Heritage Foundation

One of the saddest things about the Crap-and-Trade Bill being passed through the House is how little it would have taken to stop it. Final vote was 219-212.

In the final tally of party betrayals, 44 Democrats voted "nay" and 8 Republicans voted "aye." Surprisingly, if 4 or more of those 8 Republicans would have voted along party lines, HR 2454, or the American Clean Energy and Security Act, would have been defeated. At the least, sending it back to the drawing board if not down the toilet, forever.

Another interesting note coming from Truth and Reason, out of the 52 member Democratic conservative Blue Dog caucus in the House, 22 voted for HR 2454.

If this bill is not resoundingly stopped in the Senate the long term economic cost stands to be painful. As pointed out by the Heritage Foundation's, Senior Policy Analyst for Energy and Environment, Ben Lieberman in his testimony before the Senate Republican Conference .

What are those costs? According to the analysis we conducted at The Heritage Foundation, which is attached to my written statement, the higher energy costs kick in as soon as the bill's provisions take effect in 2012. For a household of four, energy costs go up $436 that year, and they eventually reach $1,241 in 2035 and average $829 annually over that span. Electricity costs go up 90 percent by 2035, gasoline by 58 percent, and natural gas by 55 percent by 2035. The cumulative higher energy costs for a family of four by then will be nearly $20,000.

Given that hardly any of the Representatives read the bill, or its amendment, in their entirety. Or that many Americans, mostly Democrats and Independents, even know what cap and trade is or the economic impact it could incur. The ignorance that is attached to this monstrosity should not be that surprising.

It is incumbent upon the American voter to demand a reasonable and well thought out piece of legislation that matches their future energy and environemental needs. No one, in their right minds,  should be against clean air, clean water, or the best energy innovations American ingenuity can offer. However, these needs should not be used, by public officials,  as propaganda to garner support for central planning styled legislation that will eventually curtail our freedoms or pocket books. It seems more and more that this is about power and control for a few rather than the needs of many.

Promoted. Debate is good. -Patrick

Last week, my friend Jon Henke wrote a post criticizing Heritage President Ed Feulner and more broadly the entire conservative movement (full disclosure: Dr. Feulner is my boss, but in this post I write only for myself and am representing my own views) .

As you might have guessed, I have to take issue with Jon. While he makes some valid points (as always), I still think he goes too far on a couple.

First, Jon argues that the personnel of the Republican Party apparatus is composed of movement conservatives. As someone who spent a good deal of time working in the Senate, I am surprised that he would make that argument.

I think Jon and I are both painfully aware of some the types of staffers who have clawed their way to the top throughout the beltway-Party infrastructure. In many instances, these are people who have openly disdained us and our ideas. Far too many of them desperately cling to power for power’s sake. And far too many of them wouldn’t know a great, principled policy idea if it smacked them in the face.

To say that the conservative movement should bear responsibility in that arena is something I vehemently disagree with. I mean heck, as a staffer for Jim DeMint over the better part of the last two years, I saw first hand how the good Senator repeatedly went toe to toe with GOP establishment and received nothing but scorn for it – from staffers and senators alike.

And for Heritage’s part, they have been in the battle every step of the way. But frankly, since Heritage got banned from then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s office back in 2003 over our opposition to the prescription drug bill, it has been an adversarial relationship most of the way. And that is as it should be given the makeup of the Party right now.

This adversarial relationship has continued to manifest itself over the years. Whether it be on immigration reform, Harriet Miers, No Child Left Behind or Bridges to Nowhere, Heritage and the broader movement have stood opposed to the powers that be – both elected and unelected – in the Republican Party.

That leads to my second gripe. Jon says we need to push the reset button on ideas. Look, I am somewhat susceptible to this argument. I liked parts of David Frum’s book Comeback, I read Brooks regularly and can even stomach some Douthat on occasion. I certainly don’t agree with all that these guys are pushing, but I love the outside the box thinking when and if it advances the cause. But it is, in my opinion, unfair to write a post that portrays Ed Feulner and the Heritage Foundation as a group lacking ideas.

Stuart Butler, Heritage’s Domestic Policy VP, has been the national leader in pushing the idea of a revamped employer-based health system as the alternative to Obamacare as well as a major reform of the tax treatment of health care – a proposal that would achieve equity while empowering those without employer coverage. Who knows? Heritage’s persistence may even yield successes under our new liberal overlords. The rest of our health care team have been effective as well in pushing “transformational” ideas as evidenced by nearly all the major candidates adopting some form of our proposal.

Or take entitlements. Heritage convinced the top people at left-leaning Brookings and Urban Institute to seriously address this issue. It was Heritage who argued for a transformation in the budget process to “end entitlements as we know them” by putting Medicare, Medicaid, etc. on to the same budget basis as defense.

These are ideas that are, as Jon says, “transformational” and they would be enormously beneficial to the country if acted upon.

There is plenty more.

The problem has not been within the idea incubators, it has been with the politicians who either cannot explain their position, or frankly don’t have the heart and the passion to advance the idea. We make ideas, we don’t coach politicians. Not in our job description.

Finally, Jon ends with a call to “reset the movement” and develop a new guard to “compete” with the old guard. We are conservatives, not revolutionaries. We do not reset. Conservatives build on the past by identifying what has worked and discarding what has not. We stand on the shoulders of giants and we yes, we must train up the next generation. Edmund Burke said the true mark of a statesman is the disposition to preserve and the ability to improve. I bet we both agree that should be our model.

Yesterday, Heritage Foundation founder and President Ed Feulner wrote a post at The Next Right, arguing that the failures of the Republican Party were not a failure of the conservative movement.

At the risk of losing my invitation to the Heritage Foundation Chrismas party: Ed Feulner is exactly wrong. 

The Movement doesn't want to take responsibility for where we are, but "personnel is policy" and the conservative movement is the personnel of the Republican Party.  A political Party is an empty vessel, only as effective and healthy as the ideas and incentives behind it.  We can't buy a "we'd be fine if only we could trust politicians" theory of politics.

Whether it is because the movement's ideas have been ineffectual, because the movement's infrastructure has become complacent and entrenched, or because the movement's incentives have become perverse, the failures of the Republican Party are precisely the fault of the movement. 

The problem is not Republican politicians, although many Republicans politicians are a problem.  The problem is not with the basic ideals of limited government and personal freedom, either.  The problem is a movement that plays small-ball and cedes responsibility for infrastructure to business interests, leadership that rewards those who make friends rather than waves, an entrenched Party and Movement support system that mostly supports itself, an echo chamber that has rotted our intellect, a grassroots that is ill-equipped to shape the Republican Party, and a Republican Party that has replaced strategy with tactics, substance with marketing.

As The Economist pointed out recently, the Right has been losing the intellectual battle of ideas, becoming "a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world."

Unfortunately, the result of that movement complacency has been the erosion of the Right's organizing agenda - its ideas.  There has been a lot of conversation at The Next Right in recent days about that, and at Heritage's conservative blogger briefing on Tuesday, Feulner argued that the Right excels at ideas...

[W]e believe the ideas are fundamental and you've got to get the ideas right before you can start trying to market them. Yes, marketing is important, but that's only the second stage. The first thing is to get your principles screwed on straight and make sure you understand what they're all about.

But is it really true that the Right has the fundamental policy ideas?  What effective ideas has the Right had recently?  How far have those ideas gone?  Where are we?  Unfortunately, we're even farther behind than we were. Government is not more limited; our problems have not been reformed.  Indeed, the problems ahead of us

The Right needs to push the reset button on ideas. 

I’m not talking about the general ideas – free markets, limited government, strong defense – but the way to get from here to there.  Robert Bluey says argues that have an abundance of the policy thinkers.   Well, ok, but yet we haven't had the notable, transformative ideas to move the ball forward on the core ideals.  Sure, we have plenty of ideas for agencies, programs, details, each purporting to keep markets free, government limited and defense strong...but those are ideals, not ideas, and they aren't being matched to a politically viable and organizing agenda.

The current set of ideas either hasn't worked: they either haven't been viable or they've been small.

At this stage, do we need the 900th white paper on trade, even more policy recommendations on Taiwan or new reams of paper devoted to education policy?  Well, yeah, we do.  In theory, those can be important.  But practice is more important than theory, and we've had precious little practice lately.  Our ideas have become brush strokes on a painting, fine-tuning a work that has already gotten too busy to be beautiful. 

The Right has replaced strategy with tactics; pouring gas in a car that isn’t going anywhere.  We are tinkering with an agenda that doesn't capture the public imagination.

Fine-tuning should be secondary to the big picture.

2008 was the year in which that inverted idea agenda, policy and message problems finally extracted its toll and things all fell apart.  The Right has replaced strategy with tactics. We are tinkering with an agenda that is not going anywhere.

Mr. Feulner is wrong.  We have to push reset on the movement itself - not by eliminating the old guard, but by developing a new guard to compete with the old guard - making it better or filling new roles, but always making it work harder.

“Which comes first,” asks Michael Turk, “ideas or the message?” That’s an easy one. Of course it’s ideas. But to understand why, let’s think about politics in the context of the production cycle.

This concept is not my original thinking. It was explained to me a couple weeks ago during a presentation on the future of conservatism as a way to grasp our shortcomings and understand the gaps of our movement.

Let’s start with the basic manufacturing production cycle, which I’ve boiled down to three essential steps: 1) obtain raw materials, 2) turn them into a product, and 3) sell that product to consumers.

Now let’s apply those three steps in the context of producing change in politics:

1. Coming up with ideas. Academia plays an important role, albeit less significant today due the shortage of right-leaning academics. For example, think about the work of the powerhouse team of political economists at the University of Chicago (Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, George Stigler) and how their ideas on free-market economics began to take shape after World War II.
2. Turning ideas into public policies. This is role of think tanks -- and on the right there is no shortage of them. Think tanks existed prior to the 1970s, but mostly in the form of academic institutions without students (AEI, Brookings, CSIS). The Heritage Foundation (my employer) helped usher in a new approach. These new institutions (Cato, ATR, NTU) began working directly with policymakers to have an impact.
3. Implementing policies. Here is where activist groups, media and politicians fit. The left has a superior network of implementers who are effective at shaping a coherent message (MoveOn.org) and using communications channels (full-time bloggers) to sell it. We're about to see how a politician, Barack Obama, achieves this through governing. On the right, groups like Club for Growth and online communities such as RedState fit into this portion of the cycle. Rebuild the Party is an example of an implementer.

The point of this exercise is to understand the imbalance we face on the right. There is a serious deficiency of academics and implementers. We have an abundance of think tanks. Because we lack balance, the production cycle is thrown out of whack and we’re unable to produce change.

You see, ideas alone don’t produce change. And activist groups and bloggers savvy at marketing can’t produce change if they don’t have principled public policies to back up their message. We need a more integrated structure and balanced production cycle.

Promoted: Ed Feulner is the President of the Heritage Foundation. -Matt Moon

[Listen to Feulner and ask him questions today at 12:05 p.m. ET during the Conservative Bloggers' Briefing on BlogTalkRadio.]

Conservatives today need to get their mind right. And the first order of business is to stop equating the Republican Party with the conservative movement.

Our opponents on the left are happy to draw this false parallel. Before the 2006 elections, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne argued, “The decline of conservatism leaves a vacuum in American politics.” According to Dionne, the failures of the Republican Party were a failure of the conservative movement.

A couple of months ago, the left-wing American Prospect ran an article, "The Coming Conservative Crack-up." After describing what he saw as fatal Republican mistakes in the presidential campaign, author Paul Waldman concluded: "In other words, all the pillars that have held up conservatism for so long are crumbling." There it is again: If the GOP fails, conservatism must be crumbling.

Last spring the New Yorker ran a widely discussed article by George Packer, "The Fall of Conservatism: Have the Republicans Run Out of Ideas?" That title commits the same error: Republican failures are interpreted as the fall of conservatism.

I expect this from our opponents on the left. They will seize upon any pretext to announce the death of conservatism. They've been doing it for decades. But too many conservatives today are buying into that fallacy. That is a dangerous mistake, because it will sap your will to fight. If you believe the current sorry state of the GOP is a measure of the health of conservatism, you're bound to conclude that the conservative movement is done for.

If you want to see when conservatives were in trouble, go back 35 years to 1973, the year The Heritage Foundation set up shop. We were just a handful of people in a few rented rooms. At that time there were no cable outlets like Fox News. There was no conservative talk radio, because the Fairness Doctrine was still in effect. Al Gore hadn't invented the Internet, so there were no conservative bloggers exposing the biases of the mainstream media and delivering conservative commentary to millions of readers.

In those days, the conservative movement was in trouble. In fact, it barely existed. Today the Republican Party is in trouble -- serious trouble of its own making. But the conservative movement is not in decline. In addition to Fox News, hundreds of talk radio programs and scores of national magazines, conservatives have achieved a staggering presence on the Internet. Blogs like The Next Right have inspired the next generation of conservative leaders to plot the future.

Given the results of the election, it's obvious that Congress and the White House won't be receptive to many conservative ideas. So we'll be playing a great deal more defense. And there will be plenty of defense to play as liberals try to redistribute wealth, abolish the right of workers to cast secret ballots on union elections, nationalize health care, bankrupt energy companies that use coal -- the list just goes on and on. It will truly be a “target-rich environment.”

But there's good news here, too. Conservative are better equipped than ever before to play defense. We have analytical resources like Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis; we have a vibrant network of allied organizations that can be mobilized very quickly when policy issues come to a head; we have a virtual army of bloggers who can alert tens of millions of Americans literally within hours. And we have some of the best educated and most experienced policy experts in the world.

And while we are playing defense, we must also be educating the American public – both on first principles and on specific strategies to build an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity and civil society can flourish.

This isn't a time for despondency. It is a time for optimism.

This isn't a time to look backward with regret. We need to look forward with hope and purpose and commitment.

Now isn't the time to let political setbacks drain our resolve. It is the time to remember that progress doesn't follow a straight line. Setbacks are a natural part of gaining ground.

Bottom Line Up Front: No matter what America's short term future holds (a liberal White House, a liberal Congress, etc.), the long term future of the conservative movement depends on our ability to evolve in substance and unify around principles, not personalities.

Anybody who blogs on this site can list the reasons why they're an American conservative. In fact, many conservatives who don't blog, or those who don't even know what a blog is, can list their reasons with an adequate level of logic in their explanation. But not every conservative is called to be part of a conservative movement; or, more importantly, not every conservative is attracted to be a participant of one or more parts of the conservative movement.

The reason I was attracted to the conservative movement as a student at the beginning of this decade was because I felt that the Right, significantly more so than the Left, had a better combination of message and infrastructure that could consistently win elections and legislative battles. One of the reasons why? It seemed to me at the time that the Right was a lot more concerned with principles than personalities when it came to political battles, the old cliche being that "Democrats fall in love, and Republicans fall in line." The Right has lost this advantage, not only because of the Democrats have successfully evolved their infrastructure to fit modern times, as Jon Henke notes; conservatives have also become intellectually lazy. Case in point: our movement's continuing love affair with Ronald Reagan.

Last week my Heritage Foundation colleague Todd Thurman noticed something unusual with web traffic on Heritage.org. Search engines, primarily Google, were sending far more people to the site than usual -- and almost all of it to a research paper from 2005.

The reason? Sarah Palin.

Prior to Aug. 29, the day John McCain picked her as his running mate, Palin was mentioned by name only a handful of times on Heritage.org. So why did our web traffic spike?

Back in October 2005, Heritage senior research fellow Ron Utt wrote a paper on the Bridge to Nowhere, which at the time focused on Sen. Tom Coburn’s attempt to transfer the $223 million for the bridge in Ketchikan, Alaska, to a Hurricane Katrina-damaged bridge in Louisiana. It made no mention of Palin, who at the time, hadn't yet been elected.

Nearly three years later, Utt’s paper had become one of the most popular pages on the website -- all because of its excellent rank in the Google search results. If you don't think Google is shaping people's first impressions, think again.

Search-engine traffic began to increase the day Palin was picked, but the real spike happened Wednesday night when she mentioned the Bridge to Nowhere in her acceptance speech:

I told the Congress "thanks, but no thanks," for that Bridge to Nowhere.

If our state wanted a bridge, we'd build it ourselves

Inquiring minds clearly wanted to know what this Bridge to Nowhere was all about. The fact they were reading a paper written by the Heritage Foundation, as opposed to the New York Times, certainly bodes well for the right.

More than 95% of the people entering Heritage.org were new visitors. The average time spent on the Utt paper was more than 4 minutes, indicating people probably read most of it.

Palin’s popularity in online searches has been documented by Sarah Lai Stirland and Nate Silver. And fortunately, as the above example demonstrates, people are looking for information beyond the "Sarah Palin Bikini Photos."

At the Heritage Foundry, Conn Carroll makes a great point...

Ranking all industries by profit margin, oil and gas production is 60th. That means there are 59 other industries that are more profitable than the oil industry.

Exxon Mobil already pays more taxes than the bottom 50% of taxpayers and the company invested a record $25 billion in capital and exploration spending this year.

Read the whole thing for more responses to Nancy Pelosi's questions for Republicans.  Meanwhile, this letter by Don Boudreaux is also instructive...

Barack Obama wants to help consumers cope with high gasoline prices by giving consumers a $1,000 "emergency rebate"; he proposes to pay for this rebate by taxing oil-producers' "windfall profits" ...

Sen. Obama should learn arithmetic. Total profits of U.S. oil companies in 2007 were about $90 billion. If Uncle Sam took all of these profits and distributed them equally to all households in the U.S., each household would get $750. Note that this is ALL profit, not just that portion that Sen. Obama divines to be "windfall."

So suppose that the Senator determines (rather aggressively) that half of these profits are "windfall." That would mean that each household gets a mere $375. Even if Sen. Obama's plan excludes all households in the top half of the income distribution from receiving his "emergency rebate," his "windfall profits" tax would generate only enough funds to give each of the remaining households $750.

If you're in those other 59 higher-margin industries, get ready to chip in.  Meanwhile, as Mike Turk wrote on Twitter today, it's funny how the politicians are happy to suggest a "windfall profit tax" on corporations who make billions, but those politicians rarely suggest a "windfall revenue refunds" to taxpayers from a government making trillions.