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Are Social Conservatives Holding Back Economic Conservatives?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 9, 2009 Comment (6)The national debate has been all about economics recently. While the conventional wisdom is that economic issues tend to favor the Democrats in the realm of public opinion, there is at least some evidence that complaints about the economy and Obama's plan to fix it helped fuel the GOP victories in Virginia and New Jersey last week. And as I blogged about last week, conservatives' shift to the right on economics has led to the decidedly-unconservative Ayn Rand being annointed as a GOP idol.
But maybe Republicans aren't getting as much mileage from their economic arguments as they could. A recent article in the Nation looks at how young conservatives are turned off by some of the extremes of the party.
While these young conservatives may not present silver-bullet solutions to the GOP's woes, they believe rebuilding the party shouldn't take a back seat to birthers, deathers and the rest of the far-right fringe. David Laska, the 22-year-old president of New York University College Republicans, says, "We need to start paying less attention to the Tom Tancredo wing of the Republican Party. I don't think that wing of the party is as big as some people make it out it be."
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Healthcare Reform: As Congress Debates, Small Business Hiring in Paralysis
Tweet Share on Facebook November 6, 2009 CommentIrwin Stelzer asks how private-sector employers are responding to the healthcare debate in Washington:
Small-business men I met with this week tell me they are in a state of paralysis as they watch the debate over the health care "reform" bill wending its way through Congress. Lurking in its 1,502 pages (the Senate version) are provisions that will markedly raise their costs, and their personal taxes. So even as business gets better, they won't take on more staff because they can't figure out what it will cost them to do so.
What are these cost-raising provisions? In my analysis of the Baucus bill, I mentioned the tax penalties that would apply to businesses that do not provide healthcare for employees who would be subsidized under the plan. But those penalties only applied to firms with 50 or more employees—only 4 percent of all employer businesses. The bill Congress is currently debating, however, is more expansive.
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GOP Healthcare Plan Claims 'Universal Access'
Tweet Share on Facebook November 4, 2009 CommentRhetoric is important in all political debates, but it seems to be especially dominant in healthcare. From "public option" to "death panel," it seems like the war of words has eclipsed the war of ideas.
With their one-page summary of their healthcare plan, the Republicans seem to be toting a new phrase meant to capture our hearts and minds: "Universal Access Program," described in the summary as programs that will "expand and reform high-risk pools and reinsurance programs to guarantee that all Americans, regardless of pre-existing conditions or past illnesses, have access to affordable care—while lowering costs for all Americans."
What does that mean? High-risk pools are offered by most states as separate subsidized insurance pools for people with pre-existing conditions. So the Republicans want to expand these pools in order to try to cover these people without mandatory health insurance.
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Cash for Clunkers Critics Get White House Response
Tweet Share on Facebook November 3, 2009 CommentThe White House has responded to an analysis of the Cash for Clunkers program by Edmunds.com that claims the program created only a trivial amount of new car sales, and many of the cars purchased under the program would have been sold anyway. Here's a point by Macon Phillips, the White House director of new media:
This analysis ignores not only the price impacts that a program like Cash for Clunkers has on the rest of the vehicle market, but the reports from across the country that people were drawn into dealerships by the Cash for Clunkers program and ended up buying cars even though their old car was not eligible for the program.
[emphasis mine]
That point goes two ways though. If we include cars that weren't directly eligible for the Cash for Clunkers program in our analysis, that means we need to look at the used car market. Of course, as I've pointed out before, subsidizing new car purchases is a good way to push up prices in the used market. A whole class of consumer for which used vehicles is all they can afford were pretty much given an "anti-stimulus."
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Ayn Rand's Problem With the Right
Tweet Share on Facebook November 2, 2009 Comment (3)Ayn Rand and especially her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged are more popular than ever, as I've blogged about before. This might largely be in part to conservative activists appropriating imagery and the message from the book in their criticism of the Obama administration's economic policies. Now the literary world is getting in on the action, with a number of high-profile Rand biographies being published. The New York Times reviewed one such biography yesterday, Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller.
If the protestors at tea party rallies carrying signs like "John Galt was right" were to read biographies of Rand, would they still tout her ideas and characters?
Here's an example: Glenn Beck has approvingly covered Ayn Rand on his show, and has likely increased her popularity among tea party activists. He has also called marriage the "building block of the universe" and criticized attempts to expand the definition of marriage to include same-sex relationships.
