The Gross National Debt
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Thursday, April 19, 2012
To Keep Up With Rising Costs, Austin May Raise Property Taxes Next Year
By Sarah Coppola, Austin American-Statesman
Despite Austin's rosy economic outlook — continued job growth, robust sales tax receipts and rising property values — the City of Austin may raise property taxes to cover its costs next year.
Budget staffers told the City Council on Wednesday that to raise roughly the same amount of money next year as this year, they could lower the tax rate to 47.79 cents per $100 of property value from the current 48.11 cents. But because of cost increases expected next year that are mostly beyond the city's control, such as for fuel and health insurance, the city would be short nearly $18 million at the lower rate, they said.
The staffers' financial forecast also assumes the city will give 3 percent pay raises to all city employees next year.
To avoid a shortfall, the city would have to cut costs or raise the tax rate to 49.95 cents, budget staffers said. That would mean a city bill of $910 for the owners of a median-value home of $182,198, about $33 more than this year.
City departments will soon suggest possible cuts to city services and jobs.
City Manager Marc Ott will consider those ideas before he proposes a 2012-13 budget on Aug. 1. Residents can offer input at public meetings this spring and summer before the council OKs a budget in September.
Austin has fared better than many other cities during the economic downturn of the past few years, with more stable property values and some job growth, economist Jon Hockenyos told the council Wednesday.
Consumers are spending more, so Austin's sales tax revenue, which makes up about one-fifth of the money that pays for parks, libraries, police and other basic city services, is on the rebound.
Budget staffers also predict that property values will rise 5 percent next year. City officials see that as a good sign because property taxes are a large chunk of the city budget.
Expected to decrease or stay flat next year: fees the city collects for things such as traffic tickets and library book fines, money from the city-owned water and electricity utilities that helps pay for other city services and federal grants that the city receives for affordable housing programs.
The city is required by contracts to pay 3 percent raises to police, firefighters and paramedics next year. The forecast also assumes 3 percent raises for civilian employees, who make up the bulk of the city workforce but have no bargaining rights. Ott could decide by August not to recommend that raise in the budget.
Public safety employees received 3 percent raises this year; civilian workers got 2 percent.
The forecast assumes that most city services will stay the same. But it adds in money to cover cost increases that the city can't avoid or had previously agreed to pay, such as bolstering the city's three pension funds, hiring 22 new police officers to keep pace with the city's standard of two officers per 1,000 residents and adding four more firefighters under the city's staffing model for firetrucks.
The city would have an extra $400,000 to work with next year if it chose the highest tax rate possible under state law before residents could petition for an election to limit the increase. That rate would be 50 cents per $100 of property value, or a city tax bill of $911 for the median-value home.
"I will be scrubbing the budget to look for other ways to cut spending because I do not want to see an increase in property taxes," Mayor Lee Leffingwell said in a statement.
In recent years, city officials have made conservative revenue predictions in the spring, then painted a cheerier picture by mid-summer after a few more months of sales tax and property tax data had rolled in.
The gloomiest city budget in recent memory was enacted in 2009, when the city cut more than 100 vacant jobs, raised the property tax rate and gave no employee pay raises but avoided layoffs.
For the current fiscal year, the city scaled back a summer playground program for kids, reduced the hours at John Henry Faulk Central Library and closed a few city pools during the winter months to save money but kept most programs intact.
City department officials hope the council will add some city jobs in the coming year and have written a wish list that totals nearly $25 million and includes more than 200 new jobs, such as staffers to take 911 calls, maintain city parks and review plans for construction projects.
Budget staffers will present the financial outlook for the city's utility departments, Austin Energy and Austin Water, next week.
By Sarah Coppola, Austin American-Statesman
Budget staffers told the City Council on Wednesday that to raise roughly the same amount of money next year as this year, they could lower the tax rate to 47.79 cents per $100 of property value from the current 48.11 cents. But because of cost increases expected next year that are mostly beyond the city's control, such as for fuel and health insurance, the city would be short nearly $18 million at the lower rate, they said.
The staffers' financial forecast also assumes the city will give 3 percent pay raises to all city employees next year.
To avoid a shortfall, the city would have to cut costs or raise the tax rate to 49.95 cents, budget staffers said. That would mean a city bill of $910 for the owners of a median-value home of $182,198, about $33 more than this year.
City departments will soon suggest possible cuts to city services and jobs.
City Manager Marc Ott will consider those ideas before he proposes a 2012-13 budget on Aug. 1. Residents can offer input at public meetings this spring and summer before the council OKs a budget in September.
Austin has fared better than many other cities during the economic downturn of the past few years, with more stable property values and some job growth, economist Jon Hockenyos told the council Wednesday.
Consumers are spending more, so Austin's sales tax revenue, which makes up about one-fifth of the money that pays for parks, libraries, police and other basic city services, is on the rebound.
Budget staffers also predict that property values will rise 5 percent next year. City officials see that as a good sign because property taxes are a large chunk of the city budget.
Expected to decrease or stay flat next year: fees the city collects for things such as traffic tickets and library book fines, money from the city-owned water and electricity utilities that helps pay for other city services and federal grants that the city receives for affordable housing programs.
The city is required by contracts to pay 3 percent raises to police, firefighters and paramedics next year. The forecast also assumes 3 percent raises for civilian employees, who make up the bulk of the city workforce but have no bargaining rights. Ott could decide by August not to recommend that raise in the budget.
Public safety employees received 3 percent raises this year; civilian workers got 2 percent.
The forecast assumes that most city services will stay the same. But it adds in money to cover cost increases that the city can't avoid or had previously agreed to pay, such as bolstering the city's three pension funds, hiring 22 new police officers to keep pace with the city's standard of two officers per 1,000 residents and adding four more firefighters under the city's staffing model for firetrucks.
The city would have an extra $400,000 to work with next year if it chose the highest tax rate possible under state law before residents could petition for an election to limit the increase. That rate would be 50 cents per $100 of property value, or a city tax bill of $911 for the median-value home.
"I will be scrubbing the budget to look for other ways to cut spending because I do not want to see an increase in property taxes," Mayor Lee Leffingwell said in a statement.
In recent years, city officials have made conservative revenue predictions in the spring, then painted a cheerier picture by mid-summer after a few more months of sales tax and property tax data had rolled in.
The gloomiest city budget in recent memory was enacted in 2009, when the city cut more than 100 vacant jobs, raised the property tax rate and gave no employee pay raises but avoided layoffs.
For the current fiscal year, the city scaled back a summer playground program for kids, reduced the hours at John Henry Faulk Central Library and closed a few city pools during the winter months to save money but kept most programs intact.
City department officials hope the council will add some city jobs in the coming year and have written a wish list that totals nearly $25 million and includes more than 200 new jobs, such as staffers to take 911 calls, maintain city parks and review plans for construction projects.
Budget staffers will present the financial outlook for the city's utility departments, Austin Energy and Austin Water, next week.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Ted Cruz raises $1.3 million this quarter; Keeps pace with Dewhurst
By Kate Alexander
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruz raised more than $1.3 million in the first quarter of 2012, bringing his total contributions to $5.2 million, the Cruz campaign announced Thursday.
With those tallies, Cruz appears to be keeping pace with the fund raising of Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the presumed frontrunner in the race to succeed U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. On Wednesday, Dewhurst reported collecting $1.66 million in the first quarter and $5.6 million total.
The two other top contenders, former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert and former ESPN football analyst, have not released their fund raising numbers. The reports are due on April 15.
The Cruz campaign emphasized that it was drawing financial support from thousands of small donors, which Dewhurst is relying on larger contributions as well as his own money.
“Although Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst can extract millions from Austin lobbyists, and can dump his own vast personal fortune into this race, over 17,000 conservatives have stepped forward to ensure that the next senator from Texas is a strong conservative fighter who will stand up to Barack Obama,” Cruz spokesman James Bernsen said in a statement.
By Kate Alexander
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruz raised more than $1.3 million in the first quarter of 2012, bringing his total contributions to $5.2 million, the Cruz campaign announced Thursday.
With those tallies, Cruz appears to be keeping pace with the fund raising of Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the presumed frontrunner in the race to succeed U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. On Wednesday, Dewhurst reported collecting $1.66 million in the first quarter and $5.6 million total.
The two other top contenders, former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert and former ESPN football analyst, have not released their fund raising numbers. The reports are due on April 15.
The Cruz campaign emphasized that it was drawing financial support from thousands of small donors, which Dewhurst is relying on larger contributions as well as his own money.
“Although Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst can extract millions from Austin lobbyists, and can dump his own vast personal fortune into this race, over 17,000 conservatives have stepped forward to ensure that the next senator from Texas is a strong conservative fighter who will stand up to Barack Obama,” Cruz spokesman James Bernsen said in a statement.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
The Week Obama Jumped The Shark
By Peter Wehner
In a press conference on Monday, President Obama said, “I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years, what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or the lack of judicial restraint, that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. And I’m pretty confident that this court will recognize that and not take that step.” Obama went on to say that the court would take an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” if it overturns the law because it was passed by “a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”
Set aside the fact that the House, despite a huge Democratic majority, passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by a margin of 219-212, hardly a “strong majority.” In fact, it barely qualifies as a plurality. Let’s turn instead to the substance of what the president said.
Obama, a former community organizer who is perhaps unaware of the finer points of the law, might want to acquaint himself with an obscure 19th century case, Marbury v. Madison, which established the doctrine of judicial review and grants federal courts the power to void acts of Congress that are in conflict with the Constitution. What Obama describes as “unprecedented” has, in fact, been done countless times since 1803.
Then there’s Obama’s confusion about judicial activism. It is not, as he insists, simply the act of overturning an existing law; it is when judges allow their personal views about public policy, and not the Constitution, to guide their decisions and often invent new rights out of thin air. For Justices to invalidate a law they deem to be unconstitutional is precisely what the Supreme Court is supposed to do. (“No legislative act … contrary to the Constitution, can be valid,” is how Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist #78.) If one takes Obama’s words literally, he believes an unjust and unconstitutional law, if passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress, cannot be overturned.
What the president said, then, was so ill-informed, so ignorant, that people assumed he must know better. There’s no way we can know. But whatever the case, this has been quite a bad stretch for the president. His comments about the Supreme Court, when combined with his astonishingly dishonest attack on the House GOP budget (see here for more), portray a president who is living in a fantasy world — a place where facts and history are inverted, lies become truth, where everything is subordinated to ambition and you simply make things up as you go along. Nietzsche referred to this mindset as the “will to power.” In American politics it’s known as The Chicago Way.
I don’t know what the political effect of all this will be. But intellectually, this is the week where Barack Obama jumped the shark. In a deep, fundamental way, he is no longer a serious man. Nor an honest one. His public words are now purposefully bleached of truth. And that is a painful thing to have to say about an American president.
By Peter Wehner
Set aside the fact that the House, despite a huge Democratic majority, passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by a margin of 219-212, hardly a “strong majority.” In fact, it barely qualifies as a plurality. Let’s turn instead to the substance of what the president said.
Obama, a former community organizer who is perhaps unaware of the finer points of the law, might want to acquaint himself with an obscure 19th century case, Marbury v. Madison, which established the doctrine of judicial review and grants federal courts the power to void acts of Congress that are in conflict with the Constitution. What Obama describes as “unprecedented” has, in fact, been done countless times since 1803.
Then there’s Obama’s confusion about judicial activism. It is not, as he insists, simply the act of overturning an existing law; it is when judges allow their personal views about public policy, and not the Constitution, to guide their decisions and often invent new rights out of thin air. For Justices to invalidate a law they deem to be unconstitutional is precisely what the Supreme Court is supposed to do. (“No legislative act … contrary to the Constitution, can be valid,” is how Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist #78.) If one takes Obama’s words literally, he believes an unjust and unconstitutional law, if passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress, cannot be overturned.
What the president said, then, was so ill-informed, so ignorant, that people assumed he must know better. There’s no way we can know. But whatever the case, this has been quite a bad stretch for the president. His comments about the Supreme Court, when combined with his astonishingly dishonest attack on the House GOP budget (see here for more), portray a president who is living in a fantasy world — a place where facts and history are inverted, lies become truth, where everything is subordinated to ambition and you simply make things up as you go along. Nietzsche referred to this mindset as the “will to power.” In American politics it’s known as The Chicago Way.
I don’t know what the political effect of all this will be. But intellectually, this is the week where Barack Obama jumped the shark. In a deep, fundamental way, he is no longer a serious man. Nor an honest one. His public words are now purposefully bleached of truth. And that is a painful thing to have to say about an American president.
Friday, March 30, 2012
The Worst Week of Obama's Presidency
By Charles Hurt
The past seven brutal days will go down as one of the worst weeks in history for a sitting president. It certainly has been, without any doubt, the worst week yet for President Obama.
Somehow, Mr. Obama managed to embarrass himself abroad, humiliate himself here at home, see his credentials for being elected so severely undermined that it raises startling questions about whether he should have been elected in the first place — let alone be re-elected later this year.
Consider:
• Last Friday, Mr. Obama wandered into the killing of Trayvon Martin. Aided by his ignorance of the situation, knee-jerk prejudices and tendency toward racial profiling, Mr. Obama played a heavy hand in elevating a tragic situation in which a teenager was killed into a full-blown hot race fight.
Americans, he admonished, need to do some “soul-searching.” And then, utterly inexplicably, he veered off into this bizarre tangent about how he and the poor dead kid look so much alike they could be father and son. It was election-year race-pandering gone horribly wrong.
• By the start of this week, Mr. Obama had fled town and was racing to the other side of the planet just as the Supreme Court was taking up the potentially-embarrassing matter of Obamacare. While in South Korea he was caught on a hidden mic negotiating with the president of our longest-standing rival on how to sell America and her allies down the river once he gets past the next election.
• Meanwhile, back at home, the Supreme Court took up the single most important achievement of Mr. Obama’s presidency and, boy, was it embarrassing. The great constitutional law professor, it turns out, may not quite be the wizard he told us he was.
By most accounts, Mr. Obama and his stuttering lawyers were all but laughed out of the courthouse. They were even stumbling over softball questions lobbed by Mr. Obama’s own hand-picked justices.
• Mr. Obama closed his week pulling off a nearly unimaginable feat: He managed to totally and completely unify the nastily-fighting Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Late Wednesday night, they unanimously voted — 414 to zip — to reject the budget Mr. Obama had presented, leaving him not even a thin lily’s blade to hide behind.
So, in one week, Mr. Obama got caught whispering promises to our enemy, incited a race war, raised serious questions about his understanding of the Constitution, and then got smacked down over his proposed budget that was so wildly reckless that even Democrats in Congress could not support it.
It was as if you lumped Hurricane Katrina and the Abu Ghraib abuses into one week for George W. Bush. And added on top of that the time he oddly groped German Chancellor Angela Merkel and got caught cursing on a hot mic.
Even then, it wouldn’t be as bad as Mr. Obama’s week. You would probably also have to toss in the time Mr. Bush’s father threw up into the lap of Japan’s prime minister. Only then might we be approaching how bad a week it was for Mr. Obama.
Not that you will see any trace of embarrassment in the face of Mr. Obama. He has mastered the high political art of shamelessness, wearing it smugly and cockily. Kind of like a hoodie.
• Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com.
By Charles Hurt
Somehow, Mr. Obama managed to embarrass himself abroad, humiliate himself here at home, see his credentials for being elected so severely undermined that it raises startling questions about whether he should have been elected in the first place — let alone be re-elected later this year.
Consider:
• Last Friday, Mr. Obama wandered into the killing of Trayvon Martin. Aided by his ignorance of the situation, knee-jerk prejudices and tendency toward racial profiling, Mr. Obama played a heavy hand in elevating a tragic situation in which a teenager was killed into a full-blown hot race fight.
Americans, he admonished, need to do some “soul-searching.” And then, utterly inexplicably, he veered off into this bizarre tangent about how he and the poor dead kid look so much alike they could be father and son. It was election-year race-pandering gone horribly wrong.
• By the start of this week, Mr. Obama had fled town and was racing to the other side of the planet just as the Supreme Court was taking up the potentially-embarrassing matter of Obamacare. While in South Korea he was caught on a hidden mic negotiating with the president of our longest-standing rival on how to sell America and her allies down the river once he gets past the next election.
• Meanwhile, back at home, the Supreme Court took up the single most important achievement of Mr. Obama’s presidency and, boy, was it embarrassing. The great constitutional law professor, it turns out, may not quite be the wizard he told us he was.
By most accounts, Mr. Obama and his stuttering lawyers were all but laughed out of the courthouse. They were even stumbling over softball questions lobbed by Mr. Obama’s own hand-picked justices.
• Mr. Obama closed his week pulling off a nearly unimaginable feat: He managed to totally and completely unify the nastily-fighting Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Late Wednesday night, they unanimously voted — 414 to zip — to reject the budget Mr. Obama had presented, leaving him not even a thin lily’s blade to hide behind.
So, in one week, Mr. Obama got caught whispering promises to our enemy, incited a race war, raised serious questions about his understanding of the Constitution, and then got smacked down over his proposed budget that was so wildly reckless that even Democrats in Congress could not support it.
It was as if you lumped Hurricane Katrina and the Abu Ghraib abuses into one week for George W. Bush. And added on top of that the time he oddly groped German Chancellor Angela Merkel and got caught cursing on a hot mic.
Even then, it wouldn’t be as bad as Mr. Obama’s week. You would probably also have to toss in the time Mr. Bush’s father threw up into the lap of Japan’s prime minister. Only then might we be approaching how bad a week it was for Mr. Obama.
Not that you will see any trace of embarrassment in the face of Mr. Obama. He has mastered the high political art of shamelessness, wearing it smugly and cockily. Kind of like a hoodie.
• Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
A Supreme Shock For La-La Liberals
By John Podhoretz
The panicked reception in the mainstream media of the three-day Supreme Court health-care marathon is a delightful reminder of the nearly impenetrable parochialism of American liberals.
They’re so convinced of their own correctness — and so determined to believe conservatives are either a) corrupt, b) stupid or c) deluded — that they find themselves repeatedly astonished to discover conservatives are in fact capable of a) advancing and defending their own powerful arguments, b) effectively countering weak liberal arguments and c) exposing the soft underbelly of liberal self-satisfaction as they do so.
That’s what happened this week. There appears to be no question in the mind of anyone who read the transcripts or listened to the oral arguments that the conservative lawyers and justices made mincemeat out of the Obama administration’s advocates and the liberal members of the court.
This came as a startling shock to the liberals who write about the court.
Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker and CNN confidently asserted on Charlie Rose at the beginning of the week that the court would rule 7-2, maybe even 8-1 in favor of ObamaCare. The previous week, he called the anti-ObamaCare arguments “really weak.”
His view was echoed by an equally confident op-ed assertion by the veteran court reporter Linda Greenhouse, who in The New York Times declared the case against ObamaCare “analytically so weak that it dissolves on close inspection.”
It was quite a change, then, to see Toobin emerge almost hysterical from the Supreme Court chamber after two hours of argument on Tuesday and declare the proceedings “a train wreck for the Obama administration.”
Yesterday, after another two hours of argument, he suggested it might even be a “plane wreck.”
That was the general consensus across the board. It held that the two lawyers arguing against ObamaCare — Paul Clement and Michael Carvin — were dazzlingly effective, while the administration’s solicitor general, Donald Verrilli, put in a mediocre performance.
True enough. But here’s the thing: There was nothing new in what Clement and Carvin said.
Their arguments were featured in briefs already submitted to the court and available for general inspection. And they’d already been given weight by the two judicial opinions against the constitutionality of ObamaCare issued by federal district court judges — one by Henry Hudson in Virginia in December 2010, the other by Roger Vinson in Florida in January 2011.
The briefs exist. The decisions exist. You can Google them. They are strong, fluent, well-reasoned and legitimate. They take ObamaCare seriously, and they argue against it at the highest possible level.
Thus, the strength of the conservative arguments only came as a surprise to Toobin, Greenhouse and others because they evidently spent two years putting their fingers in their ears and singing, “La la la, I’m not listening” whenever the conservative argument was being advanced.
This is not to say that the pro-ObamaCare side had no arguments. It had plenty of arguments, and by far the most important interlocutor on its behalf was Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Her perceptive and crystal-clear questioning of Clement and Carvin should put to rest forever the idea (spread both by liberals and conservatives) that she is intellectually unworthy to serve on the nation’s highest court.
The defense of ObamaCare’s constitutionality relies mainly on the truism that everyone is sure to get sick at some point in their lives, and this makes the health-care market unlike any other market. For the liberals, this fact — bolstered by the Constitution’s Commerce Clause — gives Congress the power to compel every adult in the nation to buy a private health-insurance policy.
The attack on ObamaCare was that Congress does not have the power under the Commerce Clause to force a private citizen into a private contractual relationship. If such a thing is permitted to stand, the anti-ObamaCare forces argue, there will be no limit to Congress’s power in the future.
There’s no telling which of 10 possible ways the high court will finally rule. But one thing is for certain: There will again come a time when liberals and conservatives disagree on a fundamental intellectual matter. Conservatives will take liberals and their arguments seriously and try to find the best way to argue the other side.
And the liberals will put their fingers in their ears and sing, “La la la.”
jpodhoretz@gmail.com
By John Podhoretz
They’re so convinced of their own correctness — and so determined to believe conservatives are either a) corrupt, b) stupid or c) deluded — that they find themselves repeatedly astonished to discover conservatives are in fact capable of a) advancing and defending their own powerful arguments, b) effectively countering weak liberal arguments and c) exposing the soft underbelly of liberal self-satisfaction as they do so.
That’s what happened this week. There appears to be no question in the mind of anyone who read the transcripts or listened to the oral arguments that the conservative lawyers and justices made mincemeat out of the Obama administration’s advocates and the liberal members of the court.
This came as a startling shock to the liberals who write about the court.
Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker and CNN confidently asserted on Charlie Rose at the beginning of the week that the court would rule 7-2, maybe even 8-1 in favor of ObamaCare. The previous week, he called the anti-ObamaCare arguments “really weak.”
His view was echoed by an equally confident op-ed assertion by the veteran court reporter Linda Greenhouse, who in The New York Times declared the case against ObamaCare “analytically so weak that it dissolves on close inspection.”
It was quite a change, then, to see Toobin emerge almost hysterical from the Supreme Court chamber after two hours of argument on Tuesday and declare the proceedings “a train wreck for the Obama administration.”
Yesterday, after another two hours of argument, he suggested it might even be a “plane wreck.”
That was the general consensus across the board. It held that the two lawyers arguing against ObamaCare — Paul Clement and Michael Carvin — were dazzlingly effective, while the administration’s solicitor general, Donald Verrilli, put in a mediocre performance.
True enough. But here’s the thing: There was nothing new in what Clement and Carvin said.
Their arguments were featured in briefs already submitted to the court and available for general inspection. And they’d already been given weight by the two judicial opinions against the constitutionality of ObamaCare issued by federal district court judges — one by Henry Hudson in Virginia in December 2010, the other by Roger Vinson in Florida in January 2011.
The briefs exist. The decisions exist. You can Google them. They are strong, fluent, well-reasoned and legitimate. They take ObamaCare seriously, and they argue against it at the highest possible level.
Thus, the strength of the conservative arguments only came as a surprise to Toobin, Greenhouse and others because they evidently spent two years putting their fingers in their ears and singing, “La la la, I’m not listening” whenever the conservative argument was being advanced.
This is not to say that the pro-ObamaCare side had no arguments. It had plenty of arguments, and by far the most important interlocutor on its behalf was Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Her perceptive and crystal-clear questioning of Clement and Carvin should put to rest forever the idea (spread both by liberals and conservatives) that she is intellectually unworthy to serve on the nation’s highest court.
The defense of ObamaCare’s constitutionality relies mainly on the truism that everyone is sure to get sick at some point in their lives, and this makes the health-care market unlike any other market. For the liberals, this fact — bolstered by the Constitution’s Commerce Clause — gives Congress the power to compel every adult in the nation to buy a private health-insurance policy.
The attack on ObamaCare was that Congress does not have the power under the Commerce Clause to force a private citizen into a private contractual relationship. If such a thing is permitted to stand, the anti-ObamaCare forces argue, there will be no limit to Congress’s power in the future.
There’s no telling which of 10 possible ways the high court will finally rule. But one thing is for certain: There will again come a time when liberals and conservatives disagree on a fundamental intellectual matter. Conservatives will take liberals and their arguments seriously and try to find the best way to argue the other side.
And the liberals will put their fingers in their ears and sing, “La la la.”
jpodhoretz@gmail.com
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