What to do about Syria. | Earmark revival would bring back favor factory. | What can welfare reformers learn from the UK? | Amy Ridenour, RIP. | Which states are not funding their pension plans?
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April 8, 2017 |
This week, Syria dropped a chemical weapon on a rebel-held city and President Trump retaliated with a cruise missile attack on the Syrian military. The move carries the risk of escalating the already complex situation in Syria into a direct confrontation between Russia and the United States. What should be done now? The conservative movement lost a great leader in Amy Ridenour. Congressional Republicans are thinking about reviving earmarks; history says that’s a bad idea. Great Britain is a welfare reform success story. Some states are doing better than others at funding their pensions. |
What to do about Syria: On Tuesday, a Syrian plane dropped a chemical bomb on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun, killing 86. On Friday, the United States retaliated by hitting the airfield from which the Syrian plane took off with 59 cruise missiles. The purpose, said President Donald Trump, was to send the message that the use chemical weapons will not be tolerated. The question now is: What’s next for the new administration’s Syria policy? Heritage Foundation analyst James Phillips told The Daily Signal: “It would be a mistake to expand the military effort to include the goal of removing Assad. That would be a costly and risky mission creep that would entail military clashes with Russia and Iran. And it would bog down the U.S. military in an open-ended effort to stand up and stabilize a post-Assad government. Pressing Assad to step down as part of a political settlement should be a long-term diplomatic goal pursued through sanctions, but ISIS and al-Qaeda should remain the chief targets for U.S. military action in Syria.” [The Daily Signal] Back in March, James Phillips called on the administration to avoid legitimizing the role of Russia in Syria: “Neither Russia nor Iran is a useful ally against ISIS and both actively undermine U.S. national interests and allies. Russia has paid lip service to the fight against ISIS, but has launched most of its air strikes against other rebel groups, including some supported by the U.S. Siding with Russia, which has been accused of committing war crimes in Syria, would discredit the U.S. in the eyes of most Syrians and many Sunni Arabs outside of Syria. The Trump Administration should not repeat either its predecessor’s overestimation of Moscow’s willingness to cooperate in Syria or its underestimation of Moscow’s interest in undermining U.S. influence in the Middle East.” Phillips also outlined other elements of a strategy for defeating ISIS in Syria: “Washington should press Turkey, other NATO allies, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf allies to contribute significant ground troops and special operations forces to defeat ISIS on the ground inside Syria. The U.S. could provide advisers, air support, logistical support, airlift, intelligence, surveillance, search and rescue support, and other enablers. Meanwhile, the U.S. should reassess its aid program for Syrian rebels and continue aid only to non-Islamist groups willing and able to fight ISIS effectively. It must also do a better job of vetting them to prevent arms from falling into the wrong hands. […] “Washington must focus on preventing the fighting from spilling over Syria’s borders to threaten U.S. allies, limiting the flow of refugees to Europe and helping to take care of them closer to their homes, and preventing Syria from becoming a sanctuary for Islamist terrorists. The U.S. should work closely with allies to staunch the flow of foreign fighters into Syria and to monitor and disrupt the flow of Islamist extremists out of Syria. This requires a robust, multi-pronged, global effort to dismantle the foreign-fighter pipeline and counter the radical Islamist ideology that motivates new recruits. […] “Washington should offer more humanitarian aid to support refugees there and lighten the burden on the host countries, but it should rule out the deployment of U.S. forces inside Syria to maintain safe zones. This would be a costly, risky, open-ended military mission that would make the U.S. a party to the conflict. […] “Some of America’s Arab allies have supported Sunni extremist groups against the Assad regime and Iran, which they view as their greatest enemy. Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia continue to turn a blind eye to the activities of fundraisers for Islamist extremist groups seeking donations from private individuals in their kingdoms. The U.S. should press all of its allies to crack down on the flow of such funds and insist that rebel groups they support break all ties with [Al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham].” [The Heritage Foundation]
Amy Ridenour, RIP. Amy Ridenour, longtime conservative leader and founder of the National Center for Public Policy Research, died last Friday. David Almasi writes: “Her vision was for the organization to be a very different kind of think tank: More nimble than others and focused on giving the conservative movement capabilities it didn’t already possess. Her success in achieving that vision was recognized when another conservative leader said of the Center, ‘It’s more than a think tank… it’s a do tank.’ “Under her leadership, the Center initiated Project 21, a black conservative leadership group that’s created over 30,000 media opportunities for black conservatives and libertarians. She also launched the Free Enterprise Project, a conservative shareholder activism and education program. Dozens of major corporations have voluntarily adopted shareholder resolutions proposed by the program. Amy played a significant role in virtually every conservative advance in the past three decades. “But one contribution of which she was most proud few knew about. Though the U.S. eventually won the Cold War, that outcome was far from certain. In the early 1980s, it was nearly derailed by the nuclear freeze movement. “On March 7, 1983, the day before a major nuclear freeze movement rally was to take place in Washington, DC, Amy and other pro-defense leaders countering the freeze movement met with President Reagan at the White House. The president confided that he feared his effort to rebuild America’s defenses and win the Cold War could fail because the media was against him. Amy gave the president a pep talk and outlined a strategy she’d used to go around the mainstream media to reach the American people using alternative media, including talk radio, local community newspapers, and religious media. “President Reagan took her advice and that very afternoon personally added 13 lines to a speech he was scheduled to give to the National Association of Evangelicals the next day. That speech would become known as the ‘Evil Empire’ speech. It rallied support for the struggle against totalitarian Communism by framing it in moral terms.” [Amy Ridenour’s National Center Blog]
An earmark revival threatens to turn Congress back into a favor factory. House Republicans are planning to bring back the practice of earmarking appropriations bills. A congressional earmark is an instruction inserted into an appropriation bill that tells a federal agency to allocate appropriated money to a particular project or entity—rather than allocating the funds according to formula or a competitive application process. The practice had been abolished in 2011 when Republican took control of the House of Representatives. Before Republicans bring earmarks back, writes Brian Riedl, they should recall what happened when earmarks exploded in the late 1990s: “A new industry of highly-paid appropriations lobbyists promised to help clients buy government grants for pennies on the dollar. One study estimated that every $1 companies spent lobbying bought $28 in earmarks. Another study revealed that ‘60 percent of the members of the House Armed Services Committee who arranged earmarks also received campaign contributions from the companies that received the funding.’ “Numerous criminal investigations were launched. Convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff called the Appropriations Committee an ‘earmark favor factory.’ One Congressman went to prison after circulating a menu matching various sizes of earmarks and federal contracts with the required bribes. “Politics trumped merit: Lawmakers were essentially given individual pots of tax dollars to distribute almost at will. Leadership, appropriators, and vulnerable members were allocated the largest pots, while rank-and-file lawmakers in safe districts received less. Most lawmakers refused to question each other’s pork. Accountability was absent. “Taxpayers, meanwhile, were treated to stories about Alaska’s $223 million ‘Bridge to Nowhere,’ and earmarks for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and to combat teen goth culture in Blue Springs, Missouri. And all this pork greased the skids to pass bloated government expansions. “By 2006, enraged voters had seen enough. An April NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll ranked banning earmarks as voters’ top priority for Congress. Yet the gravy train continued, and seven months later the Republican majority was thrown out of Congress in their worst defeat since Watergate. Exit polls ranked corruption and ethics (mostly tied to earmarks) as the top issue.” [Fox News]
What can welfare reformers learn from Britain? Beginning in 2010, Great Britain reformed its welfare system by consolidating benefits into a single program, structuring the benefits to ensure that work always pays for the recipient, and coupling the benefits with work requirements. Iain Duncan Smith, former UK Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, contrasts Britain’s experience with that of the United States: “[I]n just the first three months after we started rolling out Universal Credit and the work sanctions, British job-force participation increased by over a quarter of a million. […] We have the highest proportion of people in work since records began, up by more than 2.8 million since 2010. The unemployment rate has fallen to just 4.7% – a number not seen since the summer of 1975. […] “Less commented on but perhaps even more important, is the number of people no longer economically inactive – that is, people who are unemployed but not seeking work. When we took office, these were at historic highs. Seven years later, and they are at near historic lows, with nearly a million fewer people on the main out-of-work benefits.” In the United States, however: “[S]pending on welfare has skyrocketed, having grown faster in the United States since the start of the 21st century than in any country in Europe bar Ireland, Spain, and Portugal – now reaching a staggering $1 trillion a year. “The federal government funds an even more chaotic system of anti-poverty programmes than the UK’s old welfare system, with 126 separate programmes, 72 of which are paying out cash or in-kind benefits. […] [J]ust 42% of welfare recipients here are engaged in work or work-related activities. […] “[I]n the UK, the state maintains a close and ongoing relationship with the benefit claimant through the Jobcentre – and recipients are regularly engaged through the conditions they need to fulfill. “Here, the lack of such conditionality has simply led to a surge in the claims made on other types of welfare. For example, the number of people receiving disability benefits since 2000 has increased by almost 60%, and spending has increased by 140%. In the same years, Earned Income Tax Credits have ballooned. And some 44 million people are now in receipt of food stamps.” [American Enterprise Institute]
How well funded is your state’s pension plan? The Tax Foundation has a new map that shows which states have problems. South Dakota, Oregon, and Wisconsin are fully funding their state pension plans. At the other end of the scale of fiscal prudence are Illinois, Kentucky, and New Jersey, which fund their pension plans at 41 percent, 41 percent, and 42 percent, respectively.
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