Mike Huckabee or John Edwards?

Read the following quotes and see if you can guess who said them - Mike Huckabee or John Edwards.

"American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out. The Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad."

• "When I hear the headlines that the economy's doing great, I know that it is, if you look at it from the macro sense. But if you go out and talk to people who work on the floors of factories or you talk to waitresses who are doing their second job, school teachers who have to work an extra job, you don't hear quite the confidence about how great the economy is doing."

• “I don't want to see our food come from China, our oil come from Saudi Arabia and our manufacturing come from Europe and Asia.”

• "I am not interested in being the candidate of Wall Street but of Main Street. Wealthy CEOs get paid 500 times what the average worker does, but they are not necessarily 500 times smarter or harder working and that is wrong."

• "If you want to know how to fix [healthcare], I've got a solution. Either give every American the same kind of healthcare that Congress has or make Congress have the same kind of health care that every American has."

• The US has a "revenge-based corrections system." And "we incarcerate more people than anybody on earth."

If you guessed that all of these quotes are from Huckabee, you are the big winner. He is definitely not a conservative. His comments about lower income workers are not based in reality. As I posted earlier, because of economic growth, the lowest quintile saw their income increase by 90.5% from '96 to '05. Why is it any of the government's business what corporations pay their executives? If they overpay, the market will punish them. In healthcare, we should only "give" healthcare to the impoverished. Let everybody else pay their own way. Sure, he's a social conservative, but let's support all conservative principles.

Refuting the Income Gap

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a new study on American incomes between 1996 and 2005 conducted by the Treasury Department. Guess what? It doesn't give much credence to the populist, class envy messages that we've been hearing from the likes of John Edwards, Mike Huckabee, and Warren Buffet about a supposedly growing income gap.
The study examined the tax returns of 96,700 people over a ten year period. It showed that the poorest quintile actually saw the most growth (yes, adjusted for inflation) - their incomes were 90.5% higher in 2005 as compared to 1996. As the graph on the left shows, the poorer you were, the more income growth you had in the last decade. The top 5% actually saw their incomes drop 6.8%. In an impressive showing of upward mobility, 58% of those in the bottom quintile in '95 moved up at least one quintile. These data are even more impressive given the huge numbers of low skilled immigrants that have entered the economy in the last decade. The American dream appears to be alive and well. How should this data affect our view of the "income gap?"

All of this certainly helps to illuminate the current election-year debate about income "inequality" in the U.S. The political left and its media echoes are promoting the inequality story as a way to justify a huge tax increase. But inequality is only a problem if it reflects stagnant opportunity and a society stratified by more or less permanent income differences. That kind of society can breed class resentments and unrest. America isn't remotely such a society, thanks in large part to the incentives that exist for risk-taking and wealth creation.
The great irony is that, in the name of reducing inequality, some of our politicians want to raise taxes and other government obstacles to the kind of risk-taking and hard work that allow Americans to climb the income ladder so rapidly. As the Treasury data show, we shouldn't worry about inequality. We should worry about the people who use inequality as a political club to promote policies that reduce opportunity.

Axis of Idiocy

Three different Democrats, three idiotic ideas. In the past week, these are the stories that raised my blood pressure a little:

#1: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (a Democrat liberal enough to represent San Francisco) said that a border fence between the US and Mexico is "a terrible idea." She argues that some border towns would then have a wall running through them, dividing communities. Oh, and drug runners, criminals and terrorists (yes, many Mexicans are just looking for work, but a high percentage are not) would have a harder time getting into this country illegally.

#2: Pretend for a moment that Rush Limbaugh or George W. Bush said the following about African-American males: “We cannot build enough prisons to solve this problem. And the idea that we can keep incarcerating and keep incarcerating — pretty soon we’re not going to have a young African-American male population in America. They’re all going to be in prison or dead. One of the two.” Is this not an incredibly racist, pessimistic, and idiotic comment? In fact, John Edwards made these comments. A big part of being a Democrat is convincing everyone that we live in a rotten country that needs comprehensive change - more taxes, more programs, more government control. Thus, things must always be going badly. If the country is getting better, Republican ideas of less government and lower taxes make more sense to the average person. National Review Online clears up some of the misconceptions that Edwards is perpetuating. African-American males 18-24 are four times as likely to be in college as in jail and there are more in college overall than behind bars. And is racism by whites the reason so many African-American males kill each other? I would argue that growing up in a single parent household (which our welfare system has helped promote) is largely to blame.

#3 Hillary Clinton announced a plan to give every newborn a $5,000 bond. When they finished high school they could use the money for college or to buy a house. This $5,000 bond program, which would cost $20 billion+ a year, would be financed by more taxes "on the rich." Usually the Democrats are a little more subtle about buying votes. The usual line is "vote for me, I'll raise these people's taxes and give the money to you using more social programs (socialized medicine, for example)." Now Nurse Ratched's plan is "vote for me and I'll take these fat cats' money and give it to you in CASH."