Friday Open Thread

Welcome to your Friday open thread. I’m recovered from my jet lag, but I still feel like I lost a day, so it kind feels like Thursday. Happy Friday anyway!

Via Think Progress we learn that Senator Rand Paul is really worried about our safety. He is worried about the threat of legal immigrants:

It’s common to hear a senator express concerns about illegal immigration these days, but Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, is also concerned about legal immigration.

“We have 40,000 students coming to this country from all over the world,” he said. “Are they would-be attackers?”

Speaking at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on border patrol corruption, Mr. Paul on Thursday questioned whether the government was adequately screening and then keeping tabs on those who enter the country with student visas or as refugees.

Yes, libertarian hero Rand Paul doesn’t think we have a big enough police state tracking legal immigrants.

Tim Pawlenty gave a big economic speech this week which is being panned from the left and the right. It’s a mishmash of Reagan and Bush with magical growth thrown in and that’s what the Republicans are saying about it. NYT’s Ross Douthat:

Read the whole thing — and then read Tim Pawlenty’s big economic speech this week, which exemplifies the problem Ponnuru is diagnosing. Somewhere, buried in the middle of the address, there’s a line that speaks directly to the middle class: Pawlenty is talking about his plan for a rate-lowering, base-broadening tax reform, and he pitches this as a “one-third cut in the bottom rate … to allow younger — middle — and lower-income families to save and build wealth.” But you’ll search the rest of the speech in vain for anything else that’s addressed so explicitly to middle class concerns. Instead, most of Pawlenty’s agenda is a mix of “half-remembered bits of Reaganism,” transparent gimmicks (a balanced-budget amendment that caps spending at 18 percent of G.D.P.) and straightforward magical thinking, in which cutting taxes on business, investment and high-earners leads to 5 percent growth every year for a decade — something that neither the Reagan nor the Clinton booms came close to achieving — which in turn goes a long way toward closing the budget deficit, happily, before we have to start in on painful cuts. (I recommend reading Kevin Williamson on the folly of this kind of “just assume more growth!” approach to deficit cutting.) The speech has some of the Ryan budget’s political vulnerabilities, in a sense, without the Ryan’s budget’s guts: Whereas Ryan actually took the entitlement bull by the horns, Pawlenty seems to use his supply-side growth projections as a substitute for Medicare reform instead of adding them on as gravy. Reading it, you would think that the Bush economy was a huge, roaring success, since Pawlenty has little to say about the pocketbook issues that helped elect Barack Obama in the first place (wage stagnation, health care costs, etc.). And reading the excited reception that the speech is getting from movement organs, it’s clear that a great many conservatives have learned next to nothing from the trends that turned them out of office just a few short years ago.

I don’t agree with Douthat very often but he’s spot on here. The problem is that Republicans don’t have any new ideas for the economy. All their ideas deal with being Reagan/Bush ON STEROIDS plus extra-pure conservatism.