24 March 2010
Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
A Post-Health Care
Realignment? [Cato at Liberty]
MAR 23, 2010 05:08P.M.
By Julian Sanchez
From Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal to Joe Biden’s Big F-ing
Deal, progressives have led a consistent and largely successful campaign
to expand the size and scope of the federal government. Now, Matt
Yglesias suggests, it’s time to take a victory lap and call it a day:
For the past 65-70 years—and especially for the past 30 years
since the end of the civil rights argument—American politics
has been dominated by controversy over the size and scope of
the welfare state. Today, that argument is largely over with
liberals having largely won. [...] The crux of the matter is that
progressive efforts to expand the size of the welfare state are
basically done. There are big items still on the progressive
agenda. But they don’t really involve substantial new
expenditures. Instead, you’re looking at carbon pricing,
financial regulatory reform, and immigration reform as the
medium-term agenda. Most broadly, questions about how to
boost growth, how to deliver public services effectively, and
about the appropriate balance of social investment between
children and the elderly will take center stage. This will
probably lead to some realigning of political coalitions.
Liberal proponents of reduced trade barriers and increased
immigration flows will likely feel emboldened about pushing
that agenda, since the policy environment is getting
substantially more redistributive and does much more to
mitigate risk. Advocates of things like more and better
preschooling are going to find themselves competing for
funds primarily with the claims made by seniors.
I’d like to believe this is true, though I can’t say I’m persuaded. It seems
at least as likely that, consistent with the historical pattern, the new
status quo will simply be redefined as the “center,” and proposals to
further augment the welfare state will move from the fringe to the
mainstream of opinion on the left.
That said, it’s hardly unheard of for a political victory to yield the kind of
medium-term realignment Yglesias is talking about. The end of the Cold
War destabilized the Reagan-era conservative coalition by essentially
taking off the table a central—and in some cases the only—point of
agreement among diverse interest groups. Less dramatically, the passage
1
of welfare reform in the 90s substantially reduced the political salience
of welfare policy. The experience of countries like Canada and the United
Kingdom, moreover, suggests that if Obamacare isn’t substantially rolled
back fairly soon, it’s likely to become a political “given” that both parties
take for granted. Libertarians, of course, have long lamented this
political dynamic: Government programs create constituencies, and
become extraordinarily difficult to cut or eliminate, even if they were
highly controversial at their inceptions.
We don’t have to be happy about this pattern, but it is worth thinking
about how it might alter the political landscape a few years down the
line. One possibility, as I suggest above, is that it will just shift the
mainstream of political discourse to the left. But as libertarians have also
long been at pains to point out, the left-right model of politics, with its
roots in the seating protocols of the 18th century French assembly,
conceals the multidimensional complexity of politics. There’s no intrinsic
commonality between, say, “left” positions on taxation, foreign policy,
and reproductive rights—the label here doesn’t reflect an underlying
ideological coherence so much as the contingent requirements of
assembling a viable political coalition at a particular time and place. If an
issue that many members of one coalition considered especially morally
urgent is, practically speaking, taken off the table, the shape of the
coalitions going forward depends largely on the issues that rise to
salience. Libertarians are perhaps especially conscious of this precisely
because we tend to take turns being more disgusted with one or another
party—usually whichever holds power at a given moment.
The $64,000 question, of course, is what comes next. As 9/11 and the
War on Terror reminded us, the central political issues of an era are
often dictated by fundamentally unpredictable events. But some of the
obvious current candidates are notable for the way they cut across the
current partisan divide. In my own wheelhouse—privacy and
surveillance issues—Republicans have lately been univocal in their
support of expanded powers for the intelligence community, with plenty
of help from hawkish Democrats. Given their fondness for invoking the
specter of soviet totalitarian states, I’ve hoped that the folks mobilizing
under the banner of the Tea Party might begin pushing back on the
burgeoning surveillance state. Thus far I’ve hoped in vain, but if that
coalition outlasts our current disputes, one can imagine it becoming an
issue for them in 2011 as parts of the Patriot Act once again come up for
reauthorization, or in 2012 when the FISA Amendments Act is due to
sunset. In the past, the same issues have made strange bedfellows of the
ACLU and the ACU, of Ron Paul Republicans and FireDogLake
Democrats. Obama has pledged to take up comprehensive immigration
reform during his term, and there too significant constituencies within
each party fall on opposite sides of the issue.
Further out than that it’s hard to predict. But more generally, the
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 24 March 2010

possibility that I find interesting is that—against a background of

technologies that have radically reduced the barriers to rapid, fluid, and
distributed group formation and mobilization—the protracted health
care fight, the economic crisis, and the explosion of federal spending
have created an array of potent political communities outside the party-
centered coalitions. They’ve already shown they’re capable of surprising
alliances—think Jane Hamsher and Grover Norquist. Suppose Yglesias is
at least this far correct: The next set of political battles are likely to be
fought along a different value dimension than was health care reform.
Precisely because these groups formed outside the party-centered
coalitions, and assuming they outlast the controversies that catalyzed
their creation, it’s hard to predict which way they’ll move on tomorrow’s
controversies. It’s entirely possible that there are latent and dispersed
constituencies for policy change outside the bipartisan mainstream who
have now, crucially, been connected: Any overlap on orthogonal value
dimensions within or between the new groups won’t necessarily be
evident until the relevant values are triggered by a high-visibility policy (Data from the federal budget, historical tables, table 4.1, as deflated)
debate. Still, it’s reason to expect that the next decade of American
politics may be even more turbulent and surprising than the last one.

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS When National Standardizers

Club for Growth in the News Attack! [Cato at Liberty]
MAR 23, 2010 04:48P.M.
[The Club for Growth]
MAR 23, 2010 04:51P.M. By Neal McCluskey

The Club has been getting a lot of media attention lately.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Federal Health Spending [Cato
at Liberty]
MAR 23, 2010 04:48P.M.
By Chris Edwards
When describing spending growth in federal programs, I often need to
use words like “soaring” and “explosive.” But growth in federal health
spending is almost beyond superlatives to describe it, and it will increase
even faster as a result of President Obama’s new health legislation.
This chart shows total real spending by the Department of Health and
Human Services, which includes the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
Spending has increased almost nine-fold since 1970, and that’s after
adjusting for inflation. And note how the slope of the bars increased
around 1990. Health spending is truly skyrocketing and Obama has just
put us into orbit.
There’s just no pleasing some people who want to impose
uniform curriculum standards on every public school in America.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial that wasn’t even
critical of national standards (save arguing that there are better reforms),
yet Michael Petrilli of the standards-philic Thomas B. Fordham Institute
still attacked.
What exactly did the WSJ have the temerity to write? That while there is
“nothing wrong…with setting benchmarks for what the average child
should know by a certain grade,” imposing national standards is not
nearly as proven a reform as “school choice and accountability.”
Petrilli was having none of this, declaring that choice is fine, but that
people need national standards, set by government, to be able to
make better choices.
His evidence? He offered almost none, and what he did cite was
poppycock.
That curriculum standards set at any level of government will produce
accurate and useful information for parents flies in the face of historical
and political reality. Indeed, Fordham itself has furnished abundant
evidence that standards-and-testing regimes, first under state control
and then under No Child Left Behind, have repeatedly produced,
essentially, lies about academic “success.”

2
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
National standards, on the other hand? In his response to the Journal,
Petrilli simply proclaimed that they would provide “trustworthy
information.”
Not only is there no evidence to support this claim, there are good
reasons to conclude the opposite. The people employed by the public
schools are the most motivated to be involved in education politics and
the most easily organized, giving them outsized power. Couple that with
their best interest being served by being held to low or no standards, and
it is clear why standards and accountability mechanisms set by political,
“democratic” means — as national standards would be – have
almost always been rendered hollow.
This inconvenient political reality is one reason that there is no
convincing research showing that national standards drive superior
educational outcomes. But don’t expect a discussion of the national-
standards evidence from the Fordham folks. They seem determined to
avoid it. Except, that is, for citing one, isolated factoid.
Petrilli started his attack on the Journal by implying that the paper had
actually acknowledged this homerun factoid: that the ”countries that
outperform us on international assessments all have national standards
in place.”
Arrgh!
As I and many others have repeatedly pointed out — and as is obvious
when you know the whole truth — this “evidence” is meaningless. Yes,
most of the countries that beat us have national standards, but so do
most of the countries that do worse! There is simply no meaningful
correlation between having national standards and results on
international exams.
Unfortunately, Petrilli didn’t just use the factoid to sell his national
standards snake oil. He also invoked it to suggest that the WSJ
editorialists had addled brains, that they had illogically acknowledged
the factoid yet still soft-peddled national standards. But the Journal
writers hadn’t embraced the factoid half-truth. They wrote the whole
truth:
It’s true that some countries with uniform standards
(Singapore, Japan) outperform the U.S., though other
countries with such standards (Sweden, Israel) do worse. On
the 2007 eighth-grade TIMSS test, an international math
exam, all eight countries that scored higher than the U.S. had
national standards. But so did 33 of the 39 countries that
scored lower.
Unfortunately, this sort of evidence avoidance and distortion has been
par for Fordham’s national-standards course. Indeed, in reviewing
my new report that analyses the empirical evidence, Fordham’s Stafford
Palmieri suggested that I simply failed to find proof that national
standards work. She also concluded that that was no reason to
avoid such standards. But what I actually found was that while the
research is limited, what exists gives good reason to believe that national
3
24 March 2010
standards do not work. It’s a big difference.
Fordham’s refusal to systematically deal with the evidence is disturbing
since the Institute is arguably the leading exponent of this ”reform.” But
whatever Fordham does, the nation must not ignore reality. If Fordham
gets what it wants it will be imposed on everyone, and then it will be too
late to “discover” that it was the wrong thing to do.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Great Moments in International
Bureaucracy [Cato at Liberty]
MAR 23, 2010 03:47P.M.
By Daniel J. Mitchell
Greece’s fiscal disarray is a visible manifestation of Europe’s future, but
the most appropriate symbol of what’s wrong with the continent comes
from Brussels, where there are three “presidents” fighting over the right
to represent Europe at international gatherings. The contestants include
the President of the European Commission, the President of the
European Council, and the European Union President (which rotates
every six months among different national leaders).
While these three personalities fight over who gets to sit where and
shake hands first, the real problem is that they all agree that government
should be bigger, taxes should be higher, and power should be more
centralized as part of the effort to create a superstate in Brussels. Inside
this gilded cage, insulated from actual voters, Europe’s technocratic elite
is content to enjoy a parasitical existence while the welfare states of
member nations slowly but surely collapse and lead to social chaos.
Here’s an excerpt from the UK-based Express about the fight between
the the philosophical descendants of Louis XVI. Or would Nero be a
better analogy? How about the Three Stooges? Well, you get the idea:
Promises by EU leaders that the Lisbon Treaty would herald a
new era of clarity have been shattered after attempts to settle
a major internal power feud resulted in a typical Brussels
fudge. Bureaucrats have decided to send not just one
president and his entourage to global summits but a tax-
draining three. Only four months after the fanfare of Herman
Van Rompuy’s appointment as European Council president,
his most jealous and powerful rival in Brussels has persuaded
allies to allow him to muscle in too. José Manuel Barroso,
president of the European Commission, has succeeded in his
demands that he should also go to diplomatic summits, such
as the G20, after insisting only he has the expertise to deal
with specific policy matters. At certain summits there will
even be a third representative – the leader of the country
holding the EU’s rotating presidency. This seems to justify
criticism that the Lisbon Treaty would add to the EU’s murky
waters and not be a move towards transparency. …Since the
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 24 March 2010

Lisbon Treaty came into force at the end of last year, FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
arguments have raged in Brussels over which department
does what. Mr Van Rompuy, the former Belgian prime We Passed ObamaCare, but Will
minister dismissed last month by Ukip MEP Nigel Farage as a
“damp rag” and a “low-grade bank clerk”, is the permanent It Improve Health? [Cato at
president of the European Council.
Liberty]
MAR 23, 2010 11:43A.M.

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS By Michael F. Cannon

BREAKING: Comprehensive The answer may not be so obvious. I’ll explore that issue at a Cato
Institute policy forum this Thursday with two leading authorities on the
List of Net Tax Hikes in Health subject: John Ayanian of Harvard Medical School and David Meltzer of
the University of Chicago.
Reconciliation Bill [Americans
The forum is titled, “Would Universal Coverage Improve Health?” and
for Tax Reform] will be held at 4pm this Thursday at the Cato Institute. Click the link for
MAR 23, 2010 02:59P.M. details.

The U.S. Senate today will begin consideration of H.R. 4872, the
“Reconciliation Act of 2010.” It makes several changes to the healthcare
law signed by President Obama today. B... FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

ATRF Analysis: International

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS Tax Hikes In H.R. 4849
Club for Growth PAC Endorses [Americans for Tax Reform]
MAR 23, 2010 11:41A.M.
Tim Scott in SC-01 [The Club
H.R. 4849, the “Small Business And Infrastructure Jobs Act of 2010” will
for Growth] most probably come before the House of Representatives for a vote
MAR 23, 2010 12:58P.M. today. It contains within it a staggering $9 billio...

WASHINGTON S COMMITTEE. 202-955-5500.

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

Individual Mandate Is
Constitutional – If You Rewrite
the Constitution [Cato at
Liberty– If You Rewrite the
Constitution]
MAR 23, 2010 11:22A.M.

By Ilya Shapiro

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) was asked

on Friday where in the Constitution Congress gets the power to force
people to buy health insurance. He said, “Under several clauses, the good

4
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
and welfare clause and a couple others.”
As it happens, there is no “good and welfare clause” — which Conyers
should know, as both judiciary chairman and a lawyer. But even if you
excuse his casual use of constitutional language, what he probably means
— the General Welfare Clause of Article I, Section 8 — is not a better
answer. What that clause does is limit Congress’s use of the powers
enumerated elsewhere in that section to legislation that promotes ”the
general welfare.” (So earmarks are arguably unconstitutional, though
you can make a colorable argument that, when considering a pork bill as
a whole, with all parts of the country getting something, that monstrosity
is collectively in “the general welfare” — maybe.) In any event,
the General Welfare Clause doesn’t give Congress any additional powers
— and I’d be curious to know what the other “several clauses” are.
Conyers also noted that, “All the scholars, the constitutional scholars
that I know . . . they all say that there’s nothing unconstitutional in this
bill and if there were, I would have tried to correct it if I thought there
were.” Well, Mr. Conyers, to start let me introduce you to three
constitutional scholars — not fringe right-wing kooks or anything like
that, but respected people who publish widely — who think Obamacare is
unconstitutional. Now will you try to “correct” the bill?
Here’s video of Conyers’s full remarks on the subject (h/t Jon Blanks):
And for a survey of the various constitutional issues attending
Obamacare, see Randy Barnett’s oped from Sunday’s Washington Post.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Health Care Is Cheap (Subsidies
Are Not) [Cato at Liberty]
MAR 23, 2010 11:05A.M.
By Alan Reynolds
A column I wrote in 2002 seems more relevant than ever. Some
excerpts:
Health care is cheap: Eat less fat and more veggies, take a
daily walk, quit smoking, and drink a little wine with some
nuts. Fail to take care of yourself, and the long-term results
can be costly — like the results of never changing the oil in
your car and never replacing the tires. New diagnostic and
surgical technologies involve expensive equipment and skills.
Even so, insurance for gigantic medical expenses is also
cheap. My policy pays nothing unless annual medical bills top
$2,000. Most people call that “catastrophic” insurance. I call
it real insurance.
Insurance for accidental damage to cars and homes is real
insurance — something to protect against emergencies, not
5
24 March 2010
routine expenses. We do not expect an insurance company to
pay for tires and gasoline, or to pay for home painting and
termite inspections. When families make their own choices
and pay for them, they choose insurance only for catastrophic
expenses — the car becoming a total wreck, the house burnt
to the ground or the breadwinner dropping dead. If we never
collect a dime from such genuine insurance, we consider
ourselves lucky.
With health insurance, by contrast, we all want somebody
else to pay. Each of us expects to pay less for health insurance
than the insurance companies pay to hospitals, doctors and
pharmacies. Sadly, that does not add up.
More than a fourth of the U.S. population already has
federally subsidized health care through Medicare, Medicaid
and military health benefits. If that percentage ever reached
100 percent, as some politicians promise, we might finally
begin to wonder how it is possible for everybody to subsidize
everybody else.
If you subsidize something, people want more of it. That
increase in demand translates into a market in which prices
can more easily be raised.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Tuesday Links [Cato at Liberty]
MAR 23, 2010 11:04A.M.
By Chris Moody
• Estimates of the health care overhaul’s real cost over 10 years run
as high as $3.5 trillion, including $600 billion in new taxes from
the start.
• Will claims that the health care overhaul is unconstitutional get
anywhere? Here is your guide to the possible legal challenges to the
new law.
• Put this in the “things you missed during the health care debate”
file: A panel of educators assembled by 48 state governors and
school superintendents just released a uniform set of math and
reading standards for the nation’s students.
• Podcast: “The Price of Obamacare” featuring Michael F. Cannon.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 24 March 2010

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS Hour reported (along with Politico this morning) that Rep. Randy
Neugebauer shouted “baby killer” as Rep. Bart Stupak was speaking
How Can We Be at Cyberwar if Sunday night. Yet NPR reported that Neugebauer actually shouted “It’s a
baby killer” — referring to the bill, not to Stupak. Neither version is
We Don’t Know What It Is? acceptable, but there is a difference. Likewise, claims about protesters’
taunts should be treated cautiously as well, especially since they’ve been
[Cato at Liberty] denied, and as yet no footage has emerged to support them. Yet we see
MAR 23, 2010 10:51A.M. here at the Arena this morning that Harvard’s Theda Skocpol is writing,
without a shred of evidence, that ”Quite a few Republican public officials
By Jim Harper are even flirting with threats of violence against political figures they
oppose.” So let’s not pretend that the right has a corner on
Brilliant column from William Jackson on GCN.com debunking irresponsibility.
“cyberwar”:
Second, even if the claims about protesters’ taunts prove to be true, how
“The United States is fighting a cyberwar today and we are is that a warrant for condemning the entire tea-party movement, or the
losing it,” former National Security Agency chief and national Republican party, as many on the left are doing? No broad political
intelligence director Mike McConnell wrote in a recent op-ed movement can control its every “member.” Yet we find people like House
column in the Washington Post. “It’s that simple.” Majority Whip Jim Clyburn saying that GOP leaders “ought to be
ashamed of themselves for bringing these people here to Washington.”
It is neither simple nor true. Failure to distinguish between Perhaps Rep. Clyburn has forgotten that we still have the right to protest.
real acts of war and other malicious behavior not only That’s what the first tea party was about. And let’s remember that George
increases the risks of war, but also distracts us from more Washington had to wade into the “mob” from time to time to keep order.
immediate threats such as online crime.
And that brings me to a final point. The symbolism of the Democratic
The habit of threat inflation is harmful to the country. Jackson’s left’s hostility to the “tea baggers” should not go unnoticed. The tea party
welcome take on “cyber” threats earns an accolade I rarely give out: Read movement’s roots are in the American Revolution. These ordinary
the whole thing. Americans are protesting the Washington ”Establishment” — which
presently is the Democratic juggernaut – much as American Patriots
were protesting the oppressive British Establishment that was “eating
out their substance” with “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” The
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS Democratic left should think long and hard about those parallels. The
times they are a-changin’.
The Establishment Is Offended
[Cato at Liberty]
MAR 23, 2010 10:34A.M. FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

By Roger Pilon Obama’s “firm pledge” on Taxes

Today Politico Arena asks: is Anything But [Americans for
Should Republican leaders be doing more to reign in the Tax Reform“firm pledge” on
rhetoric?
Taxes is Anything But]
My response: MAR 23, 2010 10:22A.M.

One hesitates to weigh in on this mud-slinging for fear of getting muddy [PDF Version] President Barack Obama’s central campaign promise – a
oneself. But neither should commentary on Republican and tea-party “firm pledge” not to raise “any form” of taxes on families making less
reaction to Sunday’s House vote be left to the suddenly self-righteous than $250,0...
Democratic left: After all, it’s their appalling disregard for democratic
principles and processes that gave rise to the weekend’s demonstrations
and outbursts. So a few points are in order, simply to put things
in perspective.

First, let’s not leap to factual conclusions. Last evening the Lehrer News

6
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Obamacare Must Be Repealed
[The Club for Growth]
MAR 23, 2010 09:26A.M.
Wise words from Heritage t listen to constituents.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Postmaster Indicates Need for
Privatization [Cato at Liberty]
MAR 23, 2010 08:32A.M.
By Tad DeHaven
A recent Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on the U.S. Postal
Service’s dire financial prospects found little enthusiasm for the USPS’s
idea to eliminate Saturday mail service. Financial Services subcommittee
chairman Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) said “serious questions need to be
asked and answered,” and ranking member Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)
expressed concern that it would send the USPS into “a death spiral.”
The USPS is already in a death spiral due to changes in technology, high
labor costs, and costly congressional mandates that have left it facing a
projected $238 billion in losses over the next ten years. The USPS says
dropping Saturday service would save the USPS $3 billion a year.
However, the Postal Regulatory Commission believes the savings would
be significantly smaller. Regardless, if the USPS stops Saturday service
then private firms should be allowed to provide Saturday mail service.
Better yet, the USPS monopoly should be completely repealed and
private firms allowed to deliver mail every day of the week. Interestingly,
Postmaster General John Potter’s testimony inadvertently makes a case
for privatizing the USPS.
Potter notes that when private businesses are losing money, they sell off
assets, close locations, and reduce employment. He cites Sears, L.L.
Bean, and Starbucks as recent examples of companies making cost
cutting moves in the face of declining revenues. The Government
Accountability Office’s testimony noted that the USPS has more retail
outlets (36,500) than McDonalds, Starbucks, and Walgreens combined.
Yet, its post offices average 600 visits per week, which is only 10 percent
of Walgreen’s average weekly traffic.
In his testimony, Potter states:
If the Postal Service were provided with the flexibilities used
by businesses in the marketplace to streamline their
operations and reduce costs, we would become a more
efficient and effective organization. Such a change would also
7
24 March 2010
allow us to more quickly adapt to meet the evolving needs,
demands, and activities of our customers, now and in the
future.
This is precisely why the USPS needs to be privatized and subjected to
the demands of the market and not the whims of Congress. Members of
congress always raise a fuss when the USPS targets postal outlets for
closure in their districts.
Potter wants Congress to suspend a requirement that the USPS pre-fund
its retiree health benefits. He argues that the trust fund for these
payments has a $35 billion balance, which he says is enough to pay the
health premiums for its 500,000 retirees through their lifetimes.
The more fundamental problem is the existence of this generous benefit
to begin with. Potter notes that private companies aren’t subject to a pre-
funding mandate. But the vast majority of private companies don’t even
offer retiree health benefits. The GAO also points out that the USPS
retiree benefits are generous even by government standards:
USPS pays a higher percentage of employee health benefit
premiums than other federal agencies (80 percent versus 72
percent, respectively). In addition, USPS pays 100 percent of
employee life insurance premiums, while other federal
agencies pay about 33 percent.
Potter naturally wants more flexibility in dealing with the USPS’s
excessive labor costs. The average postal employee receives $83,000 a
year in total compensation. Employee pay and benefits constitute 80
percent of the USPS’s cost structure, which despite increased automation
has remained the same since the 1960s. But so long as the USPS remains
a government enterprise, it’s hard to imagine Congress standing up to
the postal unions and giving management the labor flexibility it desires.
Finally, Potter wants the USPS to have more freedom when it comes to
pricing and getting into new lines of business:
We also need the ability to expand our products and services,
and ensure prices for our Market-Dominant products are
based on the demand and cost of each individual product.
“Market-Dominant” is an Orwellian way of saying “Government Granted
Monopoly.” Again, if the Postmaster wants mail prices to have an
economic rationale, then the USPS needs to be privatized so that the
market can efficiently set prices. Further, the USPS has a poor track
record when it comes to expanding into services not protected by its
monopoly. Plus it would be competing against the private sector on
advantageous terms due to its status as a government enterprise.
What Potter wants — and needs — is something that only the private
sector can provide. If the Senate hearing is any indication, Congress has
no present plans to relinquish its control over the dying government
monopoly. Instead, the USPS will likely continue to bleed red until
policymakers run out of band-aids and are finally confronted with the
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 24 March 2010

choice of either privatization or direct taxpayer funding.