Jan 23, 2012
Gingrich’s Ideas Collapse Under Weight of Logic: Ramesh Ponnuru
By Ramesh Ponnuru
Bloomberg.com
Even Newt Gingrich’s toughest critics concede that the former speaker of the House, now enjoying his second comeback in the Republican presidential race, is a font of ideas.
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Take Social Security. Gingrich correctly labels as a “fantasy” the notion that it can “survive without any structural reforms.” He advocates allowing people to invest some of the funds they currently submit to Social Security in “personal accounts.” Under the right circumstances, personal accounts can be a useful way of setting aside money today for future retirements -- something the government has not been good at -- and of democratizing capital ownership.
The Gingrich Twist
But then comes the Gingrich twist: His plan guarantees that if people’s investments fail, they will still get all the benefits that current law promises them. How can the government save money while giving everyone their promised benefits and making up unlucky or incompetent investors’ shortfalls? It can’t. And won’t those shortfalls be larger if people know they can’t lose?
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On immigration, too, Gingrich starts with a set of sensible premises. We need to be able to enforce our immigration laws, but “the American people are not heartless” and will not deport illegal immigrants who have spent years putting down roots here. Gingrich puts forward two distinctive solutions. One is a temporary work program proposed by the Vernon K. Krieble Foundation to satisfy businesses’ demand for labor. But there’s a problem with temporary work programs: What if their participants have kids while they are here?
Current law treats those children as citizens. To enforce the time limit on the program, the government has three options: tear apart families; eject citizens; or change the law to strip those kids of citizenship. The foundation picks Option 3. Gingrich is silent about which he would pick, or how he would do any of this without heartlessness.
Gingrich’s second immigration idea is to establish local community boards to decide which illegal immigrants should stay and which should go. His website says Congress must set “understandable, clear, objective legal standards that will be applied equally.” If some boards decide to offer sanctuary to everyone and others are tough, or if some boards practice blatant discrimination, will there be another layer of bureaucracy to review their decisions? Who is going to perform the millions of background checks that Gingrich says must be done before the boards review applications? To describe how unserious this proposal is requires using Gingrich’s favorite adverbs: truly, profoundly, fundamentally.
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More: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-24/gingrich-s-ideas-collapse-under-weight-of-logic-ramesh-ponnuru.html
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