21 April 2010
Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Clarifying ATR’s Position on the
Georgia Tax Bill [Americans for
Tax Reform]
APR 20, 2010 05:50P.M.
After ATR’s lukewarm statement in support of Georgia HB 1055, Grover
today wrote a letter to Taxpayer Pledge Protection signers clarifying our
position. Though the bill was a net tax cut, some Pledge ...
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Policing for Profit [Cato at
Liberty]
APR 20, 2010 05:15P.M.
By David Rittgers
The Institute for Justice has produced a study, Policing for Profit, which
highlights the abuse of civil asset forfeiture laws. Law enforcement
agencies are empowered across the nation to seize and keep property
suspected of involvement in criminal activity. Unlike criminal asset
forfeiture, however, with civil forfeiture, a property owner need not be
found guilty of a crime—or even charged—to permanently lose her cash,
car, home or other property.
Most state laws are written in such a way as to encourage police agents to
pursue profit instead of seeking the neutral administration of justice. The
report grades each state and the federal government on its forfeiture
laws and other measures of abuse. The results are appalling: Six states
earned an F and 29 states and the federal government received a grade of
D.
Institute for Justice has more on the report here, including a video
showing the injustice created by these laws.
Cato is holding an event to highlight the findings of this report on
Wednesday, April 28. Please join us for a discussion of policing,
constitutional rights, and government accountability. You can register
here.
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FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Ending Title IX Survey a “No-
Brainer”? [Cato at Liberty“No-
Brainer”?]
APR 20, 2010 05:14P.M.
By Neal McCluskey
When kids want to know if other kids want to play a game they just ask,
“Hey, wanna play?”
Apparently, that kind of straightforward interest assessment won’t cut it
with the Obama administration, which today announced that it
is eliminating the option for schools to survey women about their desires
to play intercollegiate sports in order to comply with Title IX. The only
safe way for schools to comply with the law, as a result, will be to have
men and women participate in athletics in almost perfect proportion to
their share of total enrollment, and without regard to how potentially
disproportionate their desires to play.
In announcing the logic-leaping change, Vice President Biden said it was
a “no-brainer.” That’s true, but not in the way Biden intended.
The main problem, though, almost certainly isn’t that Title IX supporters
can’t see how obvious and straightforward a survey is for assessing
interest in playing sports. The main problem is likely that
many supporters don’t actually want women to be able to express their
interest, lest its relative paucity be revealed. Indeed, a survey would
almost certainly show a big interest gap, as evidenced by three to four
times as many men playing college intramural sports, or men flocking to
sports sites on the internet while women clearly prefer social networking.
Of course, the fairest way to judge women’s interest in intercollegiate
athletics isn’t a survey — which can’t easily capture intensity of interest
– but letting women reveal their preferences by freely choosing between
schools that offer lots of athletic opportunities and schools that don’t.
And don’t say that that wouldn’t work because women would be
systematically barred from the playing fields: Constituting nearly 57
percent of enrollment at four-year schools, colleges have huge incentives
to offer women what they want. Which seems, sadly, to be exactly what
Title IX supporters are afraid of.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 21 April 2010

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

ATR Applauds United GOP Larry Downes on Internet

Caucus Opposition to Dodd Bill “Reclassification” [Cato at
[Americans for Tax Reform] Liberty“Reclassification”]
APR 20, 2010 04:45P.M. APR 20, 2010 02:45P.M.

Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) applauds the united opposition by all
41 Republican members of the U.S. to Sen. Dodd’s (D-Conn.) “financial
reform” bill, the Restoring American Financ...
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
ATR Urges Opposition to
Current Form of Regulatory
Reform Bill [Americans for Tax
Reform]
APR 20, 2010 04:36P.M.
Today, Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) continues to urge all Senators
to oppose the current form of Sen. Dodd’s (D-Conn.) “financial reform”
bill, the Restoring American Financial Sta...
By Jim Harper
A few weeks ago, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected the
FCC’s claim of authority to regulate Internet service. That was good
news—and it sure didn’t create a crisis. It meant that the FCC would have
to get authority from Congress if it wanted to regulate the Internet.
But a little hiccup in that plan quickly emerged: Congress won’t let the
FCC regulate the Internet. Bills to do that have been floating around
Capitol Hill for years, and they’ve never gotten traction.
So the proponents of government-controlled Internet access
services have worked up an end-run around Congress: They want the
FCC to try to reclassify Internet access from an unregulated “information
service” to a “telecommunications service,” subject to common carrier
regulation, like the monopoly phone system used to be (. . . and still is,
generations after the monopoly ended).
Well, Larry Downes has been kicking the “reclassification” idea up and
down the field. To relax, he’s been jumping up and down
on ”reclassification.” Recently, Downes had a dream in which he took out
a gun and shot “reclassification.” When he awoke, he did not apologize.

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS I recommend reading his post on the TechLiberationFront blog.

White House economic advisor

refuses to rule out a VAT FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

[Americans for Tax Reform] School Laptop Spycams Took

APR 20, 2010 03:05P.M.
56,000 Pictures [Cato at
[PDF Version] White House economic advisor Austan Goolsbee today
left the door open to consideration of a value-added tax (VAT) if Liberty]
recommended by the White House deficit commission. Comi... APR 20, 2010 02:14P.M.

By Julian Sanchez

Last week, I wrote that we’d learned that the Lower Merion School
District may have gathered many more photos of more students than had
previously been revealed. Now, the Philadelphia Inquirer has put a
number on it: A security program installed on laptops assigned to
students captured 56,000 images over the course of two years,
including screenshots (showing programs in use and private messages
being sent) and surreptitious webcam photos of students at home.

2
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 21 April 2010

Many of these images, it should be noted at the outset, do appear to have FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
come from laptops that really had been stolen. Almost two-thirds of the
total came from six laptops that had been stolen from a high school gym, On Tonight’s Kudlow Report
and which kept transmitting for almost six months, though even there
it’s a close question whether a warrant should have been obtained. (Why [Larry Kudlow’s Money
it took six months to recover the laptops with an active security program
running is a good question for another time.) But many of those pictures Politic$]
seem much harder to justify: APR 20, 2010 01:08P.M.

[I]n at least five instances, school employees let the Web

cams keep clicking for days or weeks after students
found their missing laptops, according to the review.
Those computers – programmed to snap a photo and
capture a screen shot every 15 minutes when the machine was
on – fired nearly 13,000 images back to the school
district servers.

Emphasis added. The district also says it only once activated the tracking
program because a student had not paid the $55 insurance fee required
before taking a laptop home. Blake Robbins, the student whose lawsuit
brought the story to national attention, says that one case was his. That
raises obvious questions about whether school officials might have
exercised their discretion to activate the tracking program more readily
in the case of particular students. The activation procedure itself hardly
imbues one with great confidence: Apparently 10 school officials had the
authority to request laptop tracking, which they might do with a simple This evening at 7pm ET:
informal e-mail.
FINANCIAL REFORM: WHAT’S NEW ON THE FIN-
Just turn this over in your head for a moment. You’ve got ten different REG/DERIVATIVES/CONSUMER PROTECTION FRONT?
administrators—and in practice, the network techs themselves—able to
turn a child’s home laptop into a remote surveillance camera just by CNBC chief Washington correspondent John Harwood reports.
sending an e-mail reporting that a laptop is missing, or that a fee didn’t
get paid on time. The laptop can take thousands of photos over the FIN REG & THE MIDTERMS
course of days or weeks, with neither parents nor students any the wiser - Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)
until a scandal forces closer scrutiny. If Robbins hadn’t been confronted,
or if administrators had made a point of deleting these pictures of GOLDMAN’S EARNINGS
children at home rather than keeping them lying around in storage CNBC’s Michelle Caruso-Cabrera reports.
indefinitely, there’s no reason to think anyone would ever have known.
How many tens of thousands of parents have kids in one-to-one school SHOULD ALL DERIVATIVES BE BANNED?
laptop programs now? What don’t they know? DID GOLDMAN WRECK IT FOR ALL OF WALL STREET?

- David Goldman, Senior Editor First Things Magazine

- Peter Morici, University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of
Business Professor; U.S. International Trade Commission Fmr. Chief
Economist

OBAMA SHIFTING DISCUSSION TO FIN REG...USING

GOLDMAN AS A CLUB?

- Camden Fine, President & CEO Independent Community Bankers of

America
- Mark Callabria, Director of Financial Regulation Studies at the Cato
Institute

BULL/BEAR MARKETS

3
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
- James Altucher, Managing Director Formula Capital
- Jim LaCamp, Macroportfolio Advisors Sr. VP, Portfolio Manager
Please join us. The Kudlow Report. 7pm ET. CNBC.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Court Ruling Is About Free
Speech, Not Animal Cruelty
[Cato at Liberty]
APR 20, 2010 12:25P.M.
By Ilya Shapiro
As expected from the oral argument in U.S. v. Stevens last fall – when
Justice Alito was alone in expressing some support for the government’s
position – the Court on Tuesday upheld the First Amendment by
declining to add a category of unprotected speech. This was not, after all,
a case about the “human sacrifice channel” or Michael Vick’s greatest
dog fights. Indeed, cruelty to animals should be and is punished
everywhere in the country. Instead, at issue here was a broadly drawn
“depiction of animal cruelty” statute that could have ensnared Spanish
tourism brochures or hunting instructional videos. More fundamentally,
the Court rightly rejected the government’s proposed weighing of the
“value” of speech against its “social cost.” That’s simply not the way
Americans view the First Amendment.
The case is also notable because a solid majority of the Court rejected the
“speech balancing test” defended by Solicitor General Elena Kagan, often
mentioned as being on the short list of candidates to succeed retiring
Justice John Paul Stevens. Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion, joined by all of
the panel’s liberal justices, went so far as to call that argument by Kagan
“startling and dangerous.” That is the kind of legal reproach that tends to
be revisited at confirmation hearings
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21 April 2010
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Whitewashing Progressivism
[Cato at Liberty]
APR 20, 2010 12:15P.M.
By Justin Logan
Damon Root points out that the Center for American Progress has a
particularly one-sided view of “The Progressive Tradition in American
Politics.” [.pdf] To add to what Root is saying, my view is that American
politics is essentially tribal warfare and an important factor in tribal
warfare is the cohesion of the tribes. One way to accomplish this is by
romanticizing history to create a powerful identity with which the
tribesmen want to associate themselves. A political movement needs
heroes, villains, narrative. But CAP’s account of the Progressive
movement’s history is remarkably one-sided.
When I ticked over to CAP’s “Progressive Tradition” document [.pdf], I
looked to see whether they included Wilson’s 1916 reasoning that it was
“in order to keep the white race or part of it strong to meet the yellow
race — Japan, for instance, in alliance with Russia, dominating China —
[that made it] wise to do nothing” with respect to the war in Europe.
They did not. In fact, the authors select the passive voice for describing
Wilson’s slapdash diplomacy that sucked America into the war: “In his
second term, he became preoccupied with international affairs due to the
U.S. entry into World War I.” This phrasing makes it sound like “the U.S.
entry” was an act of God, not an act of Wilson. Moreover, if someone
without any prior knowledge read the document they would be painfully
unaware that the reason Wilson “became preoccupied with international
affairs” was because he got us into a war.
George Creel
What about the Committee on Public Information, a government
propaganda machine that made George Bush look like Glenn
Greenwald? The CPI worked in concert with (no kidding) the “Boy Spies
of America” to root out insufficiently pro-war thinking. CPI’s perhaps
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
most metaphysical pronouncement was that U.S. entrance to the Great
War was, in fact, “a Crusade not merely to re-win the tomb of Christ, but
to bring back to earth the rule of right, the peace, goodwill to men and
gentleness he taught.” What about Roosevelt’s puffed-up belligerence,
again foreshadowing Bush, in stating that “He who is not with us,
absolutely and without reserve of any kind, is against us, and should be
treated as an alien enemy”? What about the Palmer Raids, named for ur-
Progressive and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, wherein the U.S.
Government ransacked union halls and homes, snatched up prisoners
and held them without access to counsel or courts, and engaged in mass,
summary, and unilateral deportations? Not a word.
As to the Red Scare more generally, the best the authors can do is to
shrug that as Wilson’s “general intolerance of dissent during World I
became exacerbated by fear of the 1917 Russian Revolution, he played a
central role in promoting the Red Scare of 1917-20. The Red Scare made
domestic activism a target of both police suppression and nativist
sentiment, producing an atmosphere hardly conducive to the cause of
progressive reform.” Is that supposed to be a denunciation?
In contrast to all this obfuscation and equivocation, poor Warren
Harding comes in for a soaking for having produced “a sharp increase in
racial violence and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, new restrictions on
immigration, rises in protective tariffs, increases in economic
concentration, and tax cuts for the rich.”
Imagine if a conservative group came out with a history of American
conservative thought that expressly linked modern American
conservatism to the political thought of, say, John C. Calhoun, with only
mealy-mouthed “to be sure” language like that used by CAP with respect
to Progressivism. Lefties would be outraged, and rightly so. Will CAP
clear the air on the Progressive movement’s history of racism,
imperialism, executive supremacism and contempt for civil liberties? I
bet I know the answer.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Don’t Confuse Me with the
Facts [Cato at Liberty]
APR 20, 2010 11:58A.M.
By Roger Pilon
Opposition is building to the proposed D.C. Voting Rights Act because it
also restricts D.C.’s draconian gun-control laws. Mary G. Wilson,
president of the League of Women Voters of the United States, and Billie
Day, president of the League of Women Voters of the District of
Columbia, said today that “asking citizens to sacrifice their safety in
order to have representation in Congress is unacceptable.”
And on NPR’s Morning Edition today, we heard the thoughts of D.C.
councilwoman Mary Cheh, my con law professor: “I would rather wait to
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21 April 2010
eternity before I bow down to the gun lobby and say ‘The only way I’m
gonna get this is if we give up the right to protect ourselves.’”
The District’s gun laws protect us? By keeping guns out of the hands of
criminals?
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Rich States, Poor States 2010
[Americans for Tax Reform]
APR 20, 2010 11:25A.M.
In our federalist system, states compete. That simple fact should be a
primary influence on public policy in state legislatures. The prosperity
of a state is largely contingent on its tax...
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Libertarianism and Big
Business: A Dissent [Cato at
Liberty]
APR 20, 2010 10:40A.M.
By David Boaz
The March-April issue of Cato Policy Report featured a discussion
among Timothy Carney, Uwe Reinhardt, and Ross Douthat of Carney’s
book Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and
Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union
Bosses. The tenor of the discussion was reflected in the title, ”Big
Business, Big Government, and Libertarian Populism.” Richard L.
Gordon, a distinguished economist emeritus at Pennsylvania State
University and a Cato adjunct scholar, took strong issue with all three
commenters and sent us the following rebuttal, which we’re pleased to
publish here:
The March/April Cato Policy Report covered a January 2010
Cato Book Forum on Timothy P. Carney’s Obamanomics.
Carney summarized his book and there were responses
from Uwe Reinhardt, a Professor at Princeton noted for
advocacy of strong government intervention in health care,
and Ross Douthat, a (first-year) New York Times columnist, a
self-styled conservative who (from scanning his columns)
seems a weak one. The result was three tirades about how big
business runs government. It is surprising in the twenty-first
century to see outside of WhiteHouse.gov, movies, and
television dramas such naïve attacks on the power of big
business. This is not the libertarianism that I know. However,
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com
superficially plausible dominance theories are too convenient
not to revive frequently, regardless of enormous refutations.
Thus, some key, familiar points need recollection.
The charge of big-business dominance has at least three
flaws. First, it is a myth. Politicians created the massive
growth of government with more input from intellectuals
than from business executives. Second, it reverses causation;
government ensnares industry. Third, it is absurd since big
business, however defined, consists of diverse, often
conflicting companies.
Much, including the most problematic, expansion of
government, has almost nothing to do with big business and
is certainly not what any big (or small) firms would want. The
entitlements explosion is in social security, government-
employee pensions, Medicaid, and Medicare. The first is
notoriously a shifting of savings from private firms to an
entirely government-run program with a rigid reliance on
treasury paper debt whose repayment is dubious. Other
government pension plans do invest in the private sector so
they rely somewhat on private firms. Again, this only
displaces what individuals would have done for themselves,
despite the fears of libertarian interventionists.
The messes that are Medicaid and Medicare do involve
among many others big businesses in pharmacy and medical
insurance. In the latter case, the non-profit Blue Cross and
Blue Shield companies are major, often dominant factors.
The other, more important participants are the large number
of separate medical providers and hospitals. The final
involved sector is much of American business. To lessen the
impact of World-War II wage and price controls, the U.S.
government extended to medical insurance the legal fiction
used for Social Security that part of insurance costs could be
called “employer contributions” and not considered income
subject to personal income tax. Basic economic theory amply
confirmed by empirical research shows that these payments
are labor costs and lead to reduced direct compensation.
The result is a system in which payment is widely separated
from decisions about medical procedures. Physicians err on
the side of ordering additional tests because they know that
neither they nor the patient directly incur the costs. (The fear
of lawsuits may increase that bias, but it is unclear that tort
reform without reform of insurance provision would make a
big difference.) The prime fault of Obama care is that it
reinforces, rather than lessens, the separation of patient from
payee. This again is hardly an ideal for business.
Even more obviously, another great problem area, education,
suffers from a government takeover so ancient and thorough
that only specialists are aware of its existence. The federal
government increasingly intervenes into pre-college
education. Since World War II, all government has greatly
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21 April 2010
expanded its role in higher education to the extent that the
great private universities are heavily government dependent.
Congress tacked on to the health-care bill the total
government takeover of college loans. Only a lunatic would
postulate that any of this is due to a big-business conspiracy
to control minds, particularly given the massive leftward tilt
of academia.
The largest non-entitlement component of the federal
government, defense, does notoriously, in part, involve an
excessively cozy relationship with suppliers. However,
spending for equipment is dwarfed by direct and indirect
personnel costs. The spending on equipment, like many
government decisions, is distorted by Congressional
obsession with bringing jobs to their districts. No big-
business excuse applies to nondefense discretionary
spending. In short, it is a mockery to assert big business is the
primary source of excessive government spending.
Second, politicians, rather than business executives, generate
the dependence on government. What was described as a
craven sellout to big pharma was actually part of the ruthless
blackmail through which the Obama administration silenced
a wide range of the potential criticism of its health-care
monstrosity. Aside from all the normal government tools of
torture such as the Internal Revenue Service, the antitrust
agencies, and the Environmental Protection Agency, drug
companies are subject to special and critical government
scrutiny. The companies must endure the cumbersome, slow,
expensive, ineffective Food and Drug Administration
approval process. The industry relies on patent protection
and re-importation bans to secure profits sufficient to recover
research costs bloated by regulation.
The “big” drug and insurance companies were far from the
only frightened firms. Despite widespread physician
concerns, the American Medical Association abandoned its
long-time opposition. More strikingly, AARP, the relentlessly
wrong-headed self-created representative of seniors, flooded
its publications with distorted pro-legislation articles.
This is unfortunately typical of the pressures companies face.
Anyone who argues that lobbying is improper fails to
recognize the excessive power that government possesses. It
becomes essential to resist in every legitimate way
widespread unbridled pressure. As Obama and his admirers
constantly demonstrate, response to outrageous
interventionist claims is regularly defamed. Efforts are made
to discredit and even ban critics. In such a situation, limiting
lobbying and other forms of response is an outrageous threat
to constitutional government.
Famously, Microsoft did not take lobbying seriously until hit
by dubious antitrust suits. In the energy sector, clearly
pressures to go green and not oppose global-warming policies
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 21 April 2010

caused enormous fawning by a distressingly wide range of
companies. Many leading retailers have jumped on green
initiatives such as the long-life-bulb bandwagon arising
because legislators responded to three decades of public
resistance by forcing use of these bulbs. Exxon, after slander
over its support, far smaller than that of the U.S. government,
of research skeptical of global-warming concerns, has added
a green tinge to its advertising, albeit not as blatantly as BP
and Chevron. General Electric became a sell-out due to its
involvement in financing, medical equipment, and power
generating devices. The major banks and brokers faced and
suffered badly from the political pressures to lend heavily to
potential homebuyers with questionable financial situations.
At best, we can admit that big business is no less, but not no
more, likely than any interest group to seek to twist the web
of government control in its favor. A prime example of the
defects is that Obama regularly assumes away trade-union
influence in his attacks on interest groups. One of my great
teachers, M.A. Adelman, forcefully argued that it is the voting
power of interest groups that matters. He reached that
conclusion in studying the antitrust attack on A&P that was
driven by the extensive anti-chain store outlook of the
thirties. His student Peter Pashigian showed that similarly
automobile dealers secured protection from automobile
manufacturers. When Adelman turned to oil, he found that
“small” oil producers were sheltered at great cost to
consumers from competition, domestic as well as imported,
by big oil. A long-time concern about banking was the
legislation limiting bank consolidation. A well-known, but
regularly neglected part of this is the unreality of the big
versus small company distinction. In most of these cases, the
protected were rich local notables. In contrast, through
pension funds and mutual funds increasingly, big companies
are ultimately owned by much less affluent people.
The real danger is the unopposed monopoly power of
government. The need is protection from politicians unaware
of the limits of prudent, constitutional government. The
heath-care debate provided many examples. The
quintessence of the disgraceful process of passing Obamacare
was Nancy Pelosi, yielding a grossly oversized gavel, leading
an unnecessarily confrontational walk up the Capitol steps
through a wall of peaceful protestors, instead of taking the
underground access that is available. Less dramatic, but more
chilling, was the consistent dismissal by the law’s proponents
of constitutional flaws in the bill. It suggests a variant on
what Jimmy Durante’s character in Jumbo said when caught
with an elephant, “Constitution, what Constitution?” As Cato
has validly argued, what we need is less, not more,
restrictions on speech and stringent term limits.
Richard L. Gordon
Pennsylvania State University
For some other libertarian views on this topic, see Roy A. Childs, Jr., “Big
Business and the Rise of American Statism” or this discussion at Cato
Unbound.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
I “Chart” the 2010 Budget Chart
Book [The Club for Growth]
APR 20, 2010 09:58A.M.
The Heritage Foundation has released its awesome 2010 Budget Chart
Book. It has tons of graphs and tables that show the reckless fiscal habits
perpetrated by the federal government.

Finally, a pro-big-business or even a general pro-business

outlook is a nonsense concept. Big businesses conflict, not
just with small business, but with each other. Protection of
the once-big business of steel production was at the expense
of the manufacturers of automobiles and other durable goods
and their customers. The oil industry disagreed with the
automobile industry on the best policy, given the inevitability
of action, to reduce gasoline consumption legislatively. Large
retailers relentlessly turn to imports when domestic
producers, big and small, become too expensive.

This last point is key to understanding what libertarian

economics is about. Decades before tea parties, libertarians
were for limited government that involves among other
things free markets. We want the market to decide winners
and losers. We feel that private monopoly is so rare and
difficult to detect and reform or regulate that we oppose
purportedly anti-monopoly policies.

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FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS criticizing the tax increase and point to other sources of revenue that
would be less damaging to growth. Hernán Büchi, a finance minister in
Georgia Would Gain $79 the 1980s, and Luis Larraín, head of Chile’s free-market think tank,
Libertad y Desarrollo, have both written op-eds in recent weeks pointing
Million From Offshore Drilling out that one of the country’s main problems has been the steady drop in
productivity in recent years. Piñera was elected on a platform to increase
[Americans for Tax Reform] productivity. A tax increase would aggravate the problem. According to
APR 20, 2010 09:25A.M. Büchi, 20 years of center-left governments reduced Chile’s ability to
eliminate poverty and followed a path that was politically easy and
With Georgia facing a predicted $4.5 billion shortfall and 10.5 percent consistent with their ideology: “It would be a bad omen if the first
unemployment, Americans for Tax Reform continues to urge President measures of a government that should represent change in this regard,
Obama, Congress, and state elected officials to look to... went down the same path.” Larraín adds that the tax decision will reveal
Piñera’s governing approach, in which there is a real danger of avoiding
necessary reforms and a president content with simply being a better
administrator. We shall see.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

A Disappointing Start in
Piñera’s Chile [Cato at
Libertyñera’s Chile]
APR 20, 2010 08:48A.M.

By Ian Vasquez

The presidential election in Chile that brought Sebastián Piñera to power

last month was good news for Chile and the region. It confirmed once
again that Chile is Latin America’s most modern country, one in which
Chileans chose a center-right candidate to lead the country after 20 years
of center-left governments that by and large stuck to the free-market
model set in place in the 1970s and 1980s and that has made the country
one of the most economically free in the world. In Chile, what’s at stake
in presidential contests is not a radical change of the rules of the game,
but rather policies that build on or depend on high growth. Chile’s
mature democracy and economy serve as a model for Latin America.

But in just over a month of being in office, Piñera has made two
decisions that disappointed his supporters both inside and outside of
Chile who believed that he would reinvigorate the Chilean economy and
stand firmly against the populist-authoritarian model that Hugo Chávez
has exported to the region. Piñera backed the re-election of José Miguel
Insulza to head the Organization of American States and has proposed a
tax increase on large companies. Insulza and the OAS are widely and
correctly viewed as having been silent, incompetent or complicit in the
face of repeated violations of basic democratic and civil rights by populist
governments in the region. Whatever the domestic political reasons for
Piñera’s decision, countless Latin Americans who cherish their
rights—not the least of whom are Venezuelans, Hondurans, Bolivians
and Ecuadoreans—were disillusioned by the endorsement of Insulza.

On Friday, Piñera proposed to “temporarily” raise taxes on large

companies from 17% to 20% (and to increase mining royalties and to
permanently increase tobacco taxes) to finance Chile’s post-earthquake
reconstruction needs. But a number of Chile’s leading economists are