Scott Spiegel

According to liberals, it was “un-American” to protest the adoption of Obamacare.  Now apparently it’s unpatriotic to not go out of one’s way to help make it a roaring success.

The New York Times recently claimed that GOP Congressmen and governors are spitefully refusing to fund or participate in Obamacare implementation solely to make the President look bad.  On Monday they argued that conservatives are harping on the Internal Revenue Agency scandal just so they can delegitimize the IRS and block its assigned role in determining citizens’ income eligibility for having to buy health insurance.

In the Times’ fantasy world, Republicans are going after former IRS tax-exempt division head Sarah Hall Ingram just so they can stall her installation as head of the IRS’s health care office.  The Times also claims conservatives are spotlighting Department of Health and Human Services Head Kathleen Sebelius’s improper Obamacare lobbying efforts so the law will fail.

The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn complains that fast food restaurant owners, nursing home operators, and other low-wage employers are trying to “weasel out” of complying with Obamacare—as though it were every businessman’s patriotic duty to mindlessly accept intrusive, expensive regulations, or as though thousands of Democrat-connected organizations hadn’t already been granted waivers to evade the plan’s dictates.

Cohn explains that a loophole in the law may allow companies to offer employees only barebones coverage and pay a smaller fine than if they had offered no coverage.  Even Cohn admits to the role that free market forces would properly play under such circumstances: “[T]hese companies would have to consider the competitive effects, which could push in either direction.  Do they provide less insurance, so they keep costs lower?  Or do they provide more, so they can attract better workers?  Different companies will undoubtedly respond in different ways…”  Yes, that’s exactly the way it’s supposed to work in a free market—minus, of course, the government forcing employers to provide any coverage.

Cohn’s tepid nod to capitalism is positively Hayekian compared to the stance of Ezekiel Emanuel, former White House health policy advisor and brother of former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm.  Ezekiel admits that Obamacare may be unsustainable, because it forces young, healthy people to pay disproportionately large premiums to subsidize sick, older people—an arrangement that the former won’t stand for and the latter can’t pick up the slack for.

Emanuel’s solution?  A massive public relations blitz that reminds the Millennium Generation just how much they love Obama, and that urges them to buy Obamacare health plans even if it makes no economic sense so their dear leader’s presidency won’t fail.

In a hilariously naïve and economically illiterate editorial, Emanuel preaches, “[Y]oung people believe in President Obama.  They overwhelmingly voted for him.  He won by a 23% margin among voters 18-29—just the people who need to enroll.  The president connects with young people, too, so he needs to use that bond and get out there to convince them to sign up for health insurance to help this central part of his legacy.  Every commencement address by an administration official should encourage young graduates to get health insurance.”  (Every commencement address by an administration official should also explain to young graduates where exactly they’re going to find jobs in the Obama economy so they can purchase said insurance.)

If I understand Emanuel’s appeal correctly, twentysomethings should subsidize Obama’s legacy, and in return they won’t look like fools for having voted for him if his plan somehow miraculously succeeds.

Commenting on Emmanuel’s Don Draper approach to health care reform, Richard Epstein notes, “Emanuel’s expansive view of civic duty plays the game both ways when he accuses individuals who don’t purchase health insurance of ‘freeriding’ on the public.  But their purchase of insurance will allow the [older] preferred plan recipients to free ride on them.”  Basically, Emanuel assumes that young people are already in the bag for Democrats, whereas older folks’ votes need to be bought.

Emanuel also assumes that his proposed marketing campaign will cash in on the emotional nature of persuadable young voters.  Good luck with that.  Most young people who voted for Obama and supported Obamacare are learning that the penalty for not having health insurance is lower than the actual cost of health insurance, and are acting according to their rational self-interest by declining to purchase it.  Would we expect young adults—who earn the least of all adult age groups—to do any less?

More broadly, would we expect other age groups, or small business owners, or large business owners, or private citizens, or unions, or—yes—Congressmen and their staffers not to try to find a way to get out of a plan they know costs more than it’s worth and unacceptably limits their options?  Are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi un-American for not signing up for health care exchanges that the poor schlubs in their districts will be forced to buy?

As Obamacare implementation stumbles on, more and more stakeholders are realizing that, not only is it not their duty to make the plan succeed, it is in their strong interest to help it fail.

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Two recent events—the Benghazi coverup and the IRS scandal—provide an object lesson in how liberals and conservatives view “politicization.”

Conservatives’ definition of politicization is: liberals treating them unfairly for partisan reasons.  Liberals’ definition of politicization is: conservatives pointing out something they did wrong.

Consider: When conservatives highlighted the Obama administration’s incompetent, deceitful, disastrous handling of the terrorist attack on our Benghazi embassy, Democrats dismissed the affair as no big deal and accused Republicans of politicizing it.

Actually, politicizing Benghazi would have involved, say, a Presidential candidate who pressed the issue during his foreign policy debate with Obama, or who mentioned it in campaign commercials leading up to the election.  Instead, Mitt Romney decided it would be more Presidential to bring it up once and then never, ever mention it again.

When evidence of their malfeasance becomes too overwhelming, liberals simply switch tactics and claim that, OK, sometimes they politicize their faults by downplaying them, but the other side is just as bad.

Thus, The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd recently confessed, “The administration’s behavior before and during the attack in Benghazi was unworthy of the greatest power on earth…  The State Department’s minimum security requirements were not met, requests for more security were rejected…  Obama aides wanted to promote the mythology that the president who killed Osama was vanquishing terror.  So they deemed it problematic to mention any possible Qaeda involvement.”

Nonetheless, Dowd ludicrously titled her piece “When Myths Collide in the Capital” and claimed that both sides are politicizing Benghazi.  She wrote, “Welcome to a glorious spring weekend of accusation and obfuscation as Hillaryland goes up against Foxworld…  Truth is the first casualty here when competing fiefs protect their mythologies.”

Except that it’s not a mythology if it’s the truth.  Exactly which part of the Republicans’ Benghazi charges has proven unworthy of investigation?  Did ABC News recently join the feifdom of Fox News?

And The New Yorker’s Alex Koppelman had to admit, “It’s striking to see the twelve different iterations that the [administration’s] talking points went through…  The mere existence of the edits seriously undermines the White House’s credibility on this issue.”

Yet Koppelman felt compelled to add, “For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession.  But now there is something to it.”  No—there always was something to it; the left was just too blinded by partisanship to see it.  It isn’t bipartisan partisanship when liberals finally start admitting what conservatives have been saying all along.

Meanwhile, conservatives actually are the objects of politicization.  Witness the IRS’s recent admission that it targeted dozens of conservative and Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny during the 2012 Presidential election, solely on the basis of having words like “patriot” in their names instead of “progress,” action,” or “organizing.”  The IRS was warned about its improper filtering criteria back in 2010 and briefly stopped using them, then started using slightly different ones in 2012.  Congress learned about the IRS harassment last spring, but, as with Benghazi, didn’t address it until after the election.  Last Friday the IRS lied and said its actions were carried out by only a few low-level employees, a claim it has since retracted.

How has politicization affected free-speech rights as a result of the scandal?  Numerous conservative and Tea Party groups had their tax-exempt status delayed for months or even years, some until after the 2012 election.  Some are still waiting for approval.  Many eventually had their requests granted only because the American Center for Law and Justice stepped in and helped fight their case.  And how many conservative grass-roots activists will be intimidated into staying out of politics for fear of government harassment or bankrupting fines?

Naturally, liberals’ response to these charges has been to accuse Republicans of politicizing them.

The right is also the target of politicization in the form of persistent media bias.  At least since the 1960s, mainstream journalists have reliably voted for and donated to Democratic over Republican candidates by an order of magnitude.

Conservatives know what it’s like to have their actions politicized; they experience it in the form of a constant stream of harassment from supposedly neutral organizations like the mainstream media and the IRS.  Politicization for conservatives means an endless maelstrom of invective and staggering odds against getting their unfiltered message out to anyone outside their base.

If media-coddled liberals ever faced any actual politicization, it would crush them.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics

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The Heritage Foundation recently released a 92-page study titled “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer.”  The report, which has received much attention in the conservative media, purports to calculate the cost of granting amnesty to the country’s 11 million illegal aliens as $6.3 trillion.

How does Heritage derive this figure?  First they project the education levels and household composition of illegal immigrants, by taking all U.S. Census immigrant respondents and subtracting those that are legally here.  Then they take the average earnings and taxes paid by households by education level; weight these by the proportion of illegal immigrants with these education levels; and adjust for benefits denied to illegal immigrants.  Because illegals have lower education levels, and households with less education receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes, the authors conclude that amnesty would be a net cost to our economy.

Heritage notes that illegal immigrants are barred from receiving direct government benefits, including Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and workers’ compensation.  Illegals are also ineligible to collect means-tested benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, Section 8 housing, public housing, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Social Services Block Grant, and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Unlawful immigrant households receive only $44 a year on average in direct government benefits, compared to $9,398 for lawful immigrants and $11,617 for non-immigrants.  They collect only $4,497 in means-tested benefits, compared to $9,040 for lawful immigrants and $6,685 for non-immigrants.  In addition, illegals make less use of population-based services such as highways and police.

So how do illegal immigrants collect any benefits at all?  The answer is that their U.S.-born children, who are legal citizens, are eligible to receive them.  Heritage includes the cost of children born in the U.S. to illegals as part of the cost of illegal immigration.

U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants are eligible to receive food stamps, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program benefits, and—most expensively—public education.  The means-tested benefits illegal aliens receive, though lower than for other populations, flow largely to their children.

So how does Heritage’s analysis hold up?  As I’ve argued before, immigration-leery conservatives are not addressing the real problem plaguing the country’s economy, which is the growth of the welfare state.  All of the arguments Heritage makes constitute good arguments for why we should deport the poor, or why we shouldn’t have accepted uneducated immigrants during the great 19^th and early 20^th century immigration waves.

But the main problem with Heritage’s report is its failure to think dynamically.  The authors assume that illegal immigrants’ children will hobble along in perpetuity at the same education and career level as their parents.

But does Heritage really think that industrious, motivated parents fed up with our draconian immigration quotas, who skirted the law and possibly risked their lives to move here and make a better life for their families, are going to settle for their children drifting along on food stamps for the rest of their lives?  For as long as anyone can remember, successive generations of U.S. citizens have attained greater educational credentials and earnings than their parents.  Why should we expect immigrants’ children to be any different?

Heritage’s estimate of the costs illegal immigration places on our system via disproportionate benefits and lower taxes might be accurate—if illegal immigrants’ children never improved their station in life beyond that of their parents.  But evidence suggests that their children are likely to become better-educated, earn more, and pay more in taxes, thus offsetting the cost to our system.

As Jennifer Rubin notes, “[T]he flawed Heritage study has generated… a backlash from fiscal conservatives who cannot in good faith embrace the notion that fewer people make us richer or that every immigrant will be a poverty-stricken ward of the state (and hence a drain on the Treasury).”  Immigration bill author Senator Marco Rubio explains, “[Heritage’s] argument is based on a single premise, which I think is flawed.  That is, these people… will be poor for the rest of their lives in the U.S.  Quite frankly, that’s not the immigration experience in the U.S.  That’s certainly not my family’s experience in the U.S.  The folks described in that report are my family…  I would not say they were a burden on the United States.”

Heritage complains that Rubio’s immigration bill hides the long-term costs of granting amnesty.  But Heritage misses the long-term benefit of the bill hiding in plain sight: the future educational and earnings potential of generations of young American immigrants.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics

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• Heritage: Amnestied Illegals Will Get $9.4T in Benefits; Increase Debt $6.3T’ (ncrenegade.com)
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Which of the following countries would you prefer to live in?

(1) A bloated welfare state, with record numbers of Americans receiving disability payments and food stamps, but nice secure borders to keep Mexicans from pestering us with dirt-cheap labor;

(2) A country in which the entitlement state has shrunk to a speck, only the most destitute receive temporary federal assistance, government signs and voting ballots are in English only, and we have a policy of open immigration.

If conservatives are going to turn the 2016 presidential election into a one-issue referendum on immigration, they’d better define their terms first.

The biggest problem plaguing the country today isn’t rampant immigration—it’s rampant entitlement.  Immigration rates were far higher during many periods throughout American history—most notably during the mid-19^th and early 20^th centuries—with entering populations much more illiterate, poor, and low-skilled than today.  Yet somehow we survived and even thrived from their integration into our population and economy.

Between 1840 and 1930, 30 million Europeans immigrated to the U.S., including whole metropolises’ worth of Germans, Irish, Poles, Italians, Russians, and Scandinavians.  Most came for the same reason Mexicans and other Second and Third World residents do today—greater economic opportunity and political freedom.  Like Mexicans capitalizing on the long, porous border between Mexico and four Southwestern U.S. states, European immigrants scampered aboard crowded shipping vessels trekking to the U.S. via new trade routes and flooded immigration centers in Northeastern cities New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.

Immigration as a percentage of the general population was 11% during the 1850s and 10% during the 1900s, the two peak immigration decades in our history.  Yet immigration as a percentage of the population during the supposedly runaway 2000s was a paltry 3%.  Though immigration has slowly increased since the last great wave of the 1920s, as a percentage of population in the 2000s it was lower than during any decade between 1820 and 1930.

Even the sheer volume of immigrants from 1900-1909 was a full 80% what it was between 2000 and 2009.  The number of immigrants in the 1900s and 1910s were each greater than the number of immigrants during the alleged dark years under President Reagan’s amnesty program.

And even mass Mexican immigration is nothing new.  During the 1920s, when the U.S. was a third the size it is now, the number of Mexicans entering the country was about half the number that entered during the 1980s.  Since the late 2000s, when Mexican immigration dried up due to the economic downturn, there have been more immigrants per year from Asia than Mexico for the first time in over a century.

How did the U.S. previously accommodate so many immigrants without collapsing?

Easy.  Our welfare system used to give assistance only to the truly needy—with much more being given via charity; and most citizens, including and especially immigrants, took self-sufficiency as a point of pride.  Part of immigrants’ self-sufficiency included learning and using English and assimilating to American cultural practices, right down to changing the spelling of their last names.

In the early 20^th century, we didn’t have a federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, disability payments, or Obamacare.  The term “welfare state” wasn’t used with regularity until the Great Depression, and even then it referred mostly to job creation programs and not cash payments.  Do you think the above roster of federal behemoths might have a bit more to do with our country’s financial state than some lettuce pickers working off the books in San Jose?

Just like today, reactionary citizens a century ago wailed that immigrants were going to depress our economy, steal our jobs, and sap our international strength.  How’d that prediction work out?

If Marco Rubio’s immigration bill passes, then instead of carping endlessly about “illegals,” Congressional Republicans should make themselves useful and pass laws sharply restricting welfare benefits to legal citizens, not just those who are lawfully present.

The GOP should compromise on Rubio’s bill and leverage the immigration debate to shrink the welfare state—the underlying issue that truly matters and is fundamentally consistent with the Republican party philosophy.  Which political platform sounds like a winner: an ever-expanding welfare state in which we nonetheless put those cocky chulos in their place; or a tiny-government, pro-growth, capitalist magnet for the world’s hardest-working and entrepreneurial residents?

Let’s stop getting exercised over day laborers starting construction businesses and use immigration policy as a big fat opportunity to dismantle the welfare state.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics

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Just in time for Earth Day 2013, we can safely conclude that fewer sea mammals were killed by the Deepwater Horizon oil leak in 2010 than Bostonians were murdered by Islamic terrorists just last week.  But don’t expect that to slow down the environmentalist jihad.

Several months after the BP oil rig explosion in April 2010, honest reporters were already discovering that environmentalists had wildly overstated the likely impact of the accident.

In July 2010, TIME magazine reported that the oil spill had killed fewer than 1% the number of birds as the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989.  By November 2010, the fish and seafood population had rebounded explosively.  This regeneration of aquatic life was due to the simple fact that fishing had been restricted for several months, which allowed the stock to refresh.  Environmentalists’ prediction that oil and dispersants would stunt the fish population was dead wrong.

So fish recovered, but were they safe to eat?  Earlier this year, Robert Dickey of the FDA’s Gulf Coast Seafood Laboratory reported, “[T]he seafood is as safe to consume now as it was before the spill.  We’re back to background levels.  We were in the fall (of 2010) shortly after the spill dissipated.”  Dickey noted that levels of toxic chemicals in the seafood were only 0.1% to 1% of the level at which one should be concerned about their harmful effects on humans.

How about turtles and sea mammals?  TIME reported that researchers had located hundreds of dead turtles in the Gulf, but that “only 17 were visibly oiled; otherwise, they have found only one other dead reptile in the entire Gulf.”  (Meanwhile, Al Gore’s chauffeur kills an average of five turtles a week backing up his Priuses into the garage.)

TIME similarly reported that wildlife response teams had collected the “visibly oiled carcasses” of three sea mammals.  Three.

So birds, fish, turtles, and mammals weren’t devastated.  Surely the fragile marshes and wetlands were decimated?

Nope.  The oil spill reached only 2% of the marshlands that Louisiana was losing due to erosion each year.  Not 2% of all of Louisiana’s marshlands—2% of the fraction it was already losing each year due to other causes.  Two percent of annual losses isn’t a tragedy; it’s a rounding error.

Even the marshes tainted by oil have bounced back.  Author Michael Grunwald noted, “Mother Nature can be incredibly resilient…  [N]ew shoots of Spartina grasses were sprouting in oiled marshes and new leaves were growing on the first black mangroves I’ve ever seen that were actually black.”

Area scientists were unanimous in downplaying the damage from the spill.  Geochemist Jacqueline Michel reported, “The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared.”  Audubon Society vice president Paul Kemp compared the spill’s effects on the marshes to “a sunburn on a cancer patient.”  (To put it in terms a northeastern big-city mayor might understand, the effects were comparable to those of “a Big Gulp sipped by Michael Moore.”)

Marine scientist Ivor van Heerden noted, “There’s a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it”—which, coincidentally, describes the entire environmentalist movement.

It’s also possible that the Obama administration is exaggerating the amount of oil BP spilled in order to wring more settlement money out of the beleaguered oil company.  In March 2012, BP alleged that the U.S. was using legal privilege to shield tens of thousands of documents proving it was overestimating the size of the spill.

So why review all of this evidence now?  Because greens aren’t just living on a commune in Minnesota eating soy and wearing hemp—they’re trying to impose their worldview on the rest of us.  And they use overblown incidents like Deepwater Horizon to scare responsible citizens into accepting their doomsday scenarios.

It’s important to evaluate now and then the predicted vs. actual outcomes of supposed environmentalist catastrophes.  It’s easy to spread hype and fear immediately after an oil spill or nuclear meltdown, but we must take the long view and see whether reality matches the hype.

(Speaking of nuclear meltdowns, there still have been zero deaths from radiation leaked from the Fukushima power plant.  The number of deaths from the Chernobyl incident numbered in the dozens, though environmentalists keep lying that it was a million, and three decades later the region’s flora and fauna are even more abundant than before.)

It’s important to put incidents like Deepwater Horizon in perspective and not allow them to discourage us from obtaining the energy we need to fuel our advanced way of life.

It’s an unfortunate fact that power production sometimes results in a few reptiles and scavenger birds meeting an untimely end.  But better them than industrial civilization.

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Do illegal immigrants commit more crimes than legal immigrants, residents, or U.S. citizens?  From the stream of anecdotal evidence conservatives have been circulating as the immigration debate heats up again, you’d sure think so.

As Congress prepares to consider a reportedly 1,500-page bill cosponsored by Republican Senator Marco Rubio that would enforce current immigration laws and provide a pathway to citizenship for 11 million aliens, one of the arguments against such a de facto amnesty policy is that illegal border crossers are a risk to the nation’s safety due to their higher criminality.  But is this true?

Let’s clarify what we’re talking about: when examining the crime rates of illegal immigrants, I don’t count the acts of crossing the border illegally, bribing border control agents, or helping other immigrants cross.  Whatever you think of illegal immigration, all of those actions would be unnecessary or legal if the U.S. had an open immigration policy.  An illegal immigrant who never commits another crime in his life is not what I would consider a dangerous felon.

Let’s focus on assault, battery, murder, theft, robbery, rape, kidnapping, breaking and entering, vandalism, arson, drunk driving, fraud, illegal gun possession, drug violations.  Do illegal immigrants commit these more often than legal residents?

High-profile incidents in the wake of Arizona’s tough immigration bill, including the murder of ranchers and border patrol agents by Mexico’s drug cartels, suggest chaos and mayhem under a policy of open immigration.  The Obama administration’s irresponsible act of releasing hundreds of illegal aliens with criminal records in anticipation of the recent sequester spending cuts didn’t help matters.

But  many conservatives have been focusing on the additional crimes—i.e. crimes at the margin—that accompany immigrants’ entry to the U.S., without considering the prevalence of those crimes among the population.  Of course any group of people who enter the country are going to bring both good and bad.  The extra crime wouldn’t have occurred in this country—but neither would we have gotten all the additional talent, hard work, and cultural exchange.  The question is, do immigrants bring more of the bad, per capita, than we already have here?

Though controlled studies are far from readily available (but see this excellent analysis), the FBI reported that violent crime has decreased 17% in border city San Diego over the past decade, 10% in border city Phoenix, and 10% overall in border state Arizona.  In El Paso, which sits directly across the border from crime-ridden Juarez, Mexico, and whose residents are three-quarters Hispanic and one-quarter foreign-born, it is down a whopping 36%.

New York police statistics show that communities with high numbers of first-generation immigrants—many of them illegal—have seen dramatic drops in crime rates over the past two decades, even larger than those experienced by the city as a whole.  One possible explanation is that poor immigrants willing to move into run-down areas reduce the number of vacant buildings and storefronts and help revitalize the neighborhood.  According to social science researcher Robert Sampson, “You don’t migrate to the United States from countries around the world on a whim.  It takes planning.  And for the most part, it is driven by economic motivations.  People want a better life.  They’re seeking to get ahead.  And those are the very factors that tend to be associated with lower crime.”

Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes increased immigration and supports greater border enforcement, admits, “There’s no evidence that immigrants—or even illegal immigrants—are necessarily any more or less likely to be committing crimes than the population at large.  It’s just that they tend to be associated with certain types of crimes—drug trafficking, for example.”

The National Bureau for Economic Research found that immigrants (legal and illegal) had one-fifth the incarceration rate of non-immigrants between 1980 and 2000, a difference that grew over time.  The latter trend was due, not to increased deportation, but to self-selection and deterrence effects.  Namely, immigrants who chose to come to the U.S. were less criminally inclined than native residents, and were especially sensitive to criminal charges that might tear asunder the lives they had come here to build or send them back home.

CBS News did report that illegal immigrants are twice as prevalent in the Arizona prison system nowadays as in the general population.  But that doesn’t mean illegals are committing more crimes, just that they’re getting caught more often.  The Arizona Legislature recently empowered—and coerced—tens of thousands of police and border patrol agents to be more vigilant in checking the papers of “suspicious” individuals, so it’s no surprise that they’re catching more Latino criminals.  And poorer segments of the population who lack resources to protect themselves, who don’t understand the law as well, or who can’t afford adequate legal representation are more likely to be thrown in the brig.  This isn’t a treatise on “social justice”—it’s just an explanation of why there are so many Hispanics in Arizona jails over the last few years.

Some have assumed that, because the percentage of deported immigrants with criminal records has increased over the past few years, illegals are committing more crime.  But this trend is due in large part to Obama’s instruction to border patrol agents to prioritize deporting immigrants with criminal histories or who pose national security threats.  Large numbers of deportees with criminal records have committed only nonviolent offenses, such as drug crimes or driving under the influence.  In 2010, only 0.28% of deportees had been convicted of homicide.

There are many arguments for a more restrictive immigration policy, most of which I don’t happen to find persuasive.  But until better evidence is in, the notion that immigrants who cross the border without inspection to make a better life for themselves are a disproportionately dangerous and felonious bunch is a slanderous charge that conservatives should not toss around lightly.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics

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Democrats pushing for expanded background checks for gun owners don’t care whether such checks reduce gun violence.  They would support them even if they knew such laws had no effect.

Look at the statistics and you’ll find both zero evidence that background checks deter violence and the typical liberal display of number-fudging, reliance on tiny sample sizes, and outright lying.

If there were a better study out there proving the deterrent effect of background checks than a one-month spike in gun crimes in Missouri, the left would have produced it by now.

The reason background checks for guns don’t work is that background checks function only when the individual requesting a privilege—a gun, job, security clearance, credit card, or mortgage—is part of civilized society, abides by the consequences of his actions, and can’t otherwise acquire the thing he seeks.

If you’ve got a string of violent felony convictions, you’re not going to acquire a legally purchased firearm—but then you’re not going to allow your local gun merchant to run your name through a police database.

Would-be mass murderers don’t conscientiously submit their sordid histories to the vagaries of a police investigation.  If they anticipate trouble buying guns, there are a million other places their untroubled souls can find them.

When budding serial killers don’t have criminal records, like Newtown shooter Adam Lanza, background checks don’t stop them from buying guns.  Even shooters without criminal records sometimes obtain their weapons illicitly, just as Lanza stole the guns he used to carry out his massacre.

So why not enact expanded background checks if it’ll make liberals happy?  Why not agree to an innocuous legal restriction if it won’t cause any harm?

Because it most likely will cause a great deal of harm.

Just as with magazine size restrictions, ammunition purchase limits, and mandatory waiting periods, the only people who obey gun control regulations are law-abiding citizens who want to do the right thing and protect their records.

But these same people sometimes need a gun quickly to defend themselves against a crime wave, a stalker sending threatening messages, an angry domestic abuser.

If you were a gang member, burglar, or wife-beater, would you favor restricting the firepower your would-be victims could legally acquire?  Would you support minimizing the lethal force with which they could retaliate?  Would you approve of forcing your mark to submit to a waiting period before she could get a hold of the means to defend herself?

The general rule should be: Ask which laws career criminals want passed, then pass the opposite ones.

As John Lott has shown, virtually all gun purchase denials from background checks are faulty and are eventually reversed.  In 2009, only 0.018% of all 70,101 denials resulted in federal prosecutions or plea deals for providing false information.  Where are all the hardened felons willing to submit their criminal histories for review and be denied the weapons with which they would have gunned down civilians?

I don’t know—but I know that innocent people who need guns for self-defense, yet happen to have a name similar to that of a local criminal, are going to be defenseless for the weeks or months it takes federal bureaucrats to process their cases.

Background checks are so insidious that even rock-solid conservatives like Senator Pat Toomey, who has an A rating from the National Rifle Association, are angling to cosponsor laws supporting them.

Democrats know that getting nominal Republican support for their legislation is the only hope they have of burnishing it with any legitimacy.  (Remember how giddy Democrats were when the Senate Finance Committee twisted Olympia Snowe’s arm into supporting their first Obamacare draft?)  Last week Rachel Maddow was gushing about how the Connecticut State Senate passed bipartisan gun control legislation, even though they “did not have to do it this way,” and praising “their strategic decision to do it like this.”

Democrats keep throwing around dubious polls—conducted in the wake of Newtown but no longer applicable—showing that 90% of Americans favor background checks.  If support is overwhelming, why is it important for Democrats to get Republicans on board?  Wouldn’t passing strict background checks be a great way to do the right thing while scoring a political victory over Republicans?

Of course it wouldn’t—because Democrats know Americans aren’t dumb enough to let their emotions get the better of them after they’ve engaged in sober reflection.

If Congress passes expanded background checks, it will be because Democrats snookered Republicans who didn’t do their homework on what they assumed to be a harmless giveaway.  And more victims may die because of GOP fecklessness.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics

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In a controversial New York Times piece that’s been receiving attention from both the left and the right, former Reagan budget director David A. Stockman recently argued that the federal government’s activist role in manipulating our economy for the past eight decades is responsible for our current dire financial straits.

Stockman dissects the history of abuses carried out by the Federal Reserve and notes, correctly, that the Keynesian policy of endless money printing to stimulate demand and promote liquidity leads to long-term, permanent inflation and an erosion of our currency’s value.  He takes to task George W. Bush for recklessly expanding Medicare, Obama for his poorly targeted stimulus bill, and both for their role in the 2008 bank bailout.  He notes that even so-called fiscal hawks like House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan vastly underestimate the severity of our debt crisis and soft-pedal the steps needed to resolve it.

But Stockman gets a lot wrong, too, and the bulk of his error seems to stem from a renegade streak that reflects his desire to prove himself more sagacious than both left and right.  To wit: any analyst who finds equal economic fault in both parties—labeling the problem “bipartisan,” as Stockman does—misunderstands the situation.  Yes, the right deserves blame: Nixon decoupled paper money from gold; Reagan built up massive federal deficits; George W. Bush increased government spending more than any president before him.  But Stockman justifies holding both parties equally accountable by inappropriately coupling spending cuts with raising taxes as solutions to mitigate deficits.  Stockman falls into the trap—as do most liberals—of equating federal expenditures with tax cuts.  In the liberal worldview, both entities are equivalent, because each involves spending in different forms—one on government programs that largely help the poor and middle class, the other on tax breaks that largely favor the wealthy.

But lowering marginal tax rates on high-income earners doesn’t involve spending; it involves not taking money that isn’t the government’s in the first place.  Revealing either his confusion or his deliberate blurring of the issue, Stockman writes, “Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills [emphasis added].”  Cut massive wasteful federal spending, gouge the rich—it’s all the same to Stockman.

Similarly, he bemoans Bush’s “giant expansion of Medicare and a tax-cutting spree for the wealthy…  In effect, the G.O.P embraced Keynesianism—for the wealthy.”  In other words, Stockman thinks letting the wealthy keep their money in the hope they’ll invest and create more wealth is the functional equivalent of burying money and paying people to dig it up.

At times Stockman rails against the size of the entitlement state, but he’s inconsistent in denouncing it.  At one point he complains that Ryan’s “proposal for draconian 30 percent cuts over a decade on the $7 trillion safety net—Medicaid, food stamps and the earned-income tax credit—is another front in the G.O.P.’s war against the 99 percent.”  Is Stockman Reagan’s former budget director or a closet Occupy Wall Streeter?

Stockman betrays further obtuseness when he complains that our two stubborn political parties, caught in “stasis,” won’t resolve our fiscal crisis in one fell swoop, but rather “in carefully choreographed crises over debt ceilings, continuing resolutions and temporary budget patches.”  In other words, the country’s having to white-knuckle it through endless, panic-filled stopgap measures is equally the fault of Democrats who refused to pass a budget for four years and Republicans who desperately tried to get one signed into law during that period.  Neither party is more to blame than the other.

Showing further solidarity with the left, Stockman writes that not only should we end deposit insurance and inexpensive Fed loans for Wall Street, but banks should be “banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.”  So banks should have to shoulder all the risks inherent in their profession—a sensible idea—but government should arbitrarily restrict the scope and nature of their profit-generating activities?  Isn’t that just the inverse of the problem we have now?

But what really undercuts Stockman’s case is the solutions he presents to resolve our crisis.  While he suggests some sensible ideas involving smaller government, including reining in the Fed and replacing the welfare state with a modest means-tested safety net, he inadvertently reveals an odd, megalomaniacal desire for control.  Under his plan, for example, Stockman would demand “the abolition of incumbency”; he would order “sweeping constitutional surgery” that would require “providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks)… [and] overturning Citizens United…”  Stockman is willing to throw out free speech—including our ability to spend money to advocate for political candidates and messages—in the process of saving the country.  Why don’t we just let Stockman pick our leaders right now and be done with it?

Anyone who sees so little difference between the ideological foundations and policy contributions to our economy of our two major political parties—and who botches so many of the specifics in his exegesis of our current woes—either doesn’t have a grasp of the situation or is trying to mislead us.  And Stockman’s restrictive, authoritarian solutions suggest that—as with Democrats and their congenital desire to manipulate other people’s wealth—he really just wants to tell us working-class schlubs what to do.

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I hate taking Rush Limbaugh down a peg as much as any conservative—and am usually found defending his quotes against the left—but listening to him on Tuesday afternoon deconstruct the same-sex marriage debate and oral arguments presented to the Supreme Court on California’s Proposition 8 was downright painful.  Principled opposition to same-sex marriage is abundant, though dwindling, but lately Rush and other conservatives seem to be grasping at straws:

• According to one caller to Rush’s show who was an appellate litigator in Los Angeles, Prop 8 defenders didn’t have standing to ask the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule California’s enactment of the law after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger decided not to defend it anymore.  Therefore, the Supreme Court must invalidate the Ninth Circuit’s ruling overturning Prop 8.

Yes, you read that correctly—the defendant (the state of California) decided to no longer defend its original opposition to gay marriage; therefore, the plaintiff can’t challenge the defendant’s original position, and Prop 8 must stay on the books.  Only if the defendant still supported Prop 8 could the plaintiff challenge it—but not if the defendant had dropped all support for it.  Even the conservative Supreme Court Justices should make mincemeat of that argument.

• According to Rush, same-sex marriage proponents have made such inroads in pushing their case in the media that those discussing the issue are now required to recite “opposite-sex marriage” instead of just “marriage.”

This is patently ridiculous, in that (1) commentators who oppose same-sex marriage have never, to my knowledge, been bullied into saying “opposite-sex marriage”; (2) such pundits already have to add a less precise modifier—“traditional”—if they want to indicate that they’re talking about opposite-sex marriage; and (3) if same-sex marriage proponents are correct, then marriage for same-sex couples is simply “marriage,” not “gay marriage,” and it’s opponents who are forcing the distinction.  (No man has ever asked a woman, “Will you opposite-sex marry me?”  Has any man ever asked another man, “Will you gay marry me?”)  During the legal debate over same-sex marriage, both sides have to clarify their terms, but that doesn’t mean same-sex marriage proponents are trying to trick people with language.

• Speaking of forcing, according to Rush, same-sex marriage has never won at the ballot box, only when courts or legislatures have forced it on them; every time same-sex marriage has been put to a popular vote, it’s been rejected.

Conservatives have been using this canard for so long that perhaps Rush was reciting it out of habit, but even I was surprised at his erroneous repetition of this claim (which Mark Levin restated on his Tuesday evening show).  On a single night in November 2012, voters in state referenda legalized same-sex marriage in Maryland, Washington, and Maine, and voted down a proposed ban on same-sex marriage in Minnesota.  I know a lot of us conservatives have tried to block out the fog of Election Night 2012, but did Rush have the whole evening lobotomized from his brain?

• According to Rush, conservatives don’t try to force their will on the people like liberals do.

Except with, um, referenda like Prop 8, as well as dozens of referenda states have enacted or tried to enact to ban same-sex marriage.  Also state referenda like the one in North Dakota that would effectively ban abortion, or Mississippi’s infamous “personhood amendment.”  Or referenda to remove state court justices, force public funding of religious institutions, or secede from the nation.  Other than that, conservatives never, ever use state referenda.

• Rush claimed that our Founding Founders could never have envisioned same-sex marriage several hundred years down the road; therefore, the Supreme Court cannot infer original Constitutional intent for the institution.

Original intent refers to broad principles that are applied to concrete instances, and invoking original intent doesn’t imply that our Founders supported or could have foreseen every specific example those principles would ever cover.  Our Founders never thought we’d have interracial marriage, women voting, or a half-black President, either.

• Rush claimed that those who call same-sex marriage a civil right dismiss all opponents as bigots.

If I were the type to casually label entire groups of people based on what I thought they believed, rather than asking them what they believe, I would ascribe bigotry to gay marriage opponents who assume supporters all cynically label them as bigots.  But I’m not, so I’ll assume that they’ve just had a few bad experiences with shrill same-sex marriage proponents and should try discussing the issue with a wider array of supporters, including those who respect their prerogative to thoughtfully evolve on the subject.

There are a thousand other stupid arguments made against gay marriage that have been shot down as ridiculous again and again, and I applaud Rush for not trotting out the more shopworn and vulgar ones.  But c’mon, Rush—you can do better.

Or maybe today’s show proves that, on this issue, you can’t.

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Here’s what we know: On Saturday, March 9, 2013 around 11:30pm, two plainclothes officers—Sgt. Mourad Mourad and Officer Jovaniel Cordova—emerged from a maroon sedan on East 52^nd St. in East Flatbush and approached a group of eight teenage boys, including 16-year-old Kimani Gray.  According to police and other eyewitnesses, Gray started backing away from the approaching officers in a suspicious manner, and at some point reached for his waistband.  Cops claim he pulled out a gun and aimed it at them, though some witnesses claim he didn’t pull out a gun, and other witnesses didn’t see enough to be sure.  The police ordered Gray to freeze, and when he disobeyed, they fired 11 bullets, 7 of which hit him.  Two hit his right thigh, two the backs of his thighs, one the back of his left shoulder, and one each his left ribcage and forearm.  Gray fell to the ground and was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

We also know that police recovered from Gray’s body a .38-caliber Rohm’s Industry revolver with two spent and four live rounds.  Police learned after Gray’s death that he had been arrested four times for adult charges including grand larceny, criminal possession of stolen property, and inciting a riot.  Police believe Gray was a member of the Bloods gang, based on his presence in two online videos in which he wore a red hoodie and dressed down a member of the rival Crips.  Ex-gang member Shanduke McPhatter, who works with troubled youth in Gray’s crime-ridden neighborhood, set the context for the shooting: “[T]he situation on the streets has grown more complex for law enforcement: gangs are less organized, replaced instead by informal crews with few requirements and in which leadership is frequently up for grabs among increasingly young members.”

Here’s what we don’t know:

We don’t know whether Gray pulled out his gun and pointed it at police.

We don’t know the order in which the bullets hit Gray or whether police shot him in the back.  Coroners are attempting to ascertain these details, which could help determine which way Gray was facing when police shot him.  The fact that only three bullets hit Gray from the back suggests he may have turned and tried to run after being shot in the front; the testimony of eyewitness Camille Johnson supports this account.  That two bullets hit Gray in his right thigh implies police shot him from the front first: had they already shot him five times from the back and side, it’s unlikely they would have precisely targeted two shots to his right thigh.  Four bullets in his thighs suggest cops were not shooting to kill but to wound.

That’s what we don’t know—but don’t worry: not having all the facts isn’t preventing overheated rhetoric and wanton violence from cop-haters and liberals who condescend to people who live in high-crime areas by assuming they don’t want a strong police presence.

Those cop-haters—joined by a smattering of Occupy Wall Street types—have engaged in the following helpful activities while awaiting all the facts:

After a vigil for Gray Monday night, dozens of protestors marched to the local police precinct, where they threw bottles and garbage at the station, forcing police to don riot gear and set up a roadblock.  They threw rocks and glass bottles at oncoming traffic and broke several bus windows.  A group of 60 rioters stormed a local Rite Aid, destroying merchandise and knocking over a cash register.  They struck a pastor over the head with a wine bottle, stole his cellphone, and assaulted the store’s manager.  After looting the drugstore, they hit a local fruit market, where they demolished merchandise and stole money from the cash register.

After another vigil Wednesday night, rioters were at it again, throwing bricks at officers, hurling chairs, and tossing projectiles through police van windows.  Forty-six hooligans were arrested for disorderly conduct, assaulting police officers, and destroying property.

What does it say that Gray’s supporters behaved this way after his shooting?  It doesn’t imply his guilt, but it certainly doesn’t help their case.  As with the Trayvon Martin shooting, rioters seem to think behaving like savages and harming innocent people will help their legal argument.  Do they really believe it will draw more support for their side?  Do they see themselves as courageous freedom fighters?

There was a time in this country when racial injustice was prevalent and African Americans couldn’t get a fair deal from our criminal justice system.  The time of demonstrable, documentable, provable police bias is long over.  An occasional shooting of an armed or suspicious-looking black suspect in a high-crime neighborhood who disobeys police orders is not proof we are living in Jim Crow America.

During the civil rights era, crusaders for justice stood their ground with quiet dignity and let racist cops and governors disgrace themselves by turning on the fire hoses and releasing the attack dogs.  This new trend—riots in Los Angeles, flash mobs in Philadelphia, ransackings in Miami Beach—is a perversion of civil disobedience and the polar opposite of justice.

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