Richard J Grant

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, October 31, 2010 Health-care bill and others have given birth to new regulations by Richard J. Grant When the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, famously let slip, “But we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it,” she was referring to the health care reform bill of March 2010. She wasn't kidding. The bill had become increasingly unpopular with the American people, so she found it necessary to logroll a coalition by adding big scoops of political sweeteners to buy the support of individual senators and congressmen. The bill was passed with great urgency but little understanding. It was like a cluster bomb, full of unpleasant surprises. The final bill was so long and complicated that, now seven months later, even its supporters are expressing surprise as insurance companies raise health-care premiums and eliminate particular categories of coverage. These consequences might have been unintended, but they we...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, October 24, 2010 Tension between government, voters is nothing new by Richard J. Grant Just when our epoch seemed to be lost in vacuous notions of “hope and change,” we have suddenly noticed that some things are permanent. The laws of nature, which include the laws of human action, seem to persist no matter how well or poorly we understand them. And recent political events have arisen that remind us of our cultural and political inheritance and of the chain of responsibility that has been passed to us by previous generations. It is for us to build upon and to preserve for our descendents. The malaise in our nation is more than economic. What we today call the tea party movement is, like the Boston Tea Party of 1773, an act of open defiance by a people against what they see to be their government’s disrespect for, and encroachment upon, their rightful liberties. That original tea party gave rise to events that provided the constitutionally limited d...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, October 17, 2010 Reaganomics led to an economic turnaround By Richard J. Grant When judging the results of successive U.S. governments, it is common to focus on the simple matter of who the president was. But this neglects the importance of Congress in all legislative matters. We cannot understand the actions or the results of an administration without examining both its intentions and the context in which it served. That context includes not only the composition of the contemporary Congress, but also the cumulative legacy of previous governments as well as the economic and strategic conditions in the contemporary world. Strategies and ideologies manifest differently in different contexts. It is common, for example, to note the increases in the federal budget deficit during the years of the Reagan administration. Shallow analysts look at this one statistic and dismiss “Reaganomics” as a failure. They fail to note that the national debt had been tre...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, October 10, 2010 Paying for government is burdensome to taxpayers by Richard J. Grant To direct our attention to the cost of government, the Framers of the U.S. Constitution included in Article I, Section 9 that “a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” In compliance with this requirement, government agencies provide regular reports and projections of federal revenue and expenditures. The recent content of these reports, such as budget deficits reaching $1.4 trillion, which is about 40 percent of the budget, suggests that our government should try harder to comply with the other parts of the Constitution. There are also costs of government that go beyond narrow fiscal matters. The expanding federal regulatory structure has costs that few perceive. The best recent study of the federal regulatory burden is “The Impact of Regulatory Costs on Small Firms,” which was prod...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, October 3, 2010 Democrats’ election strategy is to evade responsibility by Richard J. Grant House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., has found a way to blame President George W. Bush for future tax increases. He says that because President Bush’s tax-rate cuts were not permanent, but were set to expire at the end of 2010, it is actually President Bush who is responsible for the coming tax increases. The trouble with Hoyer’s attempt at logic is that President Bush has been retired for almost two years and the Democrats have all the power they need to prevent the tax rates from rising at the end of the year. They have that power now. They are supposedly in charge right now. But with an election looming – and their ideology clashing with economic reality and voter sentiment – the responsibility is too much for them to handle. So they evade it. Like the Ancient Mariner who shot the albatross, Democrats have used their majorities during the current ses...