Author: Joshua Hedlund

Indiana Republican Richard Lugar has served in the Senate for almost thirty-six years; he started before the first Star Wars movie released. But after a long string of unopposed victories his time is finally coming to an end, as he lost his party’s primary on Tuesday to the more conservative Richard Mourdock.

Mourdock is pro-government enough to disappoint libertarians, but he wants to abolish several federal departments and was backed by the Tea Party. He tried to paint Lugar as an out-of-touch liberal, noting, for example, that Lugar voted to raise the debt ceiling fifteen times.

In a way, this was unfair to Lugar, because raising the debt ceiling was one of those things that pretty much everybody in Congress has done for decades; there’s nothing especially “liberal” about it. But in a way, that’s also the point – Lugar was deeply embedded in the “status quo” that got us where we are today. (Don’t get me started on his lobbying connections.) Apparently this Washington insider thought he could represent the state for the rest of his life when he didn’t even own a home in Indiana anymore.

Now the media wasted no time lamenting Lugar’s loss and bemoaning how terribly extreme the Republican party is becoming. NPR said he was a “legend undone by his greatest strength” and that he lost because “his friendship with Obama… in the cauldron of hyperpartisanship, was most vividly turned against him by his own party.” CNN said Republican voters were “punishing him for the qualities he considered assets: seniority, expertise in foreign policy and a penchant for bipartisan cooperation.” And those weren’t even the opinion pieces. Ezra Klein said Lugar’s loss shows how much Republicans are to blame for polarization in Congress.

Continue reading The Fuzzy Line Between Moderate and Establishment

The official ticket sales for Sunday won’t come in until this afternoon, but The Avengers movie is projected to be the first movie to make $200 million in the U.S. in its opening weekend. Incredibly, that is already more than each of the entire individual theater runs of Thor, Captain America, and the Incredible Hulk (it will take another week to catch the Ironman films).

Continue reading The Avengers Opening Weekend: Not Frontloaded

April 2012 was a pretty bad month for Americans under the tyrannical Transportation Security Administration. I believe we need to focus as much attention as possible on these abuses, not because I want to make you feel outraged or depressed, but because I believe everyone needs to be aware that the TSA is one of the greatest present dangers to the everyday freedoms of Americans, and things are only getting worse.

Let’s start with the latest outrageous assault stories which have, sadly, ceased to be surprising:

Continue reading What Did The Terrible TSA Do Last Month?

“1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed”

I saw this article on my lunch break yesterday. I’ve seen college friends nervously sharing it on Facebook. I’ve seen anti-Obama people spreading it on Twitter. It’s the sort of rare national news that personally impacts lots of people you know. College is supposed to be the path to prosperity, and when it’s not, you get a whole lot of ideas about what to do to fix the job market and what to do to help new graduates and what to do about student loans and what to do about the whole notion that college is the path to prosperity.

But as I read this article, I couldn’t help thinking that it suffers from the same nearsighted paradigm I discussed in my post a few months ago about Steve Jobs and the 99%. There’s a lot of talk about graduates “finding” jobs. There is absolutely no talk about graduates “creating” their own jobs.

Continue reading Graduates Can’t Find Jobs. Can They Create Them?

The level of political discourse surrounding this year’s presidential race has not been particularly remarkable, but it stumbled to a new low this week. Tired of the incessant liberal mockery of Romney’s terrible treatment of the family dog a couple decades ago, the Romney campaign attacked Obama this week for eating dog when he was a kid in Indonesia.

Or something like that. (I don’t feel like retrieving the exact details, which would give the dignity of more page views to news articles reporting on this nonsense.)

Continue reading The Right To Eat Dog

I’ve heard people from both the left and the right call for simplifying our complicated tax code. So why does it seem like all the discussion these days is about making it even more complicated?

President Obama has been touting the “Buffet Rule,” which would require Americans who earn at least $1 million to pay a minimum income tax rate of 30%. The rates for regular wages are already higher than that, but since a lot of millionaires earn most of their money from investments, which is taxed at a lower rate, combined with a variety of other tax breaks, a lot of millionaires pay an overall rate lower than 30%. Thus, the hoopla about Warren Buffet paying a lower tax rate than his secretary. Thus, the “Buffet Rule.”

But apparently there aren’t too many millionaires cheating the system too badly, because the Buffet Rule is supposed to add less than $5 billion a year to government revenues (remember, we’ve been running deficits over $1 trillion – or $1,000 billion – for several years and are projected to do so for several more). As the Obama administration itself admits, this is less about reducing the deficit and more about the vague concept of tax “fairness.”

Continue reading Simplifying the Tax Code?