http://teamdemint.com/ en-us Sat, 19 May 2012 10:32:42 -0400 http://teamdemint.com/site/post/2270/demint-take-politics-out-of-tariff-rules Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:33:52 -0400 CNN | April 25, 2012

By Jim DeMint

(CNN) — If you have lived a happy, normal, American life, you have probably never heard of something so tedious and alien as a Miscellaneous Tariff Bill. I envy you. But strange as it sounds, the obscure MTB is at the heart of a very small — but very significant — fight for American freedom.

So, what is an MTB? It works like this.

Every day, you and I use materials that come from other countries. From umbrellas to medicines to cars, even if they are made in the USA, their plastics and chemicals and other raw components are often imported.

Frequently, these raw materials are taxed at the border with federal tariffs, even if such products aren't produced in the United States and therefore must be imported.

And so, every year, hundreds of American companies ask Washington for relief from one or another tariff in the form of a "duty suspension" - essentially a waiver on the tariff. These suspensions can typically save an American company hundreds of thousands of dollars that in turn allows them to keep more Americans employed, while giving consumers access to less expensive, higher quality products we might otherwise go without.

Each particular duty suspension must first be introduced as its own bill. They all get referred to the same congressional committees, which then pass them along to the International Trade Commission, which vets the merits of the application and sends back the approved ones packaged into — you guessed it — a Miscellaneous Tariff Bill, which passes the House and Senate without any objection from anyone.

It's a bipartisan no-brainer.

Except, well, look at that first step again. Each individual tariff suspension has to be turned into a special bill and introduced by the company's representative or senator. Why? Why can't companies just petition the International Trade Commission directly, since they're the agency that reviews the applications anyway?

I mean, who could possibly benefit from a process whereby nonpolitical companies, rightly focused on their customers and products, are forced by Congress to hire a lobbyist and pony up cash for re-election campaigns in order to get something the law says they deserve? Who, indeed?

The process is worse than unfair and inefficient; it's fundamentally un-republican and un-democratic.

If an application to suspend a tariff has merit, small businesses shouldn't be forced to grovel and kiss the ring of their own public servant to get it suspended.

This is why this bad process has been treated just like spending earmarks under House and Senate rules for years and why Republicans in the House and Senate included limited tariff benefits as part of the earmark ban after 2010 elections.

Some want to restart this part of the political favor factory and hope Americans don't notice Republicans breaking their own earmark ban, and others want to redefine earmarks to create a loophole for tariff suspensions. But the whole purpose of the earmark ban was to change the way we do business, not to change the definitions and rules of earmarks to pretend bad behavior is suddenly alright.

And we wonder why Congress's approval rating is in the single digits.

That's why I have introduced bipartisan legislation to end this odious practice and reform the MTB process once and for all. The bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, streamlines the MTB process by allowing manufacturers to petition the trade commission directly.

Under our reformed process, once these requests have been properly vetted, the trade commission can make its recommendations to Congress. Congress would retain its authority over trade policy and the ability to assist constituent companies with the MTB process, while the time and money saved from cutting out the lobbying process will benefit small businesses and their consumers, to say nothing of disinfecting the ugly, quasi-feudalism of the current pay-to-play racket.

Our legislation would level the playing field for small businesses. As it is, the companies that obtain duty suspensions are too often those that can afford the most expensive, well-connected lobbyists. Our proposal allows every business to bring its case before a group of independent commissioners at the trade commission right from the start; no longer will large corporations be able to buy their way to the front of the line.

Cleaning up bureaucracy and giving small businesses a fair shake in Washington is just one small step toward helping a few more citizens to go back to enjoying a happier and more normal American life.

Jim DeMint, a Republican, is a U.S. senator representing South Carolina.]]> http://teamdemint.com/site/post/2267/obamacares-4-trillion-tax-will-hit-middle-class Mon, 16 Apr 2012 04:45:57 -0400 INVESTORS | April 16, 2012

ObamaCare's $4 trillion Tax Will Hit Middle Class

By SEN. JIM DEMINT

Recent news has provided Americans a steady stream of new reasons to support a full repeal of President Obama's controversial health care takeover.

Just in the last few months, we've seen the administration impose an unprecedented mandate that all employers, even religious schools and hospitals, pay for employees' abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception.

We have seen the Congressional Budget Office further expose the true costs of ObamaCare, raising estimates of spending on insurance subsidies by $51 billion, and admitting that millions more Americans will lose their employer coverage to get dumped into ObamaCare's brave new insurance world.

And of course, last month we heard the administration's lawyers hem and haw at oral arguments before the Supreme Court, further undermining ObamaCare's already dubious constitutionality.

But if those weren't reason enough to support the full repeal of ObamaCare by Congress and a new president, Happy Tax Day! I've got four trillion more of them for you.

You probably already know that ObamaCare is full of what Democrats these days call "revenue enhancements" — job-killing tax increases on everything they can think of to pay for their health care takeover.

What you might not know is that the largest tax increases in the ObamaCare legislation are not indexed for inflation.

For example, the "high-earners" surtax hits individuals who make more than $200,000, and couples who earn more than $250,000. People making that much will comprise about 3% of the country in 2013.

But as time goes by, and inflation drives up income, today's "high-earner" threshold will "medium" earners and, eventually, "almost everyone" earners.

According to the nonpartisan Medicare actuary, by 2080, ObamaCare's tax on high earners will hit 79% of American taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the 40% tax on high cost health plans, the so-called "Cadillac health plans," was linked to general inflation, instead of the much higher inflation rate in the health care sector.

So it won't be long before the president's "Cadillac" tax starts hitting Americans with "Honda" insurance. (A cynic might even wonder if this is why the tax won't kick in until 2018, long after the end of Obama's presumed second term.)

According to the CBO, all of the ObamaCare tax hikes will raise taxes by about 0.7% of gross domestic product by 2021. As more and more Americans sneak into the president's definition of "high earner," by 2035, it will be 1.2% of GDP, and rise from there.

Between now and 2035, that comes out to more than $4 trillion — that's what happens when taxes, aimed at the rich, inevitably hit the middle class.

The pain from ObamaCare taxes is already being felt.

Medical device manufacturers, whose products ObamaCare slaps with a special tax, are already laying off workers. Even businesses in industries unconnected to the health care sector are holding back.

As an analyst at UBS put it, ObamaCare's burdens are already "arguably the biggest impediment to hiring, particularly hiring of less skilled workers."

Consider that $4 trillion in new taxes between now and 2035 comes out to $169 billion taken out of the private economy every year.

Since it costs businesses about $63,000 to create one middle class job, ObamaCare is already going to cost Americans 2.7 million lost jobs per year.

The total comes out to $3,300 in higher taxes for the average family, on top of the $2,400 increase in health insurance premiums (which the president promised would actually drop by $2,500).

How do you solve a problem like ObamaCare? Simple: you don't. Its out-of-control costs will either destroy our health care system, or bankrupt our country — and, eventually, both.

This is a big part of why the public opposed ObamaCare in 2010, why they want the Supreme Court to overturn in and why they want Congress to repeal it.

For all the hidden taxes, for all the exploding spending projections, for all the untold dollars and freedoms that will be lost under government-run health care, for all the unknown unknowns, the American people actually seem to know exactly what ObamaCare will always cost them: more.

DeMint, U.S. senator from South Carolina, sits on Congress' Joint Economic Committee.]]> http://teamdemint.com/site/post/2263/demint-flexibility-to-do-what Thu, 29 Mar 2012 17:43:33 -0400 NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE | The Corner

March 29, 2012

By Jim DeMint

As you may have heard, earlier this week President Obama was caught on an open mike asking outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and by extension, President-elect Vladimir Putin, for “space” on “on all these issues, but particularly missile defense” because “after my election I have more flexibility.” The scandal isn’t really the embarrassing gaffe itself — or the equally embarrassing subsequent endorsement of his reelection by Pravda — but the true substance behind it.

After all, the character of the president’s words was nothing new. President Obama has been caught before voicing his condescending contempt for his constitutional accountability to an American public he clearly sees as an obstacle to progress. The moment with Medvedev was a bit rushed, but had he more time, no doubt the president might have gone on at length about Americans clinging to our guns and religion, our 72-degree thermostats, how our doctors perform unnecessary surgeries on unsuspecting patients, how our law-enforcement officers often act “stupidly,” and how much easier life would be if he were a dictator like the president of China.

The president says he looks forward to greater flexibility in a second term.

What the president misunderstands — or perhaps, simply dislikes — is that under our Constitution, the president is not supposed to feel especially flexible: That’s the whole point of a limited government. James Madison made clear in the debates of the Constitutional Convention and in the Federalist Papers that federal officials — especially those of an activist bent — are supposed to feel very, very constrained. In a constitutional republic, the government’s freedom is constrained by the people, to protect us from things being other way around.

And even more to the point, what exactly does the president think he needs “flexibility” to do?

In the last three years, Barack Obama has added more money to the national debt than any president in history. He has run three consecutive trillion-dollar deficits, the first three the world has ever seen. His signature domestic policy achievement was an unprecedented, unconstitutional power grab that may soon be struck down by the Supreme Court.

He engineered or oversaw unprecedented federal takeovers of the American auto industry, our financial system, our home mortgage industry, the health-care system, the student-loan industry, and the education system, and attempted a takeover of the energy system. He has run the federal government without a budget for three years. In foreign policy, he appeased anti-American rivals by undermining democratic allies in Israel, Honduras, and Eastern Europe.

This record, breathtaking in its hubris and scope, has been the work of Barack Obama, constrained. What could he possibly have in mind if given the “flexibility” that comes with a second term?

Ending missile defense? Sounds like it. Middle-class tax hikes? They’re already scheduled. Obamacare II? Stimulus III? Cap-and-Trade Redux? Amnesty? What will it mean for Russia’s neighbors? For Israel? For gasoline prices? For gay marriage? For religious liberty? For Iranian nukes? For the budget? For the strength of the dollar?

What even comes after trillion?

President Obama has, in word and deed, spent three years making clear that he brooks no formal limitation on his executive power. His only limiting principle, if you can even call it that, has been public opinion — “my election,” as he put it to Medvedev. Once reelected, finally loosed from even that informal, self-imposed check on his ambition, what would the suddenly “flexible” President Obama suddenly believe himself free to do?

Of course, the president himself moved quickly to clarify his comments to Medvedev, promising that he didn’t mean what he clearly meant. Apparently, he wants us to believe his intent is to mislead the Russians, not the American people.

But then again, this is the same man who once promised a “net cut” in federal spending, said he opposed the individual health-care mandate, promised to close Guantanamo, promised if you liked your health care you could keep it, promised that conscience rights would be protected under Obamacare, and on and on.

The president’s open-mike gaffe does not prove anything we didn’t already know. Mr. Obama does not feel bound either by his own past words or the Constitution — only by the stubborn, retrograde political ideas of the benighted voters he needs to fool in order to win his second, liberated, term.

Barack Obama may not be the first American president to look down on his countrymen, but he seems at least to be the worst at trying to hide it.

The chilling question is: What happens if he wins a second term, and no longer has to try?

— Jim DeMint is a Republican senator from South Carolina.]]> http://teamdemint.com/site/post/2257/obamacare-versus-individual-freedom Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:22:27 -0500 WASHINGTON EXAMINER
February 22, 2012

By Jim DeMint

President Obama’s new mandate requiring all employers to purchase insurance coverage for their employees that includes abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception is an outrage, of course.

But what kind of outrage is it? Most of the public outcry has understandably centered around the mandate’s assault on religious liberty.

The mandate forces every businessman or non-profit executive with religious objections to these products to buy them anyway, or pay a fine.

The mandate is unconstitutional, for its violation of the First Amendment’s “free exercise” clause. It is also illegal, for its violation of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Some of the outrage has been rightly directed specifically at the president, as both the mandate and the underlying law, ObamaCare, are his doing.

Indeed, many pro-life citizens and members of Congress only supported ObamaCare’s passage because the president assured them that conscience rights would be protected. Thus the mandate is also a personal betrayal.

And some of the outrage is more practical. The Obama administration’s mathematically impossible assertion that abortion drugs, sterilization and contraception will somehow now simply be “free,” and thus not paid for by morally opposed insurance customers, suggests the president believes in magic.

All of these affronts to the rights and intelligence of the American people are enough to warrant the criticism the new mandate has invited.

The violation of conscience rights is simultaneously unconstitutional, illegal, and ridiculous – any one of which are sufficient grounds for its immediate rescission.

Yet, it is still not our true cause of concern. Ultimately, the character and ideology of the president, and the particular constitutional provisions being trampled by this one mandate are incidental, compared to the manifest threat to freedom intrinsic to ObamaCare itself.

The problem is not how the federal government is abusing its new power in this instance, but that the government – indeed, a single person – suddenly wields this power at all.

To many, the anti-religious freedom mandate seems like the beginning of a slippery slope. Today, the government forces us to buy abortion pills – tomorrow they may force us to pay for euthanasia, or deny expensive treatments to the very weak or very old.

However, just as frightening as the proverbial slippery slope is the proverbial see-saw. If a pro-choice liberal president can force insurance companies to cover the morning after pill, could a pro-life conservative president force them not to?

Could an anti-smoking president deny coverage for lung disease? Could a president who embraced new age, alternative medicine restrict coverage for traditional medical treatments?

The danger is not that they would, but, under ObamaCare, that they could. That ObamaCare turns the temporary executive of one branch of a limited government into an emperor with absolute power over one-sixth of our economy, and the most intimate of personal life decisions.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “As I would not be a slave, I would not be a master.” What he meant was that if we ourselves wish to live free of oppression, we have a responsibility not to oppress others.

In the same way, if you don’t want government to coerce your health care choices, you should take great pains not to let government coerce anyone else’s. Health insurance choices should be as diverse as we are.

But that kind of freedom and diversity is prohibited under ObamaCare. What this latest Obamacare mandate reveals is that this law is fundamentally inconsistent with liberty.

The question is, which is more important? Is ObamaCare a threat to freedom? Or is freedom a threat to ObamaCare?

The controversy over this particular consequence of Washington’s health care takeover will soon be followed by another, and another, and another– the next mandate, the next rationing, the next restriction, the next loss of liberty.

There will be no rest – ever – from these battles so long as ObamaCare remains on the books. Regardless of their outcomes, these battles by definition cannot be won.

All Americans – liberal or conservative, pro-life or pro-choice, devout or secular – must recognize that these skirmishes are a trap, a distraction.

A truly free people would never have them at all. They are like arguments over the silverware pattern, while our house is burning down.

The threat to our constitution, our God-given rights, and your privacy is not in the government officials who have power over our health care choices. The real threat is in the poisonous law that gives them that power in the first place.

This controversy has taught us one thing: The government takeover of health care is not merely imperfect, it is essentially corrosive. It cannot be tweaked.

It cannot be improved on the margins. It cannot be fixed. ObamaCare is a cancer, and every last word of it must be repealed.

Sen. Jim DeMint is a South Carolina Republican.]]> http://teamdemint.com/site/post/2241/ready-for-another-rotten-highway-bill Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:52:38 -0500 WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 15, 2012

Ready for Another Rotten Highway Bill?

By JIM DEMINT

The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that our national debt could nearly double over the next 10 years — to an astounding $29.4 trillion from $15 trillion today — so you might think Washington would be looking to stop the fiscal train wreck. You'd be wrong.

Despite all the hyperventilating about a tea party takeover in Congress, the sad truth is that in 2011 Congress increased spending from the year before, raised the debt limit by $2 trillion, and funded ObamaCare.

The highway bill is the latest example of Washington's bipartisan addiction to big spending. Every six years, Congress passes a spending bill that divvies up the revenues from the federal gas tax and other highway user fees. The money goes into an account called the Highway Trust Fund, and for decades Congress has promised not to spend more on roads and bridges than is available in the trust fund.

But the trust fund has run dry thanks to reckless spending and wasteful earmarks, so Congress bailed out the highway program — to the total tune of about $35 billion — in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Circulating now are two competing highway bills that both increase spending and force new multibillion-dollar bailouts. The Senate bill spends $109 billion over two years and includes a $12 billion bailout of the trust fund. The House bill spends $260 billion over five years and includes a $50 billion bailout. Is this bipartisan spending spree what voters asked for in 2010?

A serious highway bill would at least live within the means of the highway trust fund. But Republicans and Democrats have surrendered to the status quo of unsustainable spending.

The only difference between the House and Senate bills is where the bailout funds come from. The Senate bill pays for the bailout with a bunch of accounting gimmicks that will lead to a larger national debt and higher taxes. The House, for its part, bases its bailout plans on the hope that Democrats will allow us to pursue oil and gas exploration in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), offshore and in the shale of the Midwest.

While expanding our domestic energy resources is vital, it would be unacceptable to use the revenues from new exploration to grow government and not to pay down the national debt. It's a textbook example of attaching good policy to a bad spending bill so that conservatives will hold their noses and vote for it.

Here's a radical idea: Why not pay for new spending by actually cutting wasteful spending in other areas? It's no wonder our country is near fiscal ruin when the option of cutting spending is not even being considered.

It's also inexcusable that neither bill repeals the wasteful and corrupt Davis-Bacon Act, which forces the government to pay labor-union wages for federal construction projects. Davis-Bacon harms workers who choose not to join unions, and it needlessly raises costs to taxpayers.

According to the Heritage Foundation, Davis-Bacon cost taxpayers nearly $11 billion in 2011 — money that should be going to fix bridges, not line the pockets of union bosses. It's no wonder Democrats support Davis-Bacon: It's a congressionally mandated kickback to unions that funnels millions to Democratic campaigns every year. But why do Republicans lack the courage to stand up against wasteful regulations and spending?

Our nation's fiscal situation is perilous. At $15.3 trillion, our national debt (as measured by the Treasury Department) has already overtaken our national economy, which at the end of 2011 came in at $14.95 trillion (according to the Congressional Budget Office). Bipartisan compromises on spending got us into this mess, and we'll never get out of it if Republicans don't offer a fiscally responsible alternative to the out-of-control spending that Democrats endorse.

We should devolve the federal highway program from Washington to the states. We can dramatically cut the federal gas tax to a few pennies, which would be enough to fund the limited number of highway programs that serve a clear national purpose.

In return, states could adjust their state gas taxes and make their own construction and repair decisions without costly Davis-Bacon regulations and without having to funnel the money through Washington's wasteful bureaucracy and self-serving politicians.

In order to avert a fiscal catastrophe in the near future, we're going to have to get a lot more serious about curtailing unnecessary federal spending. These highway bills — both Democrat and Republican — are anything but serious.

Mr. DeMint is a Republican senator from South Carolina.]]>