. Anyone demanding an additional $287 billion a year in spending when we are facing the entitlement debacle from the retirement of the Baby Boomers has to have their head examined. Perhaps one can make an argument for tax increases to cover those costs, but increasing federal spending by hundreds of billions in this situations is akin to looking for an additional iceberg to hit before the Titanic sinks entirely.

Heading Right Radio: Byron York

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Today on Heading Right Radio (2 pm CT), Byron York of National Review joins us to talk about his essay on Tim Pawlenty and Mark Sanford as potential VP selections for John McCain. (Be sure to read Fraters Libertas for some dissenting points on Pawlenty.)
Call 646-652-4889 to join the conversation! And don’t forget to join our chat room! This show is now sponsored by Lifelock — and listen to find out how you can save 10% on their services.
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A Farewell To BlogTalkRadio

Earlier this morning, I wrote about my new position with Hot Air and the new opportunities it affords me. I didn’t write about my status with BlogTalkRadio, in part because of some miscommunication on how to address it.
I will leave BlogTalkRadio at the end of the week. I want to thank Alan Levy, the CEO and my boss since last April, for the wonderful opportunity I have had to work as Political Director and later as Director of Customer Relations. I have enjoyed working with Alan and the entire crew at BTR, as well as the bloggers and talk-show hosts who have created a strong conservative presence on the BTR network. Let me assure you, my departure doesn’t diminish the commitment of BTR to the political channels, especially the vibrant Heading Right community I had the great fortune to build.
I will do my normal schedule of shows this week. Next week, my 3 pm ET show will get rebranded as The Ed Morrissey Show, and hopefully we’ll retire that name quickly as we transition to a Hot Air-branded interactive show. We plan on airing the show from March 3 to March 28 at the Hot Air site with BTR’s network. After March 28, we may reconceptualize the entire idea. I will not do any other shows after February 29th, however, except my afternoon show.
As you might imagine, I am deeply appreciative of BlogTalkRadio and believe in its power to give voice to the individual. It’s been a great ride, and I know they will prosper in the future.

The Road Goes Ever On

Today brings exciting news and an end to a time in my life that has proven far more successful than I ever dreamed. Beginning on March 1, I will begin working for Michelle Malkin, a friend, mentor, and writer I have long admired. She has offered me a position as writer at Hot Air, and my blogging will appear exclusively there.
That means that I will close out Captain’s Quarters sometime in March. This saddens me, as it has become my ever-ready home and because of the terrific community it has generated. I hope that the CapQ community comes with me to Hot Air, and Hot Air will have open registration today for 12 hours in order to allow CapQ commenters to join me at my new digs.
Michelle and I have different voices, and sometimes different points of view. Rest assured that Michelle respects these differences and wants them as part of Hot Air. My writing and my viewpoints will continue, and find even more encouragement than before. In fact, we look forward to debating on some of these points between her personal blog and Hot Air, much as we have between her personal blog and CapQ – with respect, affection, and the absolute belief that we have it right!
In short, nothing really changes except location. I’ll still write as I have always done, perhaps with even more frequency, as I join Allahpundit at Hot Air. I’ll continue my daily show as a key piece in building the Hot Air brand and increasing our visibility. The show may take new directions before long, but we’ll talk more about that when the time comes.
At some point, we’ll redirect the CapQ domain to Hot Air. My archives will remain on line, though, and I intend to keep them available permanently at this link. Comments will close on all posts after March 1, even though I may cross-post for another few weeks to make for a smooth transition.
I want to thank everyone who has helped make Captain’s Quarters such a great success. I hope you will all join me on the next part of the great adventure.
UPDATE: Michelle wrote a warm, welcoming announcement at both Hot Air and her own blog. Be sure to register as a commenter today so that we can all pick up where we left off here on March 1. Also, I’ve done my first (cross-)post at Hot Air.
UPDATE II & BUMP, 10:39: The link for commenter registration is here. There is no requirement to register to just read the site. And let me say thank you to the numerous well-wishers in the comments and on e-mail this morning.

AOL Hot Seat Question Of The Day

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AOL and BlogTalkRadio have partnered on the Hot Seat poll, extending the debate to our listenership. I will host a 15-minute show weekdays at 1:00 pm ET to review the poll, interview the blogger, and take calls from the participants. We’ll speak to a wide spectrum of bloggers and callers alike for each day’s poll — including today’s:
[Poll expired.]
Be sure to tune it at BlogTalkRadio — and don’t forget to cast your votes! We will also take your calls at (347) 205-9555.

Not An Aphrodisiac

The Hillary Clinton campaign has tried just about everything that it can to derail Barack Obama’s improbable rise to front-runner status in the Democratic primaries. Now it has begun circulating a photo of the young politician pandering to Muslims abroad by adopting a native costume, calling into question his commitment to Christianity and opposition to Islamist terror:
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Oh, hey! Wrong picture. I meant this one:
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Damn! Wrong one again! Let’s try one more time:
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Dating and campaigning have something in common. The reek of desperation does not act as an aphrodisiac on potential suitors.

Where’s The Diplomatic Beef?

Benny Avni at the New York Sun looks at Barack Obama’s promise to meet with America’s enemies, and wonders what could come from this policy. Given that Obama doesn’t discuss the goals or the potential trading points would be, Avni sees the potential for humiliation as far greater than that of progress. It also demonstrates Obama’s moral relativism:

For Mr. Obama, however, dangling high-end diplomatic meetings as an incentive for a change in behavior is bad policy rooted in American hubris. “If we think that meeting with the president is a privilege that has to be earned, I think that reinforces the sense that we stand above the rest of the world at this point in time,” he said during the CNN/Univision debate with Senator Clinton on Thursday.
His aversion to American exceptionalism aside, Mr. Obama’s position evolved out of a primary debate last July, when he casually said he would talk, without preconditions, with the leaders of Iran and Syria. Mrs. Clinton immediately seized on the statement as a gaffe by an inexperienced politician, but Mr. Obama declined to correct his course. He instead doubled down and in last week’s debate said he favored a sit-down with Raul Castro, selected yesterday in Havana as his brother Fidel’s successor, before a single political prisoner is let out of Cuba’s gulags.
Because of his background, Mr. Obama is likely to increase goodwill toward America around the world. The leaders of Cuba, Syria, Iran, and North Korea are likely to welcome him too, which may open up new diplomatic opportunities. But what will he tell them? So far, he has declined to articulate a coherent negotiation policy beyond the need to negotiate.
For tutoring, he may turn to President Clinton’s first secretary of state, Warren Christopher, whose multiple trips to Damascus during the reign of Hafez al-Assad in the mid-1990s famously led to little of note beyond a great humiliation to America’s diplomacy. Or Mr. Obama may want to talk to the European Union’s foreign policy point man, Javier Solana, who has negotiated endlessly with the Iranian mullahs in an effort to convince them to suspend their enrichment. Or he could secretly turn to his nemeses at the current White House. Try Christopher Hill, whose negotiations with the North Koreans were successful on all fronts — except for Pyongyang’s failure to deliver its end of the bargain, as in dismantling its nuclear program.

Supporters of Obama wonder what it would hurt to meet with people like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Kim Jong-Il. As Avni explains, it creates a legitimacy that has far-reaching repercussions. In nations ruled by extraordinarily oppressive regimes, we try to support ground-up democratic movements to find alternatives to the dictatorships. These nations directly threaten the US and its allies, and it is in our best interest to encourage the reformers than to publicly befriend their oppressors.
We can, however, push for progress in lower-level diplomatic contacts in hopes of gaining real change by holding out the possibility of higher-level contacts later. We gain more from supporting the reformers than we can in a tea party with the dictators. The point of diplomacy, after all, is to further American interests, and that has usually meant helping to free people from oppression than to give oppressors a nice photo op.
Moreover, in contract to Obama’s rhetoric, the US does stand above many other nations in terms of liberty, justice, and standard of living. North Koreans routinely starve while Kim’s elite delight in Western trade. The Iranians chafe under the theocracy that has brought them misery and poverty despite having enormous oil resources.
Why should an American President consider Iran and the DPRK our equal among nations? Why should Americans elect a man to the presidency who does not believe that we stand above at least those two nations and their dictators? That’s what Barack Obama doesn’t understand, and why his stated foreign policy smacks of dangerous moral relativism.

The Ironic IAEA

Mohammed ElBaradei has issued a new IAEA finding that states Iranian explanations of its nuclear activities — with one glaring exception –are “consistent” with the agency’s own findings. Danielle Pletka and Michael Rubin slam ElBaradai in today’s Wall Street Journal for his agenda in assisting Iran in hiding the true nature of its nuclear activities, and of hiding behind his Nobel Peace Prize to do so:

The report represents Mr. ElBaradei’s best effort to whitewash Tehran’s record. Earlier this month, on Iranian television, he made clear his purpose, announcing that he expected “the issue would be solved this year.” And if doing so required that he do battle against the IAEA’s technical experts, reverse previous conclusions about suspect programs, and allow designees of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad an unprecedented role in crafting a “work plan” that would allow the regime to receive a cleaner bill of health from the IAEA — so be it.
Mr. ElBaradei’s report culminates a career of freelancing and fecklessness which has crippled the reputation of the organization he directs. He has used his Nobel Prize to cultivate an image of a technocratic lawyer interested in peace and justice and above politics. In reality, he is a deeply political figure, animated by antipathy for the West and for Israel on what has increasingly become a single-minded crusade to rescue favored regimes from charges of proliferation.
Mr. ElBaradei assumed the directorship on Dec. 1, 1997. On his watch, but undetected by his agency, Iran constructed its covert enrichment facilities and, according to the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, engaged in covert nuclear-weapons design. India and Pakistan detonated nuclear devices. A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear godfather, exported nuclear technology around the world.
In 2003, Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi confessed to an undetected weapons effort. Mr. ElBaradei’s response? He rebuked the U.S. and U.K. for bypassing him. When Israel recently destroyed what many believe was a secret (also undetected) nuclear facility in Syria, Mr. ElBaradei told the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh that it is “unlikely that this building was a nuclear facility,” although his agency has not physically investigated the site.

ElBaradei does have an enthusiasm for helping Iran escape the consequences for its nuclear research. Tehran fooled the IAEA for almost a decade while it worked on nuclear weapons, including several years while ElBaradei ran the agency. After the discovery of their attempt to construct a nuclear weapon, ElBaradei remained strangely credulous of their later denials, even though the Iranians have never let the IAEA into suspect facilities such as Parchin.
As with other international regulatory boards and commissions, the IAEA seems more focused on opposing the US rather than stopping nuclear-arms proliferation. This comes as a piece to the UN Human Rights Council, which took up its anti-West, anti-Israeli business right where it left off from the old Human Rights Committee after a change of letterhead. The IAEA and the UN seem determined to prove that pursuit of multilateral bureaucracies are a folly that cannot long be suffered if one wants real security against real threats.
And ironically, the IAEA is helping to undermine the UN. While the UN Security Council tries to contain Iran and take the threat from the mullahcracy seriously, ElBaradei’s pronouncements make gridlock at the UNSC all but inevitable. His rosy reports give Russia and China an excuse to drag their feet on confronting Tehran, which will inevitably force the US, France, and UK to seek solutions that bypass Turtle Bay. As Pletka and Rubin conclude, the IAEA is working overtime to make a military solution the only option left on the table.

Is This Helpful?

The ascent of Barack Obama to front-runner status has also given rise to some highly irresponsible talk in the media, mostly sotto voce, about the potential for assassination. The New York Times breaks this into the open, giving Obama more uncomfortable associations with Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy than those his soaring rhetoric had already generated:

There is a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to rally: Will he be safe?
In Colorado, two sisters say they pray daily for his safety. In New Mexico, a daughter says she persuaded her mother to still vote for Mr. Obama, even though the mother feared that winning would put him in danger. And at a rally here, a woman expressed worries that a message of hope and change, in addition to his race, made him more vulnerable to violence.
“I’ve got the best protection in the world,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said in an interview, reprising a line he tells supporters who raise the issue with him. “So stop worrying.”
Yet worry they do, with the spring of 1968 seared into their memories, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in a span of two months.
Mr. Obama was 6 at the time, and like many of his admirers, he has only read about the violence that traumatized the nation. But those recollections and images are often invoked by older voters, who watch his candidacy with fascination, as well as an uneasy air of apprehension, as Democrats inch closer to selecting their nominee.

Why does the Times, and other media outlets, even make this an issue? Will talking about this make Obama or anyone else one whit safer? Of course not. The Times makes it worse by releasing Obama’s Secret Service code name, which has usually been considered confidential. Karl Rove recently refused to reveal his, and he no longer has Secret Service protection.
In one sense, the debate over the potential for assassination gives Obama even more of a messianic veneer. King and Kennedy were both cast as martyrs, the former for more reason than the latter, after their murders. This focus on Obama as a prime target is giving him a pre-martyr sense, something Obama and his family certainly don’t appreciate for very obvious reasons. He doesn’t want to martyr himself — he just wants to run for President. And while Obama probably likes people comparing him to Kennedy and King, he doesn’t want to join them.
2008 isn’t 1968. The Secret Service knows how to protect people to the extent they can be protected, and Obama has had their protection for almost a year. Nothing more can be done to keep him from harm. It serves no purpose to have public hand-wringing over his security or that of any other candidate, and it could encourage nutcases to test the Secret Service.

Can The Dolphin Be Far Behind?

They call him Flipper, Flipper, faster than lightning,
No-one you see, is smarter than he….

When Mitt Romney first appeared at CPAC in 2007 as a presidential candidate, a man in a dolphin costume began following him to highlight his “flip-flops” on policy. Flipper made an appearance at this year’s CPAC as well, but found himself out of a job on the first day when Romney withdrew from the presidential race. If he reads today’s Washington Post, he might find new material to extend his gig by making appearances at Barack Obama rallies instead:

Top Obama Flip-Flops
1. Special interests In January, the Obama campaign described union contributions to the campaigns of Clinton and John Edwards as “special interest” money. Obama changed his tune as he began gathering his own union endorsements. He now refers respectfully to unions as the representatives of “working people” and says he is “thrilled” by their support.
2. Public financing Obama replied “yes” in September 2007 when asked if he would agree to public financing of the presidential election if his GOP opponent did the same. Obama has now attached several conditions to such an agreement, including regulating spending by outside groups. His spokesman says the candidate never committed himself on the matter.
3. The Cuba embargo In January 2004, Obama said it was time “to end the embargo with Cuba” because it had “utterly failed in the effort to overthrow Castro.” Speaking to a Cuban American audience in Miami in August 2007, he said he would not “take off the embargo” as president because it is “an important inducement for change.”
4. Illegal immigration In a March 2004 questionnaire, Obama was asked if the government should “crack down on businesses that hire illegal immigrants.” He replied “Oppose.” In a Jan. 31, 2008, televised debate, he said that “we do have to crack down on those employers that are taking advantage of the situation.”
5. Decriminalization of marijuana While running for the U.S. Senate in January 2004, Obama told Illinois college students that he supported eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana use. In the Oct. 30, 2007, presidential debate, he joined other Democratic candidates in opposing the decriminalization of marijuana.

The Post, which does not have a byline for this article, also has a list of Hillary Clinton’s flip-flops …. but who cares at this point? The Clintons have always triangulated; it’s their main strategy in grabbing and holding power. Issuing a comprehensive list of their switchbacks could take months and more newsprint than the Post can afford.
It stings the Obama campaign more, and rightly so. Obama has made his new, non-pandering politics the central selling point for his election. This shows that Obama has no problem with adjusting his message when needed. The specifics of the changes are less interesting than the changes themselves. It also calls into question for what Obama really stands, other than platitudes about “hope” and “change”.
Mitt Romney got bounced from the campaign for changing his mind on fewer policy issues over a much longer period of time. If people thought Romney had authenticity issues, what will they make from these more recent and more numerous Obama flip-flops? Will Flipper find a new lease on life out on the campaign trail?