Morning in America, Again

Reporting from the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington:

Anticipation of Saturday's late afternoon appearance by Rush Limbaugh to close out CPAC 2009 began this morning and, midday, attendees were essentially faced with a choice -- keep your seat in the Shoreham Hotel's Regeny Ballroom for the duration, or risk viewing El Rushbo's remarks on a monitor from spillover seating down the hall.

This is the what you might the call the perfect Conservative storm. Rush blowing in from the south, converging with nearly 9,000 registered CPACers in a ballroom at near-maximum capacity, in a moment when nothing short of a religious experience is adequate to calm the apprehensions of Conservatives young and less young.

Author Ann Coulter also drew a full house around the lunch hour. It was telling that her humorous verbal arrows, while well received, did not have the audience actually rolling in the aisles in side splitting ecstasy. The material was not the problem. It just seems all too apparent that most fervently patriotic Americans are shell shocked by the rapid deployment of B. Hussien Obama's destructive economic and social marching orders, and terrified to think too far beyond tomorrow.

(Among Coulter's best lines: "The media tell us Obama is the Second Coming, but his policies seem to ensure there won't be a second term coming.")

That's why my vote for the day's top speaker amid the Countdown to Rush goes to former Reagan cabinet member Bill Bennett, radio talk host, former Secretary of Education and recent author of a comprehensive history tome, "America: The Last Best Hope".

Bennett brought a no-frills, raspy voiced, rumpled sensibility to Day 3, and his
message is one to embrace tomorrow, next week and throughout the year to come:

"Things looked dire, looked worse, in 1974," said Bennett, referencing the year of
Nixon's demise, stock market stagnancy and the debut of CPAC. "And in 1978, '79, at the end of Jimmy Carter's presidency, things looked dire, too."

Then, Bennett issued his rules for the road ahead. I'd clip and save these.

1. Understand reality. Obama is an appealing politician. And he is not likely to make the stupid mistakes associated with the Clinton years.

2. Obama will not wreck the country. As Conservatives, we gain nothing by predicting that these are the "end of days". No one individual can wreck the country. We have feared this in our past, and it has proven to be misguided.

3. Watch our rhetoric. We are NOT seeing the rise of Socialism. (Bennett was the
only speaker of the three days who rejected this charge). We're seeing the resurgence of a Democrat Left Wing Catechism. In other words, unsettling but not unexpected.

4. Conservatives have talent. "I can't remember a time when we've had a better
bench." He named Jindal, Pawlenty, Sanford, et al. "We had no bench like this in 1979 (when Reagan stepped up)."

5. Never underestimate the American capacity for self-renewal. "It is not dark, or dusk in America," Bennett said. "It is MORNING in America."

Optimism. Realism. Conservatism. Morning.

Any questions?

Thought For The Day

Ronald Reagan generated many great quotes in his day, but I never saw this one until today:

"How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."

Why Pick on John Kerry?

Today's Rocky Mountain News is the last. Because Rightsideproject's overhead on a per reader basis is substantially lower than the Rocky Mountain News', we continue while RMN doesn't. Simple equation, doesn't take much effort to calculate or understand.

Unless of course you're a Senator from Massachusetts who chairs the Senate Finance Subcommittee on the Blindingly Obvious and "predicted 'this won't be the last in this unfortunate trend in the newspaper business' and pledged to 'take a hard and close look' in his capacity as chairman of a committee on communication, technology and the Internet."

What are you going to look at, Sen.? Craigslist gives away for free what newspapers have to sell. Google News aggregates stories for free. Technology has destroyed the newspaper business model, video killed the radio star, call it what you want. Go do something else.

On second thought, given the Obama budget maybe it's better if Sen. Kerry spends time taking a hard, close look at stopping the inevitable instead of working the budget.

Why pick on John Kerry?

Because it's easy and fun.

The Awakening

Reporting from the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington:

The "leader board" after Day 1 of CPAC 2009 on Thursday is populated by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), a young patriot the nation will embrace in years to come, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), who is a riveting speaker, the wry and authoritative John Bolton, and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, an advocate of fair election practices stemming from the fury in Ohio on Election Night 2000, and beyond.

There is a sense of urgency and a tug of destiny among these patriotic conservatives. In these horrific times, optimism is bubbling. The Obama opportunists underestimate these tremors of unrest at their peril.

To open CPAC, American Conservative Union president David Keene noted record attendance, now north of 8,500. The attendees I've met personally are here from Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Utah, to name a few. At the first CPAC in 1973, 125 registrants, mostly from "inside the Beltway", gathered to hear the keynote speaker -- a former Governor named Ronald Reagan.

This week's swarm of enthusiastic attendees is half comprised of engaging, optimistic college students. Very encouraging, to say the least. Today's CPAC also attracts 90 co-sponsoring organizations.

Highlights on Day 1 from the historic Omni Shoreham Hotel:

Paul Ryan, 38, is a gifted and forceful speaker, both eloquent and entertaining. His home run line today was that "without enduring (Conservative) principals, we get change but no direction."

Ryan urged Conservatives not to "erect roadblocks" merely to deter the Obama administration but to "create roadmaps" that can lead our nation away from the Marxist threat we face in 2009.

Learn more about Ryan's vision at AmericanRoadmap.org.

No one was on top of his game more than the former U.S. representative to the United Nations, John Bolton, who used his dry one-liners and searing criticism -- both of Presidents Bush and Obama -- to inspire repeated applause and cheers from audience of more than 8,000 attendees.

"The (global) challenges we face may be more than this (Obama) administration can handle," Bolton said. "But the good news is, if (Conservatives) get our acts together, he is a one-termer!"

Bolton wasn't through. "On foreign policy, I don't think President Obama thinks it's a priority. ... (But) a threat to the safety of any American is a threat to our nation. A President who doesn't understand that has a lot to learn."

Turning to Iran, Bolton acknowledged that there are unfortunate parallels between Bush and Obama on the refusal of the United States to confront Iran's military and nuclear ambitions.

Iran's determination to develop weapons of mass destruction is not motivated "by an abstract interest in astrophysics," he said. Bolton fears future military responses to Iran will be left to Israel because "you can count on (the Obama administration) NOT to use force against Iran."

Ohio's Blackwell appeared on a panel entitled, "Al Franken and ACORN: How Liberals are Destroying the American Election System". If the public tuned into even half of what has been done and is on tap to hijack the integrity of free elections, there would be revolt that would cross party lines.

Putting aside spending he proposes, President B. Hussein Obama is leading "the greatest realignment of political power ... ever witnessed," pointing to liberal agendas on six fronts: "card check" intrusions on union workers; censorship of talk radio and other mediums; blanket amnesty proposals for 12 million+ illegal immigrants; universal same-day voter registration; the packing of federal courts with liberal activist judges at the appellate level; and the hijacking of the U.S. Census.

"Taken collectively, you can begin to see the game plan," Blackwell said. "It is a battle of the nature of the relationship to our government as individuals, and the nature of our culture. This is a battle cry."

Indiana's charismatic Congressman Pence crystallized the undeterred resolve of the thousands who converged on the largest CPAC in history.

"We are on the brink of a great American awakening," Pence said. "And it will be Conservatives who will lead it. Beginning right here (in 2009)."

The 2% Illusion

This Op-Ed in today's Wall Street Journal is a good discussion of the folly of trying to pay for big government by taxing only the richest Americans. This strategy will never work, for two main reasons:

1. There isn't enough revenue potential in just raising taxes on the rich. As the editorial states, using an extreme example, even if the government had confiscated 100% of the income of those making over $500,000/yr in 2006, they would only have gained an extra $1.3 trillion in tax revenue. Assuming that raising rates by 65% (from 35% to 100%) would have raised $1.3 trillion, raising rates by the 6.6% Obama proposes (a combination of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the backdoor tax rate increase caused by the proposed disallowance of itemized deductions) would have raised about $130 billion. Add in the extra revenue from raising rates on those making over $250,000, which is where Obama has said the higher rates will be assessed, and you might have a total of $200 to $250 billion in extra tax revenue, a drop in the bucket compared to the proposed new spending in excess of $1 trillion annually. But here is the kicker. That is using a static revenue model, which leads to Point #2.

2. Raising marginal tax rates never yields as much revenue as the Congressional Budget Office estimates, because the CBO uses a static estimation method, i.e. it assumes no change in economic behavior due to the change in tax rates. This assumption has been proven invalid time and time again, and yet the CBO continues to use static analyis when estimating the tax revenue effects of increases or decreases in marginal rates.

The static method is especially egregious in the case of capital gains tax rates, where experience has shown that lowering the capital gains rate has actually increased tax revenue. It is also inaccurate for marginal rates on earned income. One need look no further than 2004-2006, when tax revenue actually increased by about 15% per year.

The storyline that the Bush tax cuts caused the deficit to explode was a fallacy. The deficit increased in the first couple of years of the Bush Presidency for three reasons:

1. The popping of the tech equity bubble and the subsequent recession in 2001-2002, which caused a major reduction in tax revenues.

2. An explosion of domestic spending, one of the big mistakes of the Bush Presidency.

3. The fact that when the first Bush tax cuts were enacted in 2001, the lower rates were phased in over a number of years, causing economic activity to be delayed until the lower rates were in effect.

The second round of tax cuts in 2003 corrected the phase-in problem by making the lower rates effective immediately, which led to growth in tax revenue and a reduction in the budget deficit in 2004-2006 as the economy expanded.

Unfortunately, the sunset provision ending the tax cuts after 2010 was not eliminated by the 2003 Tax Act. If the economy begins to recover in 2010 (a big if), rest assured it will run into a brick wall in 2011 when the Bush tax cuts expire and Obama's additional proposed tax hikes presumably take effect. But at least we'll have government-run health care!