Month: May 2013

Not everyone is saying “not in my backyard”:

On Tuesday, voters in Youngstown, Ohio, gave the fracking industry carte blanche to continue pumping chemicals into the ground beneath them and pumping natural gas out. A city charter amendment that would have outlawed hydraulic fracturing in the city was rejected by voters, with the unofficial final vote tally showing 3,821 votes against and 2,880 in favor. The ballot measure would also have banned new pipelines in the city and prevented oil-field waste from being transported through the city.

Philip Bump notices that these battles are increasingly happening in municipalities rather than at the state or federal level:

Dryden sits in the Finger Lakes region of New York, just east of Cayuga Lake. It’s a region that’s dependent on tourists who come for the beautiful foliage in the fall and pristine water in the summer. Which is why opinions on fracking in the region have been split — the threat of pollution in the lakes hard to offset with the promise of jobs. Less so Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown, a city hit hard by the collapse of the steel industry, has hard a hard time regaining its footing.

Adam Briggle encourages more local control over the allocation of fracking permits:

The view from local places is far more accurate: fracking is like Frankenstein’s monster, an unholy creature out of sync with the order of things. The local perspective is the more human one. It is from this angle that the most important questions come into focus: what can happen in my neighbourhood and what will it do to my children, my lungs, and my water? That’s the stuff of local government and that’s why its power should trump state and federal laws.

But this is not about saying “no” to fracking as much as it is about simply having a say. It is only at the local scale of political activity that we can genuinely exercise “public freedom,” the capacity to take part in the decisions that directly affect our lives. If a well is planned near your home or your child’s school, you ought to be involved in that decision, and local government is the only political institution that will be responsive. Take it from those in unincorporated areas living near wells governed only by the bare bones rules of state agencies concerned primarily with getting the minerals out of the ground. If you don’t live in an area with police and zoning powers, you are treated not as a person in a place but as a node on a network.

Reihan wonders:

[I]magine 2016 in the unlikely but not completely impossible event that a budget surplus does materialize [in 2015]. Republican elevation of the deficit issue will allow the Obama administration and its Democratic allies to declare “mission accomplished,” all without taking the blame for entitlement reform. The House-passed budget that promised a balanced budget within the ten-year budget window by making unrealistically deep cuts in Medicaid and domestic discretionary spending will continue to be hung around the necks of congressional Republicans. One hopes that one or several of the GOP presidential candidates will devise a more compelling economic message and reform agenda. But this will have to be done in a near-vacuum, as conservative lawmakers have been emphasizing deficit reduction above almost everything else.

Justin Green encourages the GOP to restructure its agenda “no matter what the fiscal outlook looks like over the next three years:

The Republican coalition is shrinking because its solutions are less and less pertinent to the needs of actual voters. While it can be comforting to retreat to tried and true during midterm elections that favor conservative purists, the long-term demographic numbers are not great for committed conservatives.

That’s why it’s so important that Republicans look to 21st century ideas such as helping alleviate the woes of student debt, making it easier for young people to form healthy and stable families, and looking to different ways to ease peoples’ tax burdens and ensure they too will be able to count on a secure retirement.

Ryan Cooper rates 15 “reformish” writers on the political right. From his intro:

The average conservative reformist output consists of about three articles bashing liberal statism for every one questioning Republican dogma. To retain an audience among Republicans, one must be “considerate of the contours of conservative opinion,” Ponnuru told me. By being careful in what they say, a number of these writers have built audiences among party elites, and increasingly so since November, according to interviews with Republican House and Senate staffers. “They’re addressing ideas in policy spaces where there may be gaps,” says Neil Bradley, an aide to Eric Cantor. “Ramesh is widely regarded as a smart and insightful thinker,” agrees a Senate Republican aide. The reformists are read in Marco Rubio’s office; Paul Ryan’s office is a fan of [Yuval] Levin.

It is easy, however, to exaggerate their influence. “There is a cultural gulf,” says John Feehery, a former staffer for Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert, between the reformist writer-intellectuals, with their New York/Washington sensibilities, and Republican officeholders, with their base of voters in Texas, Kansas, and Georgia. The reformists “are speaking the language of policy,” notes Feehery, while the base “is speaking the language of hating Obama.”

Jacob Heilbrunn singles out one of the Dish’s biggest go-tos:

Larison is in some ways the most unpredictable member of this gallery of conservative authors. He is aptly described: “An acerbic critic of American interventionism in both parties, Larison has few fans among the GOP’s neoconservative wing. However, his brand of paleoconservatism is on the upswing among the more libertarian-minded Republicans, most recently on display during Rand Paul’s famous filibuster.” Cooper may go somewhat astray in suggesting that with “Obama’s relative hawkishness,” Larison’s views could gain greater traction in the GOP. Actually, unless I am misreading him, Larison has at times been complimentary of what he views as Obama’s realist proclivities. So the gulf may not between the paleocons and Obamaites may not be all that great—unless, of course, Obama buckles and intervenes in Syria.

Frum goes against the grain by backing the Heritage study. He reminds its critics on the left and right that the report was not investigating the economic benefits of immigration but the “fiscal cost”:

Fiscal measures, by contrast, look at the effects – not on the economy as a whole – but on the revenues and expenditures of government. And it’s been a notorious fact for years that immigration’s modest economic benefits are offset by very large fiscal costs. … Unless you posit that the newly legalized immigrants will dramatically outperform the existing immigrant population, you will reach a result very like that of the Heritage Foundation: that the taxes paid by the newly legalized will not begin to equal the costs of their Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other benefits. …

Let me put this in boldface: Heritage’s cost estimates are driven not primarily by welfare, but by healthcare.

Every newly legalized immigrant, no matter how ambitious and hard-working, will get old. When he or she gets old, he or she will qualify for Medicare. Medicare is very, very expensive, and getting more expensive all the time. Fewer and fewer Americans – whatever their ethnic origin – pay enough in taxes to cover their predicted future health care costs. Inevitably, Medicare is becoming a more redistributionist program. People on the left get this point when they scoff at the imputed Tea Party slogan, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Why do they forget the point when they speak of immigration?