It’s Tuesday, April 17th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, as the WSJ reports, things are looking up in Badgerville for Governor Scott Walker:

A Wisconsin Vindication

Property tax bills fall as Scott Walker’s reforms start to kick in.

The public employee unions and other liberals are confident that Wisconsin voters will turn out Governor Scott Walker in a recall election later this year, but not so fast. That may turn out to be as wrong as some of their other predictions as Badger State taxpayers start to see tangible benefits from Mr. Walker’s reforms—such as the first decline in statewide property taxes in a dozen years.

On Monday Mr. Walker’s office released new data that show the property tax bill for the median home fell by 0.4% in 2011, as reported by Wisconsin’s municipalities. Property taxes, which are the state’s largest revenue source and mainly fund K-12 schools, have risen every year since 1998—by 43% overall. The state budget office estimates that the typical homeowner’s bill would be some $700 higher without Mr. Walker’s collective-bargaining overhaul and budget cuts.

The median home value did fall in 2011, by about 2.3%, which no doubt influenced the slight downward trend. But then values also fell in 2009 and 2010, by similar amounts, and the state’s take from the average taxpayer still climbed by 2.1% and 1.5%, respectively. In absolute terms homeowners won’t see large dollar benefits year over year, but any hold-the-line tax respite is both rare and welcome in this age of ever-expanding government.

The real gains will grow as local school districts continue repairing and rationalizing their budgets using the tools Mr. Walker gave them. Those include the ability to renegotiate perk-filled teacher contracts and requiring government workers to contribute more than 0% to their pensions. A year ago amid their sit-ins and other protests, the unions said such policies would lead to the decline and fall of civilization, but the only things that are falling are tax collections.

The political lesson is that attempts to modernize government are always controversial, but support usually builds over time as the public comes to appreciate the benefits of structural change that tames the drivers of a status quo that includes ever-higher spending and taxes. The Wisconsin recall donnybrook in June will test whether voters value their own bottom lines more than the political power of unions.

Like any good Conservative, Walker deals in facts; like every prevaricating Progressive, his opponents deal in fraudulent, falsified feelings.  For Wisconsin voters, the choice couldn’t be any clearer.

In a related item, as Guy Benson details in Townhall.com, America’s the contrast between America’s options is equally evident:

Geithner: Obama’s Economic Policies Have Been “Remarkably Successful,” 

Hey, it was only my personal income taxes; it’s not like I’d use position and privilege to cheat the taxpayers!

It was not a fun go ’round on the Sunday morning talk circuit for Team Obama yesterday, underscored by David Axelrod’s accidental de facto endorsement of Mitt Romney on Fox News. The White House likely nudged Hilary Rosen to decline a Meet the Press invite in order to help turn the page from their floundering “war on women” narrative to a Buffett Rule hypefest. Treasury Secretary Tim Geither — last seen explaining how Obama has no solution to the gathering debt crisis — informed NBC viewers that the president’s economic policies have been “remarkably successful“:

For a primer on just how “remarkably successful” Obama’s major economic initiative has been, consult my handy ‘Stimulus’ assessment, published on the third anniversary of its passage. (Spoiler: The ‘Recovery Act’ has failed on its own terms). But Geither argues that the most important metric for success has nothing to do with the president’s promises and predictions as he implemented his agenda, but rather how today’s listless recovery compares to other American economic comebacks throughout history.  Ok, fine. Over to you, Stanford Business School professor Ed Lazear:

How many times have we heard that this was the worst recession since the Great Depression? That may be true—although the double-dip recession of the early 1980s was about comparable. Less publicized is that our current recovery pales in comparison with most other recoveries, including the one following the Great Depression. The Great Depression started with major economic contractions in 1930, ’31, ’32 and ’33. In the three following years, the economy rebounded strongly with growth rates of 11%, 9% and 13%, respectively.

The current recovery began in the second half of 2009, but economic growth has been weak. Growth in 2010 was 3% and in 2011 it was 1.7%. Who knows what 2012 will bring, but the current growth rate looks to be about 2%, according to the consensus of economists recently polled by Blue Chip Economic Indicators. Sadly, we have never really recovered from the recession. The economy has not even returned to its long-term growth rate and is certainly not making up for lost ground.

Read Lazear’s entire piece, which — problematically for Geither — is entitled, “The Worst Recovery in US History.  Ed Morrissey notes that Geither was forced to make a rather unhelpful concession during his other Sunday television appearance on ABC’s This Week:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he believed the economy is “gradually getting stronger,” but said “we can’t tell yet” whether growth has stalled as it has in previous spring months during the Obama administration. “We can’t tell yet,” Geithner said on “This Week” when asked if the same pattern from previous years was repeating, with strong growth in early months of the year, followed by a slow-down, as happened the last two years.

A humongous majority of Americans believe the country is still mired in a recession, and Mitt Romney has seized a decent-sized lead over Obama on the question of who is best suited to handle economic issues.  Unless tangible economic indicators improve significantly over the next six months, no amount of Buffett Rule-style misdirection or wailing about the Republican “war on [fill-in-the-blank]” will save this president’s bacon.  Speaking of the “fairness fetish,” are gadgets like the so-called Buffett Rule all that beneficial politically?  On one hand, that particular gimmick — which would cover 17 hours worth of federal borrowing annually — polls reasonably well.  On the other, Americans are far less interested in some abstract concept of fairness than they are in growth and opportunity.  From a recent Third Way poll of independents:

Would you be more likely to vote, the survey asked, for a candidate who said we should help the middle class by stressing growth and opportunity, or by making sure the rich paid their fair share of taxes. The former won by 76 to 20 percent. Other answers indicate that respondents don’t mind the rich paying higher taxes, and even generally back the idea. It’s just not very interesting to them. They’re far more interested in growth than fairness. (“Fairness”, by the way, should have appeared in quotation marks.)

This closely mirrors the numbers we highlighted from Gallup a few months back.  Fairness simply isn’t a prioritized economic value for most American voters, a fact that presents a genuine problem for Democrats.  I’ll leave you with two final nuggets from that Third Way poll, both of which were mined by Allahpundit for a post last week:

Here, independents split evenly between higher and lower taxes for “the rich” (which doesn’t even take this data into account), and express about as much support for an across-the-board flat tax as they do for the current progressive system, which even the Ryan and Romney plans preserve in some form.  Again, if things don’t turn around noticeably — and March’s jobs numbers weren’t encouraging — the fairness brigade is in for a long general election cycle.

And the hits just keep on coming, as this next item from Michael Barone relates:

Ouch! Decade of Obamacare Will Cost $1,160 billion

How much will Obamacare — call it the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act if you like — cost over the next 10 years? More than you’ve been led to believe, reports Charles Blahous of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. To be specific, he projects it will add $1,160 billion to net federal spending over the next 10 years and at least $340 billion to federal budget deficits in that time.

Blahous was appointed by Barack Obama as one of two public trustees of the Social Security and Medicare programs. He worked on these issues in George W. Bush’s administration and submitted his Mercatus paper for anonymous peer review.

Why does he say Obamacare will increase spending when the Obama administration, citing Congressional Budget Office numbers, promised it will save money?

One reason is that the CBO said Obamacare’s “Class Act” provisions would save money, since the government would collect premiums immediately but not pay off policyholders until later. But Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has conceded that the Class Act is unworkable, and so Blahous zeroes out those phantom savings.

Another reason Obamacare was supposed to save money is that it raises the Medicare tax 0.9 percent for high earners. It then dedicates those resources both to Medicare and to general revenues, with the CBO counting the savings twice.

That’s because under a 1985 internal ruling (not a full-fledged law passed by Congress), the CBO scores the costs of legislation against a hypothetical baseline rather than against current law. But, as Sebelius conceded to Congress in March 2011, that’s double counting. The government can’t spend the same money twice. Medicare tax revenues dedicated to current Medicare spending can’t be used to reduce the budget deficit. That’s true “in practice,” Medicare chief actuary Richard Foster wrote last year, despite the CBO’s scoring procedure.

And, as Blahous points out, if the funds don’t go to Medicare, then under current law, Medicare will go broke faster and be forced to reduce benefits. Since Congress is not likely to let that happen any sooner than it has to, the deficit reduction promised by the CBO score and claimed by the Obama administration simply ain’t going to happen, no how, no way.

To all of which the Obama White House says only the CBO numbers should count and that Blahous worked in a Republican administration. This is about as intellectually serious a reply as, “Nyah, nyah, nyah nyah nyah, nyah.”

Which is what we are coming to expect from the Obama White House. Consider the president’s Supreme Court trash-talking earlier this month. The supposed constitutional scholar didn’t seem to know that the Supreme Court has been overturning laws since Marbury v. Madison in 1803. He suggested the Lochner case was an example of the Supreme Court striking down New Deal legislation. But Lochner was decided in 1905 and overturned a state, not a federal, law.

Similarly, Obama characterized House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget as “social Darwinism” and falsely said it would require zeroing out spending for various wonderful programs. And he has heaped scorn on those who harbor any doubt that renewables will become major energy sources in the 21st century.

His experiences in university neighborhoods and Chicago politics have apparently left Obama ignorant that there are intellectually serious arguments against liberal policies. So when presented with such arguments by Ryan and others, he scowls, calls people names and does the intellectual equivalent of stamping his feet.

Someone needs to tell him that combining arrogant condescension with intellectual shoddiness is not a winning political tactic. Or a winning governing strategy. Obamacare’s architects also combined arrogant condescension with intellectual shoddiness. They shamelessly gamed the CBO scoring process to make Obamacare look like a money-saver. They threw in unworkable programs like the Class Act to make political points.

And so when Charles Blahous totes up the numbers and give us an idea of what Obamacare would really cost, they are left without an intellectually serious reply.

If Obama really knew constitutional law, he might remember that the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the National Recovery Act in 1935, after it became clear that, with its 700-plus industry groups setting wage and prices, it was unworkable and was becoming increasingly unpopular. The legal arguments are not quite on point, but Obamacare is looking to be as unworkable as the NRA and even more unpopular. Plus, as Charles Blahous has established, hugely more expensive than advertised.

Hey, what’s another $1.16 trillion (for the benefit of your children’s children’s children, that’s $1,160,000,000,000) between suckers….er,….friends!

Perhaps this, along with so many other things, helps explain Jennifer Rubin’s bleak analysis of B. Hussein’s political future, courtesy of George Lawlor and the WaPo, entitled:

Romney’s bright electoral landscape

His future’s so bright, he’s gotta wear shades!

Easy….but very far from certain; parTICularly if Romney were ignorant enough to name Jeb, or any other Bush, as his running mate.  Why not just suggest Charlie “The Turncoat” Crist as a potential candidate for the #2 slot?!?  Florida’s the prize, and from where we’re sitting, absent Rubin knowing something in Marco Rubio’s past about which the rest of us are unaware, he seems the only logical choice for what will be Mitt’s political better half.

Meanwhile, as detailed in today’s edition of Tales From the Darkside, courtesy of Bill Meisen and Real Clear Politics, with every passing day, Team Tick-Tock’s degree of desperation results in ever-more deceptive and deliberate disinformation:

Obama Tells Univision Romney Supports Racial Profiling

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/04/16/obama_tells_univision_romney_supports_racial_profiling.html

As we’ve said before on numerous occasions, fasten your seatbelts….it’s going to be a very bumpy, and very, VERY ugly, 6-1/2 months.

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s this gem from G. Trevor, Lord High King of All Vietors:

Finally, in the “Momma, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Broncos” segment, we learn….

Sacha’s right about one thing; prior to him, no male ever had made it to the auditions….but only because no male ever wanted to….at least not….

….as a participant!

Magoo