Archive for the ‘Economy’ Category

New effort to increase visas for tech workers as high as 300,000

Tuesday, January 29, 2013 by:Carolyn Lochhead
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The tech industry, one of the most powerful players in the immigration debate, threw down its marker Tuesday with a bipartisan stand-alone bill to increase H-1B visas for skilled workers from 65,000 to 115,000 with an escalator that could bring total visas to 300,000 a year.

Silicon Valley has been chafing under H-1B caps since the last comprehensive bill collapsed in 2006. Industry leaders have long argued that a green card should be stapled to every diploma earned by a foreign student in math or engineering, on the grounds that the U.S. is losing talented people educated in its own universities. Despite support from California House Democrats Anna Eshoo (Palo Alto) and Zoe Lofgren (San Jose), the effort has been stymied by stiff resistance from some U.S. tech workers and bipartisan opponents in Congress who say the industry just wants cheap labor.

The bill would also “allow dual intent for foreign students at U.S. colleges and universities to provide the certainty they need to ensure their future in the United States.” And it would exempt from the employment-based green card cap dependents of employment-based visa holders, U.S. STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) advanced degree holders, “persons with extraordinary ability” and “outstanding professors and researchers.”

This year’s model of an H1b visa increase is called I-Squared, or the Immigration Innovation Act, sponsored by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.).

The authors say the bill is critical to U.S. competitiveness in the global economy. In addition to increasing H-1B visas to 115,000 a year, the bill would create an automatic escalator “so that the cap can adjust – up or down – to the demands of the economy” with a total ceiling of 300,000.

Depending on how quickly the annual cap is reached, mini-escalators are included that would provide as many as 20,000 additional visas immediately. Additional sponsors include Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), John Hoeven (R-N.D.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), and Mark Warner (D-Va,).

Whether 2013 will be a replay of the immigration failure of 2006, we shall know by summer. The various factions are suiting up for well-worn roles. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., will be pushing for expanded temporary slots for the farm workers who are essential to California’s produce industry. The bigger bipartisan Senate framework introduced Monday by the Gang of Eight has placeholders for both tech and farm workers. Florida Republican Marco Rubio is one of the Gang and also a sponsor of the separate tech worker bill, giving it added juice.

Pew just released a new estimate on the total U.S. immigrant population, tallying a record 40.4 million in 2011, or 13 percent of the population, based on an analysis of Census data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.

UPDATE: Obama gave a plug to the tech side in Las Vegas Tuesday: “Right now, there are brilliant students from all over the world sitting in classrooms at our top universities. They’re earning degrees in the fields of the future, like engineering and computer science. But once they finish school, once they earn that diploma, there’s a good chance they’ll have to leave our country. Think about that.

“We’re giving them all the skills they need to figure that out, but then we’re going to turn around and tell them to start that business and create those jobs in China or India or Mexico or someplace else. That’s not how you grow new industries in America. That’s how you give new industries to our competitors. ”

Solar chief argues for natural gas exports

Thursday, January 10, 2013 by:Carolyn Lochhead
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With a huge fight heating up over whether to allow exports of U.S. natural gas, California solar executive Arno Harris argued that allowing exports would help the solar industry and reduce global carbon emissions.

The U.S. shale-gas boom (fracking) has up-ended global energy markets, lowering energy costs in the U.S. and promising to make the U.S. a net energy exporter, instead of a dependent on Middle East oil.

Cheap natural gas “is wiping coal off the map,” said Harris, CEO of San Francisco-based Recurrent Energy, which builds large-scale solar plants that sell electricity to utilities.

That’s a big plus for climate change, because natural gas has about half the carbon emissions of coal. But cheap natural gas also threatens to undercut green energy.

But Harris argued in an interview that solar costs are plummeting too, and that the industry can remain competitive.
“Everybody knows we’re in this cheap gas environment,” Harris said. “Gas-fired electricity today is probably five cents or six cents per kilowatt hour, wholesale.” But new solar plants that Recurrent Energy is building will sell power to utilities as low as seven cents a kilowatt hour, he said.

“There’s no longer this giant gap like there used to be a few years ago,” Harris said. “What Americans aren’t aware of is in fact how narrow that gap gotten, just as gas is at historically low prices, wind and solar are at historically low prices as well.”

Gas exports are a rare case where Republicans and the Obama administration agree. The Dept. of Energy set off a ruckus with a study saying gas exports would provide a “net economic benefit” to the United States. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, called foul. Democrats want to keep gas prices low. Environmentalists oppose exports because they oppose the fracking that allows the gas to be reached; they also fear that low gas prices will undercut cleaner energy.

Harris favors gas exports because they could help boost the price of gas, making solar and wind more competitive.

“I’m making the argument to my friends in the environmental and climate community that they shouldn’t make this knee jerk reaction about exported gas,” Harris said. “In fact export of gas is the best step we can take to bring order back to energy markets and raise the price a little bit.” Gas has gotten so cheap that utilities are under intense pressure to build gas turbines and decrease their use of renewables.

U.S. natural gas exports could also reduce U.S. exports of coal to Europe, Harris argued.

Paradoxically, the U.S. gas boom has encouraged coal exports to Europe, where U.S. coal is cheaper than natural gas from Russia, which controls most of the gas supply to Europe. The price shift has made it more difficult for European countries to meet their carbon emissions targets.

“That coal is still coming out of the ground, it’s just all going to Europe,” Harris said. “They are switching from Russian gas to American coal, so overall, even though we’re keeping the natural gas here, it is still resulting in a big uptick in carbon emissions because we’re still pulling all that coal out of the ground. We’re just not burning it here.”

Harris is on the board of a new trade group, AEE, or Advanced Energy Economy, which wants to add a pro-business voice to counteract forces who argue that alternative energy is not viable without subsidies. (Harris argued that fossil fuels are “all permanently subsidized in the permanent tax code” as opposed to temporary breaks for renewables.)

There’s a lot at stake in the coming fight over corporate tax reform, although more may be happening in state legislatures. California’s incentives, including its renewable portfolio standard that requires utilities to use green power, drew the solar industry to the state, and the AB 32 climate change law is being closely watched worldwide.

(National Journal argued that with AB 32 Arnold Schwarzenegger has done more to combat climate change than Al Gore or President Obama.)

New utility additions

Poll: Public demands deal — but opposes almost every deficit-reduction option

Tuesday, December 11, 2012 by:richard.dunham@chron.com (Richard Dunham)
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Deal-breakers

Wonder why we can’t get a deficit-reduction deal?

Well, look in the mirror.

A new McClatchy-Marist Poll highlights the dilemma of the so-called “fiscal cliff.” Seventy-one percent of Americans, the poll finds, say it’s important that Congress and the White House reach a deal to avoid automatic spending cuts and tax hikes triggered at the end of the year in the absence of an agreement.

But other than letting the George W. Bush-era tax cuts expire for American families earning more than $250,000, Americans oppose every other option to make major budget savings that was included in the poll.

There is a partisan divide. Republicans oppose every major option on the table, while Democrats and Independents strongly favor an expiration of Bush tax cuts for highest-income Americans (but nothing else).

“Most voters are worried about the fiscal cliff and think reaching a deal by month’s end matters,” says Dr. Lee M. Miringoff, Director of The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. “But, like Washington, voters are polarized along party lines on the question of whether to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire and for whom.”

Here’s our visualization of the data. What do you think?

Graphic by Rick Dunham / Hearst Newspapers

Newt Gingrich: There is no fiscal cliff

Friday, November 30, 2012 by:alex.yap@chron.com (Alex Yap)
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AP Photo

Newt Gingrich has occasionally been accused of living in his own world. Late Friday afternoon, the former House Speaker and presidential candidate posted a simple statement on Twitter that defies the wisdom of the Pundit Elite.

There is no fiscal cliff. So sayeth Newt.

Accompanying his tweet was a link to a recent blog post on Gingrich Productions, a Washington, D.C.-based multimedia production company featuring the work of Gingrich and his wife.

In his blog post, Gingrich alleges that the term was manufactured by Democrats and a left-leaning media to strike fear in the hearts of Americans. According to Gingrich, the struggle between both parties to find a compromise is in actuality a ploy for Republicans to “surrender their principles and appease the fiscal cliff Gods as defined by the left.”

Gingrich implores his colleagues not to concern themselves with phony and dishonest negotiations – the failure of which will be blamed on Republicans or success credited with the failure of Republican policies. Instead, Gingrich writes that House Republicans should propose solutions they truly stand behind.

Here is the blog in its full text:

How many times have you heard about the terrible, frightening, all-imposing “fiscal cliff” in the last few weeks?

Now we have a constant media drumbeat that Republicans will have to cave to President Obama’s demands or they will bear responsibility for going over the fiscal cliff.

President Obama has increased his demands for more taxes and more spending.

The Left, both the politicians and the news media, have created a mythical threat which can only be solved by Republicans surrendering their principles and abandoning their allies.

Yet the fiscal cliff is entirely a manufactured threat.

The same people who are now negotiating worked two years ago to create the mess which they say is such a threat.

At any point they wanted to, the President and the Congress could reduce the “cliff” to a series of foothills by breaking the problem into ten or twenty component parts.

They could then focus on solving each problem on its own merits and out in the open with public hearings, public understanding and public involvement.

Public understanding, however, would limit the level of waste, favoritism, and special interests which could be funded.

That is exactly the opposite of what the Washington establishment wants.

To get a unique insight into the current psychological process of chanting “fiscal cliff,” it is worth reading Tom Wolfe’s essay, “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” (1970).

Wolfe describes a San Francisco welfare office in which the senior management hides away on the second floor and hires young, underpaid people to catch the flak of the welfare recipients who show up angry and unhappy. It is the job of the junior staff to endure the hostility while protecting the calm and isolation of the senior leaders.

The local Samoan community had figured out the game and decided to change it. As Wolfe vividly describes, they would send very large Samoans with war clubs into the office. The flak catcher would start explaining why they couldn’t see the senior decision makers on the second floor. The Samoans would begin chanting and pounding their clubs on the color. After a couple minutes of threatening noises, the young welfare worker would decide they weren’t getting paid enough to endure the tension and the sense of threat. They would let the Samoans go upstairs to make their demands to the senior welfare officials.

This brief description does not do justice to the beautiful writing and keen insights Wolfe brings to this scene.

But hopefully it does paint a picture of what we are living through.

The political and news media Left have fashioned an artificial club called “the fiscal cliff”.

They are now standing on national television pounding their club and describing more and more horrifying outcomes if Republicans refuse to surrender their principles and appease the fiscal cliff Gods as defined by the Left.

Their goal is to panic the country so the people will then apply pressure to panic the Republicans.

Every time you hear “fiscal cliff” just remember it is an artificial invention of the Left.

Every time you hear a dire warning about the coming crisis remember the Samoans pounding their war clubs and chanting.

House Republicans should start legislating solutions they believe in, allow President Obama’s alternatives the honest chance to win a floor vote, and move forward.

The current negotiations are phony, dishonest, and calculated to produce either a failure to be blamed on the Republicans or a success defined by the collapse of the Republican policy positions.

Republicans would be far better off to refocus their energy on legislation, appropriation, oversight, and communication — and relegate negotiation to being fifth on their priority list.

Dianne Feinstein willing to look at mortgage interest deduction

Tuesday, November 27, 2012 by:Carolyn Lochhead
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Oakland Hills: The bigger the house, the bigger the deduction

Even as we watch the spectacle of Republicans throwing anti-tax activist Grover Norquist under the bus (it started the day after the election with House Speaker John Boehner putting revenue on the table), some Democrats are eying other sacred cows.

In a telephone interview before her re-election, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said she would support scaling back the mortgage interest deduction — the most revered bovine of all — to help reduce the deficit.

The California Democrat said Congress should use the Bowles Simpson framework to attack the fiscal cliff, giving the Finance Committee time “to work out which deductions” should be trimmed to raise revenue.

“For example, nobody is going to want to take the interest deduction from someone’s first home away,” Feinstein said. “Maybe second, third, fourth, fifth” house though. “You have to look carefully at things like child tax credits, the AMT (alternative minimum tax) has to get fixed, probably the R&D tax credit should continue, the doc fix (perennial roll back of slated cuts for Medicare providers).”

The immense popularity of the mortgage interest deduction among the hoi polloi is perplexing given the distribution of its benefits. These are heavily concentrated in a handful of pricey, heavily Democratic cities including San Francisco.

Here’s from our Sept. 4, 2011 story:

Just three metro areas – greater New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco – receive more than 75 percent of the subsidy, according to a 2004 study by economists Todd Sinai and Joseph Gyourko. Mortgaged homeowners in the San Francisco and San Jose region receive $4.6 billion a year from the McMansion tax break, according to a study by John Burns Real Estate Consulting in Irvine.

The tax break is available to anyone who borrows up to $1 million for a mortgage – including for a vacation home – or takes as much as $100,000 in a home equity loan. The bigger the mortgage and the higher one’s income, the bigger the deduction. A person in the top tax bracket of 35 percent who borrows $1 million can get a tax break of $17,500. That’s on top of a slew of other subsidies such as preferential capital gains taxes on the sale of a primary residence, deduction of local and state property taxes, and subsidies to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

By comparison, households earning less than $75,000 get less than $200 in savings from the deduction. More than three-fourths of taxpayers do not itemize, and so don’t claim the deduction at all. Those who rent or have paid off their mortgages, most of them seniors, get no benefit.

Californians receive 2 1/2 times as much in mortgage interest deductions as Texans, and have for decades. Residents of the Dakotas, Mississippi and Arkansas regularly receive among the lowest share of benefit. McAllen, Texas, mortgage holders get about $23 million a year from the deduction, but Petaluma and Santa Rosa homeowners get more than $300 million, according to the John Burns Consulting study

If you have a better idea, here’s a handy online way to set your own priorities. Here’s another, along with a wealth of ideas here and here.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, Republicans turn attention to immigration reform

Friday, November 16, 2012 by:summer.ballentine@chron.com (Summer Ballentine)
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It’s immigration, stupid.

GOP members are turning to immigration reform to upgrade a party image tainted by negative rhetoric toward Latinos this election.

Mitt Romney reopened fresh wounds when he said President Barack Obama was reelected because he bribed minority groups with “extraordinary gifts from the government.”

Comments like Romney’s get in the way of the conservative message and turn Latinos off to the GOP, said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the new chairman of the Republican Governor’s Association, during CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.”

“Republican candidates this year did a lot of damage to the brand,” Jindal said. ”As a party, we need to stop talking down to voters.”

WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 08: Latinos and immigrants participate in a rally on immigration reform in front of the White House on November 8, 2012 in Washington, DC. Immigrant rights organizations called on President Barack Obama to fulfill his promise of passing comprehensive immigration reform. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

So Jindal and other Republicans are taking a new look at immigration, and it’s nothing like the “self-deportation” approach that might have cost Romney the presidency.

Texas, home to 1,254 miles of the 1,900-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border and a staunch Republican state, is shedding GOP stereotypes and moving toward  immigration reform in an attempt to ward off a potential Democratic takeover as the Latino population grows.

The movement is being spearheaded by Brad Bailey, a restaurant owner and political activist from Houston (who also uses E-Verify to check the citizenship status of his employees). His proposed immigration solution includes a temporary guest worker program, securing the border and reforming Social Security cards to prevent counterfeiting.

Bailey said a guest worker program would help employers find workers willing to take the jobs American won’t and help boost the economy. That’s something that gets Republicans to listen, and they did.

The Republican Party of Texas adopted the temporary worker program in its platform in June. The national party followed in August during the convention in Tampa.

Bailey said he’s watched as disbelieving Tea Partiers and GOP women’s groups come around to the reforms. Skeptics slowly uncross their arms when he talks them through the nuts and bolts.

“It’s resonated with people,” Bailey said. “A lot of people want to see solutions. They don’t want to see government gridlock.”

Bailey said it’s an issue that needs to be solved across the aisle but has divided the parties as they battle for the Latino vote. There’s also a chance it might loose momentum as Congress deals with the impeding fiscal cliff.

But especially now, there still might be a chance Republicans can work with Democrats to help fix the broken immigration system, said Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico’s ambassador to the U.S.

“The time is ripe not only because of the lessons being…derived from what happened a week ago in the United States, but because this new lay of land and the political muscle of Latino vote,” Sarukhan said.

Sen. Coburn thinks we can trim Pentagon spending — like the beef jerky research and study of tweeters’ slang

Thursday, November 15, 2012 by:alex.yap@chron.com (Alex Yap)
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It’s no secret that our policy makers are scrambling to figure out how to slow down the massive growth of our national debt, which at the time of writing clocked in at $16.25 trillion and counting.

The Department of Everything

If you ask Republicans how they would balance the budget the answer is easy: Cut spending in every corner of big government – everywhere except defense.

But Tom Coburn, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, sees things a little differently from his colleagues on the right. He thinks the Department of Defense could save at least $67.9 billion over a decade by making cuts to DOD expenses that actually have very little to do with defense.

Think beef jerky. And red balloons. And peace through fish. Yes, fish.

On Thursday, Coburn released a report titled “The Department of Everything,” which looks at the “non-defense” spending that he says could save taxpayer dollars and reduce our deficit “without cutting any Army brigade combat teams, Navy combat ships, or Air Force fighter squadrons.”

The oversight report found $6 billion that went to non-military research and development, $15.2 billion went to education, $700 million went to alternative energy, $9 billion to grocery stores, and $37 billion to overhead, support and supply services.

But the strangest findings of the report come from the Pentagon’s expenses in research and development.

“The federal government will spend about $138.9 billion on research and development in 2012,” the report states. “The Department of Defense (DOD) will spend nearly $73 billion, which is more than the combined total of every other federal agency and department.”

Coburn isn’t convinced that we’re spending our money wisely, and after taking a look at the report, we aren’t either.

Here’s a look at some of the kookier places we’re sending our funds.

‘Koo’ Use of Slang in Twitter Messages Reveals ‘Suttin’

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Office of Naval Research funded an analysis of 380,000 tweets by 9,500 Twitter users in March 2010. Using the GPS locations of the tweets, researchers at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science looked at regional slang and dialects.

Here is what they found:

“Postings on Twitter reflect some well-known regionalisms, such as Southerners’ ‘y’all,’ and Pittsburghers’ ‘yinz,’ and the usual regional divides in references to soda, pop and Coke,” according to the study. “In northern California, something that’s cool is ‘koo’ in tweets, while in southern California, it’s ‘coo.’ In many cities, something is ‘sumthin,’ but tweets in New York City favor ‘suttin.’ While many of us might complain in tweets of being ‘very’ tired, people in northern California tend to be ‘hella’ tired.”

Coburn argues in his report that although this information may be interesting to linguists, the study of slang and dialect by the Pentagon is a waste of taxpayer dollars.

Pentagon Researchers Study Fish to Determine if Ignorance Can Save Democracy

Yes, you read that right. Researchers at the Pentagon and Princeton are studying the ignorance of fish in order to save our highly polarized nation.

The study looked at the color preferences of golden shiner fish to determine whether animals with “no prior knowledge or strong feelings on a situation’s outcome” will side with the majority or minority opinion.

They trained fish to swim towards a blue target while a “strongly ‘opinionated’ minority group” “driven by a natural attraction to the color yellow.”

The results found that the minority group won when uninformed individuals were not present, but lost when untrained fish added to the experiment sided more consistently with the trained majority. In other words, undecided voters are more likely to be swayed by the majority opinion of their community than a more outspoken minority.

In bold-faced type, Coburn writes:

“How is this study comparing fish to democracy and politics possibly linked to the defense of this nation? How can this study be considered as necessary to help our military fight and win the nation’s wars?”

Pentagon Raids Weapons Program to Develop Beef Jerky Roll-ups

The Foreign Comparative Testing program is cooking up a new brand of beef jerky that “will shock and awe your taste buds,” Coburn writes.

The FCT has spent over $1.5 million on its jerky which the Department of Defense describes as “a meat roll-up that can be consumed as a savory snack or used as a filling for a shelf stable sandwich.”

This is all well and good, but the Oklahoman points out that the FCT’s funding is supposed to go towards testing weapons and technologies for our soldiers.

DOD Hunts Ten Red Balloons

Playing off of the 1982 Nena song, “99 Red Balloons,” the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency hosted a Red Balloon Challenge, a techno-treasure hunt during which participating teams explored “how the Internet and social networking can be used to solve a distributed, time-critical, geo-location problem.”

DARPA awarded $40,000 to the first team to find one of 10 red balloons hidden across the country.
The English version of the song is about two children who release 99 red balloons into the air, sending governments into red alert and triggering a nuclear war.

In a statement, Coburn said:

“I believe in peace through strength but we cannot be strong militarily unless we are strong economically. And we cannot be strong economically if we treat politically-sensitive areas of the budget as sacrosanct. At a time when our own military leaders are calling our debt our greatest national security threat we need to look at every area of the budget for potential savings. No part of the budget can be taken off the table. Achieving peace through strength, and getting our debt under control, must involve refocusing the Pentagon on its core mission.”

According to Coburn’s 73 page report, other areas of research and development include robots as playmates for children, the color of the first bird’s feathers, and a mobile app to tell users when to take their next coffee break.

Read the full report here.

Conservatives — at least a few — declare war on the Republican Party

Wednesday, November 14, 2012 by:alex.yap@chron.com (Alex Yap)
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The political chasm is widening. A line has been drawn between two different ideologies, but not between Republicans and Democrats. This gap is between the Republicans and conservatives.

Ed Meese and Mark Levin discuss the impact of the election on conservative politicians. (Alex Yap/Hearst Newspapers)

“I think the Republican Party is devouring the conservative movement,” said radio host and conservative commentator, Mark Levin on Wednesday.

Levin sat down with former Attorney General Edwin Meese III at the Heritage Foundation to discuss the impact election mean for conservative politicians. The discussion was the final installation in the Heritage Foundation’s “Preserve the Constitution” series.

Since Barack Obama was re-elected last week, high profile members of the Republican Party have called for a new way to communicate. But Levin and other conservatives say that the problem is not poor communication — it’s establishment Republicans.

Doris Eisen was a registered Democrat for 50 years. She grew disillusioned with the party and believes the direction of the country under Obama is destructive, but she’s not a Republican either – she’s a conservative.

“It’s time for the old bulls to get out of the way,” Levin said. “I can’t even tell you what the Republican Party stands for.”

Levin’s disdain for the party doesn’t stop with two failed presidential elections. He said Republican politicians are “good at clawing their way to the top” but not at enforcing conservative policies when they get there.

“The three branches aren’t checking and balancing, they’re working with each other,” Levin said. “The moderates and RINOs (Republicans in name only) are trying to clean out the election.”

Sonny Branham, a professor of political science at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, agreed, saying Republicans are quick to cut down Tea Party or Libertarian candidates who pose challenges to their incumbency.

GOP elected officials “lean more to the right for their political survival” than to actually uphold conservative values, Branham told Hearst Newspapers after the event.

“[Constitutional conservatives] need to engage otherwise the Republican Party will go the way of the Whig,” Levin said.

Levin said conservatives need to embrace the Tea Party and Libertarian movements as the hope for the future.

Noting disparities between the two parties’ abilities to turn out votes, Levin called the low Republican turnout a failure to communicate about the issues.

“It was ludicrous that the American people don’t have enough education about what’s at stake,” said Nancy Griffin, a member of the Chevy Chase Women’s Republican Club who also attended the discussion.

“The country that I love is being taken from me,” said Eisen. “The ignorance of the people is going to imprison them.”

“Too many students in my estimation are interested in social media as opposed to social studies,” Branham said. “My students are not as aware as they should be of the challenges that face them.”

When Meese asked how the conservative movement could attract more of the youth vote, Levin said the “very, very difficult, complex problem” lies with the influence of public school and Hollywood on young voters to think “more emotional than cerebral.”

“Kids coming out of puberty – which liberals never do – don’t like authority,” Levin said. “Think of big government that way.”

Levin suggested that an anti-authority attitude could be a “very powerful argument” to engage conservative students.

Courtney Mattison, a communications and political science student at Johnson State College, agreed. She said she didn’t understand why more of her peers didn’t turn out for Romney in this year’s election.

Mattison said the past four years have been grim for the U.S. economy, and thinking about the election graduating into an Obama economy is “really depressing.”

She said conservatives politicians should “tap into the rebellious anti-authority attitude that college students feel and tie it to liberty.”

Mattison, who was the communications director for the Rutland County GOP, is “completely uncertain” about what she wants to do when she graduates in May.

Levin is also a lawyer and author of the books, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America, Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, and Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America.

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