LAR: The 'new' normal, part 1
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March 27, 2012 The practice of printing money or inflating a currency to "pay" for a national debt has been around for at least as long as the practice of governments borrowing funds to pay for their unsustainable obligations. Is the individual mandate a tax? The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on this. ObamaCareWatcher.org's John Vinci explains. Now we ask, which side wanted to change the subject from the economic concerns that had dominated this endless campaign season? Justices both liberal and conservative appear unconvinced of the Obama Administration's key argument. The 'new' normal, part 1 By Bill Wilson  The "new" normal is actually not so new. The practice of printing money or inflating a currency to "pay" for a national debt has been around for at least as long as the practice of governments borrowing funds to pay for their unsustainable obligations. Economist Adam Smith noted this sort of trickery by governmental authorities in 1776 in his tome, The Wealth of Nations: "The raising of the denomination of the coin has been the most usual expedient by which a real public bankruptcy has been disguised under the appearance of a pretended payment." Which is exactly what countries are doing today. In the U.S., the Federal Reserve holds $1.66 trillion, or 10.6 percent of the $15.6 trillion national debt. That is an increase from about 7.5 percent of the debt in 1996. Throughout the rest of the world, things are not much better. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) holds about •66.1 trillion ($797 billion) of its country's •958.6 trillion ($11.6 trillion) debt, or about 6.8 percent of the total. That's slightly misleading, however, because Japan's debt is already more than twice the size of its •468.4 trillion ($5.65 trillion) economy. BOJ's holdings of Japanese debt as a 14.2 percent share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is actually larger than the Fed's of U.S. debt at 10.8 percent. BOJ is continuing to expand its pot of government debt with even more programs, including a new purchase this year of •10 trillion ($120 billion). This comes in addition to its regular purchases of about •21.6 trillion ($260.7 billion). "It looks like they have crossed the Rubicon," said Eiji Hirano a form BOJ executive director of international affairs from 2002 to 2006. That's putting it mildly. Get full story here. Supreme Court Hears Arguments On Obamacare, ObamacareWatcher.org Explains Video by Frank McCaffrey  Get permalink here. The Myth of the GOP's War on Women By David Bozeman  The intellectual heavy lifting of maintaining meaningful political discourse in America is done mostly by conservatives. And sometimes they drop the ball, which is excusable given that the left dominates news dissemination and entertainment. The leftist currency is not rational debate but smelling-salt hysterics and theater, and a conservative need only speak his mind to be cast as the day's Dickensian abuser of orphan children, or, luckily, just the village idiot. The idea of the Republican Party waging a war on women is preposterous. It goes something like this: with unemployment at just above 8 percent and a national debt at over $15.5 trillion, Republicans are so threatened by good economic news that they would change the subject and seek to alienate women, who comprise approximately 51 percetn of the voting population. That makes almost as much sense as the notion of Republicans being the party of the rich. How does a party remain viable for most of its 150-year existence by catering to so narrow a demographic? But news and commentary tend to focus on the inane over the substantive. Conservatives find themselves gnawing on the liberal bait - by simply calming fears and quelling nasty rumors, conservatives resemble animals who must chew off their own limbs to free themselves from traps. Why are we arguing about contraception? Why has so much cable news airtime been spent debating whether the president should return a $1 million donation made by Bill Maher, who uttered misogynistic comments about Sarah Palin? CNN's Piers Morgan recently interviewed the insufferable Gloria Allred, who is still droning on about the heroism of the women she represents who claimed sexual dalliances with Herman Cain. It is not by accident but by design that the intellectual gravitas of political talk shows and regular news broadcasts sometimes matches that of Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood. Get full story here.  ALG Editor's Note: In the following featured commentary from the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein analyzes the first day of oral arguments on the monumental Obamacare Supreme Court case:  SCOTUS skeptical of idea that mandate is a tax By Philip Klein The first day of oral arguments in the case challenging President Obama's national health care law, justices seemed skeptical that the individual mandate should be considered a tax -- one of the main consitutional defenses being offered for the law. To be clear, today's 90 minutes of oral arguments did not concern the underlying merits of the case, but whether an 1876 law called the Anti-Injunction Act bars the Court from ruling on the suit at this time. Under the Anti-Injunction Act, people cannot challenge a tax in court until after they have paid it. This would effectively punt the issue until at least 2015. However, there is some overlap between this question and the idea of whether the mandate is a tax, and justices on both sides of the ideological fence expressed skepticism that the mandate should be treated as a tax. "This is not a revenue-raising measure, because, if it's successful, they won't -- nobody will pay the penalty and there will be no revenue to raise," said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the mandate. Another liberal on the court, Justice Stephen Breyer, said of Congress's description of the fine for non-compliance with the mandate, "They called it a penalty and not a tax for a reason." Get full story here. |
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