FactCheck.org:

President Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress was stuffed with signals about the new direction his budget will take and meant-to-be reassuring words about the economy. But it was also peppered with exaggerations and factual misstatements.

Down here in the cheap seats we call those “exaggerations and factual misstatements” by their more familiar name: lies.

Enough already.

Even assuming just for the sake of argument that Jerome Corsi isn’t a complete kook, and there may be some legitimate questions over the validity of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate — and let me be clear that I don’t subscribe to that view — nobody cares.  The guy’s president.  There are ample grounds on which to criticize and oppose him without resorting to “Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster killed!”-level conspiracy-mongering.

The second part of my “Gun Policy ‘Pragmatism’ According to Who?” series is forthcoming, and deals exclusively (and exhaustively) with so-called “assault weapons”.  However, a quick note about Eric Holder’s dishonest demagoguery on the subject:

“As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons,” Holder told reporters.

Holder said that putting the ban back in place would not only be a positive move by the United States, it would help cut down on the flow of guns going across the border into Mexico, which is struggling with heavy violence among drug cartels along the border.

Emphasis mine.  A commenter at Reason magazine’s Hit & Run blog points out the comments of former U.S. drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey:

The outgunned Mexican law enforcement authorities face armed criminal attacks from platoon-sized units employing night vision goggles, electronic intercept collection, encrypted communications, fairly sophisticated information operations, sea-going submersibles, helicopters and modern transport aviation, automatic weapons, RPG’s, Anti-Tank 66 mm rockets, mines and booby traps, heavy machine guns, 50 [caliber] sniper rifles, massive use of military hand grenades, and the most modern models of 40mm grenade machine guns.

First, none of that stuff meets the definition of an “assault weapon” under any statutory formulation anywhere.  That’s military equipment, full stop, and trying to address it by banning “assault weapons” is a little like (and approximately as silly as) trying to deal with illicit methamphetamine production by regulating the provision of over-the-counter cold medicines containing methamphetamine precursors — as if people running meth labs are routinely heading down to the local Walgreens and buying shelfsful of Sudafed for raw materials.

Second, I’ve been involved in the shooting sports, to one degree or another, for nearly 30 years.  Like that Hit & Run commenter, I have yet to find military-grade nightvision and ECM/ECCM equipment, ocean-going submersibles, planes and helicoptors, automatic weapons, RPGs, anti-tank rockets, mines, heavy machine guns, military hand grenades, and automatic grenade launchers freely available at any U.S. gun store or gun show.  Not even in Texas.  Possibly — and I’m just spitballing here, because I’m no legal wunderkind like our AG — Mexican drug gangsters are getting their gear from someplace else.

In his not-really-State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, Mr. Obama promised to cut the budget deficit in half by the end of his first term.  The Washington Post explains why this is flim-flam:

Republicans and some budget analysts noted that this highly touted goal is not particularly ambitious: This year’s budget deficit is bloated by spending on the stimulus package and various financial-sector bailouts, expenses unlikely to be repeated in future years. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently predicted that the deficit could be halved by 2013 merely by winding down the war in Iraq and allowing some of the tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration to expire in 2011, as Obama has proposed. That alone would cut the deficit to $715 billion [from about $1.75 trillion -- ed], according to the CBO.

“It’s easy to cut the deficit in half after you’ve quadrupled it,” said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “The end of the recession, the drawdown of Iraq spending and the end of temporary stimulus spending will by itself cut the deficit in half.”

Remember that line: “It’s easy to cut the deficit in half after you’ve quadrupled it.”  If Mr. Obama and his political allies simply avoid producing any sequels to the monthlong orgy of spending they’ve just completed, the deficit will probably halve itself over the next four years.  Also, it’s worth emphasizing the Post’s point that of the $2 trillion in deficit reductions the Obama administration claims to have identified, about half the money comes from tax increases (in the Democratic Party vernacular, confiscating less of what people earn is “spending”, and confiscating more of what people earn is “savings”) and a big chunk of the rest comes from dishonestly assuming that the Iraq war will have an annual price tag of $170 billion in perpetuity.

Bruce McQuain over at QandO calls my attention to something else from Mr. Obama’s speech:

A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future.

Even if one subscribes to the popular mythology that Bush “squandered the Clinton surplus” (in reality the surpluses were largely the product of accounting legerdemain and a revenue spike driven by the dot-com boom of the late 1990s; by 2000 the boom had turned to bust, and Clinton’s final budget — the FY2001 budget, which ran through September 2001 and thus ended eight months after Bush took office — generated a $133 billion deficit), that line is newspeak of a positively Orwellian character.

Since when did letting people keep more of their money amount to a “transfer [of] wealth to the wealthy”?  Cutting taxes is only a “wealth transfer” if you believe that people aren’t entitled to their property in the first place.

Mr. Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress was on the radio as I was driving home last night, and while I anticipated my own sour reaction to the speech I turned it off about midway through because my disgust was becoming a distraction.  After reading the transcript, there are a few points I think are worth making.

First, one cannot help but admire Mr. Obama’s cheek in his complaining about “inherited” deficits.  The man was part of the Congress that helped run up the bill over the last eight years (and the majority that helped run it up over the last two), and he and his political allies have just finished stuffing a trillion or so dollars down the fiscal rathole of dubious Keynesian “stimulus” theories (with still more in the wings).  The budget-bloat under George W. Bush was by any measure appalling, but for Mr. Obama to try to absolve himself and his party of bloody-handed complicity in that bloat is even moreso. 

Second, the Clinton-era practice of using human shields to protect bad policy has evidently come back into vogue.  The political left complained, not entirely unjustifiably, about George W. Bush’s propensity for implying that disagreement with his policies was unpatriotic — but Bruce at No Looking Backwards finds no fewer than nine instances of disgraceful “for the children!” hectoring in Mr. Obama’s speech.  Apparently dissent is the highest form of patriotism so long as the president is a Republican, but anti-child when a Democrat occupies the White House.

Third, let’s again call out the audacious lie that the recent “stimulus” bill contained no earmarks.  I’ve talked about this before, so there’s no need to belabor the point here.

Fourth, responding to Mr. Obama’s point:

But that does not mean we can afford to ignore our long-term challenges. I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves; that says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity.

…calling this “making the world safe for straw men,” take it away, Tom Maguire:

Reagan believed that the US government had an obligation to face down the Soviet empire; Bush 43 believed it had an obligation to oppose terror.  Who are the folks who think government has “no role” in laying the foundation for our prosperity?  Laws, courts, national defense – c’mon.  The ongoing tussle has not been between “no role” and a modest role for the government; the tussle has been between limited government and a wildly expansive government that is involved in every nook and cranny of the economy.

I would add “and individuals’ lives” to the end of that last sentence, but otherwise, just so.

Fifth, as to Mr. Obama’s remark:

As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President’s Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government – I don’t.

This is transparently disingenuous.  Mr. Obama is rather clearly a proponent of activist government with benevolent technocrats empowered to try to save us all from our own (real or perceived) human failings.  His writings, speeches, and actions all lead ineluctably to the conclusion that he regards government as problem-solver without portfolio notwithstanding the cost to individual and economic liberty whenever and wherever government intervenes.  But I agree with Rich Lowry: Mr. Obama is once again trying to camoflage an explicitly ideological agenda as simple, non-ideological, just-doing-the-people’s-work pragmatism, and it’s frightening that he might succeed.

Sixth, when will those self-styled hard-headed empiricists on the left call Mr. Obama out for playing fast and loose with medical bankruptcy figures to further his case for socialized medicine?

Seventh and finally, I (unsurprisingly) find much to agree with here:

The president called his budget “a blueprint for our future,” and as my colleague John Samples notes, “A blueprint is a plan for the society as a whole just as a real blueprint is a plan for a building…. [This is] a plan for the remaking of America. The metaphor reveals a habit of mind at odds with a free society.” Obama promised that the federal government would impose comprehensive redesigns on energy, health care, and education. But the success of America has always been rooted in individual enterprise and free markets. Obama blames free markets for our problems, when it was cheap money from the Fed and misguided federal incentives that caused the mortgage debacle.

It’s going to be a long four years.

Megan McArdle has an excellent post up on the divide between homeowners and renters in the current economic climate:

I think that most of the people supporting the mortgage plan really do feel like falling home prices is an obvious catastrophe.  I also think that most of them own homes.  Because, of course, if prices stay high, where is the money coming from to support them?  Well, from people like me, who do not currently have a home to sell, but would like to acquire one in the not-terribly distant future.  Keeping people and banks from selling at a loss requires that I buy a house which is overpriced.

This nicely underscores two points, one specific to the mortgage crisis, the other a more general observation about government.  First, the unspoken assumption behind virtually all of the government’s maneuverings with respect to the economy lo these past six or so months has been that the bursting of the housing bubble was uniformly a bad thing.  The elephant in the room is that while the bubble bursting produced a lot of economic wreckage (among homeowners who see the values of their residences plummet, and can no longer afford and cannot refinance adjustable rate mortgages; and among financial institutions left holding the bag for defaulting mortgagors), it also — if left well enough alone by government — would produce positive economic effects.  People who didn’t get caught up in the housing bubble would be able to afford a house, without creative financing, as prices returned to non-bubble levels.  Government intervention to rescue homeowners and housing speculators from their own bad financial decisions prevents those positive economic effects.

Second, this is a reminder that government doesn’t ever produce anything of value: it can only redistribute capital from one group to another.  It can only ever rob Peter (here, renters) to pay Paul (here, mortgagors and housing speculators).  That’s terrific if you’re Paul, but it’s fundamentally unjust to Peter.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Barack Obama boasted about his support for “PAYGO” budgeting rules — essentially, the notion that any new government spending should be offset by either spending cuts elsewhere, or tax increases.  Patrick Ruffini, blogging at The Next Right, advocates statutory balanced budget requirements, and is catching some flak from PAYGO devotees because of balanced budgeting’s supposed inherent inflexibilities (along with the claim that the regulation of government spending necessarily resides in the political sphere).

PAYGO is a superficially-attractive idea that never results in either fiscally-responsible budgeting or meaningful constraints on the size of government because Democrats and many Republicans (a) spend taxpayer money like drunken sailors on shore leave and (b) squeal like stuck pigs about cutting existing government spending.  Thus, in practice, PAYGO rules simply act as a one-way ratchet for tax increases while creating some plausible political deniability for big spenders: “The Rules™ made us increase your taxes!  We didn’t want to, but widows and orphans would be out on the street if we cut any existing boondoggles to pay for our new boondoggles!  Under The Rules™, we had no alternative!”  This allegedly more-flexible approach to budgeting turns out to be an entirely inflexible path to soaking the taxpayer.

To get the spurious objections to statutory (or constitutional) balanced budget requirements out of the way first: yes, the prioritization of public spending is an essentially political question, but to impose serious constraints on the otherwise-unlimited capacity of politicians to bloat government and fritter away taxpayer money is to answer that question, not dodge it.  It is to say, “The political debate about public spending priorities will take place within the following limits, which, by the way, are themselves products of the political process.”  Yes, those limits are inflexible compared to a world in which politicians have a free hand, but that’s the whole point: the limits are designed to eliminate the “flexibility” of politicians to grow government beyond all measure and to spend us into penury.

That said, a balanced budget requirement isn’t a virtuous end in and of itself.  After all, even a monstrous budget, larger by an order of magnitude than anything contemplated by the most idealistic of utopian collectivists, can be “balanced” through the confiscation of sufficient resources from the citizenry.  Balanced budget requirements can turn into one-way tax-increase ratchets just as easily as PAYGO if politicians refuse to cut existing spending or constrain new spending.  Nor do I think ”taxpayer bill of rights” laws, which limit budget increases to inflation plus population growth (plus, perhaps, some fixed percentage), are a particularly useful solution.  At best these laws are just a finger in the proverbial dike: government will continue to grow at the maximum rate year after year, plus whatever overrides politicians can cram through.

Ultimately, imposing fiscal discipline on politicians requires a three-prong approach:

1. Spending must be constrained not by reference to previous years’ budgets, but by reference to revenues — the principle being that a responsible government spends only what it reasonably expects to collect in taxes, just like a responsible individual spends only what he reasonably expects to earn in salary.  Non-partisan bodies must be charged with producing conservative (not in the political sense, but in the risk-assessment sense) revenue forecasts, and legislatures must be required to spend within those means except in bona fide emergency situations.  Emergency overrides must be approved by supermajorities, and must be time- and purpose-limited.
2. When actual revenues exceed conservative forecasts plus any applicable overrides, government must promptly bank some percentage of the excess (say, 25%) in a rainy-day fund, and refund the remainder to taxpayers.  When actual revenues fall short of conservative forecasts plus any applicable overrides, government can make up the shortfall by using the rainy-day fund, cutting spending elsewhere, borrowing, or by raising taxes or fees.  However…
3. Any provision to increase revenues by raising taxes or fees must be approved by supermajorities (be it a supermajority of legislators or a supermajority of voters).  Any provision to cut taxes or fees need only be approved by simple, 50% + 1 majorities.

California is a terrific example of how not to accomplish this sort of reform: a half-assing of provision #3, restraining the state legislature from increasing taxes without any concomitant restraints on the ability of the citizenry to increase taxes (or approve bonds) via plebiscite, and without any restraints on spending growth.  The result has been a decades-long orgy of spending that led to exploding budget deficits — and then, predictably, when some fiscal austerity was called for, a lot of whining from the usual suspects about how there was no fat to trim from the budget, and how the only solution was to increase tax rates that are already confiscatory and are killing growth.

Note that this is a path towards imposing fiscal responsibility on governments.  It is not a path toward permanent, material reductions in the size of government, as it will result in spending cuts only to the extent that spending exceeds revenues.  Granted most governments live and breathe deficit spending, so this would certainly go a ways toward caging Leviathan; however, actually restoring personal and economic liberties that have been trampled by overweening government is going to require inculcating in the culture the notion that love doesn’t scale, and people need to solve their own problems rather than using government to steal from their neighbors.

Keeping track of this sort of thing is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, but here, again, we have a perfect example of why people like me decline to have frank conversations about race:

Clyburn also had some strong comments for Gov. Mark Sanford on why he thinks he opposed the stimulus.

“The governor of Louisiana expressed opposition. Has the highest African-American population in the country. Governor of Mississippi expressed opposition. The governor of Texas, and the governor of South Carolina. These four governor’s represent states that are in the black belt. I was insulted by that,” Clyburn said. “All of this was a slap in the face of African-Americans. It had nothing to do with Governor Sanford.”

James Clyburn is the House Democratic Whip, and a congressman from South Carolina.  He’s implying, here, that the state governors who opposed the Obama-Pelosi-Reid “stimulus” boondoggle did so because they don’t like or don’t care about their black constituents.

A frank conversation about race with the likes of James Clyburn is one in which you either accept leftist orthodoxy or he calls you a racist.  Sorry.  No sale.

Appropos of yesterday’s post on Eric Holder’s “nation of cowards” remarks, the Weekly Standard points out the conspicuous absence of any outraged coverage compared with Phill Gramm’s “nation of whiners” remark back during the presidential campaign.

But there is no such thing as media bias.