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By Gregory Taggart, May 23, 2011 4:09 pm

I remembered reading this from The Village Voice in 2008 while I was reading this in The Weekly Standard from last week about David Mamet’s conversion of the left to the right, liberal to conservative. The first article, an essay actually, by Mamet himself, had the better title: “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead’ Liberal.” The second is the story of what’s happened since.

Read both. Maybe–if you find yourself on the left bank–you’ll be persuaded to convert too. After all, his family looks happy.

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By Gregory Taggart, May 23, 2011 3:51 pm

The Economist gets the thumbs up for the best line of the week. In an editorial titled “Damned,” the magazine laments the possible loss of DSK’s ideas because of his fall from grace. “They are more important [than him,” the editorial says. And why? Well among other things, he stood to become the first Socialist Party candidate to win the presidency of France since François Mitterrand ate Ortolan Bunting.

That’s important because DSK apparently knows something his party doesn’t (bolding mine):

The danger now, as Socialist alternatives line up, is that the party sloughs off its modernising aspirations and reverts to type. Unlike parties of the left in Britain or Germany, France’s Socialists have yet to digest the sour reality that wealth needs to be created before it can be distributed. Their draft manifesto includes a jaw-dropping pledge to reverse France’s minimum retirement age, which has only just been raised from 60 years to 62. The Socialists’ reflex is to tell the French that they need to be “protected” and “sheltered”. However, the French cannot for ever defy the laws of economics and protect themselves with costly benefits that only pile up huge public debts for future generations. France’s tragedy is that Mr Strauss-Kahn, who understood that, misunderstood so much else.

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By Gregory Taggart, May 4, 2011 2:14 pm

Obama Says He Won’t Release Bin Laden Death Photo.

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By Gregory Taggart, April 25, 2011 11:22 am

Paul Clement 1, King & Spaulding 0.

Defending unpopular clients is what lawyers do.

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By Gregory Taggart, April 18, 2011 10:19 am

Standard & Poor’s just shot a big gun across the bow of our ship of state, warning of

a “material risk” the nation’s leaders will fail to deal with rising budget deficits and debt.

At least one player in the government bond market agrees:

“It’s truly a shot across the bow and a message to Washington, which has been clowning around on this and playing politics when they should toss ideology aside and focus on achievement,” said David Ader, head of government bond strategy at CRT Capital Group LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. “The bond market is still trying to find out what to make of it. People don’t know what to do. If you sell Treasuries, what do you go in to? No one knows.”

So what’s Treasury’s response?

Treasury Assistant Secretary Mary Miller said today that S&P’s outlook on the U.S. credit rating “underestimates” U.S. leadership.

“We believe S&P’s negative outlook underestimates the ability of America’s leaders to come together to address the difficult fiscal challenges facing the nation,” Miller [NKA Baghdad Bobbette] said in a statement. (emphasis supplied)

Our debt may becoming more expensive, but this response is priceless.

UPDATE: As Barry Ritholtz’s post at The Big Picture reminded me, the S&P is very late with its take on this party, a party Bill Gross walked out of over a month ago.

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By Gregory Taggart, April 11, 2011 8:10 am

Or as Pogo might say,

Today in The Washington Post,
Robert Samuelson writes,

We in America have [elected a] suicidal [president]; the threatened federal shutdown and stubborn budget deficits are but symptoms. By suicidal, I mean that [president] has promised more than [he] can realistically deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have.

Okay, so I changed a few things, the word president for the word government, for example. Or the word elected for the word created. But Samuelson could have written what I’ve posted and still have been right. Right?

Anyway, he actually says that our suicidal government is so in part because

[We] depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat.

Why is that? Surprise of surprises, because

The Census Bureau reports that in 2009 almost half (46.2 percent) of the 300 million Americans received at least one federal benefit: 46.5 million, Social Security; 42.6 million, Medicare; 42.4 million, Medicaid; 36.1 million, food stamps; 3.2 million, veterans’ benefits; 12.4 million, housing subsidies. The census list doesn’t include tax breaks. Counting those, perhaps three-quarters or more of Americans receive some sizable government benefit. For example, about 22 percent of taxpayers benefit from the home mortgage interest deduction and 43 percent from the preferential treatment of employer-provided health insurance, says the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

Kind of makes you lose hope that things are going to change.

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By Gregory Taggart, April 7, 2011 9:44 am

Gary Becker, George Schultz, and John Taylor have a plan to bust the budget. It’s worth reading. To me the most obvious gem in the plan, and the one most sorely missing in all the talk in Washington right now is this:

Assurance that the current tax system will remain in place—pending genuine reform in corporate and personal income taxes—will be an immediate stimulus.

Congress and the President (any Congress and any President) have used the tax code to implement policy choices. It’s time to leave the rules be, so that business can plan, something they are loathe to do when there’s no promise that the rules won’t change next week.

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By Gregory Taggart, March 26, 2011 5:04 pm

Ten former chairmen and chairwomen of the Council of Economic Advisors have joined in a statement that calls on Congress and the President to step up and get to work on the important task of cutting our monstrous deficit.

There are many issues on which we don’t agree. Yet we find ourselves in remarkable unanimity about the long-run federal budget deficit: It is a severe threat that calls for serious and prompt attention.

You can read more here, but there is one thing missing from both their statement and the Bowles/Simpson report they refer to: What can Congress and the President do to regain the trust they’ll need to pull this trick out of a hat?

I’m all for deficit reduction. I’ll even sign on for tax increases. But I will not agree to those increases unless and until Congress and the President show me that they are serious about cutting spending and that they will use the tax increases to cut the deficit rather to spend.

I am not holding my breath.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 28, 2011 11:50 am

The New York post has a column today about the prescience of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of my favorite people.

According to writer Bob McManus, Moynihan saw the future of public unions, and it was not rosey.

“[NYU economics professor William J.] Baumol started out by asking himself why the costs of the performing arts always seemed to be rising” Moynihan wrote. “I remarked that if you want a Dixieland band for a campaign rally today, you will need the same [number of] players you would have needed at the beginning of the century. Productivity just hasn’t changed much.”

But per-player costs — salaries and benefits — had risen dramatically, and the price of that Dixieland band along with them.

So, too, the price of health care, the senator argued. An already labor-intensive industry was becoming even more so with each technological advance — driving per-patient productivity ever lower and overall costs inexorably higher.

The same, he said, is true of what he termed the “stagnant [public-sector] services” — including “education high and low, welfare, the arts, legal services, the police. This means that the [costs] of the public sector will continue to grow.”

Moynihan had an eye for what seems obvious today. And he was not shy about telling others what he saw, a trait that served him well–and impressed me–when he served as the U.S.’s ambassador to the United Nations.

My cousin, then an aide to Senator Alan Simpson, once arranged a tour of the Capitol for me. The highlight was when a door swung open as I walked by, revealing Senator Moynihan, bow tie and all, talking to someone behind what had been closed doors.

The Democrats–hell, the Republicans–could use someone like him right now.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 28, 2011 11:25 am

I’m a conservative who leans libertarian, and here’s what I think about taxes, entitlements, and deficits. It all comes down to trust, and Congress has lost mine. Consequently, I will not agree to any tax increase unless and until I see real movement on the budget front. By that I mean I want to see real cuts given the realities of the budget. In other words, I realize that defense and entitlements make up such a large proportion of the overall budget that there is no way we’re going to be able to get real deficit reduction without either making big cuts there or raising taxes or both.

Now I’m willing to cut entitlements, even social security–and I’m on the verge of retirement. I could probably find cuts in the Defense budget as well. And I’m agreeable to raising some taxes. However, I’m not willing to do any of this until Congress regains my trust. And it can only do that by getting serious about cutting what can be cut now. No more political gamesmanship. No more calling $80 billion in cuts “draconian.” No more quibbling about this jot and that tittle. Start cutting now and don’t stop until we’ve eliminated every unnecessary program, all wasteful expenditures, and each and every earmark.

Do that, and I’m willing to talk about tax increases and reduced entitlements. Don’t do that, and I’ll do what I can to see that you’re not re-elected.

It’s all about trust. And you don’t have mine.