Why Did We Invade Iraq?

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

 

On the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the back-and-forth recriminations continue, but in all the “not me” defenses, we have forgotten, over the ensuing decade, the climate of 2003 and why we invaded in the first place. The war was predicated on six suppositions.

 

1. 9/11 and the 1991 Gulf War. The Bush administration made the argument that in the post-9/11 climate there should be a belated reckoning with Saddam Hussein. He had continued to sponsor terrorism, had over the years invaded or attacked four of his neighbors, and had killed tens of thousands of his own people. He was surely more a threat to the region and to his own people than either Bashar Assad or Moammar Qaddafi was eight years later.

 

In this context, the end of the 1991 Gulf War loomed large: Its denouement had led not to the removal of a defeated Saddam, but to mass slaughter of Kurds and Shiites. Twelve years of no-fly zones had seen periods of conflict, and the enforcement of those zones no longer enjoyed much, if any, international support — suggesting that Saddam would soon be able to reclaim his regional stature. Many of the architects or key players in the 1991 war were once again in power in Washington, and many of them had in the ensuing decade become remorseful about the ending of the prior conflict. The sense of the need to correct a mistake became all the more potent after 9/11. Most Americans have now forgotten that by 2003, most of the books published on the 1991 war were critical, faulting the unnecessary overkill deployment; the inclusion of too many allies, which hampered U.S. choices; the shakedown of allies to help defray the cost; the realist and inhumane ending to the conflict; the ongoing persecution of Shiites, Marsh Arabs, and Kurds; and the continuation of Saddam Hussein in power.

 

Since there was no direct connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam, take away the security apprehensions following 9/11, and George Bush probably would not have taken the risk of invading Iraq. By the same token, had the 1991 Gulf War ended differently, or had the U.N. and the NATO allies continued to participate fully in the no-fly zones and the containment of Iraq, there likewise would not have been a 2003 invasion. The Iraq War was predicated, rightly or wrongly, on the notion that the past war with Saddam had failed and containment would fail, and that after 9/11 it was the proper time to end a sponsor of global terrorism that should have been ended in 1991 — a decision that, incidentally, would save Kurdistan and allow it to turn into one of the most successful and pro-American regions in the Middle East.

 

2. Afghanistan. A second reason was the rapid victory in the war in Afghanistan immediately following 9/11. Scholars and pundits had warned of disaster on the eve of the October 2001 invasion. Even if it was successful in destroying the rule of the Taliban, any chance of postwar stability was declared impossible, given the “graveyard of empires” reputation of that part of the world. But the unforeseen eight-week war that with ease removed the Taliban, and the nonviolent manner in which the pro-Western Hamid Karzai later assumed power, misled the administration and the country into thinking Iraq would be a far less challenging prospect — especially given Iraq’s humiliating defeat in 1991, which had contrasted sharply with the Soviet failure in Afghanistan.

 

After all, in contrast to Afghanistan, Iraq had accessible ports, good weather, flat terrain, a far more literate populace, and oil — facts that in the ensuing decade, ironically, would help to explain why David Petraeus finally achieved success there in a manner not true of his later efforts in Afghanistan.

 

Since the U.S. had seemingly succeeded in two months where the Soviets had abjectly failed in a decade, and given that we already had once trounced Saddam, it seemed likely that Iraq would follow the success of Afghanistan. History is replete with examples of such misreadings of the past: The French in 1940 believed that they could hold off the Germans as they had for four years in the First World War; the Germans believed the Russians would be as weak at home in 1941 as they had seemed sluggish abroad in Poland and Finland in 1939–40. Had Afghanistan proved as difficult at the very beginning of the war as it did at the end, the U.S. probably would not have invaded Iraq.

 

3. Everyone on board. A third reason was the overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress, in the media, and among the public — for reasons well beyond WMD. In October 2002, both houses of Congress passed 23 writs justifying the removal of Saddam, an update of Bill Clinton’s 1998 Iraq Liberation Act. Senators Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Harry Reid were among those who not only enthusiastically called for Saddam’s removal, but also warned of intelligence estimates of Saddam’s WMD arsenals. Pundits on both sides, from Thomas Friedman to George Will, likewise supported the invasion, which on the eve of the war enjoyed over 70 percent approval from the American people. Bush, in that regard, had achieved what Clinton had not on the eve of the Serbian War — he had obtained a joint resolution of support from Congress before attacking, and had taken nearly a year in concerted (though failed) attempts to win U.N. approval for Saddam’s removal. Had Bush not gone to Congress, had he made no attempt to go to the U.N., had he had no public support, or had he been opposed by the liberal press, he probably would not have invaded Iraq.

 

4. WMD. A fourth reason was the specter of WMD. While the Bush administration might easily have cited the persuasive writs of the bipartisan resolutions — genocide against the Kurds, Shiites, and Marsh Arabs; bounties for suicide bombers; sanctuary for terrorists; attempts to kill a former U.S. president; violations of U.N. sanctions and resolutions; etc. — it instead fixated on supposedly unimpeachable intelligence about WMD, a “slam dunk,” according to CIA director George Tenet, a judgment with which most Middle Eastern governments and European intelligence agencies agreed. This concentration on WMD would prove a critical political mistake. Note in passing that the eventual public furor over missing WMD stockpiles (although there is solid evidence that Saddam was perilously close to WMD deployment) did not fully develop with the initial knowledge of that intelligence failure, but only with the mounting violence after a seemingly brilliant victory over Saddam.

 

The missing vast stockpiles of WMD then became the source of the convenient slogan “Bush lied, thousands died.” Yet had the reconstruction gone well, we would surely not have heard something like “Bush lied — and so there was no need, after all, to depose Saddam and foster consensual government in Iraq.”

 

The Bush administration apparently believed that, without the worry over WMD, the other writs would not generate enough public urgency for preemption, and thus it would not have invaded Iraq. Note that when Barack Obama talks of “red lines” and “game changers” in Syria that might justify U.S. preemptive action, he is not referring to 70,000 dead, the horrific human-rights record of Bashar Assad, Syria’s past effort to become nuclear, or even the plight of millions of Syrian refugees, but the supposition that Syria is planning to use chemical or biological weapons — a crime Saddam had often committed against his own people, and one that inflames public opinion in the West. As a footnote, we will probably not know the full story of WMD in the region until the Assad regime is gone from Syria — although we are starting to hear the same worries about such Syrian weapons from the Obama administration as we did of Iraqi weapons during the Bush presidency.

 

5. Nation-building. A fifth reason was the notion of reformulating Iraq, so that instead of being the problem in the region it would become a solution. Since the 1991 war had not ended well, because of a failure to finish off the regime and stay on, and since the aid to the insurgents against the Soviets in Afghanistan had been followed by U.S. neglect and in time the rise of the Taliban, so, in reaction, this time the U.S. was determined to stay. We forget now the liberal consensus that the rise of the Taliban and the survival of Saddam were supposed reflections of past U.S. callousness — something not to be repeated in Iraq.

 

Finally, America would do the right thing and create a consensual government that might ensure not only the end of Saddam’s atrocities, but also, by its very constitutional existence, pressure on the Gulf monarchies to liberalize and cease their support for terrorism of the sort that had killed 3,000 Americans. While there may well have been neo-cons who believed that the Iraqi democracy would be followed by a true Arab Spring of U.S.-fostered democracy sweeping the Middle East — something akin to the original good blowback of Pakistan’s detaining Dr. Khan, Qaddafi’s surrendering his WMD arsenal, and Syria’s leaving Lebanon, before all this dissipated with Fallujah — most of the Bush administration policymakers believed that democracy was not their first choice, but their last choice, for postwar reconstruction, given that everything else had been tried after past conflicts and just as often failed.

 

Administration officials were not hoping for Carmel, but for something akin to post-Milosevic Serbia or post-Noriega Panama, as opposed to Somalia or post-Soviet Afghanistan. Note well: Had George Bush simply announced in advance that he would be leaving Iraq as soon as he deposed Saddam, or that he planned to install a less violent relative of Saddam’s to keep order as we departed, Congress probably would not have authorized an invasion of Iraq in the first place. The Iraq War was sold partly on the liberal idealism of at last doing the right thing — after not having done so previously against Saddam or following the Soviets in Afghanistan.

 

6. Oil! Sixth and last was the issue of oil. Had Iraq been Rwanda, the Bush administration would not have invaded. The key here, however, is to remember the war was not a matter of “blood for oil,” given that the Bush administration had no intention of taking Iraqi oil — a fact proven by the transparent and non-U.S. postwar development of the Iraqi oil and gas fields.

 

Instead, oil was an issue because Iraq’s oil revenues meant that Saddam would always have the resources to foment trouble in the region, would always be difficult to remove through internal opposition, and would always use petrodollar influence to undermine U.N. resolutions, seek to spike world oil prices, or distort Western solidarity, as the French collusion with Saddam attested. Imagine North Korea with Iraq’s gas and oil reserves: The problem it poses for its neighbors would be greatly amplified and far more likely addressed. Had Iraq simply been a resource-poor Yemen or Jordan, or landlocked without key access to the Persian Gulf, the U.S. probably would not have invaded.

 

TEN YEARS LATER

The invasion of Iraq was a perfect storm predicated on all these suppositions — the absence of any one of which might well have postponed or precluded the invasion.

 

That we have forgotten or ignored most of these causes stems not just from the subsequent terrible cost of the war. Instead, our amnesia is self-induced, and derives from the fact that 70 percent of the American people and most of the liberal media commentators supported the invasion, came to reverse that support, and remain hurt or furious at someone other than themselves for their own change of heart — one predicated not on the original conditions of going to war, but on the later unexpected costs in blood and treasure that might have been avoided.

 

Given that less than a third of the American people initially opposed the war, the subsequent acrimony centered on whether it was better for the nation to give up and depart after 2004, or to stay and stabilize the country. Ultimately the president decided that the only thing worse than fighting a bad war was losing one.

The Left's Thought Tyranny and the Right's Cowardice

By David Limbaugh

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

 

A couple of recent news items illustrate the close-mindedness, aggressiveness and oppressiveness of modern liberalism's thought police.

 

MSNBC's Toure issued a scathing commentary against the GOP for considering outreach efforts toward African-Americans. Toure said: "Such is the dysfunctional, abusive relationship the GOP insists on with black folks. They say they want a new relationship while continuing to try to screw us over."

 

Toure went on to lambaste Dr. Ben Carson, a black person, for daring to stray from leftist ideas and endorsing conservative ones, such as a flat tax. Carson has "intellectual tumors in his mind, like a flat tax, which is regressive and ignorant in the face of American wealth inequality." Toure continued: "I doubt the GOP would entertain a white non-politician with unserious ideas." But blacks such as Carson "get raced to the front of the line because then people get to put a bumper sticker on their cars saying, 'How can I be racist? I would have voted for Carson."

 

Another story involves Ryan Rotela, a student at Florida Atlantic University who alleges that he was suspended from his class on "intercultural communications" because he refused to comply with a directive (or request) by the course's instructor, Deandre Poole.

 

Poole allegedly told his students to write "Jesus" on a sheet of paper, put the paper on the floor and then stomp on it. Rotela, a devout Mormon, said he refused and "picked up the paper from the floor and put it right back on the table." He said he told the professor he didn't believe this was appropriate, that it was unprofessional for the professor to have initiated this exercise and that he was "deeply offended" by what he had told him to do.

 

Todd Starnes of Fox News said that according to documents, Rotela "has been brought up on academic charges by the school and may no longer attend class." But this "notice of charges," according to Starnes, is contrary to a statement the university released Friday night, which said no one had been disciplined as a result of the classroom activity.

 

Regardless, the assignment itself was outrageous and is illustrative of a hostile attitude toward Christianity (and conservatism) on many campuses and elsewhere in our culture today.

 

The left can vehemently deny it, but does anyone really believe that a professor would still have his job if instead of using the word "Jesus," he had used "Muhammad" or "Barack Obama" or the name or symbol of any other iconic figure of the left?

 

In so many universities, what passes for open academic inquiry is often more like indoctrination. In the name of diversity, multiculturalism and tolerance, academics trash Western civilization and traditional moral values on the perverse rationale that those values are intolerant and thus undeserving of tolerance and favorable treatment.

 

We see this same phenomenon occurring throughout our society, not just in universities but also in the media and in corporate America, where the tyranny of political correctness has taken firm root. How often have we read about corporate employees being forced to attend "sensitivity training" when they've expressed views about same-sex marriage or other issues about which leftist culture commanders are passionate?

 

As Paul Kengor of The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College explains, "these are the new secular disciples of 'diversity' and 'tolerance' -- empty buzzwords that make liberals and progressives feel good while they often refuse to tolerate and sometimes even assault traditional Christian and conservative beliefs."

 

Liberals hold themselves out as open-minded, tolerant and supportive of academic inquiry, but many of them are contemptuous of views they reject. If you do not subscribe to the left's views on politics, social science, religion, affirmative action, sexuality, etc., your views are not only not worthy of protection but deserving of scorn, ridicule and sometimes even punishment and recalibration.

 

But guess what. These tactics tend to work. No matter how many courageous conservatives fight back against the left's intolerance and no matter how many black conservatives refuse to toe the liberal line that requires them to think like liberals -- lest they cease being authentic blacks -- more and more on the right are throwing in the towel instead of standing up for what they believe and facing ridicule and abuse from the left.

 

Many, for example, are jumping on the bandwagon to support same-sex marriage to receive their pat on the head from our progressive culture. Some have been persuaded, no doubt, but many are just afraid to be branded as bigots or homophobes for taking a principled stand in support of traditional marriage.

 

Long ago, leftists learned that bullying and persistence work, and they are being rewarded for their efforts by those whose social and political opinions are determined more by a craving for popular approval than by deeply held convictions.

Florida Atlantic University: Another Left-Wing Seminary

By Dennis Prager

Tuesday, March 23, 2013

 

Question: What is the difference between Christian seminaries and American universities?

 

Answer: Christian seminaries announce that their purpose is to produce committed Christians. American universities do not admit that their primary purpose is to produce committed leftists. They claim that their purpose is to open students' minds.

 

This month Florida Atlantic University provided yet another example of how universities have become left-wing seminaries.

 

An FAU professor told his students to write "JESUS" (in bold caps) on a piece of paper and then step on it.

 

One student who did not, a junior named Ryan Rotela, complained to the professor and then to the professor's supervisor. He explained that he had refused to do so because it violated his religious principles.

 

Two days later, Rotela was told not to attend the class anymore. The university then went on to defend the professor in an email to a local CBS TV station: "Faculty and students at academic institutions pursue knowledge and engage in open discourse. While at times the topics discussed may be sensitive, a university environment is a venue for such dialogue and debate."

 

FAU further pointed out that the stomping exercise -- to "discuss the importance of symbols in culture" -- came from a textbook titled "Intercultural Communication: A Contextual Approach."

 

After the story became national news, FAU issued an apology: "We sincerely apologize for any offense this has caused. Florida Atlantic University respects all religions and welcomes people of all faiths, backgrounds and beliefs."

 

Of course, this "apology" was meaningless. Apologizing for "giving offense" has nothing to do with condemning the act. Not to mention that kicking Rotela out of the class belied the university's claim of open discourse.

 

This story is significant because it provides yet another example of the deteriorated state of American higher education. There are some excellent professors in the so-called "social sciences" at American universities. But they are in the minority. The left has taken over American universities as well as most high schools, and like almost everything the left has influenced -- education, religion, the arts and the economies of most countries -- this influence has been destructive.

 

The argument that the professor represents no one but himself is refuted by the fact that the university defended the professor until it feared the national outcry that resulted.

 

Moreover, in another nationally reported incident, Northwestern University acted similarly in 2011. One of its professors invited his 600 students to stay after class to watch a live demonstration of female ejaculation, the subject of that day's class. A naked young woman (not a student) then used a motorized sex toy to come to orgasm. About 120 of the students watched.

 

When word got out, Northwestern defended the professor: "Northwestern University faculty members engage in teaching and research on a wide variety of topics, some of them controversial and at the leading edge of their respective disciplines. The university supports the efforts of its faculty to further the advancement of knowledge."

 

Like FAU, only after national condemnation increased did Northwestern "apologize."

 

Entire books have been written providing hundreds of examples of left-wing indoctrination having replaced education in American universities. FAU is just the latest example.

 

It is also instructive that the name to be stepped on was JESUS, not, for instance, MUHAMMAD, ALLAH or, for that matter, BILL CLINTON or MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

 

Imagine the reaction at FAU if a professor had told students to step on the name MUHAMMAD. The professor would be condemned at huge rallies organized by the university to protest "Islamophobia." And he would fear for his life. Desecrate Christianity and you get tenure. Desecrate Islam and you get bodyguards.

 

Or, imagine if the name had been MARTIN LUTHER KING. FAU professors would have competed with one another in expressing outrage at this example of the racism that pervades the university and America. The president of the university would have issued a statement condemning the professor and distancing FAU from his action.

 

And is there one reader of this column who is surprised to learn that the FAU professor, Deandre Poole, is vice-chairman of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party? Or that the party defended him?

 

This is why I founded Prager University (www.prageru.org): to undo in five-minute courses the intellectual and moral damage that universities do over four years. And unlike FAU and Northwestern, PragerU is free.

 

The universities' damage is huge and enduring. And you don't have to believe in JESUS to recognize it.

Repeal Obamacare

National Review Online

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

 

Liberals had hoped, and some conservatives had feared, that the legislative Frankenstein’s monster known as Obamacare would become more popular as its sundry measures were implemented. But the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is no more popular now than when it was passed, as Americans have come to realize that it will neither protect patients nor provide for affordable care. While full repeal of the law is not within the realm of short-term political reality — the presence of Barack Obama in the White House and a Democratic majority in the Senate ensures that — repeal should nonetheless remain the end goal, either one piece at a time for now or root and branch.

 

The price tag for Obamacare has gone from shocking to preposterous. In March 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the ten-year cost of the law at $898 billion; by February 2013, that number had climbed to $1.6 trillion, and it is likely that further revisions will be in the upward direction. That is a very high price to pay for a system that will, by the admission of its own supporters, leave some 30 million Americans uninsured. Long gone is the fiction pronounced by President Obama and repeated by his media enablers that the law will not add “one dime” to the deficit; the latest estimate is that Obamacare will add as much as $6.2 trillion to the long-term national debt, according to the Government Accountability Office. No thinking person takes President Obama seriously on fiscal questions, but those alleged experts and pundits who argued for Obamacare on fiscal grounds should be regarded as thoroughly discredited.

 

As mind-boggling as its price tag is, expense is not the main reason to repeal Obamacare. What is not sufficiently understood is that Obamacare does not reform or regulate health insurance: It effectively abolishes health insurance. Health insurance functions by creating pools of beneficiaries large enough that the incidence of particular health-care expenses — for everything from heart attacks to injuries in car accidents — can be predicted by actuaries with some statistical reliability, thus enabling costs to be distributed among beneficiaries over time. Obamacare demands that all insurance beneficiaries be offered identical rates regardless of health-related variables, and severely restricts the kinds of plans that may be offered. The most important variable is, of course, the question of whether somebody already is sick. Under Obamacare, an uninsured person who develops a serious illness can demand that he be insured at a rate no different from that of a person who had been purchasing insurance for decades before he became ill. The “individual mandate” was supposed to prevent that problem by requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance, but it is a mandate that manages to be both too invasive and too lax at the same time: The mandate will invite the micromanagement of individuals and businesses by the federal government, but Americans will in many cases find themselves financially better off paying the tax for not getting insurance (as Chief Justice Roberts has reformulated the mandate) until they become sick and need insurance. Because of that defect, the main rationale for Obamacare — bringing all Americans into a large insurance market that can then be regulated and subsidized to bring it into accord with the tastes of the central planners in Washington — will prove impossible to realize.

 

Obamacare proposes to control health-care costs by empowering a small panel of unaccountable political appointees — the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — to keep a lid on medical costs by imposing price controls. We have two relevant bodies of experience from which to draw insight on how this is likely to play out: Medicaid payments are subject to similar price controls, and doctors have responded to low rates of reimbursement by refusing to see Medicaid patients. Medicare is supposed to be subject to similar price controls, but, because the elderly are more politically influential than the poor, Congress has declined to actually cut payments to Medicare doctors, year after year after year, knowing that doing so would make doctors just as unwilling to take Medicare patients as they are to take Medicaid patients. The result in the former case is price controls that work by hurting Medicaid’s intended beneficiaries, who often have worse health-care outcomes than those with no coverage at all; the result in the latter case is price controls that do not work, period.

 

During the debate over Obamacare, the president and his supporters promised that enacting the law would cause insurance premiums for the typical family to decline by some $2,500 a year. In fact, premiums have continued to go up, now at an accelerated pace. In 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected president, health-insurance premiums rose by 0.6 percent. In 2009, the year Obamacare was passed, they rose by 1.3 percent. In 2011, they rose by 9.6 percent, or 16 times as quickly as they did the year before the law was passed. Expenses are expected to rise the most severely for young and healthy people. Because of the perverse incentives the law creates, the CBO estimates that the number of people insured through the subsidized health-insurance exchanges will begin to decline quickly after 2018 as the young and healthy realize that paying the fine is more economical than paying ever-higher insurance premiums. That means that those remaining in the insurance pool will be on average older and sicker, which is why the CBO estimates that the cost of subsidizing them will grow by almost 6 percent a year. Put another way, the cost of subsidizing the exchanges is expected to double every twelve years.

 

In short, the system created by this ill-advised law would prevent the emergence of normally functioning markets in medical services and health insurance. Instead, it establishes a top-down system of price controls and subsidies that will discourage healthy people from buying insurance in the first place, reward those who exploit the system’s defects, and discourage doctors and other health-care providers from extending their care to those who most need it.

 

IPAB, the price-fixing board, remains one of the least popular aspects of Obamacare. It is also an anchor of the scheme. Republicans should begin by promoting legislation to eliminate it. Republicans should also work to eliminate some of the most unpopular taxes associated with Obamacare, such as the tax on medical devices, a move that already is supported by many Democrats (79 senators have voted against the tax this week). Capping Medicaid spending per beneficiary and giving states a free hand to decide how to allocate their Medicaid dollars would be prudent from both the fiscal and the medical points of view. Here Republicans have an advantage: Democratic opposition to such measures as these is by no means unanimous, but Republicans are very much united in their opposition to Obamacare.

 

Repeal is only one part of a two-step solution. Republicans made a critical error during the debate over Obamacare when they left the impression that they approved of the U.S. health-care system. In truth, that system was deeply defective before Obamacare was passed, marred by expensive and poorly designed entitlements on the one end and on the other by a tax preference for employer-based insurance that left millions of Americans either uninsured or entrapped by the threat of losing their insurance by losing their jobs. A better system would allow Americans to shop for insurance in a large, nationwide market, securing for themselves benefits that cannot be stripped away simply because they change jobs, become unemployed, or get sick. With a functioning market in place, offering assistance through tax benefits or direct subsidies becomes a much simpler set of challenges, as does enacting targeted, narrow regulation to curb the abusive practices toward which the health-insurance industry is occasionally inclined.

 

As Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin argue in our most recent issue, Obamacare is too flawed in in its basic conception to be improved through reform. It must be replaced, either all at once or step by step. Replacement remains a viable option because the law is still unpopular and still unlikely to work. Indeed, the next phase of its implementation promises to be a chaotic enterprise that will further undermine the standing and credibility of the law and its architects. Republicans can and should begin taking it apart and building something better on the ruins.

Have We Lost America? Hell No!

By Kurt Schlichter

Monday, March 25, 2013

 

It’s the easiest thing in the world to be a pessimist, and the least American. We’re optimists, and as tough as things are, as many skirmishes as we’ve lost, we haven’t lost this country to the left quite yet. If you had to choose between being them or us, you’d be crazy to choose being them. We’re going to win, and America is going to rise again.

 

Pessimism is a cop-out, an excuse to do nothing and wait for the end instead of figuratively fixing bayonets and charging head-long into the enemy. That military metaphor is no accident, because decades in the military taught me that “pessimism” is just another name for “failure.” You don’t always get to pick your enemy. You don’t always get to pick your situation. Your job is to take whatever you face, find your advantages, and exploit them to drive on to victory.

 

We’re conservative Americans. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, Irish it up with a little Stoli, and then grill a rib-eye while you drink it.

 

Let’s assess our situation as conservatives. We face a leftist President and his senatorial minions. The media is against us. Our culture embraces a whole range of bizarrely self-destructive and immoral notions. The supposedly conservative party is divided between folks who want to promote conservatism and those who want to promote themselves.

 

So we’re under siege. So what else is new?

 

Now let’s look at the situation from a different perspective, one that looks for hope and opportunities. They’re there all right – we just need to be willing to see them.

 

Every day makes it clearer that President 51% is the lamest of ducks. The only thing he’s squandering faster than money borrowed from the Chinese to subsidize his coalition of lazy government hacks and welfare bums is his political capital.

 

The closest thing he has had to a political victory since eking out a win over Mitt Romney by a couple percentage points is getting through the Fiscal Cliff morass by making permanent the Bush tax rates on all but a few people. Yeah, his big success was making automatic taxes increases apply to fewer folks than it otherwise would have. That sort of failure is only considered a “victory” if you’re a MSNBC commentator or a French general.

 

And the sequester? Not only didn’t the sky fall but people kind of looked around, read their money market statements, and thought, “Uh, if this is what happens when we cut 2% of the budget, let’s see what happens when we cut 10%.”

 

That normal people are realizing that the Democrats’ sound and fury about slashing the budget signifies nothing is huge.

 

And the Senate? If I were Senator Mitch McConnell I’d be barging into Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office to start measuring the drapes. The GOP stands a great chance of snatching a bunch of Democrat seats up in 2014 if it can avoid nominating a bunch of Akin clones.

 

For example, just look at Mitch’s likely opponent, a puffy, washed-up actress who claims Tennessee residence and talks like a particularly militant Gender Studies TA at a second-rate liberal arts college. There’s a perfect fit for the Bluegrass State’s electorate – I’m surprised Mitch can keep a straight face.

 

You’ll note that the Minority Leader showed up at the Rand Paul party a few weeks ago. Mitch McConnell is a lot of things, but a guy who bets on losers isn’t one of them. He stood with the Wacko Birds while Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham fumed. That’s all you need to know about which way the wind is blowing inside the Beltway.

 

Oh, and Lindsay may be facing a primary challenge from the right by Bruce Carroll, a guy who used the Twitter handle “GayPatriot.” Watch for Lindsay to respond by backpedalling on immigration – and watch Marco Rubio shrug his shoulders and say, “Well, I tried,” as it becomes obvious to him that there is a liberal/squish conspiracy to fake border security in exchange for amnesty.

 

But that’s all mere politics – let’s look at the big picture. For all the abuse it has been taking, our Constitution remains strong and Americans are tenaciously defending it from the liberals’ assaults on the God-given rights it guarantees.

 

The right to freedom of religion is under attack, often via Obamacare’s un-American mandates, but citizens are successfully litigating those threats in courts across the country. No one is rolling over and giving up on our right to live in conformity with our faith.

 

The right to free speech remains strong. Sure, nitwits like the mayor of Philadelphia and academic neo-fascists whine about it, but Americans aren’t ready to surrender their right to say what they think just because the elites disapprove. Contrast that with once-Great Britain, where the subjects of that once-great nation are willingly casting away their ancient freedom because of an anti-free press campaign led by celebrity Hugh Grant.

 

Yeah, the U.K. has fallen so far that its people are willing to give up their tradition of liberty in reliance upon the judgment of a guy who gave up mega-hottie Elizabeth Hurley for some tacky L.A. streetwalker. Good plan, limies.

 

And the Second Amendment? The fury of Senator Feinstein at Harry Reid’s unwillingness to join in her Senatorial majority suicide pact says it all. Notice how the President has said nothing about it? He knows how weak this utter rout on his marquee priority makes him look, and he’s happy to let the egg splatter on DiFi’s face. It is mighty crowded under the Obama bus.

 

Sure, Colorado Democrats squeaked some limited anti-gun laws through, but they’ll wish they hadn’t. Remember those conservatives who sat out the last election? They’ll be flocking to the polls in the Centennial State to extract their unholy vengeance. No one ever wins elections by pushing gun control, but Colorado’s voters are about to demonstrate that folks do lose elections by pushing gun control.

 

How about the rest of the Bill of Rights? Rand Paul’s epic filibuster threw a spotlight on the fact that there is a huge overlap when it comes to the concept of liberty between conservatives and liberty-loving people who currently think of themselves as liberals. Next up – a conservative-hipster campaign to repeal the iPhone jailbreaking felony fiasco and similar corporate-sponsored assaults on freedom.

 

This is a huge opportunity to expand our coalition based not on superficial things like race or ethnicity or gender or any of that consultant-fetish nonsense but upon a solid foundation of a shared love of liberty. It’s an opportunity we need to ruthlessly exploit. As we continue our painful campaign of conservative self-assessment – itself a tremendously good sign that we intend to learn from our mistakes –we need to look for ways to cut into other groups that our opponents take for granted.

 

Our opponents have grown lazy. They have also grown old and tired. Their great gray hope Hillary will be a frisky 69 years old in 2016. She’ll energize the youth vote just like the dynamic John McCain did. Their ideas – which all seem to boil down to taking money from people who work to give it to losers who vote for Democrats – are played-out. Their short-term dream of retaking the House (Ha!) and keeping the Senate (Good luck!) are almost certain to be crushed.

 

It’s glorious.

 

This is no time to be a pessimist. Americans are natural optimists, and we conservatives have reason to be. The initiative and the momentum are with us in the campaign to take this county back from the liberal elites and their spineless lackeys. We’re going to win, and America is going to rise again.

 

In fact, I almost feel sorry for our opponents.

 

Almost.

The Red and the Black

By Deroy Murdock

Monday, March 25, 2013

 

‘What have the Democrats done for you lately?”

 

Republicans should start asking black Americans that question — early and often. Doing so could become the GOP’s secret weapon.

 

As Republicans regroup after presidential and Senate campaigns that they should have won easily last November, they should seek votes among the 41 million black Americans whom Democrats take for granted, and Republicans lately have written off. Here’s why engaging black voters could revitalize the GOP.

 

Republicans need not win the black vote, or even a third of it. Securing 15 percent of the black electorate severely erodes the stalwart-Democrat base. If 20 to 25 percent of blacks vote GOP, it’s curtains for Democrats.

 

If Republicans seek black votes, they will win some. As the Republican National Committee’s recent autopsy of the 2012 election noted: “We are never going to win over voters who are not asked for their support.” The study lamented that black voters routinely back Democrats “without hearing anyone in their community making a case to the contrary.”

 

Campaigning among black voters would help Republicans stop resembling “stuffy, old white men,” as an RNC focus group described them. Listening to and speaking with black Americans refutes the notion that Republicans are just country-club Caucasians.

 

If Republicans largely campaign among white voters, Democrats will caricature them as racists who dislike or even hate blacks. That lie collapses when white GOP candidates shake black hands and kiss black babies. Doing so reassures nervous white voters that Republicans are not bigots, and it’s OK to support them.

 

Like Al Capone with a knife but no machine gun, Democrats would be badly disarmed without the race card. Denied the GOP = KKK meme, Democrats would have to double down on their phony “War on Women” and stoke class hatred even harder.

 

Bored by cautious, vanilla GOP nominees, Republicans and right-leaning independents likely would become electrified, knock on doors, populate phone banks, and cast ballots for Republicans who deploy this strategy. Mitt Romney contracted terminal shrunken-base syndrome. Had Romney visited black neighborhoods in Miami, Richmond, Cleveland, and Denver, unenthused conservatives would have become inspired and, at least, voted. That might have been Mitt’s margin of victory.

 

Such overtures to black voters surely would parallel appeals to other minorities. But even in a vacuum, such black-outreach efforts likely would increase support for Republicans among voters of Asian and Hispanic descent.

 

The Republican message should combine opportunity-related themes with historical facts about Democrats’ largely shameful record towards blacks (from stymieing Reconstruction to launching the Ku Klux Klan and filibustering federal anti-lynching legislation and the 1964 Civil Rights Act). Democrats’ treatment of blacks remains pitiful — e.g., celebrating the leadership of the late Senator Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.), a former Exalted Cyclops of the KKK, until his 2010 death in office. There also is Obama’s defunding of the Washington, D.C., school-voucher program.

 

Republicans should cite these additional steps backward — by comparing these material conditions on January 20, 2009, the date of Obama’s first inauguration, with those on his second, last January 21: The rise of black unemployment (from 12.1 percent to 14.0 percent), an increase in poverty among blacks aged 18 to 64 (from 34.9 percent to 38.6 percent), and a fall in black median income (from $22,901 to $21,206).

 

Besides addressing the NAACP, Mitt Romney did little to win black votes. Nonetheless, against Obama, he won 6 percent of black voters, 50 percent more than Arizona Republican senator John McCain’s 4 percent in 2008.

 

What if Romney had fought for black votes? He barely lost several swing states. With mildly stronger black support and a modestly tighter embrace among decreasingly “nervous” whites and energized GOP-base voters, Romney could have delivered an Electoral College squeaker.

 

Based on ballot results and exit polls, here’s how Romney could have added  at least 64 electoral votes to his actual 206 and advanced to the Oval Office.

 

• Obama won Florida’s 29 electoral votes by 74,309 votes. To win the Sunshine State, Romney needed to swing just over half of that total, or 37,155 votes. Boosting Romney’s black support from 4 percent to 5 percent would have won him 11,106 votes. Lifting his white support from 61 percent to 61.5 percent would have won Romney 28,308 votes. These additional votes would have totaled 39,404 — enough to win Florida.

 

• Obama won Virginia’s 13 electoral votes by 149,298 votes. To take the Old Dominion, Romney needed to shift just over half of that amount, or 74,650 votes. Raising Romney’s black support from 6 percent to 9 percent would have yielded him 23,124 votes. Hiking his white support from 61 percent to 63 percent would have given Romney 53,962 votes. These additional votes would have totaled 77,086 — enough to win Virginia.

 

 

• Obama won Ohio’s 18 electoral votes by 166,277 votes. To grab the Buckeye State, Romney needed to switch just over half of that margin, or 83,139 votes. Boosting Romney’s black support from 3 percent to 5 percent would have added 16,742 votes. Expanding his white showing from 57 percent to 58.6 percent would have given Romney 70,540 votes. These new votes would have totaled 87,282 — enough to win Ohio.

 

• Obama won Colorado’s nine electoral votes by 137,858 votes. To score the Centennial State, Romney needed to convert just over half of that sum, or 68,930 votes. Increasing Romney’s black support from 6 percent to 9 percent would have delivered 2,313 votes. Augmenting his white showing from 54 percent to 57.5 percent would have won Romney 70,147 votes. These added votes would have totaled 72,460 — enough to win Colorado.

 

These 69 additional electoral votes would have totaled 275 and spelled President Romney.

 

This scenario assumes that a Romney outreach to black voters would have allowed him to edge past Obama. Of course, such an effort also could have transformed Romney’s persona so much that he could have beaten Obama handily and sent him back to Chicago with his tail between his legs.

 

Rather than duck and cover when Democrats lie about Republicans’ so-called racism, the GOP should stand and fight. Top Republicans terminated slavery, wrote the Brown v. Board of Education decision, broke the Democrats’ filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, signed the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday into law, extended the 1965 Voting Rights Act to 2031, and appointed both of America’s two black secretaries of state.

 

What a racist party!

 

Black voters deserve to hear the Republican vision of growth, opportunity, prosperity, and personal responsibility rather than the Democrat formula of profligacy, indebtedness, and redistribution (unforgivably, also advanced by GOP socialist G. W. Bush).

 

A muscular, year-round appeal to black voters would benefit the GOP and black Americans alike.

Games and Tribes

By Kevin D. Williamson

Saturday, March 23, 2013

 

There’s a joke among psychology researchers: We know almost nothing about human psychology, but we know everything about the psychology of Harvard psychology undergrads — because they’re the ones who serve as the subjects of influential studies. It is likely that the same thing holds true of experimental economics.

 

Economists like to study human behavior through games, two of the most common being the Dictator Game and the Ultimatum Game. Dictator Game is simple: Player A is given a sum of money to divide any way he likes with Player B. Player B has no say in the transaction. (Dictator Game is not formally a game, since outcomes are not determined by any interaction among players.) Ultimatum Game is like Dictator Game, but with an important variable: Player B has veto power. Player A proposes a split, and Player B has the power to accept it, in which case both parties get something, or reject it, in which case neither party gets anything.

 

Ultimatum Game is often used to show that people in the real world are not representatives of the purely utility-maximizing species Homo economicus. If they were, the game would play out like this: Given $100 to divide, Player A would propose a split of $99 for himself and $1 for Player B, and Player B would accept it every time — and, perhaps more important, Player A would know that Player B would accept it every time. Player B is better off with $1 than with nothing, so Player A is confident that he can keep most of the prize for himself in exchange for offering the minimum benefit to Player B. In the real world, it does not work that way. Most people in the B position will reject a split of less than 60/30, and people in the Player A position tend to offer splits around 50/50. When asked why, players remark that very uneven splits just seem “unfair.”

 

At least, certain kinds of players do that — namely, players from developed Western societies. Those with very different cultural backgrounds behave in ways that would surprise most Americans, as the social scientist Duncan J. Watts documents in his very enjoyable book Everything Is Obvious Once You Know the Answer. For example, A players from cultures that have strong traditions of reciprocal gift-giving may make hyper-generous offers, presumably because such an open-handed gesture would oblige the recipient in some meaningful way. Interestingly, B players with similar backgrounds will reject hyper-generous offers more often than Westerners typically would, presumably because they do not wish to take on the unspecified obligation that accepting such a gift would entail. Conversely, players from cultures with very little tradition of cooperation between people who are not related tend to behave more like Homo economicus: Offering and expecting the minimum.

 

The ability to negotiate the two kinds of games in a way that maximizes one’s own interests — parsimonious in the Dictator Game, just generous enough in the Ultimatum Game — is sometimes used as a measure of what researchers call “Machiavellian intelligence,” the ability to navigate social groups profitably.

 

As Watts points out, players in these kinds of games, regardless of their cultural background, have a hard time explaining why they have the particular sets of preferences they have: They have internalized their rules of the game without ever quite being conscious of them.

 

Liberals and conservatives do not agree on much, but we often agree on this: The people in the opposite camp often seem like they come from another country, from another society and culture altogether. Conservatives in New York City or on the campus of Bryn Mawr College may feel like they have been parachuted into an alien and possibly hostile environment, and no doubt liberals feel like that when their magazine editors send them on National Review cruises. It may be the case that Red America and Blue America really are separate societies, at least on some micro-cultural level.

 

Such studies as have been done on the relationship between the Ultimatum Game and political preferences have been inconclusive, which is disappointing. There are a few tantalizing little bits: High levels of Machiavellian intelligence have been associated with “right-wing” economic preferences (which of course are more accurately known as “liberal” economic preferences outside our own perversely up-is-down political discourse), while progressive types have been found to be relatively generous in the Dictator Game but not in the Ultimatum Game, which comports nicely with the conservative hunch that liberals are most generous when the other guy doesn’t really have any say in the matter. (That’s only the case in one study I’ve come across; it would be interesting to see this explored more deeply.)

 

It could be the case that progressives simply have a different threshold for what they consider “unfair” in the Ultimatum Game. (Again, this has not been established; I’m just hypothesizing here.) Even a small difference — perhaps one so small that it has not shown up robustly in studies — might incline one favorably toward more redistributive political schemes. And conservatives, whose beliefs are more firmly aligned with classical economic assumptions (or an oversimplified version of them, a progressive might protest), could very well be more open to less even splits in the Ultimatum Game. That, too, opens up some interesting lines of inquiry: If conservatives are more open to uneven splits in the Ultimatum Game, is that because they think more like Homo economicus — never mind “fairness,” both parties are better off than they were before — or do they find that line of argument appealing because it comports with a preexisting micro-cultural tendency?

 

A more likely hypothesis is this: Liberals elevate the abstraction of “fairness” over the concrete benefits that accrue to both parties under even the most uneven split in the Ultimatum Game because they believe that life is in fact a lot like something somewhere between Dictator Game and Ultimatum Game. The fundamental liberal economic fallacy is that the economy is a kind of pie and that somebody, somewhere, is deciding how to divide it up. Economies do not work that way, of course, which is why the phrase “distribution of wealth” is in fact meaningless in most modern contexts — wealth is the result of a dynamic process of creation and exchange, not something that sits in a bucket waiting to get handed out by The Man. (My guess is that this is a holdover from the liberal land-redistribution project that goes back at least to the Lex Sempronia Agraria, the conflict over which some scholars blame for the destruction of the Roman republic. Unlike modern wealth, land really does exist in fixed amounts in any given political territory, and was in fact handed out by the prince according to his whims. Our liberals: Still bravely fighting the social injustices of 134 b.c.)

 

Ask a liberal to describe the relationship between employer and employee, and you will very often hear something like Dictator Game or Ultimatum Game: The lordly employer simply proposes to share some of his revenue with his serf, who, as in Ultimatum Game, may have the wherewithal to walk away or may face immediate material privation unless he accepts whatever terms are offered him, even if they are as meager as those that would be dictated to him in the Dictator Game. In the real world, things are of course much more complex — there are lots of employers, lots of employees, lots of options, and lots of negotiation — but the case for (e.g.) labor unions is generally presented as a response to an implied Dictator Game. The nice thing about free markets: You may have some Ultimatum Games, but you never have a Dictator Game.

 

It may be that we have highly rational, intellectually consistent, and empirically provable reasons for our political differences. It may be that we are just members of different tribes. But on some very important metrics — material prosperity is not the least of them — some tribes do better than others, and one suspects that there must be a reason for that.

The Iraq War, Ten Years Later

National Review Online

Saturday, March 23, 2013

 

Ten years ago this week, the United States launched the Iraq War. A decade later, thanks to the mismanagement of the Bush administration, the indifference of the Obama administration, and the inherent difficulties of Iraqi society, it is clear that we expended great blood and treasure for an unsatisfactory outcome.

 

Saddam Hussein and his regime of torture and mass murder are gone. He started a war by invading a neighbor and sought dominion over the global oil supply. He was an ongoing threat to the region and in flagrant violation of his international commitments. If he no longer had weapons of mass destruction, it wasn’t for lack of trying. He was undermining the strictures that kept him from restarting his weapons programs. Even the harshest critics of the war are loath to admit that their alternative would have left Saddam atop Iraq.

 

The war was popular at the beginning, supported by the public, by Democrats in Congress, and by many of the liberal and conservative commentators who eventually turned against it.

 

The notion that Bush “lied” about Saddam’s weapons is itself a dastardly lie. That Saddam had WMD was a matter of bipartisan and international consensus. His presumed possession of these weapons was widely considered intolerable in the context of the September 11 attacks, which taught a bitter lesson in allowing threats to fester. Bush launched the war for good reason, and in its initial phase, it was a rapid and undeniable triumph.

 

Then things went wrong. We didn’t know enough about the country we had taken over. We underestimated the devastation that had been wrought in Iraqi institutions and civil society by Saddam’s rule. We couldn’t get our act together as bureaucracies crossed signals and pursued rival agendas. We faced a determined Sunni insurgency. With insufficient troops using ill-advised tactics, we couldn’t impose order. The country spun out of control and into a sectarian war that threatened to rip it apart and to give al-Qaeda in Iraq an operating base in the heart of the Arab world.

 

With the war slipping away, President Bush ordered the surge, an infusion of additional troops to clear and hold territory in keeping with classic counterinsurgency doctrine. Bush acted against the fierce opposition of Democrats and with only the lukewarm support of his own party (with the honorable exception of John McCain, whose advocacy for the surge was his finest moment). Critics predicted the surge’s inevitable failure and the direst consequences. Instead, we dealt al-Qaeda a significant defeat. We won over the Sunni tribes and suppressed the Iranian-backed Shia militias. Violence dropped dramatically. We afforded the Iraqi government enough stability to establish its authority and legitimacy.

 

This was the situation that Bush handed over to Obama. Shamefully, his successor had no interest in building on it or even maintaining it. The administration failed to secure an agreement with the Iraqis to maintain a U.S. troop presence. As soon as we left, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki let loose his worst instincts. He has ruled as an authoritarian and Shia sectarian and has allied himself with Iran. In our absence, al-Qaeda in Iraq has begun to make a comeback.

 

At the end of the day, of course, Maliki is no Saddam Hussein. Iraq won’t be developing weapons of mass destruction anytime soon and it is not a direct threat to its neighbors. But any hope that Iraq, still wracked by political violence, would become a shining example to the rest of the Middle East was lost long ago. The Iraqi elections were inspiring exercises. A few years ago they even seemed to herald the advent of a nonsectarian politics. Yet the promise of those elections, and of Iraq’s new democratic structures, hasn’t been fulfilled. Key political players in Iraq have lacked a commitment to the rule of law and pluralism, and have been egged on and supplied by mischievous neighbors who had more staying power than we did.

 

The story in Iraq isn’t over. It didn’t end with our departure, and what we do still matters. The Obama abdication in Iraq, though, has continued. We should be using every remaining financial and diplomatic lever we have to try to force Maliki to give up his campaign against the Sunnis and to maintain some distance from Iran. Instead, the administration is content to take Maliki as it finds him, even as he allows Tehran to funnel aid to the Assad regime in Syria, which we want to see fall.

 

Throughout the near-decade of war in Iraq, there was one constant: the heroism and selflessness of our troops, who paid the highest price for the mistakes of their superiors. They gave their lives and their limbs. They were the tip of the spear of the most proficient and humane fighting force that the world has ever known. We wish the results so far in Iraq were more worthy of their sacrifice.

Sorry, GOP, but You Will Never Out-Care the Democrats

By David Harsanyi

Friday, March 22, 2013

 

Republicans now have a comprehensive "autopsy" report detailing some of the perceived and some of the real shortcomings of the 2012 presidential election. And the rather optimistically named Growth and Opportunity Project's report is jampacked with so many painfully obvious observations that one wonders why it had to be written in the first place.

 

You may not be surprised to learn, for instance, that a bunch of people find the Republican Party "scary," "narrow minded," "out of touch" and a party of "stuffy old men." Alas, the "perception that the GOP does not care about people is doing great harm to the Party and its candidates," states the report. This theme was in full display at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, as well. The GOP has to care more, a lot more.

 

As practical politics go (not to mention personal morality), compassion is never a bad idea. But rest assured, politically speaking, the GOP will never out-"care" the Democratic Party. It will never out-empathize it. Or out-diversify it. Or be able to promise that government can do more. And it shouldn't want to.

 

For starters, there's no reason to accept the liberal definition of caring -- at all. Conservatives can be as compassionate as anyone else; just look at polls that gauge who gives to charities. It just so happens that conservatives don't like to do their caring with other people's money. If Republicans start holding up government as the principal source of empathy, hope and charity, America can expect an even bigger arms race in spending and dependency -- the kind that, in the end, burdens the young and poor and everyone else.

 

It's one thing to be more diverse and open-minded, to engage all sorts of people, even to shift your opinions when generational forces or facts demand it. It's quite another to, as Newt Gingrich explained at CPAC, become a "party focused on the right to life and the right to a good life." To begin with, politicians are in no position to offer you a good life -- or a right to it. Secondly, it's a myth that a good life isn't available to anyone who is genuinely seeking it. In any event, liberal populism already has a monopoly on victimhood, so there's scarce room for Republicans in that space.

 

In many tactical areas, the Growth and Opportunity Project seems to make sense. Modernization and more effective outreach are great ideas. The problem is that too often, the RNC allows Democrats to define the parameters of debate. There's way too much worrying about acceptance and far too little about persuasion.

 

As a practical matter, let's concede for a moment that conceding issues such as immigration, gay marriage and abortion makes sense -- and that's the implicit message of the project's report. I'm sympathetic on a number of points, but what's the cost-benefit analysis? Folks in Washington are obsessed with winning, and winning is nice. But politics is their livelihood. Average Americans don't participate in the political process to join a team; they knock on doors because -- as surprising as this may be to some -- they believe in something.

 

And even though social conservatives feel as if they're being swept aside by Republican Beltway types, fiscal conservatism will fare no better under this thinking. The idea of free markets is a moral one -- an American idea -- and a sellable one. Yes, polls show that young Americans are more pro-government than ever. So it'd be nice if there were a plan to convince them of how wrong they are -- as opposed to trying to sound more like the people they already agree with.

The 50 Percent Solution

By Charles Krauthammer

Thursday, March 21, 2013

 

The proposition that entitlement curbs are the key to maintaining national solvency is widely accepted, though not by many congressional Democrats. President Obama, however, has endorsed it on various occasions. And he could make it happen.

 

If he wants. I remain skeptical that he does. But national solvency is important enough to test this proposition at least once more. The obstacle is Obama’s current position that entitlement cuts must be “balanced” with new revenue from closing loopholes.

 

Republicans are adamantly opposed. No more revenues, Mr. President. You got your tax hike on January 1.

 

Is there a solution? Yes: tax reform with a twist.

 

The problem begins with definitions. By tax reform, Obama means eliminating deductions, exclusions, and credits of various kinds with all the money going to the Treasury.

 

That’s radically new. The historic 1986 Reagan-O’Neill tax reform closed loopholes with no extra money going to the Treasury. The new revenue went directly back to the citizenry in the form of lower tax rates.

 

This is called revenue neutrality. The idea is that tax reform is a way not to fatten the Treasury but to clean the tax code. It means eliminating special-interest favors and behavior-altering deductions that create waste and inefficiency by inducing tax-preferred rather than market-oriented economic activity. And it introduces fairness by removing breaks and payoffs for which only the rich can afford to lobby.

 

As a final bonus, tax reform’s lower rates spur economic growth. A unique win-win-win: efficiency, fairness, growth.

 

Obama’s own Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission offered a variant. First, it identified an astonishing $1.1 trillion per year of these “tax expenditures.” That’s more than $11 trillion in a decade. In one scenario, it knocked them all out and lowered marginal tax rates to just three brackets of 8 percent, 14 percent, and 23 percent.

 

But here’s the twist. Using the full $1.1 trillion annually of newly redeemed “loophole” revenue, Simpson-Bowles could have dropped the rates a bit below 23 percent. But instead it left some of that money in the Treasury, an average of almost $100 billion a year, or about $1 trillion over a decade. It was a reasonable compromise, so reasonable that even the Senate’s most fierce spending hawk, commission member Tom Coburn, signed on.

 

Now, Simpson-Bowles is not on the table, but it could be a model. Obama’s “tax reform” would send 100 percent of the revenue to the Treasury. Reagan-O’Neill sent zero percent. Simpson-Bowles fell somewhere in between. So should any grand compromise.

 

Before deciding exactly where to locate that compromise, however, we have to decide which deductions to cut, yielding how much revenue. The bad news is that, given all the lobbying and haggling this would occasion, it could take years to work out. The good news is the formula proposed by Harvard economist Martin Feldstein. Before even picking and choosing which deductions should remain permissible, it simply allows no one to reduce his tax bill by more than 2 percent by using any or all of the deductions and loopholes in the current tax code (except for charitable contributions).

 

There should, of course, be separate negotiations over which of the thousands of loopholes and deductions should be tossed out as corrupt or counterproductive rent-seeking. But the 2 percent ceiling means that we don’t have to wait until full tax reform — because the Feldstein formula significantly and immediately reduces the impact of all the loopholes.

 

Feldstein calculates that his tax reform would yield $2.1 trillion in new revenue over a decade. Now we can cut the pie. Obama wants the government to keep it all. The GOP wants to give it all back to reduce tax rates. Let’s be Solomonic. Divide the revenue in half — 50 percent to the Treasury for reducing debt, 50 percent to the citizenry for reducing rates.

 

That’s roughly $1 trillion each. Everybody gets something. Republicans unexpectedly get a rate cut, minor but symbolic after having had to swallow the fiscal-cliff rate hike. The country gets the first significant tax reform in a quarter century. Obama gets $1 trillion worth of “balance,” his price for real entitlement reform. And if he turns out to be serious about that, we get the Holy Grail — tax and entitlement reform all at once.

 

Which means a deal that manages to simultaneously promote efficiency, fairness, growth, debt reduction, and a return to national solvency. In other words, the best deal since the Louisiana Purchase.