Free Frank Warner

Democrats propose fingerprint ID for foreigners and citizens alike

Requiring identification of foreigners in the United States is not a Republican idea. In fact, it’s been required since 1940, when Franklin Roosevelt was president. And a new immigration bill proposed by the Democrats would expand that requirement.

This bill would force all workers, foreigners and citizens, to carry a national ID card.

The advantage of this ID card, which would include biometric information such as fingerprints or eye scans, is that it would avoid the targeting of foreigners. The disadvantage is that it would target all of us, stripping us of one of our last remaining curtains of privacy.

Hole in the wall. The ACLU already is complaining about the new bill, and it should be. But the legislation brings us back to basics. Do we enforce the requirement that foreigners and people likely to be foreigners show reliable ID papers? Or do we finish that wall at the border? Or both.

The serious solutions are obvious. Let’s see if anyone in this lost government can get serious.

Frank Warner

How is a high-paying, protected federal job 'public service'?

I was startled three months ago when President Obama proposed that those college graduates who go into government jobs get a special break on paying off their college loans.

Government workers already are paid handsomely, and have generous benefits to boot. So why give them more?

Some people seem to argue on the premise that most people make a sacrifice by working for the government, when it's clear that, at least on the federal level, government workers are paid about twice the average private worker's income.

Pay gap. The Washington Examiner:

Data compiled by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis reveals the extent of the pay gap between federal and private workers. As of 2008, the average federal salary was $119,982, compared with $59,909 for the average private sector employee. In other words, the average federal bureaucrat makes twice as much as the average working taxpayer. Add the value of benefits like health care and pensions, and the gap grows even bigger. The average federal employee's benefits add $40,785 to his annual total compensation, whereas the average working taxpayer's benefits increase his total compensation by only $9,881. In other words, federal workers are paid on average salaries that are twice as generous as those in the private sector, and they receive benefits that are four times greater.

The situation is the same when state and local government compensation data is compared with that of the private sector. As the Cato Institute's Chris Edwards notes in the current issue of the Cato Journal, "The public sector pay advantage is most pronounced in benefits. Bureau of Economic Analysis data show that average compensation in the private sector was $59,909 in 2008, including $50,028 in wages and $9,881 in benefits. Average compensation in the public sector was $67,812, including $52,051 in wages and $15,761 in benefits." Those figures likely underestimate the true gap on the benefits side because the typical government employee gets a guaranteed defined benefit pension under very generous terms, while the private sector norm is a 401(K) defined contribution plan that is subject to the ups and downs of the economy.

Who serves whom? How would federal workers merit early college-loan forgiveness? I must be missing something, but it sure feels as if private-sector workers have become servants of the "public servants."

Frank Warner

What’s it going to be? Something has to control immigration

I don’t want anyone offended or abused by police simply because we have 11 million foreigners in the U.S. illegally. The obvious solution is to finish that border wall we were promised years ago, but I understand: No one likes obvious solutions anymore.

So what do we do? Arizona wants people who seem to be here illegally to show some solidly valid identification. This rule has brought an outcry from people who say the idea sounds too much like cinema Nazis shouting, “Show me your papers.”

It does have a little of that feel. ID is ID. But there’s a big difference. People without proper ID in Arizona are not going to be sent to death camps. Generally, they’re supposed to be sent home. (And as one of the legislation’s writers points out, foreigners have been required by federal law to carry this documentation since 1940.)

Forever amnesty? But if we’re too polite to insist on reliable ID from people who don’t speak English (in a nation where the English languish is a requirement of citizenship), then how would any new immigration-amnesty law work?

The 1986 immigration-amnesty law -- the one currently on the books -- forced me to provide three forms of identification when I applied for a job in 1987. As the years went by, that ID requirement was nearly forgotten by employers, and the federal government generally stopped enforcing it.

Which brings us to today’s 11 million people here illegally, and more pouring in through Arizona every day.

What control? So if we again give illegal immigrants amnesty, as we did in 1986, how do we also get back to border control without demanding proper ID? Do we just continue letting foreigners trespass, and then wait another 25 years to give them amnesty? What’s the difference between that policy and simply annexing all of Latin America?

One way to reduce the problem is letting police, under reasonable circumstances, demand proper ID. But if that is unacceptably distasteful, or if we know we’ll abandon a new ID requirement as fast as we gutted the 1986 law, then finish that wall.

Frank Warner

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See also: Why Arizona Drew a Line, in The New York Times.

Cape Wind project is approved! My God! My God!

In a land where the most obviously good projects can die of political suffocation, this is a monumental victory.

Who said it was impossible to catch the wind? Soon, the breezes off Nantucket will be producing CO2-free electricity.

But let's not stop here. We have lots of domestic energy sources that would boost our economy and not add to CO2 emissions.

Frank Warner

Madoff scheme and Social Security compared

The Institute for Truth does a simple comparison.

The recession: What the gut and gray matter tell us

The gut has something do with how each of us would try to end a recession.

In the early 1980s, President Reagan allowed the Federal Reserve Board to restrict the money supply, squeeze out inflation and force the nation to adapt to new economic realities. At the same time, Reagan and Congress provided a modest “safety net” to the jobless – producing a federal deficit of $200 billion in 1983 -- and a tax incentive to encourage the unemployed to find jobs.

The policy worked, and kicked off 25 years of nearly-uninterrupted economic expansion (only a few short and minor recessions). But to my gut, the early 1980s felt harsh. And if you could not find a job or buy a house you wanted from 1981 to 1983, it was harsh.

Spend, spend. Today, despite low interest rates, the unemployment rate is about 9.5 percent, the same as it was in 1983. President Obama and Congress are doing nothing to adapt to the new economics of scarcer energy and international competition. They are doing nothing to prevent Congress from once again junking prudent lending practices at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Instead, they’re spending hundreds of billions on a thick cushion of extended unemployment benefits and siphoning hundreds of billions more on expanded federal programs.

The federal deficit this year is expected to be $1.4 trillion, and the jury’s still out as to whether this Obama policy will work to get us out of the job recession. I have serious doubts, but I admit my judgment is partly from the gut.

Each of us makes an internal calculation, considering everything we know and feel, of how much spending, borrowing and taxing is too much. Considering the $13 trillion federal debt and the $50 trillion-plus of unfunded federal obligations for Medicare, Social Security et cetera, my gut tells me that any more federal borrowing is a high risk. And yet, to other people who claim to be smart, trillions more in debt is a trifle.

Rainy days. In a recession, higher taxes also are risky. Borrowing risky. Taxing risky. Which means higher spending in this recession is inherently rife with hazards. With nothing saved for a rainy day, the U.S. must borrow or tax more if it is to spend more. Some emergency spending is needed now, but considering our circumstances, the spending has to be done with extreme care.

That’s what’s lacking, extreme care. So far, the Obama administration has doled out “stimuluses” and “affordable health care” and financial bail-outs and corporate takeovers – a list of gifts so long it suggests we have a bottomless pit of cash to spend like madmen. But standing tiptoed at the edge of this recession’s deep empty pit, with a mountain of debt on our shoulders, we shouldn’t be taking on new loads without bracing. And yet we are taking heavier loads.

We should be aiding the jobless, mindful that unemployment benefits cannot be extended forever. Where we try to stimulate the economy, the spending should be targeted narrowly to activities that a broad range of economists agree have a good chance to create long-term jobs. We should be trimming Medicare benefits, using creative competition to boost efficiency and innovation enough to keep most existing benefits at existing prices. We should be trimming Social Security – even older Americans are demanding it in the name of reason. We should be in the middle of a massive program to expand clean, economical energy supplies. And we should be breaking up “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions and insisting that they not abandon safe and sound lending practices, even under pressure from reckless members of Congress.

Costly carelessness. Our guts are upset, but these failures upset more than the gut. Anyone with a brain knows the federal government has to act responsibly if we are to maintain the peace and progress of a free and democratic civilization.

Let’s hope this recession can be handled less harshly than the recession of the early 1980s. But let’s not pretend the sudden loss of hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of jobs will be reversed without pain. That would only increase and prolong the pain.

Your gut might define how much spending is reasonable to reduce the hardships. Your head reminds you that every move must be taken with care.

Frank Warner

Ross Douthat: ‘South Park’ censorship reveals cowardice and self-loathing

Ross Douthat, in The New York Times, explains that the successful targeting of “South Park” by the Islamist fringe has unveiled the West as a fragile civilization too willing to surrender its freedom.

In a way, the muzzling of “South Park” is no more disquieting than any other example of Western institutions’ cowering before the threat of Islamist violence. It’s no worse than the German opera house that temporarily suspended performances of Mozart’s opera “Idomeneo” because it included a scene featuring Muhammad’s severed head. Or Random House’s decision to cancel the publication of a novel about the prophet’s third wife. Or Yale University Press’s refusal to publish the controversial Danish cartoons ... in a book about the Danish cartoon crisis. Or the fact that various Western journalists, intellectuals and politicians — the list includes Oriana Fallaci in Italy, Michel Houellebecq in France, Mark Steyn in Canada and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands — have been hauled before courts and “human rights” tribunals, in supposedly liberal societies, for daring to give offense to Islam.

But there’s still a sense in which the “South Park” case is particularly illuminating. Not because it tells us anything new about the lines that writers and entertainers suddenly aren’t allowed to cross. But because it’s a reminder that Islam is just about the only place where we draw any lines at all.

Across 14 on-air years, there’s no icon “South Park” hasn’t trampled, no vein of shock-comedy (sexual, scatalogical, blasphemous) it hasn’t mined. …

Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place.

Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing.

This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that “bravely” trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

Happily, today’s would-be totalitarians are probably too marginal to take full advantage. This isn’t Weimar Germany, and Islam’s radical fringe is still a fringe, rather than an existential enemy.

For that, we should be grateful. Because if a violent fringe is capable of inspiring so much cowardice and self-censorship, it suggests that there’s enough rot in our institutions that a stronger foe might be able to bring them crashing down.

Indeed. And who expected to see this in The New York Times?

Frank Warner

‘Evil empire’ and the mystery of Reagan’s index cards

Ten years ago, when I did some research into Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire speech, I found an eyewitness to the 1983 address who swore that Reagan inserted the “evil empire” sentence at the last minute.

He said Reagan departed from his 17 pages of prepared remarks and pulled out two rush-job index cards containing the historic words of shame for the Soviet Union.

This witness told me about the index cards in 2000, when just about no one outside of the National Association of Evangelicals had seen Reagan’s March 8, 1983, speech in Orlando. When it was difficult to find a video of it. When there was no YouTube.

In the cards. Fortunately, the Reagan Library had a videotape of the speech and made a copy for me. The video (and the preserved documents, including the cards) proved the witness was wrong. Reagan did pull out two index cards of new text, but the added words mentioned neither “evil” nor “empire.”

The “evil empire” phrase had been in there from the first draft by speechwriter Anthony Dolan. Now, thanks to YouTube, you can see the evidence for yourself (though it might not be easy to notice him shifting to the index cards). The Evil Empire speech is online.

Frank Warner

Health and Human Services: Health-care law will jack up costs

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has just released a report revealing -- surprise -- the "Affordable Health Care Act" will increase health care costs over the next 10 years.

Wasn't this legislation, taking on the most expensive health-care system in the world, supposed to lower costs?

The report, by Richard S. Foster, Medicare's chief actuary, says health-care costs will rise at least 1 percent over 10 years -- that's 31 trillion red pennies -- and the cost will be much more if the fantasized $463 billion in cuts to Medicare "waste and inefficiency" aren't realized.

If Congress had a brain, they'd use competition, competition and more competition to reduce health-care costs. Instead, it legislates infinity and passes the bill to future generations.

Frank Warner

Matt Stone and Trey Parker, heroes

Matt Stone and Trey Parker are heroes of freedom.

Abu Talhah Al-Amrikee will surely go to Hell for his campaign against life and liberty, and in particular, for his malicious targeting of "South Park" creators Stone and Parker. He has brought shame on himself and his family. It would have been better had he not been born.

The champions of terror and tyranny deserve no mercy. Their appeasers deserve no friends.

Frank Warner