“It’s one thing about the money. We’d be willing to negotiate the money. [But] he’s trying to take away our human rights.”

So says Laurie Bauer, a 51 year old library media specialist in Wisconsin, speaking about the governor’s effort to introduce budget cutting reforms to public sector unions.

Really? You want to make this about human rights while simultaneously arguing against right-to-work laws? Wisconsin is currently a union shop state, meaning that employees must either join the union or pay the equivalent of union dues. It’s either pay up or get out. Such extortionism-lite, is not exactly what I think of when I hear the words “human rights.”

The fact is, it’s all about the money. The state needs to save more of it in order to close a $137 million deficit and public sector employees want to keep more in their pockets. I don’t blame them necessarily, they’ve legally negotiated their salaries with prior elected officials. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t time for some change. After all, are we so quick to forget this episode that happened this past November, as reported by the National Review:

“In a letter [Gov. Walker] asked outgoing Democratic governor Jim Doyle to refrain from finalizing contracts with state union employees. The governor nonetheless continued to negotiate the contracts, and when he finalized them, the assembly pushed ahead, even pulling one Democratic assemblyman out of jail (where he was serving a 60-day sentence for drunk driving) for a day so that he could cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the contracts. But in a surprise move, Democratic senate majority leader Russ Decker voted against the contracts. Outraged Democrats stripped Decker of his leadership position that same day.”

So don’t let me hear sob stories from unions about how this was a fair deal between them and government. The fact is, the you scratch our back and we’ll scratch yours approach to swapping election votes for hearty concessions leaves the average taxpayer out to dry.

As it stands Wisconsin public sector workers have secured pay and benefits well above that of the average private sector worker. Currently, union workers in Wisconsin pay only 6 percent of their health care premium costs. They also receive a generous defined-benefit pension in which they contribute only .2 percent of their gross pay towards their retirement.

Governor Walker’s bill would raise the average employee contribution to 5.8 percent of salary for pensions and 12percent toward health insurance premiums.

As the Wall Street Journal wrote today,

If those numbers don’t sound outrageous, you probably work in the private economy. The comparable nationwide employee health-care contribution is 20% for private industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average employee contribution from take-home pay for retirement was 7.5% in 2009, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute.

In other words, even with the changes, they are still doing better than the national average of private sector workers!

Public sector union workers just don’t want to say it’s about the money. They don’t want to admit that even with the changes, not only will they still be substantially better compensated than private workers, but will also still pay less towards pensions and healthcare than the average government worker across the country.

Unwilling to admit that, they’re going to extremes. They’re drawing parallels between Gov. Walker and Hosni Mubarak, the recently deposed dictator of Egypt. They’re calling it a “throwback” to “communist Poland and East Germany.” And if all else fails, they pull out the tired line – it’s all about the kids.

Of course, it’s tough to say it’s all about the kids when 40 percent of the teachers called in sick, in an apparent protest to the proposed cuts. If it’s about the kids, you’ll get in the classroom and teach.

But it’s not about the kids, or human rights, or Gov. Walker being a fascistic dictator, it’s about money. And the bottom line is that the state has to save more of it. Ideally we’d do this through shared sacrifice, but the public sector unions have shown no desire to be a part of it.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/02/18/wisconsin-unions-show-no-willingness-to-share-in-sacrifice/

Anti-business Obama is back in business.

There for a while it looked like President Obama was actually going to make friends with America’s businesses. In December he met a group of 20 chief executives, the latest in a series of meetings designed to thaw the icy relations between the White House and business leaders.  At the end of the meetings Obama said, “I feel very confidence we made some good progress.” CEOs seemed similarly pleased with the results, “At the end of the day the idea is how business and the White House work hand-in-hand together to create more growth,” said Robert Wolf, chief executive of UBS Group.

President Obama even used his State of the Union to cozy up to business leaders and explain the government’s role in the job creation process. “The true engine of job creation in this country will always be America’s businesses. But government can create the conditions necessary for businesses to expand and hire more workers,” Obama said .

Carrying that momentum, Obama gave a speech at the U.S Chamber of Commerce in February in “an attempt to mend strained relations between his administration and the business community.” He said , “I’m here today because I’m convinced we can work together. . . If we can harness your potential and the potential of the people all across our country, there will be no stopping us.”

And then came yesterday. All that talk about working together, about creating conditions for businesses to thrive, and about competing in a global economy got crushed beneath 209 pages of Obama’s budget.

Obama did his best to hide the anti-business nature of his budget. There’s an entire section entitled “Competing and Winning in the World Economy,” for goodness sakes. But when you dig into exactly what Obama has planned, you see that it has very little to do with allowing business to flourish and a lot to do with letting government grow.

His plan has three pillars : “an educated and skilled workforce; cutting edge research into the innovations that will power the industries of tomorrow; and a modern, robust infrastructure that can support a growing, high tech economy.”

All that stuff is well and good, but it doesn’t mean jack if you can’t keep companies on our shores in an increasingly globalized economy. Sure companies like educated employees, research and development tax credits, and solid infrastructure, but the real language they speak is money. Increasingly, these perks that Obama is doubling-down on are failing to compete with the more favorable tax jurisdictions overseas.

Obama’s budget makes our tax burden on businesses even heavier.

The first big hit is a $129 billion tax hike on overseas profits of companies. Under the current system, American multinational corporations are doubled taxed. That is, they are taxed in the nation where they make the profits and then taxed by the United States on the same profits. Of course, the United States makes up for this by providing companies with a tax credit for whatever taxes they paid in the other nation. To compensate for the competitive disadvantage this creates Congress traditionally allowed businesses to only pay taxes when they repatriated their earning back to the US.

Rather than get rid of this convoluted system altogether in favor of a territorial tax system, something that we have advocated for , Obama has decided to make things worse. His plan is to make companies pay taxes on their foreign earnings whether they repatriate them or not. This will make the US even more of an anti-business jurisdiction by creating a more punitive tax code. Moreover, it doesn’t solve the problem, rather it simply creates an enormous incentive for businesses to simply form elsewhere.

The second job killer is Obama’s assault on investment. Obama’s budget proposes to bring back pre-2001 tax rates on capital gains. The problem is best explained by Glenn Hubbard, Dean of the Columbia Business School and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers:

Think of the economy as a pie split among workers, savers and the government, with the government’s slice fixed. The savers’ slice will equal the after-tax return on each unit of the capital stock, and what’s left goes to workers as after-tax wages. The fairness advocates in effect claim that low tax rates on dividends and capital gains increase the share of the pie that goes to high-income savers. But the low tax rates increase the absolute size of the workers’ slice by making the entire pie bigger. That’s because low tax rates encourage capital accumulation, productivity and wage growth.

By taxing capital, we are in effect discouraging investment in the economy. While that might not lead to immediate problems it could have potentially disastrous effects on our long-term ability to create wealth and jobs.

So what happened to the President Obama that was a friend of business? The truth is, he was never there. As we’ve come to learn through promise after promise, Obama’s words are often nothing more than a political ploy to appear responsive to the pressures of the day. If the public starts to think he’s anti-business he goes and speaks jovially to the Chamber of Commerce. If he comes off as a big-spender, he talks sternly about how he will focus on the deficit. If the talk centers around how he doesn’t listen to Republican ideas, he’ll hold some fancy conference in the Blair House.

He’s a chameleon, and a damn good one. So forget the talk of Obama extending an olive branch to business. His budget reveals his true colors, and he is, as he always was, a tax-and-spend liberal.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

Crossposted: http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/02/15/so-much-for-an-olive-branch-obamas-budget-reveals-more-taxes-on-businesses/

Warning: Doom and gloom ahead.

Following the State of the Union, Slate writer John Dickerson made an interesting observation about President Obama’s mood.

President Obama has been more upbeat in 2011 than he said he was going to be. Last year he promised America a tough conversation about cutting the deficit. “If we are concerned about debt and deficits, then we’re going to have to take actions that are difficult and we’re going to have to tell the truth to the American people,” he said. Shrinking government would be his focus for the remainder of his first term, he pledged. Everything else would be secondary, even investments of the kind he is now proposing. They would have to wait until he presented “a credible plan for dealing with the medium- and long-term budget problems.”

That “tough talk” nonsense went straight out the window. Apparently, Obama’s speechwriters are very one-dimensional, they can only do happy and hopeful, not serious and concerned. But this isn’t a romantic comedy, and if it is, it’s a bad one. Things don’t necessarily have to end well. This isn’t an episode of Friends for chrissakes.

But it’s a smart move. While President Obama is out talking about “winning the future” while handing out t-shirts that say “We do Big Things,” Republicans are out there being Grumpy Guses.

Or at least that is the perception. In reality, we’re all about some hope. We hope that we can get the deficit back down to a level where businesses and investors don’t have to sit on edge in fear of a drastic spike in interest rates. It’s a jobs agenda, but it’s a multi-step one. We want to lower spending so we can pay down the deficit to prevent future tax hikes and interest rate rises to enable businesses to get off the sidelines and into the game. Try fitting that on a T-shirt.

By contrast, Obama’s job is much simpler. We just need to invest. One step. Wham-bam, thank you ma’am, be sure to vote in 2012.

It’s a carefully conceived gamble. As Dickerson writes:

The president has decided that he’ll let Republicans be the dour ones. A credible deficit-reduction plan is no longer a precondition for weeks of talk about plans for government investment. Let Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, do all that gloomy talking about the grim fiscal picture. . .

The two parties are making opposite bets about what the public really thinks about the deficit. The president is betting that people don’t see an iron connection between reducing the deficit and increasing the number of jobs. When they judge who is doing more for them—the GOP or the president—they will pick the person optimistic about the future, not the guys preaching pain.

The problem, as Dickerson rightly points out, is that deficits don’t have an immediate job impact. It’s like all the economic fallacies that liberals employ – they come out looking like winners because the time frame is short and the beneficiaries are clear. Take the example of government funding to build a bridge. The government will take the immediate results and say, look at the jobs that were “created or saved” to build this bridge. Conservatives will say, for every dollar that is spent on the bridge a dollar is being taken away from taxpayers, for every job that was created with that dollar a job is being taken away somewhere else. The problem is that the dollar is spread among every taxpayer and the jobs are fractional and spread throughout the economy. So while liberals are pointing on their shiny new bridge and shaking hands with the construction worker to post on the White House blog, conservatives are left pointing at economic formulas.

It’s a losing argument.

The problem is that so long as one party injects politics into the policy, it is likely to stay a losing argument, up until the very moment when the economic house of cards comes crashing down.

Ideally, you’d like to hit the brakes before you hit the wall, but when President Obama keeps telling you that the wall is made of fluffy pillows and if you just step on the gas hard enough you’ll break right through it, it’s tough to get people to pay attention. Unless we wake up and stop smelling Obama’s roses, we’ll all just be crash test dummies.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

Crossposted: http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/02/15/obamas-happy-talk-will-lead-to-an-unhappy-future/

The Democrats’ cynical gamble now looks about as smart as betting on Pittsburgh in the Super Bowl. The gamble was despite voters saying they want to reduce the deficit, when push comes to shove they will vote out the politicians who made the cuts.

Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent explained the rationale in a recent post ,

Don’t look now, but there are increasing signs that Democrats are adopting a surprisingly aggressive and unapologetic posture in the looming political battle with Republicans over government spending. Rather than running from the issue . . . they are treating this as an argument that can be turned to their advantage, if it’s framed in the right way.

A Democratic strategist familiar with ongoing discussions says Dems have been encouraged by recent polling on these questions. While polls undoubtedly show that the public supports reducing government spending in general, Gallup recently found that sizable majorities oppose cuts to education, funding for the arts and sciences, Social Security and Medicare.

Democrats’ move is cynical because it is pure election politics, completely ignoring the budgetary realities that threaten to push us towards insolvency. It is a strategy based in short term success for the Democratic Party, even if it meant long term disaster for the nation as a whole.

As it turns out, gambling against Americans is a bad idea. It is no doubt true that Americans love many of the programs government funding supports. Older voters will fiercely defend Social Security, young adults want to maintain public subsidies for higher education, and everyone in between has likes something or another funded by the government. But that doesn’t mean we as a society do not understand that our government cannot continue to live beyond its means.

The latest proof comes from who else, the king of in-your-face budget cutters, Chris Christie. A Quinnipiac University poll out today finds that 52 percent of New Jersey voters saying they approve of governor Christie. That’s up 6 points since December. Eight in ten Republicans, and more importantly, 55 percent of independents approve of the job Christie has done.

“Deep cuts in public budgets and a popular governor don’t usually go together,” said Peter Woolley , a Fairleigh Dickinson professor who has also polled New Jersey.

Woolley was right. That’s just what Democrats were gambling on. But things have changed. Our nation’s dire fiscal straits have reframed the debate. Voters understand that we cannot remain on our current spending path and that we have a choice to make – more taxes or less government. Regardless of what choice they make voters are increasingly rewarding politicians who engage in the debate rather than continue on with their head in the sand.

Democrat’s had better adjust their strategy. Any more gambles like this and they will soon find their party has gone belly up.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/02/09/gov-christies-rising-approval-rating-shows-dem-gamble-failed/

Democrats love to paint the picture of Republicans cozying up to lobbyists. Their always either eating lunch in some impossibly upscale place where average folk couldn’t even sniff a reservation, or in some dark, smoke filled, bar smoking cigars and sipping Scotch, their pinky finger stuck out for good measure. The story goes, Republicans are in it for the money, Democrats are the ones left to defend the average people.

Yeah, well get ready to toss that fairy-tale out the window. ABC News reported today that key Democrats are gathering together an army of lobbyists and special interest groups who stand to lose big money from Republican’s proposed budget cuts.

In an e-mail obtained by ABC News , a top staffer for the key Senate Appropriations subcommittee called for a meeting of lobbyists and interest groups that would be affected by expected cuts to the Labor and Heath and Human Services budget. The Jan. 24 meeting was attended by approximately 400 people, sources told ABC, and served as a “call to arms” for those determined to fight Republican budget cuts.

“One thing everyone should be able to agree on now is that a rising tide lifts all boats, and that a higher [Labor, Health & Human Services] allocation improves the chances for every stakeholder group to receive more funding ,” the committee staffer for Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, wrote in an e-mail inviting people to the meeting.

While Republicans are searching for ways to trim our exorbitant budget deficit, Democrats are looking for ways to preserve funding for their pet projects.

Our debt and deficit represent the largest threat to the next generation. Unless our fiscal path changes drastically, the economy will grow more slowly, the job market will become ever-more competitive, and wages will fall.  At the end of the day our American Dream will consist of smaller houses, fewer opportunities, and reduced aspirations.

None of that matters to the special interests and lobbyists that Democrats are currently courting to help them fight to keep the government money train rolling. They care about maximizing their results today.  That means ensuring teachers unions continue to receive cushy pensions, regardless of how they perform in the classroom. That means ensuring that the Health and Human Services budget doesn’t get cut so the hordes of new administrators don’t lose their plum government jobs. It means fighting for their individual interests over the interests of all Americans.

Paul Lindsay of the National Republican Congressional Committee wrote to reporters,

“House Democrats will stop at nothing to block efforts to cut spending and reduce the deficit. To help in this fight, they’ve enlisted their Senate Democrat colleagues and special interest lobbyists to use scare tactics in order to help continue their government spending binge that continues to inhibit job creation throughout the country.”

Normally, I’d say “scare tactics” is taking it a little far. But one of ABC’s sources inside the Democrats’ meeting with lobbyists wrote ,

“They said these evil House Republicans are here and they’re going to kill all these programs that support little kids, senior citizens, and health care. They’re trying to instill the fear of God that Republicans are basically going to blow up all these programs, kill these programs, defund them.”

Such hypocrisy must stop. Our deficit is not something that can be toyed with. Republicans’ effort to trim the budget represents a long overdue attempt at clamping down on the massive waste of taxpayer money that has defined Washington over the past decade. If Democrats are not going to join us in an honest discussion over how best to address our nation’s most fundamental problem, instead choosing to talk behind our back with lobbyists, then we will go it alone.

Solving our deficit is shaping up to be a battle between special interests and our future. Democrats are showing what side they are on.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

Crossposted: http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/02/04/democrats-secret-meeting-with-lobbyists-show-they-arent-serious-about-our-deficit/

The U.S. Senate voted on Wednesday to get rid of a small part of the Obamacare bill.

The eliminated provision was a requirement that all businesses submit a 1099 tax form on all purchases of goods and services of more than $600. It was designed to ensure that businesses actually keep up with and pay the taxes they owe.

Your probably asking what the heck this has to do with healthcare. Good question. The answer is absolutely nothing. In fact, the only reason it was included in the Obamacare bill at all is that it was expected to generate $17 billion in new tax revenue that Democrats wanted to use to lower the cost of their spend-happy bill.

The problem is, not long after the bill was passed, almost everyone agreed that it was a terrible, no good, very bad idea. The US Chamber of Commerce said that the new regulations would amount to “oppressive regulations” that would cause an “avalanche of new paperwork for small business owners.” As Time blogger Adam Sorenson wrote today,

Basically, it wasn’t well thought out and shortly after passage, both Democrats and Republicans agreed they wanted it gone. Forget today’s 81-17 vote for a moment. Max Baucus, who wrote the freaking thing to begin with, introduced language that would have nixed it last year. Repealing it was even a bullet point in President Obama’s State of the Union corporate pep talk on how to Win the Future.

The 1099 measure is pretty much a metaphor for the entire Obamacare bill: poorly thought out, bad for business, and in dire need of repeal.

The 1099 provision was passed with the hope that it would reduce the number of businesses who either mistakenly or purposefully cheat the system. In true government fashion, it does this by making a complex tax code even harder to comply with. In other words, the Democrats saw a real problem, and then proceeded to make it worse by piling on more government. The unintended consequences quickly became clear – the increased cost of compliance would have cost businesses money and dampened job growth.

Obamacare does the exact same thing. To its credit it came in response to a true problem; healthcare costs are rising much faster than inflation and will soon put families and the federal government in a tough financial situation. Rather than offer true reform, went to their go-to maneuver – add more government to the mix.  The results, even if unintended, have been disastrous.

Older generations have been hurt. Obamacare led to 700,000 seniors losing the Medicare Advantage plans because of insurance companies quitting the business. Children have been hurt. Health insurers in 34 states have stopped selling child-only policies because insurance companies have dropped out of the market citing higher costs. High risk patients have been hurt. Obamacare’s high risk pools have attracted a mere 8,000 people , well short of the 375,000 expected, in large part due to higher than expected costs. Frankly, everyone has been hurt! Health insurers across the board say they will be forced to raise premiums 1-9% to pay for new mandated benefits under the law.

It’s not just the 1099 provision whose unintended consequences demand that Congress rescind it, it’s the entire Obamacare monstrosity. Susan Eckerly of the National Federation of Independent Business wrote in a letter to Senators about the 1099 reporting requirement, “At a time when we need small businesses to help our economy grow, saddling them with expensive new requirements and paperwork burdens will only further hamper their ability to aid in our economic recovery.” She may as well have been talking about the entire bill.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Commitee

XPosted: http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/02/03/1099-repeal-a-metaphor-for-larger-obamacare-debate/

Judge Vinson just placed himself in the upper echelons of liberal’s shit list. Apparently liberal ideologues just can’t imagine that anyone could find a flaw in their greatest of achievements – Obamacare.

“There’s something thoroughly odd and unconventional about the analysis,” said one White House official. Really? The best critique you can come up with is “odd” and “unconventional”? This guy is clearly a legal scholar. I mean c’mon. Attack the precedent its based on, go after the logic used, argue that its interpretation of the Commerce Clause is way off, but if all you can say is essentially that it is weird, do me a favor and shut your yap. All that tells me is that you really, really, really want to find something wrong with the opinion, but can’t think of one darn thing that you is worthy of criticism.

Sadly, calling it “odd and unconventional” seems to be the best liberals could muster. Ezra Klein decided to compare it to Bush v. Gore for the simple, if idiotic, reason that it’s another case that liberals hate. Jonathan Cohn went on a search for clues to some sort of conspiracy theory and came up with a veiled reference to Tea Party groups. Look, look, it’s right there on page 42! Judge Vinson was trying to make the point that it seems ridiculous our founders would rebel against a tax on tea if they were then going to create a government that could mandate its purchase. Cohn loses all nuance, essentially pointing and shouting “He said tea! He said tea!” This he says is an obvious “shout out to the Tea Party.” To my knowledge liberals have been unable to find any hidden references or codes about Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck.

Finally, unable to come up with any of their own critiques, they decided to steal one of conservatives lines of attack – judicial activism. Stephanie Cutter of the White House Blog writes a post entitled “Judicial Activism and the Affordable Care Act” in which she argues, “Today’s ruling – issued by Judge Vinson in the Northern District of Florida – is a plain case of judicial overreaching. “ Jonathan Cohn echoes the argument,

“If judicial restraint means anything, it means deferring to the Congress on matters of policy preference–like, for example, whether it’s better to run a national health insurance system with a system of regulated private insurance rather than via a single-payer, government-run plan”

What liberals like Cohn and Cutter fail to understand is that the measuring stick for judicial activism is not Congress, it’s the Constitution. Obamacare runs so far afoul of the Constitution, by broadening its Commerce powers to the point where Congress could do almost anything, that only judicial activism could interpret it any other way.

So why is Judge Vinson’s ruling getting liberal’s undies in a wad? After all, he isn’t the first judge to rule that Obamacare is unconstitutional. Ah, but he is the first judge to strike the law down in its entirety .  Whereas the previous court found that the individual mandate (perhaps the most Constitutionally odious portion of the bill) could be taken out of the bill without harm, Vinson ruled otherwise.

On this issue, liberals shot themselves in the foot. As Vinson writes in his opinion,

I note that the defendants have acknowledged that the individual mandate and the Act’s health insurance reforms, including the guaranteed issue and community rating, will rise or fall together as these reforms “cannot be severed from the [individual mandate].” See, e.g., Def. Opp. at 40. As explained in my order on the motion to dismiss: “the defendants concede that [the individual mandate] is absolutely necessary for the Act’s insurance market reforms to work as intended. In fact, they refer to it as an ‘essential’ part of the Act at least fourteen times in their motion to dismiss.”

Congress knew that the individual mandate was essential to keeping healthcare costs low. By mandating younger, healthier individuals purchase more comprehensive healthcare than they want, or likely need, the bill could effectively subsidize their planned coverage expansion. Congress even said in the Act that,

[I]f there were no [individual mandate], many individuals would wait to purchase health insurance until they needed care . . . The [individual mandate] is essential to creating effective health insurance markets in which improved health insurance products that are guaranteed issue and do not exclude coverage of pre-existing conditions can be sold.

Now that liberals have spent the better part of the last two days trying, and dismally failing, to argue with Vinson on the merits, the fun part will be watching Democrats argue against themselves. Vinson’s agreement with Democratic legislators on the issue of severability essentially means that their lawyers will have to use their appeal to argue that the individual mandate was not necessary after all. As if their house of cards won’t tumble down when you remove the aces that prop up the entire thing.

Democrats greatest achievement of Obama’s term may also end up being their most spectacular failure. If they can’t do any better than call the decision “odd,” that result seems inevitable.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/02/02/obamacare-ruling-has-tied-democrats-in-rhetorical-knots/

High speed rail can travel up to 160 miles per hour. Pretty darn fast. The only downside is, it wastes taxpayer money almost as quickly.

The budgetary history of government rail projects is an ugly one. In fact, after some cursory research, I could not find one single high speed rail project in the world that didn’t receive an enormous government subsidy. Not one!

Japan is often the country most associated with high-speed rail. The state-owned Japanese National Railways has run an operating deficit every year since the opening of its first high speed line. In the late 80s, after continuous deficits led to a financial crisis, the government privatized the railway. Today, private operators are earning a “profit” but only because rail service continues to receive a generous subsidy.

Europe has faced similar problems. France, by far Europe’s number one high-speed rail carrier, has actually seen a decline in use over time. In 1980 rail accounted for 8.2% of passenger travel, according to research done by the Cato Institute, by 2000 it had declined to 6.3 percent despite the advent of high speed rail. University of Paris economist Remy Prud’Homme told Cato that, “Users pay about half the total cost of providing the service,” and estimates that rail service receives about $100 billion in subsidies each year.

Despite this reality, when Obama sold his stimulus plan he said, “I am always jealous about European trains. And I said to myself, ‘why can’t we have high speed rail?’ And so, we’re investing in that as well.” Apparently jealousy trumps sound-economics in this White House.

The United State’s experience with government run rail is similarly disastrous. Amtrak lost money on 41 of its 45 train lines in 2008, according to a study done by Pew Charitable Trust. The average loss per passenger on trains was approximately $32. One train, serving the east cost from New York to Miami, which you would assume would be one of its more profitable lines, had a $145.23 per passenger loss. It literally costs taxpayers hundreds of dollars every time someone stepped on that Amtrak train.

Don’t even get me started on the Washington, DC metro system. We can’t get escalators to work, trains to run on time, or track maintenance done properly and it still operates with a 68 cents per-passenger subsidy!

Despite this ugly reality President Obama has seemed hell-bent on bringing high-speed rail to the United States. He used a major portion of the stimulus bill to kick-start investment in high speed projects. Now he is after more money. President Obama used his recent State of the Union address to make the case for more “investment.” He said,

“Our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail. This could allow you to go to places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying – without the pat-down.”

I’d laugh if it weren’t such an awful idea. Now Senator John Kerry is offering a bill to provide more grant funding for high speed rail projects, arguing that, “It’s so obvious that if you can bring trips down in time, we would be wasting less time from families, move products faster, raise property values, and create jobs in a larger area.”

President Obama and Senator Kerry are both focused on the wrong thing – time. But in this case time isn’t money, in fact it’s just the opposite. Saving people’s time is no doubt a good thing, but the question we must ask is: at what cost?

Just ask California. Obama gave them $2.3 billion to help launch a high speed rail line that will connect its most populous areas – Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. Of course that $2.3 billion isn’t going to go along way when some estimates for the project say it will cost as much as $80 billion. Who is going to fill the gap in a state where its budget is in shambles and they had to furlough teachers in order to save money?

The fact is, high speed rail just doesn’t make sense in the United States. We are not Japan, or even Europe, when it comes to the size or population density of our country. With the exception of the Northeast (where we still cannot demonstrate that passenger rail can turn a profit) our cities are too far apart to justify the infrastructure investment required.

Geography is not the only issue. We also have our existing freight railways to contend with. As Steve Forbes explains in a must-read article about the failure of high-speed rail,

“While Europe focused on moving people by rail, we focused on moving freight, which is why the U.S. has by far the best and most efficient freight railroad system in the world.”

Nevertheless, the Administration is undermining this impressive achievement. Transportation expert Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation points out: “[There is an] inherent conflict between high-speed passenger rail and freight rail. Because the service characteristics are so different, you can optimize a rail system for one or the other, but not both.”

High speed rail is simply the wrong choice at the wrong time for America. We are deeply in debt and in dire need of spending discipline. If we really want to “invest” in our future, we should at least do it in something that offers a reasonable rate of return. The history of high speed rail shows that it does not.

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

Crossposted: http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/01/30/runaway-train-obamas-high-speed-rail-investments-a-bad-idea/

We’re in deep trouble. There is simply no other conclusion you can take away from yesterday’s CBO Report.

In their “Budget and Economic Outlook,” the CBO said that the 2011 deficit will hit $1.48 trillion – nearly 40% higher than estimates the CBO made earlier in the year. That’s even larger than the $1.41 trillion deficit we racked up in 2009. It also represents the second highest percentage of the nation’s output since World War II, lagging only behind last year in terms of size.

How did we get to this point? As Rep. Paul Ryan explained in the Republican’s Response to the State of the Union:

There is no doubt the president came into office facing a severe fiscal and economic situation.

Unfortunately, instead of restoring the fundamentals of economic growth, he engaged in a stimulus spending spree that not only failed to deliver on its promise to create jobs but also plunged us even deeper into debt.

The facts are clear: Since taking office, President Obama has signed into law spending increases of nearly 25 percent for domestic government agencies – an 84 percent increase when you include the failed stimulus.

All of this new government spending was sold as “investment.”

The CBO’s report and Rep. Ryan’s response, make President Obama’s demands for more “investment” all the more absurd. Our government should not be looking for more ways to spend, it should be looking for ways to save. The CBO has already warned that, “a growing level of federal debt would also increase the probability of a sudden fiscal crisis, during which investors would lose confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget.”

Our growing debt has real consequences. On the one hand, the CBO predicts that large budget deficits would reduce national saving and domestic investment which “would lower income growth in the United States.” On the other hand, as the debt grows, it becomes increasingly more difficult to solve the problem without raising taxes to a level that would substantially harm our economy.

Without immediate action we are approaching a Catch-22 that inevitably leads to dampened economic growth.

So we urge you to call, write, or email your Congressman. Let them know that we cannot afford President Obama’s “investments.” As this year’s $1.5 trillion deficit attests, we simply must stop trying to spend our way out of this recession. It’s time we demand fiscal accountability in Washington, it is clear they are not going to do it on their own.

To find contact information for your Congressman go HERE

by Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

Crossposted from: http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/01/27/cbo-2011-will-be-another-year-of-record-deficits/

In last night’s State of the Union, president Obama took a page out of the Republican playbook. Obama said , “If a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it.” Seems straightforward enough.

In fact, it is something that Congressional Republicans have been doing since March.  As then-Whip Eric Cantor wrote in an op-ed last October,

“House Republicans took an unprecedented stand in March, imposing an immediate moratorium on earmarks for the remainder of the Congress. Yet, because the governing rules of one Congress cannot bind the next, this moratorium will expire on Jan. 3, 2011. I do not believe that should be allowed to happen.

The next Republican Conference should immediately move to eliminate earmarks. Should Republicans be elected as the majority party, I believe that we should extend the moratorium to the entire House – to Democrats and Republicans alike. And I encourage President Barack Obama and the White House to take a similar step.”

President Obama’s comments in the State of the Union suggest he is ready to do just that as part of a “government that lives within its means.”

Not surprisingly, Democrats were furious. As Politico reported immediately after Obama’s speech,

After Obama surprised lawmakers in his State of the Union address with a bold threat to veto all bills with earmarks, Democrats in the Senate grew visibly frustrated, denouncing the president’s call as a power grab that’ll have little-to-no impact on the federal budget deficit.

Perhaps the most vocal critic of President Obama’s plan was Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. Reid told reporters yesterday, “I think this is an issue that any president would like to have, that takes power away from the legislative branch of government. I think it’s the wrong thing to do. I don’t think it’s helpful. It’s a lot of pretty talk.”

Apparently, the White House couldn’t stand the heat coming from his own party. Just hours after making his no-earmarks pledge, President Obama was already attempting to qualify his statements. As Jim Harper of the Cato Institute just reported ,

A “government reform factsheet” circulated by White House staff says, “The President intends to veto bills with special interest earmarks .” (emphasis added) This appears to create a class of earmarks that will bring the president’s veto, special interest earmarks, and a class that will not—national interest earmarks, one supposes.

This just goes to show that President Obama isn’t truly interested in changing the spending culture of Washington. He’s interested in sounding like a moderate who is willing to follow Republican ideas, but in reality continues to act like a free-spending liberal. Sadly, it appears Harry Reid was right on the money when he said that Obama’s pledge was just “a lot of pretty talk.” Well Mr. President, as the 2012 president elections near, remember that actions speak louder than words.

http://speakout.crnc.org/blog/2011/01/26/obama-already-retreating-from-earmarks-promise/