WSJ.com - Why I Won't Vote to Raise the Debt Limit

WSJ.com - Opinion: Why I Won't Vote to Raise the Debt Limit

By MARCO RUBIO

 

Our generation's greatest challenge is an economy that isn't growing, alongside a national debt that is. If we fail to confront this, our children will be the first Americans ever to inherit a country worse off than the one their parents were given.

Current federal policies make it harder for job creators to start and grow businesses. Taxes on individuals are complicated and set to rise in less than two years. Corporate taxes will soon be the highest in the industrialized world. Federal agencies torment job creators with an endless string of rules and regulations.

On top of all this, we have an unsustainable national debt. Leaders of both parties have grown our government for decades by spending money we didn't have. To pay for it, they borrowed $4 billion a day, leaving us with today's $14 trillion debt.

In a few weeks, we will once again reach our legal limit for borrowing, the so-called debt ceiling. The president and others want to raise this limit. They say it is the mature, responsible thing to do.

In fact, it's nothing more than putting off the tough decisions until after the next election. We cannot afford to continue waiting.

I will vote to defeat an increase in the debt limit unless it is the last one we ever authorize and is accompanied by a plan for fundamental tax reform, an overhaul of our regulatory structure, a cut to discretionary spending, a balanced-budget amendment, and reforms to save Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Finally, instead of simply raising the debt limit, we should reassure job creators by setting a firm statutory cap on our public debt-to-GDP ratio. A comprehensive plan would wind down our debt to sustainable levels of approximately 60% within a decade and no more than half of the economy shortly thereafter. If Congress fails to meet these debt targets, automatic across-the-board spending reductions should be triggered to close the gap. These public debt caps could go in tandem with a Constitutional balanced budget amendment.

 

 

WSJ.com - How Washington Ruined Your Washing Machine

WSJ.com - Opinion: How Washington Ruined Your Washing Machine

It might not have been the most stylish, but for decades the top-loading laundry machine was the most affordable and dependable. Now it's ruined—and Americans have politics to thank.

In 1996, top-loaders were pretty much the only type of washer around, and they were uniformly high quality. When Consumer Reports tested 18 models, 13 were "excellent" and five were "very good." By 2007, though, not one was excellent and seven out of 21 were "fair" or "poor." This month came the death knell: Consumer Reports simply dismissed all conventional top-loaders as "often mediocre or worse."

How's that for progress?

The culprit is the federal government's obsession with energy efficiency. Efficiency standards for washing machines aren't as well-known as those for light bulbs, which will effectively prohibit 100-watt incandescent bulbs next year. Nor are they the butt of jokes as low-flow toilets are. But in their quiet destruction of a highly affordable, perfectly satisfactory appliance, washer standards demonstrate the harmfulness of the ever-growing body of efficiency mandates.

When the Department of Energy began raising the standard, it promised that "consumers will have the same range of clothes washers as they have today," and cleaning ability wouldn't be changed. That's not how it turned out.

In 2007, after the more stringent rules had kicked in, Consumer Reports noted that some top-loaders were leaving its test swatches "nearly as dirty as they were before washing." "For the first time in years," CR said, "we can't call any washer a Best Buy."

WSJ.com - The Unhappy Paradox of Santa-Statism

WSJ.com - Opinion: The Unhappy Paradox of Santa-Statism

 

The real problem [with budget cutting] is that cutting almost anything is impossible when what passes for governing philosophy is little more than a bromide such as, "The government should do nice things for people."

The president is hardly alone in this Santa-Statism. And to be sure, polls about the government doing generic good things for people elicit positive responses, even in these times of antigovernment fervor.

So it might seem like a winner for a politician to lard up every policy and speech with government kindness. But this leads to a terrible paradox for policy makers. While Americans favor "nice things" in theory, the resulting government—a kind of adlibocracy, if you will—ends up looking wasteful at best and predatory at worst.

The "doing good" philosophy cannot accommodate difficult but necessary budget decisions. It will always devolve into a drunken spending binge largely directed toward rewarding political friends like public-sector unions (witness the current mayhem in Wisconsin), engaging in social engineering (see the new health-care mandates), socializing losses (emergency loans and grants to failing businesses), and doling out pork (look almost anywhere in the stimulus).

So citizens say they want government to help them, politicians oblige, but citizens loathe the result. How do we cut this Gordian Knot? The solution is a real philosophy that outlines what the government should do—and, just as importantly, not do.

What is that governing philosophy? Here is an answer from the great economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek: As regards the economy, the government should provide a minimum basic standard of living for citizens, and address market failures in cases where government action can do so cost effectively. That's all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

WSJ.com - Public Unions Get Too 'Friendly'

WSJ.com - Opinion: Public Unions Get Too 'Friendly'

 

In what might be called an expression of the new spirit of transparency that is sweeping the globe, two documentaries came out in 2010, "The Lottery" and "Waiting for Superman." Both were made by and featured people who are largely liberal in their sympathies, and both said the same brave thing: The single biggest impediment to better schools in our country is the teachers unions, which look to their own interests and not those of the kids.

In both films, as in real life, the problem is the unions themselves, not individual teachers. They present teachers who are heroic, who are creative and idealistic. But they too, in the films, are victims of union rules.

Unions have been respected in America forever, and public-employee unions have reaped that respect. There are two great reasons for this. One is that unions always stood for the little guy. The other is that Americans like balance. We have management over here and the union over here, they'll talk and find balance, it'll turn out fine.

But with the public-employee unions, the balance has been off for decades. And when they lost their balance they fell off their pedestal.

When union leaders negotiate with a politician, they're negotiating with someone they can hire and fire. Public unions have numbers and money, and politicians need both. When governors negotiate with unions, it's not collective bargaining, it's more like collusion. Someone said last week the taxpayers aren't at the table. The taxpayers aren't even in the room.

 

 

 

 

WSJ.com - The Truth About U.S. Manufacturing

WSJ.com - Opinion: The Truth About U.S. Manufacturing

 

Is American manufacturing dead? You might think so reading most of the nation's editorial pages or watching the endless laments in the news that "nothing is made in America anymore," and that our manufacturing jobs have vanished to China, Mexico and South Korea.

Yet the empirical evidence tells a different story—of a thriving and growing U.S. manufacturing sector, and a country that remains by far the world's largest manufacturer.

In every year since 2004, manufacturing output has exceeded $2 trillion (in constant 2005 dollars), twice the output produced in America's factories in the early 1970s.

The truth is that America still makes a lot of stuff, and we're making more of it than ever before. We're merely able to do it with a fraction of the workers needed in the past.

Critics view the production of more with less as a net negative—fewer auto plant jobs mean fewer paychecks, they reason. Yet technological improvement is one of the main ingredients of economic growth. It means increasing wages and a higher standard of living for workers and consumers. Displaced workers learn new skill sets, and a new generation of workers finds its skills are put to more productive use.

 

 

 

WSJ.com - Let's Begin Obama's 'Conversation' on Entitlements

WSJ.com - Opinion: Let's Begin Obama's 'Conversation' on Entitlements

 

Nobody should be surprised that public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are fighting to preserve every penny of their promised benefits.

Nobody should be surprised that state governors—and it doesn't matter which party—are trying to trim those privileges and benefits.

This fight was penciled in long ago, when politicians and union leaders made the strategic decision to negotiate benefits without negotiating for the funding to make good on them. The mock shock and horror is all the more laughable given that events in Wisconsin are a perfect microcosm of the battle that every sentient American knows, and has known for a generation, awaits Medicare and Social Security.

Medicare is the real killer. An average couple retiring last year can look forward to consuming Medicare benefits with a present value of $343,000, having paid Medicare taxes with a present value of $109,000.

Moving toward a system of real savings, in which payroll taxes would flow into some version of personal accounts controlled by the worker, would bring a big improvement to incentives. We could expect a sizeable growth dividend to help finance the transition.

By "finance the transition," of course, we mean today's workers having to reach into their own pockets twice, paying for their own retirement while also making up for the saving their parents and grandparents didn't do. When people talk about generational injustice, this is what they mean.