OnCenter

Broken

2012-01-26T15:45:00.002-05:00

In his best-selling in-depth biography of Steve Jobs, Apple’s iconoclastic CEO, Walter Issacson notes that Job’s always spoke his mind to and about both friends and enemies. Based on the biography, I think it’s fair to state that Job’s was an ideological friend of Barack Obama. Yet, after conversations with the President, Job’s—a man who accomplished great things—is quoted as saying, “"the president is very smart. But he kept explaining to us reasons why things can't get done."

That’s what President Obama did in his recent State of the Union speech (and at virtually every campaign stop as he barnstormed important swing states afterward). He parrots the public's frustration by saying “Washington is broken.” But the President implies that somehow he is removed from the wreckage, that he is blameless for the gridlock, the bickering, and the hyper-partisan atmosphere. That, in itself, is astonishing. He is, after all, President—the most powerful person in Washington. If the town and it politics are broken, the buck must stop with him. If the atmosphere is hyperpartisan, he shares a significant part of the blame. If things don’t get done, he is the one who must accept a large part of criticism.

In a way, his comments are pathetic—'the meanie Republicans won’t let me do what I think is right for all of you,' he whines, 'and therefore, I can’t get anything accomplished.' Polls have indicated that many things that the President thinks are right, don’t sit very well with a majority of Americans. But in a way, that’s beside the point.

Politics 101 tells us that negotiation—a give and take—often outside the public eye, is how things get accomplished. You give something to your opponents and they give something to you. You both work to get to “yes.” I suspect that the critics of the President who argue that he seems unwilling to get to yes, are not lying. It’s almost as if Obama, like a Hollywood A-lister, is surrounded by sycophants who always say ‘yes’ to him. He seems unaccustomed to push-back, to folks who say ‘no.’ And when he gets pushback, he seems unwilling or unable to adapt his positions.

His job is to get things accomplished. How? By negotiating, by listening, by meeting with those who oppose you. By being dogged in your pursuit of getting to ‘yes.’ That doesn’t mean he can’t play hardball, but in the end, he will be measured not by what he says, but by what he gets done.

In reality, Washington isn’t “broken.” It’s just a bunch of venal politicians, each with his or her own agenda and ideology, trying to outmaneuver one another.

Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton (to name a few) worked in a “broken” Washington, and they got things done. They never used the toxic political atmosphere as an excuse. They never whined.

The only thing that appears to be broken is Barack Obama’s ability to lead, and more importantly, to get things done.

A Fantasy Future

2012-01-25T16:30:00.002-05:00

The President’s State of the Union speech will either serve Barack Obama well or expose the vacuity of his leadership and more importantly, his grasp of the problems facing this nation. Time will tell.

The President has essentially stopped governing and is now doing what he does best—campaigning. Although if you listened to his SOTU, you’d think his record on both domestic and foreign affairs was excellent.

You’d think that increasing spending across the board; countenancing only cosmetic changes to entitlement programs like social security and medicare, “making government more efficient” and long string of other political clichés would actually help reduce the deficit that our children and grandchildren will have to repay. But wait, you’d also discard arithmetic and believe that “taxing the rich” and reducing military budgets will magically offset a deficit that is growing at 4 billion dollars a day!

In the foreign policy realm, you’d think that the Arab Spring has vindicated the President’s approach to the Middle East. You’d nullify overwhelming evidence to the contrary and believe that the Muslim brotherhood and other Islamist groups can and will embrace true democratic reforms, you’d discount the belligerence of Iran; you’d agree with the President when he vetoes the construction of a pipeline from Canada that would help wean us from Arab oil.

You’d believe that the financial catastrophe that is on-going in Europe is theirs alone and that we can learn nothing from it. You’d think that the very European social democracies that are now bankrupt are a good model for the United States to emulate.

Richard Fernandez provides useful insight when he writes:

The great intellectual failing of the Obama administration has been its tendency to see Europe and to some extent the Middle East as harbingers of a “fair” future rather than as canaries in a coal mine; to confuse danger with opportunity and conflate its PR operations with leadership. It wants to be like what is dying rather than countenance a life that is not to its ideological liking. Or perhaps it is calculation. After all, if there is no “long run” and the administration knows there is no future at all, then short-term optimization is actually a viable strategy …

It can be argued that the administration by predicating its policy on short term gain and a fantasy future, is really acting as if a real future were no longer possible at all. And therefore they are gittin’ while the gittin’s good. But eventually the word will get out. Once Hope and Change vanishes, it won’t degrade gradually, as any genuinely sound effort would adjust its goals when met with difficulty, but it will collapse utterly, in the manner of a bubble burst.

If we follow the President as he leads us toward a fantasy future, the bubble will burst. And when it does, the people who suffer the most will be the very same people whom our President professes to care about so deeply.

The Inquisitor

2012-01-24T08:56:00.002-05:00

College sports is a business machine that generates billions of dollars in revenue for universities, the media, local and national businesses, and many others. The only constituency that does not make money is the athletes themselves. The athletes are barred from any compensation by a Gestapo-like organization—the NCAA—that gives new meaning to the phrase sanctimonious hypocrisy.

While college player receive no financial compensation, the NCAA profits handsomely. Its top 14 executives had over $6 million in salaries and bonuses last year from a budget of well over $700 million—all extracted from revenues earned from the endeavors of collegiate athletes.

The NCAA tells us that it must maintain the "purity of the game," that “student athletes” (the NCAA never uses the word “player”) must be above reproach. That even the smallest compensation is verboten. That players have no rights to their image and its use long after they’ve left college.

Colleges and players live in fear of the NCAA. They cannot question or criticize their vicious reign because doing so puts them on an undesirables list. They cannot defend their players who are accused of wrong-doing because it opens the door to further “investigations” and penalties.

Joe Nocera writes about the case of Ryan Boatright, a freshman guard on the University of Connecticut basketball team:

It was early in the evening of Jan. 13 when Ryan Boatright, the freshman basketball player at the University of Connecticut, learned that he was being suspended from the team for the second time this season. Earlier that day, he had flown into South Bend, Ind., with his teammates for a game against Notre Dame. The 19-year-old point guard was excited because some 400 people from his hometown, Aurora, Ill., were coming to see him play.

When his coach, Jim Calhoun, broke the news that the N.C.A.A. was still investigating him, Boatright collapsed in Calhoun’s arms. In tears, he called his mother, Tanesha, who began weeping uncontrollably. As I chronicled on Saturday, it was her acceptance of plane tickets a year or so ago that had caused his first suspension. The N.C.A.A. had ruled the tickets an “improper benefit,” and had ordered him to sit out six games and pay a $100-per-month fine to repay the tickets. What more, she wondered, could the N.C.A.A. want?

A lot, it turned out. Tanesha is a single mother raising four children on a small salary. The N.C.A.A. investigators viewed her circumstances as a cause for suspicion, not sympathy. For instance, she owns a car. Where did she get the money to pay for it, they asked? How did she pay for her home? And so on.

The NCAA has no legal authority to ask these questions, but it can (and often does) ruin the careers of athletes whose parents and friends refuse to cooperate. It is a regulatory body that is so caught up in its zeal to “protect the game” that its has become the grand inquisitor. Nocera comments further on the grand inquisitor's approach:

When I asked the N.C.A.A. about the Boatright case, the response I received was deeply disingenuous. Refusing to discuss the actions of its investigators, it essentially said that Connecticut, not the N.C.A.A., declared Boatright ineligible. That is technically true. Schools declare athletes ineligible because if they don’t, the N.C.A.A. will deprive them of scholarships, force them to forfeit games and prevent them from playing in postseason games. Most astonishing, an N.C.A.A. spokeswoman told me that the organization does not have the legal authority to compel cooperation from parents. Again, technically true: Its real weapon — the threat of destroying their sons’ careers — is far more potent than any mere subpoena.

Our country is faced with many problems, and there’s little question that the NCAA’s tyrany is small potatoes. There’s also no question that there are abuses in college athletics. But that doesn’t mean that the NCAA should have free reign to terrorize young men and women and the institutions that provide them with an opportunity to play.

It’s time for a congressional committee to investigate the NCAA investigators and to shut down the petty inquisitions that ruin lives and do little, if anything, to make the college game cleaner. When billions of dollars are in play, people will bend rules. That’s not a good thing, but neither is a sanctimonious, hypocritical inquisitor that has gotten completely out of control.

Hypotheticals

2012-01-23T12:28:00.003-05:00

Presdient Obama will give his state of the Union address tomorrow night. Before he does, let’s consider a few hypotheticals. What if, over his three years as president …

Obama had taken steps that reduced the 6.8 percent unemployment, to say, 6.0 percent.

Gasoline prices had risen 20 percent from $1.68/gal in January, 2009 to a modest $2.00/gal today.

Household income had remained steady.

The public debt was under control and increased by only one billion dollars per day.

Bi-partisan legislation was formulated to address the severe problems facing entitlements.

The President would mention those things tomorrow night, would use them as campaign themes, and would be easily and effortlessly be re-elected later this year. He would be praised by the media and given grudging respect by his opposition. He would be unbeatable in November.

But reality is somewhat different:

Unemployment has increased from 6.8 to 8.5 percent, with the real number closer to 11 percent (if we count those who’ve simply stopped looking). Private sector job growth is stagnant and the President insists on demonizing those who are best able to create private sector jobs.

Gasoline is now $3.39/gal, an increase of 102 percent. To put things into perspective, the increase over the eight years of the previous president was about 20 percent. In addition, newly minted FDA regulations and a reduction in domestic oil production and acquisition (think: the Keystone pipeline) has caused annual electric bills to increase to a record $1,420 today.

Median household income has dropped by 7 percent. Instead of recommended strategies to improve that dismal number, the President suggests that taxing the “1 percent“ and thereby remedying “income inequality” will somehow provide a fix. He never explains how.

Public debt increases at $4 billion per day, and at the same time, the President continues to advocate even more spending.

Nothing has been done to change entitlements, and those who have had the political courage to propose changes have been demonized by the President as "unamerican."

When President Obama speaks tomorrow night, listen carefully. Will he take responsibility for his dismal economic record, or will he blame others—the congress, the “rich,” the demon Republicans, the circumstances? Will he adapt his approach and take a more realistic view of our economic problems, or will he plow forward, ignoring his failures? Will he reach out to the opposition party or will he blame them for his administration’s incompetence? We’ll see.

Keystone

2012-01-11T16:58:00.002-05:00

It’s interesting the President Obama’s decision to vote “present” on the Keystone pipeline has dropped from the news. As usual, the media would prefer not to prolong stories that reflect poorly on their annointed politician. After all, in a time of unprecedented joblessness for the "99 percent," it’s really very difficult to explain how a project that would lead to thousands of “shovel ready” jobs for “hard-working” Americans could be shelved in an effort to placate the radical environmental lobby.

But that’s not really what happened. By voting present, i.e., by delaying a decision, Barack Obama guaranteed that the Greens would support his 2012 campaign monetarily. But at the same time, the promise that the pipeline might be approved guaranteed that the labor unions, who are unequivocally in favor of it, would also contribute millions to his re-election. Always follow the money.

But the world moves on. A few days ago, Canadian Natural Resources Minister, Joe Oliver, wrote an “open letter” in Canada’s Financial Post . In the aftermath of Keystone, he writes:

Canada is on the edge of a historic choice: to diversify our energy markets away from our traditional trading partner in the United States or to continue with the status quo.

Virtually all our energy exports go to the United States. As a country, we must seek new markets for our products and services and the booming Asia-Pacific economies have shown great interest in our oil, gas, metals and minerals. For our government, the choice is clear: we need to diversify our markets in order to create jobs and economic growth for Canadians across this country. We must expand our trade with the fast-growing Asian economies. We know that increasing trade will help ensure the financial security of Canadians and their families.

But it appears that the same forces that threaten to derail our national efforts to attain energy independence, to build better infrastructure, and to introduce new technologies are at work in Canada. Oliver continues:

Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade. Their goal is to stop any major project, no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydroelectric dams.

These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special-interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources. Finally, if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: Sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further. They do this because they know it can work. It works because it helps them to achieve their ultimate objective: delay a project to the point it becomes economically unviable.

Anyone looking at the record of approvals for certain major projects across Canada cannot help but come to the conclusion that many of these projects have been delayed too long. In many cases, these projects would create thousands upon thousands of jobs for Canadians, yet they can take years to get started due to the slow, complex and cumbersome regulatory process.

Sound familiar?

The Green Movement claims to sit on a higher moral plane—“saving the planet” is, after all, a calling that few can criticize. But in reality, they are just another lobbying group that reflexively argues against forestry, mining, oil production, hydroelectric energy, nuclear energy, even solar and wind energy. They are the 21st century’s Luddites.

But worse, their moral hubris seems to discount the very real needs of the 99 percent—you know, the 99% who need jobs and (in the near term) affordable gasoline so they can get to those jobs, the 99% who need affordable electricity rates so they can keep the lights on in their homes, the 99% who purchase fuel oil so that their home can stay warm in the winter.

So while Barack Obama and his Green friends give speeches about saving the planet, combating “climate change,” and controlling the rapacious corporations who rape the land and its people, the 99% remain jobless and broke. No worries … there’s no story there, let’s all just move along.

Echoes

2011-12-26T10:38:00.002-05:00

Over the past 60 years, Islamic countries throughout the Arab crescent have practice judenrein—the calculated persecution and ultimate ethic cleansing of the vast majority of Jews within their population. The left-leaning media throughout the world remained silent, or worse, decided that the real villain was Israel, because it “oppressed” the Palestinians and therefore drove these events.

There’s an old saying that Jews are “the canary in the coal mine.” When an evil ideology works to exterminate them, it’s a harbinger of future attempts to exterminate others.

Over the Christmas weekend, bomb blasts in Nigerian Churches killed dozens of Christians who were attending Christmas eve and Christmas day masses. The bombings, perpetrated by an Islamist group called Boko Haram. Although these atrocities have gotten some coverage in the MSM, the stories are fleeting and under-reported. The administration and state department responses have been muted at best, and even the Vatican has remained largely silent on the events.

It’s reasonable to invert the situation and ask what the coverage would be like if a Christian majority has bombed a mosque on the first day of Ramadan? The MSM would be outraged, expressing horror at the viciousness of the attacks. Stories asking whether it might happen here would be rampant along with handwringing about “Islamophobia.” Christian leaders would immediately condemn the violence (as they should) and reach out to the Muslim community.

But in this instance the dominant sound is crickets chirping. Mark Steyn comments:

On this Christmas Eve, one of the great unreported stories throughout what we used to call Christendom is the persecution of Christians around the world. In Egypt, the “Arab Spring” is going so swimmingly that Copts are already fleeing Egypt and, for those Christians that remain, Midnight Mass has to be held in the daylight for security reasons. In Iraq, midnight services have been canceled entirely for fear of bloodshed, part of the remorseless de-Christianizing that has been going on, quite shamefully, under an American imperium.

Not merely the media but Christian leaders in the west seem to be embarrassed by behavior that doesn’t conform to their dimwitted sappiness about “Facebook Revolutions”. It took a Jew to deliver this line:
When Lord Sacks, chief rabbi in England, rose in the House of Lords to speak about the persecution of Christians, he quoted Martin Luther King, [Jr.]. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Richard Fernandez notes one country that has not been silent:

Will there be “Western” governments which will match Israel’s dispatch of medical teams to Nigeria? Or would there be more which would denounce the act as inflammatory, divisive and a slander on a great creed of peace?

There are likely to be those who will argue that Israel is sending relief for their own political ends. Doubtless it is, but it is because they perceive it as being in their own interest to help the Nigerian Christians, something which many Western politicans cannot say about themselves.

And that is a shame. For there are many nonviolent and peaceful ways in which the evil which killed people across Nigeria on Christmas Day may be fought. One of them is using words to name it. The other is sending material relief to its victims. Still another is to open the doors to those it persecutes. None of these partake of war. None of these harm a hair on the head of al-Qaeda or Boko Haram.

And the evil that invaded the Nigerian churches on Christmas eve? Our leadership in the United States, along with most leaders in the West refuse to use “words to name it.” It’s not appeasement—oh no. It’s multiculturalism run amuck, it’s fear of Islamic outrage, it’s … echos of 1938. A different time, a different place, and a different ideology, but no less—echoes.

Safety

2011-12-17T11:39:00.002-05:00

The ongoing debate about cell phone usage while driving an automobile often leads to a complementary debate about government intrusion into our lives. The question is this: How much control does the federal government have over our day-to-day usage on technology or devices or food or activity, and how much does a concern for “safety” trump all other aspects of our lives?

There’s little question that talking on a cell phone (or far worse, texting) will distract some drivers. But so does manipulating the car’s entertainment system, drinking your morning coffee, trying to read a billboard, or simply talking with a passenger. Where do we draw the line?

This debate goes beyond cell phone usage because if taken to the extreme, it will lead to a damping of new technologies that may have to potential to "harm" some users. Frank Fleming poses an intriguing example when he writes:

Imagine if cars hadn’t been around for a century, but instead were just invented today. Is there any way they’d be approved for individual use? It’s an era of bans on incandescent bulbs; if you suggested putting millions of internal-combustion engines out there, you’d get looks like you were Hitler proposing the Final Solution.

Even aside from pollution, the government wouldn’t allow the risks to safety.

“So you’re proposing that people speed around in tons of metal? You must mean only really smart, well-trained people?”

“No. Everyone. Even stupid people.”

“Won’t millions be killed?”

“Oh, no. Not that many. Just a little more than 40,000 a year.”

“And injuries?”

“Oh . . . millions.”

There’s no way that would get approved today.

Driving is basically a grandfathered freedom from back when people cared less about pollution and danger and valued progress and liberty over safety …

We live in an imperfect, dangerous world that regulators and activists want to make perfect and safe.

It’s hard to argue with a concern for safety, but every new regulation and law that purports to increase the "safety" of the population must be carefully weighed against the degree to which it erodes the freedom to make our own decisions and then take responsibility for those choices.

Tomorrow

2011-12-10T16:52:00.002-05:00

It pretty obvious that President Obama can’t campaign on his dismal economic record, can’t brag about his jobs record, can’t tout healthcare legislation that is disliked by 60 percent of the public, and is hard-pressed to note a single foreign policy success, other than the killing of a number of terrorist leaders, most notably, Osama bin Laden. So he and his band of political advisors have decided that class warfare is a winning political strategy.

His recent speech in Osawatomie, Kansas exemplifies his divisive rhetoric. He declared, “This isn’t about class warfare.” And then proceeded to suggest that income inequality is somehow to blame for the current state of the economy. He never quite explains how, except to condemn the now infamous ‘one percent’ for not paying their “fair share.” He correctly laments the plight of the middle class, but his only solution to their plight is to tax the rich for “fairness” and to extend payroll taxes, thus reducing social security revenues (for the most part, that’s what payroll taxes are) and therefore leading to even greater instability of this enormous entitlement. His only recommendation to “create” jobs is for big government to do it via his jobs bill, even though an earlier $800 billion stimulus was a failure by any objective measure.

When the President said that he wasn’t using class warfare as a tactic, it reminded me of a well-worn aphorism—Whenever you hear someone say, “It’s not about the money,” it’s almost always about the money. Whenever you hear a politician say, “This isn’t about class warfare,” that’s exactly what it’s about.

But the President persists to the cheers of his Left-leaning supporters. He fervently believes that bigger government, more centralization, and demonization of a small, very successful segment of our society will cause the economy to improve. His euphemism for more and more government spending is “investment,” as if that somehow changes the debit on our national balance sheet.

Mark Steyn comments on all of this when he writes:

The political class looted the future to bribe the present, confident that tomorrow could be endlessly postponed. Hey, why not? “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” says Macbeth. “To borrow, and to borrow, and to borrow,” said the political class … and they failed to anticipate that the petty pace would accelerate and overwhelm them. On Thursday, Jon Corzine, former United States senator, former governor of New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs golden boy, and the man who embodies the malign nexus between Big Government and a financial-services sector tap-dancing on derivatives of derivatives, came to Congress to try to explain how the now-bankrupt entity he ran, MF Global, had managed to misplace $1.2 billion …

When Corzine took over the two-and-a-quarter-century-old firm, he moved it big-time into sovereign debt — because you can’t lose with sovereign debt, right? Because a nation, even one that is in any objective sense bankrupt as Mediterranean Europe basically is, is not bankrupt in the sense that a homeowner or small business is: Corzine figured, reasonably enough, that no matter the balance sheets of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the rest, they’d somehow be propped up unto the end of time. As their credit ratings hit the express elevator to Sub-Basement Level Four, Corzine was taken down with them. The smart guy made a bet on government and lost. That’s where the rest of us are headed: The “you’re not on your own” societal model of Western Europe has run out of people to stick it to.

Barack Obama and those who support him believe that “tomorrow” will never come. Those of us who are a bit more responsible look around and see “tomorrow” arriving throughout Western Europe—a union of countries that has been only too happy to make sure their citizens were the wards of big government.

If we maintain our current trajectory, “tomorrow” will arrive for us as well. And when it dawns, it will be a dark and stormy day indeed.

Paradox

2011-12-05T12:46:00.003-05:00

In my last post, I noted that Leftist economist Paul Krugman applies his own “reality distortion field” to claim that Europe’s problems can be remedied with more spending.

Economist Paul Samuelson suggests a somewhat less delusional view about the modern European welfare state:

To flourish, the welfare state requires favorable economics and demographics: rapid economic growth to pay for social benefits and young populations to support the old. Both economics and demographics have moved adversely.

The great expansion of Europe's welfare states started in the 1950s and 1960s, when annual economic growth for its rich nations averaged 4.5 percent compared with a historical rate since 1820 of 2.1 percent, notes Eichengreen. This sort of growth, it was assumed, would continue indefinitely. Not so. From 1973 to 2000, growth settled back to 2.1 percent. More recently, it's been lower.

Demographics shifted, too. In 2000, Italy's 65-and-over population was already 18 percent of the total; in 2010, it was 21 percent, and the projection for 2050 is 34 percent. Figures for the European Union's 27 countries are 16 percent, 18 percent and 29 percent.

Until the financial crisis, the welfare state existed in a shaky equilibrium with sluggish economic growth. The crisis destroyed that equilibrium. Economic growth slowed. Debt - already high - rose. Government bonds once considered ultra-safe became risky.

The reason this argument is so threatening to American leftists is that it threatens their belief that big government can sustain itself indefinitely. A few weeks ago I noted that ironically many on the Left who believe so fervently in “sustainability” in all things, selectively reject the notion that sustainability in government is gravely threatened by their advocacy of big government. But back to Samuelson:

Switch to the United States. Broadly speaking, the story is similar. The great expansion of America's welfare state (though we avoid that term) occurred in the 1960s and 1970s with the creation of Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps. In 1960, 26 percent of federal spending represented payments for individuals; in 2010, the figure was 66 percent. [emphasis mine] Economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s averaged about 4 percent; from 2000 to 2007, the average was 2.4 percent. Our elderly population was 13 percent in 2010; the 2050 estimate is 20 percent.

If, like members of the Obama administration, we turn up the intensity of the reality distortion field, all of these data are meaningless because all you really have to do is believe. But belief is running into the harsh realities of arithmetic. The numbers just don’t add up.

Samuelson writes:

The paradox is that the welfare state, designed to improve security and dampen social conflict, now looms as an engine for insecurity, conflict and disappointment. Facing the hard questions of finding a sustainable balance between individual protections and better economic growth, the Europeans have spent years dawdling. The parallel with our situation is all too obvious.

Except for those who live within the reality distortion field.

Reality Distortion Field

2011-12-03T18:26:00.002-05:00

In his fascinating biography of Apple’s founder, Walter Isaccson writes about Steve Job’s “reality distortion field.” In essence, Job’s had the unique ability to discard the reality of a situation and to demand that co-workers and others substitute his perception of reality. In some cases, this worked well, and through sheer force of will (along with Herculean efforts by dedicated staff), his dreams became reality. But not always.

Leftist economist Paul Krugman suffers from a different kind of reality distortion field. Discarding 100 years of economic theory, centuries of history, and common sense, Krugman tries to persuade his New York Times readers that Europe is in trouble because it needs to borrow more, spend more, and otherwise expand the size, scope, and control of its already bloated governments. Let's step inside Krugman's reality distortion field:

How did things [in Europe] go so wrong? The answer you hear all the time is that the euro crisis was caused by fiscal irresponsibility. Turn on your TV and you’re very likely to find some pundit declaring that if America doesn’t slash spending we’ll end up like Greece. Greeeeeece!

But the truth is nearly the opposite. Although Europe’s leaders continue to insist that the problem is too much spending in debtor nations, the real problem is too little spending in Europe as a whole. And their efforts to fix matters by demanding ever harsher austerity have played a major role in making the situation worse.

That’s the ticket. Greece (not mention Italy, Spain and others) should jettison any attempt at (Krugman hates this word) austerity and spend, spend, spend. They should borrow so they can spend. They should tax so they can spend. They should spend to expand government benefits. They should spend to service the enormous carrying costs associated with their new debt, and plow ahead, waiting for the utopian day when all of the spending will somehow save them. No worries about running out of money, after all, there will always be a lender to provide more Euros. Won’t there?

For a moment, I'll channel Krugman's reality distortion field and propose a metaphor: Following Krugman’s arguments, a crystal meth addict should not seek treatment, but rather up his dose of crystal meth. After all, it will make him frenetic, and maybe, he’ll become more productive and happier, and then, miracle of miracles, he’ll break his meth habit. He'll do this not by the austerity of treatment, but by increasing his use of crystal meth. I’m sure most meth users would agree with that, but then again, like Krugman, their judgment is just a little impaired.

But I digress. There’s a reason for Krugman’s reality distortion field. He’s working very hard to convince his readers that the USA will not become “Greeeeeece!” He writes:

For in America, as in Europe, the economy is being dragged down by troubled debtors — in our case, mainly homeowners. And here, too, we desperately need expansionary fiscal and monetary policies to support the economy as these debtors struggle back to financial health. Yet, as in Europe, public discourse is dominated by deficit scolds and inflation obsessives.

So, almost all of us who are concerned about profligate spending to feed big government are nothing more than “deficit scolds and inflation obsessives.” After all, growing government even bigger and spending trillions more than we have is a good idea. It’ll save us! All of us “scolds and obsessives” simply have to distort reality and everything will be A-OK.

Off a Cliff

2011-12-02T13:17:00.004-05:00

In February, 2011 the President and his supporters in the media breathlessly touted the sea change that was then underway in Egypt. Enamored with young, idealistic, Egyptian college students who used Facebook and Twitter to drive their “revolution,” the administration and the media forgot realities on the ground.

At that time, I wrote:

When I was a boy, the premier comic periodical for boys in the 12 – 18 age group was Mad Magazine. Mad’s iconic spokesperson was Alfred E. Newman, a weird little kid who graced almost every cover of the magazine. His signature quote was: "What, Me Worry?"

When asked about the inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in some future Egyptian government, President Obama channeled Alfred E. Newman. He all but dismissed the worry that over some period of time, the MB would become a dominant force in Egyptian politics. Adopting a meme that has permeated his administration and its legion of media supporters, he shrugged his shoulders and suggested that the MB was a small fringe in Egyptian politics and that there is little cause to worry.

For those who might not be aware of it, here’s the operative sentence in the MB charter: “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu akbar!”

Of course, those on the Left will find nothing troubling in this statement, insisting that it be interpreted in the “religion of peace” mold. Never mind that the MB is virulently anti-Semitic, homophobic, and misogynistic, and the progenitor of Al Qaida and other terrorist groups. Never mind that the MB advocates Sharia law, not just for Egypt, but for the entire world! Never mind that MB wants to abrogate the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, tried to assassinate Gamal Abd an-Nasser, is a backer of terrorist groups Hamas and Hezballah, and a key supporter of Chechen terrorists who just killed 30-plus people in a Moscow airport.

Our President seems convinced that the MB will either (1) sit this out and remain passive as the government changes or (2) become a reasonable and productive faction in the “new” Egyptian government. "What, Me Worry?"

This morning, USA Today reports:

CAIRO (AP) – Egypt's ultraconservative Islamist party plans to push for a stricter religious code in Egypt after claiming surprisingly strong gains in the first round of parliamentary elections, a spokesman said Friday …

Islamists led by the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Salafists appear to have taken a strong majority of seats in the first round of Egypt's first parliamentary vote since Hosni Mubarak's ouster, a trend that if confirmed would give the religious parties a popular mandate in the struggle to win control from the ruling military and ultimately reshape a key U.S. ally.

The Islamists took exactly one election to gain majority control. So much for the President’s naïve view that characterized the MB and other Islamists as "fringe." Andrew McCarthy comments:

It would be hard to overstate what a catastrophe the Egyptian elections are shaping into. Reports about stage one of the long process show not only that the Muslim Brotherhood may be getting over 50 percent of the vote; an even more extreme Islamist party — called “Nour” — is apparently getting between 10 and 15 percent … [USA Today reports that it may be as high as 30 percent!]

The Islamist ascendancy in Egypt, enabled by the West’s democracy fetishists [on the Right] and its Leftist allies of the MB, will have immediate disastrous consequences — in the imminent drafting of the new Egyptian constitution; in the eventual Egyptian presidential election next year; in overcoming the Egyptian military’s half-hearted attempts to stem the Islamist tide; in the deteriorating security of 8 million Coptic Christians (about 10 percent of the population); in a radically new and more threatening Islamist threat to Israel on a long border it has not had to worry about for the last 30 years; and in ensuring (in cahoots with Islamist Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, a longtime MB intimate) that the Brotherhood will take over Syria when Assad falls — probably sooner rather than later.

Egypt has every right to choose its own destiny, but it was kind of sad to see an inexperienced President and a sycophantic media hoard cheer on a group of idealistic college kids as they walked their country off a cliff.

Ka-boom

2011-11-30T21:58:00.003-05:00

John Lennon is famous for the quote: “What if they gave a war and no one came.” In Iran, entities unknown have modified that sentiment in a far more pragmatic way: What if you fought a war, but no one could see you.”

For the past month, two significant explosions have rocked Iran’s nuclear and missile facilities. As is the penchant of many Islamist regimes, Iran tried to explain the explosions by lying through their teeth. First, Iranian spokesmen claimed that the explosions didn’t happen, backing off that lie when satellite photography provided indisputable evidence of the wreckage. They then claimed they were conducting a training exercise—odd, given that if that were the case, they caused tens of millions of dollars of damage to their own facilities. Then, they suggested that it was all an accident—an interesting coincidence to say the least.

Sheera Frenkel comments on all of this in The Australian.

On Monday, Isfahan [a city in Iran] residents reported a blast that shook tower blocks in the city at about 2.40pm and seeing a cloud of smoke rising over the nuclear facility on the edge of the city.

"This caused damage to the facilities in Isfahan, particularly to the elements we believe were involved in storage of raw materials," said one [Israeli] military intelligence source.

He would not confirm or deny Israel's involvement in the blast, instead saying that there were "many different parties looking to sabotage, stop or coerce Iran into stopping its nuclear weapons program".

Iran went into frantic denial yesterday as news of the explosion at Isfahan emerged. Alireza Zaker-Isfahani, the city's governor, claimed that the blast had been caused by a military exercise in the area but state-owned agencies in Tehran soon removed this story and issued a government denial that any explosion had taken place at all.

On Monday, Dan Meridor. the Israeli Intelligence Minister, said: "There are countries who impose economic sanctions and there are countries who act in other ways in dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat."

My money is on the latter group of countries.

Like the devastating damage done by the now-infamous STUXNET computer virus, the two explosions this month have further degraded Iran’s nuclear progress.

A shadow war has begun, and although it is fraught with dangers, it provides a counterpoint to the West’s pathetic public efforts at containment over the past three years.

War is a very deadly and very serious business, but it’s hard not to smile when thinking about the frustration of the Mullahs as they try to fight an enemy that they cannot see. Ka-boom!

IMF

2011-11-28T10:06:00.003-05:00

The main stream media in the United States has covered the European financial crisis in only the most peripheral sense. We get an occasional story of trouble in Greece, an inkling that things are not going well in Italy and Spain, and a passing remark that problems are spilling over to France, Germany and other countries. We get almost no discussion of why these problems have occurred and why the countries in trouble are past the point where they can be easily fixed.

Sure, the MSM reports on protests and riots among the populace when EU politicians, facing the very real specter of bankruptcy, try to reign in spending, reduce entitlements, and otherwise attempt to get the deteriorating situation under control. In the main, European people who have taken to the streets are characterized a heroic protesters who are being set upon by their respective governments.

In the United States, Leftist economists (Paul Krugman comes to mind) step through the looking glass and try to convince their readers that the problems in Europe have little to do with 60 years of big government policies. They argues that it can’t be socialist policies that are bringing down Greece and Italy, it must be something else—the Euro? right wing extremists? trade imbalances? —anything but over-spending, over-borrowing, and over-taxing (albeit that because of over-taxing, many Europeans have made non-compliance with income taxes an art form).

And now, Krugman’s kindred spirits within the Obama administration remain eerily quiet as the IMF moves to loan still more money to shore up Italy and Spain and the Euro. Robert Winnet reports:

Reports in Italy suggested that the IMF is drawing up plans for a €600 billion (£517 billion) assistance package for the country. Spain may be offered access to IMF credit, rather than a rescue package, to avoid it being “picked off” by the markets in the coming weeks…

An IMF rescue package involves a country being offered hundreds of billions of euros in return for agreeing to launch a major austerity programme to cut spending. A credit line is a more flexible arrangement which gives countries short term access to international finance.

Italy and Spain are likely to be forced to accept some international help as the cost of their debts has risen to unsustainable levels of about seven per cent.

The United States share of this loan is about $140 billion of taxpayer money.

If there was real hope that serious spending cuts and reduced borrowing would occur in Italy and Spain, I’d be in favor of the loans, even though the U.S. is in dire financial straits itself. After all, both Italy and Spain are allies, and helping one another is the right thing to do.

But our participation in the IMF program is more like loaning big money to an inveterate gambler as he enters a casino. Sure, he’s promised to reform himself, to use the money to pay-off his gambling debts with a promise of paying back the loan sometime soon, but …

The irony in all of this is that we’re heading in the same direction as Greece, Italy and Spain. Our fiscal path is unsustainable and all the wishful thinking about taxing the rich and redistributing wealth won’t change that a bit. When we reach the economic point of no return, who will be there to help us?

Obvious

2011-11-25T16:14:00.002-05:00

The Washington Post is generally no enemy of the President. It is surprising, therefore, that the WaPo Editorial Board is beginning to question the President’s soft power diplomacy with respect to Iran. In an Editorial Board Opinion, they write:

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION pledged that Iran would suffer painful consequences for plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington and for refusing to freeze its nuclear program. Key European allies and Congress — not to mention Israel — are ready for decisive action. But on Monday the administration unveiled another series of half-steps. Sanctions were toughened on Iran’s oil industry, but there was no move to block its exports. The Iranian banking system was designated “a primary money laundering concern,” a step U.S. officials said could prompt banks and companies around the world to cease doing business with the country. But the administration declined to directly sanction the central bank.

The result is that President Obama is not even leading from behind on Iran; he is simply behind. At the forefront of the Western effort to pressure Tehran is French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who issued a statement Monday calling on the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada and “other willing countries” to “immediately freeze the assets of Iran’s central bank” and suspend purchases of Iranian oil. France rejects the Obama administration’s view that these steps would cause a counterproductive spike in oil prices. In any case, higher oil prices are preferable to allowing an Iranian bomb — or having to take military action to stop it.

It’s encouraging to see that some of the President’s staunchest supporters in the media are finally beginning to recognize the vacuity of his administration’s naïve and ineffective foreign policy decisions.

Two years ago (almost to the day), I wrote:

Our pathetic attempts at controlling nuclear weapons development in Iran continue as (to quote the AP): “The United States and five other world powers … meet Friday in Brussels to discuss what measures can be taken to punish Tehran for its refusal to halt its nuclear enrichment program.”

The West has been all too happy to adopt President Obama’s “soft power” approach. As I predicted month’s ago, it has been an abject failure. Obama’s naive attempts at detente impressed his fans on the Left, but have done nothing but project an image of weakness. … harsh words don’t much impress the bad actors in Tehran, unless they’re backed up by a credible threat of force. The Mullahs know, to an absolute certainty, that force is now off the table. So words—even harsh words—mean little.

About four months earlier (July, 2009), I commented on the prevailing meme among many commentator’s on the Left who counseled “strategic patience” with respect to Iran.

According to many on the Left we should do nothing, hoping against hope that change will occur within Iran. But doing nothing will more likely allow the Iranian Islamist regime to strengthen it hold on Power and at the same time ensure that they’ll have a nuclear weapon that might completely destabilize the region. Because if we do anything, the Left argues, it will allow the Iranian Islamist regime to strengthen its hold on Power and at the same time ensure that they’ll have a nuclear weapon that might completely destabilize the region.

Two and a half years later, what happened? The Obama administration did nothing ... and Iran's regime strengthened it's hold on power, and based on recent IAEA reports, Iran is well on its way to a nuclear weapon. Hmmm, the Left's notion of strategic patience didn't work out too well, did it?

Still earlier, just five months into his Presidency (May, 2009), Barack Obama was naively trying to reason with the leaders of both North Korea and Iran by “reaching out” to each. My comments at the time:

Both NoKo and Iran make outrageous threats and then soften their rhetoric if "talks" are promised. They might even agree to a few things, with no intention of keeping their promises. They talk to buy time and that they get. Time to build nukes. Time to prepare for aggressive action. Time to fortify their defenses.

I don’t mean to belabor the point, but President Obama is supposed to be a smart guy, not a dummy like Bush. You’d think he’d better understand the rules of the big game. Like it or not, he’s a player, and to date, he's certainly no Kobe Bryant.

It’s taken some time, but the WaPo editorial board has finally figured it out:

By now it should be obvious that only regime change will stop the Iranian nuclear program. That means, at a minimum, the departure of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has repeatedly blocked efforts by other Iranian leaders to talk to the West. Sanctions that stop Iran from exporting oil and importing gasoline could deal a decisive blow to his dictatorship, which already faced an Arab Spring-like popular revolt two years ago. By holding back on such measures, the Obama administration merely makes it more likely that drastic action, such as a military attack, eventually will be taken by Israel, or forced on the United States.

The WaPo editorial board is right. But what they say now was “obvious” three years ago.

Sustainability

2011-11-23T15:55:00.003-05:00

“Sustainability” is a term that is used quite freely today. In it’s simplest interpretation, it implies the ability to endure—to achieve a long-term level of existence that can be maintained across years and generations.

Many people use the term when they write or speak about the environment, ecology, population, food, living spaces, and communities. Ideally, almost everything that humans encounter in their world should be sustainable. As a concept, sustainability is reasonable enough, although a bit vague when we move from philosophical discussions to actual implementation in the real world.

In the millions of words that have been written about sustainability, those who espouse the concept rarely discuss sustainability of our current federal government. Leo Linbeck III writes:

The US is facing a tremendous challenge in the coming years, one that will test the mettle of our nation. We have allowed too much power to become concentrated in Washington DC, and that power has dangerously corrupted our system of governance. The federal government spends too much, regulates too much, borrows too much, and is on an unsustainable path. [emphasis mine] Lobbyists, politicians, bureaucrats, and the “bigs” (big corporations, big unions, and big special interest groups) love and abet this concentration of power, as it enhances their own power, prestige, influence, and net worth. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle of power to get the money, and money to protect and accumulate the power.

Most of us in the Center agree with Linbeck’s sentiment. But how does all this relate to sustainability?

In general, proponents of sustainability argue that it can be achieved by going small. For example, they distain “big” corporations, suggesting that we do business with small “locally-owned businesses.” They criticize “big” agriculture, suggesting that we “buy from local farms and cooperatives.” They lambast “big” pharma, advocating government controls on pharma profits. Yet when it comes to “big” government, they never seem to consider sustainability.

Big government in its current form is simply not sustainable. The number of dollars required to feed government’s ravenous growth cannot be raised through borrowing or taxing—at least not without ruining our economy and our children’s future. Sure, massive borrowing and heavy taxes would postpone the day of reckoning for a while, but continuing to feed big government’s current demands for more and more spending is just another way of kicking the can down the road. The road will end, and when it does, big government programs that many take for granted will come to a painful halt.

Reducing the size of the federal government is all about sustainability—and you’d think that would be something that the everyone would enthusiastically support.

Failure

2011-11-22T12:57:00.004-05:00

It’s really no surprise that the vaunted Congressional Budget Supercommittee failed in it’s job of finding a $1.4 trillion in budget cuts over the next 10 years. Remember, that’s 140 billion in cuts a year (on average) against a budget of 3.7 trillion in spending per year. About 4 percent in cuts.

The Democrats blame the intransigence of the Republicans, who at least proposed a concrete, albeit flawed, plan as the basis of a start in negotiations. Robert Samuelson reports:

Contrary to much press coverage, the committee's Republicans opened the door to compromise by abandoning -- as they should have -- opposition to tax increases. Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania proposed a tax "reform" that would raise income taxes by $250 billion over a decade. First, he would impose across-the-board reductions of most itemized deductions and use the resulting revenue gains to cut all tax rates. Next, he would adjust the rates for the top two brackets so that they'd be high enough to produce the $250 billion. All the tax increase would fall on people in the top brackets.

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin called Toomey's proposal a "breakthrough." With good reason: It came from a "no new taxes, over my dead body" Republican who had signed Grover Norquist's pledge against any tax increases. But the details of Toomey's plan are murky, and many Democrats claim that it would cut taxes for the rich. Nor did Democrats respond with an equal concession: a willingness to deal with Social Security and Medicare.

According to many sources in the media, the Democrats on the committee seemed frozen, not able to make a substantive counter-offer and come to a negotiated agreement.

Part of the problem with the Democrats inability to make a counter-offer was the President’s now predictable absence during this process. Rather than defining his position clearly (i.e., stating specifically what structural changes in entitlements he could accept) he talking in broad generalities. As a consequence, the Democrats were leaderless and seemingly afraid to commit.

So now, we go to “sequestration cuts,” mandatory cuts in defense and other small cuts to discretionary spending. The GOP howls about cuts to defense, when in fact, they are probably justified and will do little to endanger the country. The Democrats seem relieved that they didn’t have to address entitlements, even though it’s delusional to believe that structural changes are not required. The President? He has demonstrated repeated that he’d prefer to vote present and not commit to anything unless it aids in his reelection.

The problem is that sequestration cuts do little to change our current trajectory. Veronique de Rugy writes:

… the automatic sequester cuts do very little to the overall trend in the growth of debt. Under current law, according to CBO projections, public debt will reach nearly $14.54 trillion by 2021. Under sequestration, it is projected to reach $14.38 trillion, a rather minute difference of $153 billion.

The United States was downgraded by S&P in August for failing to take the steps necessary to change our financial path. Unfortunately, sequestration cuts wouldn’t change much about our march to more and more debt.

Rather than taking fiscally responsible actions, both parties will now fight about the viability of the sequestration cuts, even though the cuts themselves are miniscule. The President will promise vetoes to protect the cuts in a laughable effort to look like a deficit hawk, hoping that we forget that he spent more money in 3 years than his predecessor spent in eight.

And in the background, we watch Greece, Italy, Spain, and other countries slide into bankruptcy for doing the things 10 years ago that we’re doing right now.

A Win

2011-11-20T20:31:00.001-05:00

The President Obama’s foreign policy has resulted in so many mistakes and missteps that it’s wonderful to note a significant foreign policy win. During the past week, President Obama has traveled through Asia, solidifying the work of Hillary Clinton and the DoS diplomats. Walter Russell Mead reports:

The cascade of statements, deployments, agreements and announcements from the United States and its regional associates in the last week has to be one of the most unpleasant shocks for China’s leadership — ever. The US is moving forces to Australia, Australia is selling uranium to India, Japan is stepping up military actions and coordinating more closely with the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea, Myanmar is slipping out of China’s column and seeking to reintegrate itself into the region, Indonesia and the Philippines are deepening military ties with the the US: and all that in just one week. If that wasn’t enough, a critical mass of the region’s countries have agreed to work out a new trade group that does not include China, while the US, to applause, has proposed that China’s territorial disputes with its neighbors be settled at a forum like the East Asia Summit — rather than in the bilateral talks with its smaller, weaker neighbors that China prefers.

Rarely has a great power been so provoked and affronted. Rarely have so many red lines been crossed. Rarely has so much face been lost, so fast. It was a surprise diplomatic attack, aimed at reversing a decade of chit chat about American decline and disinterest in Asia, aimed also at nipping the myth of “China’s inexorable rise” in the bud.

The timing turned out to be brilliant.

By reasserting itself in China’s domain of influence, the United States (and the President) delivered two messages. First, the purported weakness and lack of support for the U.S. in SE Asia is belied by the week's events. Second, that China is not quite as ascendant as some would believe. Overall, an important win.

Work Habits

2011-11-17T09:23:00.003-05:00

USA Today reports on a national study of college students:

Full-time college students on average study 15 hours a week, but averages varied by academic majors, says the survey, released today by the National Survey of Student Engagement, based on a spring survey of 416,000 freshmen and seniors at 673 colleges and universities nationwide.

Engineering seniors studied the most, 19 hours on average, and business and social science majors studied the least, about 14 hours. A companion survey found that faculty expectations for study time by major corresponded closely to what students reported. One exception: Social science faculty expected students to spend about 18 hours a week, four more hours than students reported.

This comes as no surprise to most of us who have engineering degrees.
Thinking back, I seem to recall that I spent far more than 19 hours a week studying, solving homework problems, and doing lab work. But then again, that was a long time ago, and memory fades.

Engineering students can’t rely on rote memorization to excel. There were times when I remembered every fact in a chapter, but still did poorly on the exam. Almost every engineering student can remember the nightmare landscape of entering an exam prepared, but still being unable to “see” how to solve a particular problem.

All of the extra study (33 percent more than business or social sciences students) is about learning how to dissect a problem, learning how to understand the core elements that must be solved, learning how to select an appropriate approach that will result in a solution, learning how to craft the solution, and then, implement it without error. In essence, all of those study hours teach engineering students how to think in an organized way. The best students go beyond that and learn to create innovative and creative solutions.

Maybe that’s why many engineers have trouble with the weak problem-solving skills exhibited by our national political leadership on both sides of the aisle. If you check, you’ll find quite a few lawyers are in positions of political leadership. I suspect that if you were to take a poll, as undergraduates most those lawyers never learned how to solve problems—they never had to. Now, they’re very good at talking about problems, but not very good at solving them. Maybe they should have taken a few basic engineering course and studied just a bit more.

Crash Test

2011-11-12T11:45:00.003-05:00

It appears that some conservative commentators and right-wing media sources look for any reason to criticize electric vehicles. The narrative follows one of a number of memes: they’re underpowered and unattractive, they’re too expensive, the public doesn’t want them, they’re nothing but government subsidized golf carts, their range is insufficient, and most recently, they’re unsafe because a few car fires have occurred.

None of these claims stand up to scrutiny and that's why it's quite odd that some conservatives have such a violent reaction to EVs. After all, if adopted in meaningful numbers, EVs will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, particularly from countries that are clearly not our friends. EVs will also reduce pollutants into the air (because EVs emit no pollutants and have no tail pipe). EVs will create American jobs and in some cases, EVs are close to 100 percent American made in American factories.

Most recently, a car fire that occurred after a violent NTSA sanctioned collision test of a Chevy Volt has the right-wing blogosphere aflutter. In reality, the car was purposely crashed into a pole, which destroyed the car and cracked the battery casing. It was towed to a wrecking lot and three weeks later, it caught fire.

According to GreenCarReports.com :

After news of the fire, both Chevrolet and the NHTSA independently replicated the crash test and subsequent vehicle rotation procedure. In neither case could they reproduce the conditions under which the battery pack ignited.

Months later, the NHTSA doesn't appear to view the fire as terribly alarming. It has given the Volt a five-star safety rating, and the IIHS designated the Volt a Top Safety Pick as well.

“Based on the available data, NHTSA does not believe the Volt or other electric vehicles are at a greater risk of fire than gasoline-powered vehicles," the agency said in a statement today. "In fact, all vehicles -- both electric and gasoline-powered -- have some risk of fire in the event of a serious crash.”

It will take decades, but EVs will become a major segment of the automotive fleet. The Right’s unthinking resistance to these 21st century vehicles is antithetical to any attempt at energy independence.

Reboot

2011-11-01T13:08:00.003-04:00

In a fascinating article on the decline of great powers, historian Niall Ferguson suggests that the decline great powers, whether it happened to Rome, the Incas, the Chinese Ming Dynasty, or the Soviet Union, happened quickly—in a matter of a decade or two. Ferguson goes on to suggest that the West surged after the 1500s “thanks to a series of institutional innovations that [he] call[s] the ‘killer applications’”:

1. Competition. Europe was politically fragmented into multiple monarchies and republics, which were in turn internally divided into competing corporate entities, among them the ancestors of modern business corporations.

2. The Scientific Revolution. All the major 17th-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology happened in Western Europe.

3. The Rule of Law and Representative Government. An optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on private-property rights and the representation of property owners in elected legislatures.

4. Modern Medicine. Nearly all the major 19th- and 20th-century breakthroughs in health care were made by Western Europeans and North Americans.

5. The Consumer Society. The Industrial Revolution took place where there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for more, better, and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments.

6. The Work Ethic. Westerners were the first people in the world to combine more extensive and intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.

For hundreds of years, these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia. They are the best explanation for what economic historians call “the great divergence”: the astonishing gap that arose between Western standards of living and those in the rest of the world.

The West is slipping perceptibly in each of these killer apps, as a consequence, talk of decline or collapse is common.

Ferguson comments:

Is there anything we can do to prevent such disasters? Social scientist Charles Murray calls for a “civic great awakening”—a return to the original values of the American republic. He’s got a point. Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic. They know the country has the right software. They just can’t understand why it’s running so damn slowly.

Unfortunately, our current leadership can’t seem to understand that “most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy” and are reflexively antagonistic to those who suggest that they no longer work. The anti-capitalist, anti-consumer memes espoused by some in power and a small minority on the streets are correctly perceived as threatening apps #1 and #5. The near-religious belief in tenuous climate change theory and related attempts to make massive changes in public policy are viewed by many as a threat to app #2. The highly partisan, grid-locked events in Washington over the past few years threaten app # 3. An attempt to implement a government takeover of medical care is correctly viewed as a threat to app # 4. A leader who assails “the rich” is perceived as a leader who, at some level at least, is criticizing app # 6.

Can we yet recover? Ferguson continues his metaphor:

What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our over-leveraged personal finances, and our new found unemployment ethic.

Then we need to download the updates that are running more successfully in other countries, from Finland to New Zealand, from Denmark to Hong Kong, from Singapore to Sweden.

And finally we need to reboot our whole system.

I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe’s PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it’s America.

But the lesson of history is clear. Voters and politicians alike dare not postpone the big reboot. Decline is not so gradual that our biggest problems can simply be left to the next administration, or the one after that.

If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may be even tighter than one election cycle.

One can only hope that a "reboot" will be initiated in 2012.

Slow Motion

2011-10-31T19:50:00.004-04:00

In a slow motion train wreck that will result in the eventual failure of Greece and then the slow collapse of the EU, the West watches helplessly as Greece reaps the poison fruit that it has sown for many decades. Greece, like most EU countries is a social democracy—a prime example of the ultimate result of big government. Massive government pensions protect retirees, government funded universal health care drains tax revenues, strikes occur at the drop of a hat as public sector unions demand more and more, private unions follow their lead, demanding 6 or more weeks of vacation as productivity plummets, cradle to grave “benefits,” all paid by the government with money borrowed from European banks, make the populace happy. If this sounds familiar it's because the same system exists in countries like Spain, Italy, and Portugal, and all are in trouble.

But why not increase taxes on the rich? Or for that matter, on everybody? The top income tax rate in Greece is 45% (12 percent higher than ours) but that hasn't seemed to help.

As demands for more and more money occurred, continued government borrowing became close to impossible, and the money simply ran out. Internal attempts to implement “austerity” measures were met by protests and then riots. How dare the country try to salvage its economy? Demands by creditor nations to implement even more austere “austerity” measures were met with xenophobic derision and then more riots. And now, Greek politicians have decided to put the whole austerity thing to a vote. I wonder how that will turn out?

David Warren comments on the latest attempt to save Greece after creditor banks were convinced to take a 50 percent write-down (a.k.a. haircut) on Greek debt:

… Even after write-downs that begin to seriously limit the ability of European banks to finance the European economy (which is where the wealth comes from), Greece is left owing more than 100 per cent of GDP …

And once again, let me emphasize: no banks, no economy. No economy, no jobs; and incidentally, no tax revenue. The fatuous "Occupy Wall Street" movement is premised on the notion that this isn't true, that all bank lending should be taken for free money, if the borrowers aren't in a mood to repay … A substantial part of every western electorate nods approvingly towards them, without bothering to think through what they are approving.

It was upon such electorates the Nanny States were built; and in turn, within such Nanny States that incredibly irresponsible public attitudes were cultivated. The very impulse to blame everything that has gone wrong on the greed of "bankers" and "capitalists" betrays a world view that is essentially insane, and now shifting, under pressure, towards malice.

Which is hardly to say bankers and capitalists are without blame. They played along with fanciful regulatory regimes, from short-term self-interest. They knowingly accepted a dream world in which paper is backed by paper in infinite recession, and applied all their wits to devising the clever instruments by which they themselves were fooled.

Why is all of this important? After all, it’s a European problem. Or is it?

As we watch a perpetually campaigning President demagogue economic issues, propose programs “right now” that follow the Greek model, and at the same time sow the seeds a class warfare, it’s not difficult to envision an outcome for us that is not too far different than the inevitable outcome for Greece.

The class warriors who support Barack Obama live in a fantasy world in which “the rich” can be taxed at levels that will assuredly support the economy. Just tax at 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 percent, and everything will be okay. It simply isn’t possible for such a small number of people (“the rich’) to support the growing trillions that the same class warriors expect us to spend. But no matter, the class warriors believe it to be true. Just like the Greek people believe that their government is lying to them when it states that the money is gone and the creditors will lend no more.

If we follow the lead of the class warriors, your children, like Greek children today, will live in a time when the money is gone and our creditors will lend us no more. If we follow the lead of the class warriors, our future is assured—and it won’t be pretty.

One Percent

2011-10-27T14:44:00.005-04:00

President Obama has escalated his class warfare rhetoric in what appears to be a desperate attempt to gain some political traction among many within his base who are becoming increasingly disaffected with his leadership. Although class warfare is a common political meme among those on the Left, the President is the first chief executive in my lifetime who has been so strident and obvious on the subject.

Rep. Paul Ryan ((R-Wisconsin and certainly no friend of the President) characterized the President’s class warfare strategy in the following manner:

"He gave us a message of hope three years ago of uniting, not dividing. And what we're getting now is class warfare. We're getting very polarizing rhetoric that puts class against class, pits people against one another. And I would simply say sowing social unrest and class resentment does not make America stronger, it makes America weaker."

It seems that the Occupy Wall Street movement has picked up on the President’s meme and introduced the term “one percent” into the political lexicon. The term is pejorative, suggesting that those who reside in the top one percent of all income earners somehow did not work hard for their wealth, did not pay taxes or paid them at an unfair rate, do not contribute their “fair share,” and are therefore subject to government mandated income redistribution. The one percenter cut-off income of just under $600,000—is far, far beyond my personal income. Yet, I don't sympathize with those who are now trying to demonize the one percent.

Over the years, I’ve worked with and have known many one percenters. In the main, they work very long hours, take substantial risks to build businesses that employ others (sometimes, many others), pay their taxes at rates that exceed those of the other 99 percent, are philanthropic by becoming major donors for charities, universities, the arts, and medicine. Relatively few work on Wall Street. Many are politically liberal. And yet, if you are to believe the President, they’re somehow to blame for uncontrolled spending, skyrocketing deficits, and 9.1 percent unemployment.

The President and his supporters appeal to anger and envy when they talk about private jet owners and billionaires who pay taxes at rates that are lower than their secretaries. They want the listener to extrapolate these anecdotal accounts to everyone in the one percent. In reality, it’s likely that billionaires and jet owners make up less than 1 percent of the one percent and are hardly representative.

It also appears that politics has more to do with one’s membership in the one percent club than annual income or wealth. Consider the following conversation between CNN’s Piers Morgan and Michael Moore, reported by CelebrityNetWorth.com :

Piers Morgan:I need you to admit the bleeding obvious. I need you to sit here and say, I’m in the 1 percent, because it’s important.
Michael Moore: Well, I can’t. Because I’m not.
Morgan: You’re not in the 1 percent?
Moore: Of course I’m not. How can I be in the 1 percent?
Morgan: Because you’re worth millions.
Moore: No, that’s not true. Listen, I do really well. I do well. But what’s the point, though?…

Moore denies the obvious. His net worth is well in excess of $50 million. He earns additional millions from his movies and books. He goes on the claim that because he "cares" about the "workers" and has dedicated his life to their plight, that he somehow doesn't qualify for the one percent. Of course, many others in the one percent care about their workers by creating businesses that employ them, a work environment that supports them, and opportunity for those same workers to progress to higher levels of achievement and income. But somehow, that doesn't seem to count.

By Moore’s logic, I’m certain that Al Gore, Sean Penn, The Clintons, and thousands of other multi-millionaires are also not members of the one percent. To Michael Moore and those who think like him, only those people who are politically agnostic, centrist, or conservative qualify for one percent demonization. It’s not about the money—it’s about the ideology.

It seems to me that Moore clearly understands that one percenters are being demonized. That’s probably why he adamantly claims that he’s not part of the group. Discarding all logic, he ignores the definition, steps through the looking glass, and baldly states that he is not a one percenter.

Well, neither am I. But I know demonization of a particular class of people when I see it. It’s distasteful at best and dangerous at worst. I expect those things from Michael Moore, but I believe that the President of the United States should be held to a higher standard.

Numbers

2011-10-12T16:30:00.002-04:00

President Obama is already in full campaign mode, traveling the country and blaming the poor economy on pre-existing circumstances, the hated-Republicans, and world events. It’s only fair to state that the President did not have a healthy economy when he took office, in fact, a combination of poor public policy going back to the 1990s and Wall Street malfeasance led the 2008 crash. President Bush had culpability for this, but so did many prominent congressman and senators from the President’s party.

Many of the President's supporters—DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz comes to mind—have already begun delivering an oft-repeated message that under this President the economy has “turned the corner” and is significantly better than it would have been if George W. Bush was still in office. Obama supporters buttress their claims by citing that anywhere from 1.6 to 2.2 million jobs have been “saved”—convenient, because that number cannot be realistically measured and has never before been used as a metric for economic health.

Given that this argument will get a lot of air time and print in the coming months, it’s only reasonable to look at a few other numbers. Milton R. Wolf does this when he writes:

Under Obamanomics, the unemployment rate has increased from 7.8 percent to 9.1 percent, and underemployment has increased from 14.0 percent to 16.2 percent. The average length of unemployment has increased from 19.9 weeks to 40.3 weeks. Median income has dropped from $52,029 per year to $49,445.

Since Mr. Obama has taken office, the total number of jobs in America has decreased from 142.2 million to 139.6 million. Most schoolchildren with a calculator would say that’s a loss of 2.6 million jobs, but not Barack Obama. The White House has claimed that the stimulus created - or saved - 2.5 million to 3.6 million jobs. Off by 6 million, but close enough for government work, I suppose.

On President Obama’s watch, $835 billion dollars were squandered on a stimulus that didn’t create enough jobs. Now, the President insists that doing more of the same, but only half as much, will create 1.9 million jobs. Luckily, even with Democratic control of the senate, his jobs legislation was rejected. The President bashed Republicans, even though they are in the minority.

And even after the expenditure of almost a trillion dollars, much of it going to programs to help those at the low end of the income scale, Wolf reports:

Under Obamanomics, the poverty rate has increased from 13.2 percent to 14.3 percent. The number of Americans living below the poverty level has increased from 39.8 million to 43.6 million. The number of Americans on food stamps has increased from 31.9 million to 45.2 million.

And finally, there’s the small matter of the debt. Again from Wolf:

Since Barack Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress took control of the national checkbook, annual spending has increased from an already mind-blowing $2.9 trillion to $3.8 trillion. The annual deficit has increased from an already shameful $438 billion to an unbelievable $1.5 trillion. Meanwhile, the national credit card balance has increased from $10.6 trillion to a maxed-out $14.7 trillion.

In 2008, Sen. Obama complained that President George W. Bush “added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back - $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.”

Irresponsible, he said, before he tacked on another $17,000 for every man, woman and child. Unpatriotic. It’s hard to disagree.

I suppose it's possible to explain away some of these numbers, but it will be difficult to explain away all of them. In fact, it’s the numbers, plain and simple, that will be the President’s undoing.

OWS

2011-10-10T17:04:00.003-04:00

After everyone from Nicholas Kristof (of The New York Times) to Mahmoud Amadinejad (of the Islamic Repubic of Iran) began comparing the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement (a.k.a. the 99 percenters) to Tahir Square in Cairo, I thought it might be worth trying to understand exactly what the OWS positions are.

Like many within OWS, I do think Wall Street bears a significant portion of the blame for the economic debacle that has been visited upon us since 2008. I do, however, wonder why those who are angry at Wall Street aren’t equally angry at the Obama Justice Department who has not indicted a single Wall Street senior executive, even though their actions and decisions are in the gray area that is close enough to criminal behavior to be indictable (think: Michael Milken). You’d think the OWS members would be picketing the Justice Department or the Obama White House—curious that they aren’t.

Like many within the OWS, I do think that many senior executives at major U.S. corporations are compensated without regard to their accomplishments and often, without considering the value they bring to shareholders. I find it interesting, however, that the OWS protesters don’t carry signs decrying the enormous income disparity between say, someone like Bono and the lowliest member of his roadie crew or someone like George Clooney and the grips who build his movie sets.

Like most within the OWS, I agree that capitalism isn’t a perfect system, but unlike the majority of people sitting in parks and carrying signs, I believe that history has indicated that it is the only viable economic model that gives people from humble beginnings the opportunity (not the guarantee, the opportunity) to improve their lot in life. I also wonder why many within the OWS movement use "capitalist" as a pejorative term, but at the same time, decry a lack of well-paying jobs. Exactly who do they think creates private sector jobs?

Like many young people within the OWS, I think it's a travesty that institutions of higher education drive a majority of their students into significant indebtedness. But I wonder why instead of demanding student loan forgiveness and thereby sticking the overburdened 99 percent with the bill, the OWS doesn’t question whether those in higher education are selling a product that ill-prepares most liberal arts students for the economy of the 21st century. Maybe a few elite universities should be occupied as well.

Like many within OWS, I recognize that there are income disparities across the broad spectrum of people that make up our population, but I wonder why OWS members believe, against all of human experience, that everyone should be guaranteed an equal outcome, regardless of the work they put in, the career they choose, or, the luck they have. On a similar note, I wonder why members of the OWS become enraged when discussing income disparity and the “1 percent” they claim is raping the other 99 percent, but seem less than concerned about the huge disparity between the 10 percent who fund the vast majority of all government functions and the remainder of the populace who fund relatively little.

Like many within the OWS, I agree that no one should become destitute because they become seriously ill, but I wonder why no one asks whether there a difference between catastrophic health coverage provided by private insurers but subsidized by the government (a relatively low cost form of universal health care) and dollar-one coverage that is enormously expensive and ruinous to our already monumental indebtedness.

Unlike many within the OWS, I’ve learned that life isn’t fair, and that no one is guaranteed a job, a happy, stress-free life, or a cradle-to-grave government security blanket. What we are guaranteed is the opportunity to achieve those things, and in return, our society only asks that we take responsibility for ourselves and our actions.

An Iconic Capitalist

2011-10-06T09:19:00.002-04:00

As I read and watch the tributes to Apple’s Steve Jobs, I’m struck by how a successful, very, very profitable corporation, lead by an iconic innovator, can change the world for the better. In fact, in many ways, Jobs’ company has done more to better the human condition, provide jobs, educate the young, and establish a role model for future entrepreneurs than all the politicians and "activists" who currently criticize corporations in America.

Steve Jobs has been lionized as an innovator by virtually every writer and pundit. Yet many seem to forget that in addition to being a true visionary, he was a hard-nosed businessman and the leader of one of the most influential corporations on the planet. In fact, for a time, Apple’s market valuation exceeded that of Exxon.

Back in August of this year, The Wall Street Journal wrote this about Jobs:

… let's also acknowledge that coupled with [his] vision and the pursuit of excellence was hard-headed business strategizing. The triumph of iTunes, the App Store and the incipient Apple Cloud ushered in the era at Apple of network-esque complexity as well as the possibility of network-esque revenues. It made Mr. Jobs, despite himself, an empire builder. Success brought rivals like Google and Amazon. There came the need to anticipate moves and countermoves, the need to play defense. This was an unsung part of the Jobs C.V. in later years. And almost tactless to mention is the garish side effect: the rise of Apple to exceed Microsoft and on some days Exxon Mobil, as the world's most valuable company.

Now this was an almost inexplicable business success, a miraculous reversal of fortune of the sort that inspires banner headlines and hyperventilating on cable TV when it happens on the ball field. It was an astonishing achievement, emblematic of a man meeting his moment completely, when few men get a chance to meet their moments even partially.

Apple is an American corporate success story. And few would argue that Steve Jobs was the driving force behind that success. Jobs demonstrated how a dedicated entrepreneur can build something important—something that has set the stage for computing throughout the reminder of this century.

He made no apologies about striving for profit. He was unabashed about creating wealth for those who invested in his company. And he had few regrets about his competitive attempts to defeat his business rivals. Steve Jobs was a capitalist. He exemplified the very best of that breed. In his short life, he certainly contributed his fair share.

Steve

2011-10-05T21:03:00.001-04:00

It’s exceptionally rare for the founder of a garage shop operation to build a company that employs tens of thousands and has evolved into one of the most respected brands in the world. It’s rarer still for the founder to take risks—repeatedly—and insist that his company innovate rather than copy. It’s even rarer for the founder to have the vision to conceive of transformation products, even when others told him there was no market, that those products wouldn’t sell. But that was Steve Jobs—the founder of Apple.

Steve Jobs died today.

Apple released the following statement: "Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve."

Indeed.

One hundred years from now, the transformative products that were created under Jobs’ leadership will be seen as the true harbingers of the inextricable integration of computing into our lives. That integration is just beginning. But Jobs, more than any other person on the planet, created the products that defined the beginning. He was, in his own way, something that is very rare in this era—Steve Jobs was a great man.

He will be missed.

Speed of Light

2011-09-25T14:22:00.002-04:00

This week the world famous CERN labs in Switzerland reported on a meticulously conducted experiment on the Neutrino, a sub-atomic particle. The experiment seems to indicate that it may be possible to exceed the speed of light! For well over half a century, science has stated that the speed of light, c, is a constant (186,000 miles per second) and that it is physically impossible to move any faster. Yet, the CERN experiment indicates that c may not be a constant and speeds faster than c may, in fact, be possible.

Many physicists are skeptical about the result and the experiment will be repeated again and again. Theoretical investigation will ensue and a healthy debate will be on-going. Science encourages skepticism, but is open to new, even radical, ideas if they can be proven.

The interesting thing is that no one is calling those physicists who are questioning the value of c—“speed of light deniers.” Even though there has been consensus that c = 186,000 mps for decades, not a single scientist has suggested that the value of c is “incontrovertible” or that the science on the matter is “settled.” Not one. And that’s as it should be.

And yet, climate alarmists suggest that evidence of a significant anthropogenic impact on climate is “incontrovertible” and that the science on the matter is “settled.” If you don’t believe me ask Al Gore, or more recently, Barack Obama or Bill Clinton—eminent scientists all.

Jeff Jacoby discusses this when he writes:

You don’t have to look far to see that impeccable scientific standards can go hand-in-hand with skepticism about global warming. Ivar Giaever, a 1973 Nobel laureate in physics, resigned this month as a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) to protest the organization’s official position that evidence of manmade climate change is “incontrovertible’’ and cause for alarm. In an e-mail explaining his resignation , Giaever challenged the view that any scientific assertion is so sacred that it cannot be contested.

“In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves,’’ Giaever wrote, incredulous, “but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?’’

And yet, climate alarmists treat a weak and largely unsubstantiated theory that man-made CO2 is a dominant driver of climate change as the gospel. In fact, “gospel” is an appropriate simile because climate change true believers treat all of this like a religion. If you question their largely unsubstantiated positions, you’re a denier, a heretic, and worse, you’re a really bad person. No matter that there are compelling reasons to be skeptical; no matter that the models they’ve created are cannot reproduce past history, no matter that the data that has been used to support anthropogenic climate change is highly questionable—skepticism is not allowed—ever.

Gosh, you’d think that those of us who are skeptical about anthropogenic climate change were, well, questioning the speed of light.

Alternative

2011-09-24T10:18:00.001-04:00

I have been and continue to be a strong proponent of alternative energy. Solar, wind, tidal, thermal, and nuclear all have significant potential and all should be used in conjunction with domestic carbon-based energy sources to gain full energy independence for the United States. Energy independence is the first step in establishing a new and better foreign policv stance for the USA. It is a national security issue that has the added benefit of being green.

Recent efforts by those on the Right to demonize or belittle alternative energy is short-sighted and ideological. It smacks of the same delusional thinking that is often evidenced on the other side of the political spectrum.

Ironically, the Obama administration—a strong supporter of alternative energy—has done more to hurt the prospects for alternative energy than the any other administration in history. Its ham-handed and potentially illegal treatment of Solyndra has given the right-wing its cause célèbre. By needlessly rewarding political donors who invested in the company, by rushing a half-a-billion dollar loan to a company that was in trouble, by circumventing the prescribed vetting process, and by subordinating the taxpayers' loan to politically-connected fat-cats, the Obama administration has damaged government-loans for legitimate alternative energy companies in an irreparable fashion. And now, Solyndra executives—the same guys who glad-handed with the President on his special visit (photo-op) at the company a year ago—plead the fifth in front of congress! What a mess.

We need alternative energy development badly. Small, targeted loans to well-vetted entrepreneurial companies are not a bad thing. But now, alternative energy funding is in serious trouble.

The amateurs at the White House strike again.

Social Contract

2011-09-23T16:22:00.002-04:00

Over the past few weeks, President Obama has demanded that “millionaires and billionaires” (defined as anyone making more than $250,000 per year ) “pay their fair share.” No matter that those making over $250,000 per year pay approximately 45% of all taxes collected and those in the top 10 percent of all income earners pay almost 70 percent.

Many of us in the Center and almost everyone on the Right views the President’s demands as blatant class warfare and a cynical political ploy to rally his base on the Left. In fact, the current rallying cry of the President's supporters is to dismiss any suggestion that class warfare is in play. Instead, people like Elizabeth Warren and an increasingly unhinged Paul Krugman have begun talking about a “social contract.”

Those who use the phrase “social contract” suggest that the government provides the infrastructure (e.g., roads, fire, police, the courts) that enables, say, a “rich industrialist” to succeed, and that in return, he or she should pay his or her “fair share.” They never mention that small business owners—not rich industrialists— will pay the preponderance of the President's proposed taxes and it’s those small business owners who create jobs. They also never quantify what the "fair share" is. Apparently, 70 percent is insufficient.

But never mind—in the Alice and Wonderland world of the Left, it’s “fairness” that matters, even if fairness harms the economy, and as a consequence, the government programs that the President’s supporters purport to love so much.

People like Warren conveniently forget to mention that "rich industrialists" and small business owners work 18 hours a day to bring their ideas to market; that they put their own money at risk; that they create jobs—lots of jobs. That all they ask is for the government not to bury them in regulations, red tape, and onerous legislation—to get out of their way.

Well, not all. In the President’s economy there are politically connected entrepreneurs and politically-correct businesses like, oh, Solyndra. The administration forced a hesitant Department of Energy to provide Solyndra with a half a billion dollars in loan guarantees. Solyndra went bankrupt and the taxpayer's money is lost.

But that’s a mere speed bump on the road to the Left’s utopian world in which the “rich” meet their "social contract."

I’ve been thinking about this, and I have a suggestion. Since the “rich” currently pay 70 percent of all income taxes collected, why don’t we have them pay 100 percent! Ninety percent of taxpayers will then pay absolutely no income taxes—none. Even Barack Obama will be hard pressed to argue that isn’t fair—although he might.

All we’ll need to do is reduce the size of government across the board—federal departments, programs, entitlements, the whole shebang. With less money required to run the government, the “rich” could pay for the whole thing. That is, the tax dollars now collected (their existing 70 percent) would cover the entire cost of the government that is funded by income taxes. No new taxes for anyone, and for 90 percent of existing taxpayers, no income taxes at all.

That seems like a reasonable "social contract" to me. Right?

It's certainly no less irrational than the suggestion that a small group of people who pay for 70 percent of something that benefits a very large group of people are somehow not paying their fair share.

It's Math

2011-09-20T10:11:00.002-04:00

It’s looks as if President Obama and his political advisors are in full campaign mode 15 months before the presidential elections. That, in itself, is unprecedented and unsettling. With our country in severe economic trouble, you’d think the President would spend 100 percent of his time trying to develop effective mechanisms to deal with our problems, rather than campaigning in “battleground states” or attending fund-raisers and the like. How naïve of me!

But in truth, that’s not the core problem. Because he has already begun his campaign, it’s necessary for the President to shift the focus away from a deficit that he has increased by almost 25 percent, away from the economy that has seen 9 percent unemployment for almost two years, and onto something that might galvanize the millions of unemployed and the tens of millions of people who pay no income taxes whatsoever and are reliable Democratic voters.

So in a cynical political ploy, the President has returned to the hard-Left go-to strategy—class warfare. For the past few months, Barack Obama has suggested the “millionaires and billionaires” don’t pay their “fair share.” In fact, against copious evidence to the contrary, he suggests that most folks who earn over $1 million a year pay taxes at a rate that is less than office workers. He uses billionaire Warren Buffet, a man who earns tens of million of dollars from investments, as the poster child for his claim—but how many Warren Buffets are out there? Answer: very, very few.

When accused of class warfare, President Obama bristles and tells us that “It’s not class warfare, it math.”

Being a math person, I liked that, so I checked the math. According to IRS data, the top 1 percent of all taxpayers pay 38 percent of all income taxes. The top 5 percent, pay 58 percent of all income taxes. The top ten percent pay 70 percent of all income taxes. And the bottom 50 percent? They pay about 2.7 percent of all income taxes collected.

Hmmm. Is that balanced? Not a single reporter has asked the President. For the “millionaires and billionaires” in the top 1 percent, is paying almost 40 percent of all income taxes collected somehow not paying your fair share? Is there any “balance” whatsoever in having close to 50 percent of all wage earners pay no income taxes at all?

But it gets worse.

Even if his class warfare arguments were passed by the Congress (there is no chance of this happening), it would do little to reduce the deficit.

But the President tells us it’s math. I guess at Harvard Law School, math is different, because a simple examination of the numbers indicates that the problem is spending, and the President’s proposal does nothing—absolutely nothing—to reduce on-going continuing spending in the short term. Like all politicians he pushes his new taxes and “cuts” out into the future, long after the election.

If Barack Obama persists in this approach (and every indication is that he will), he’ll fall victim to another kind of “math.” That math is the kind that counts votes in November of 2012.

Train Wreck

2011-09-18T13:18:00.002-04:00

As we watch the slow motion train wreck that is the upcoming vote for Palestinian “statehood” at the UN, all you can really do is shake your head.

The majority of UN nations favor the move, even though Palestinian leadership seems incapable of governing in a manner the elevates its own people. It prefers to collect international welfare payments rather than building a viable economy, and refuses to move away from the hyper-violence the guides its interaction with Israel. Palestinian leadership is unwilling to accept Israel as a legitimate nation. They honor murderers and murder their own people when they make overtures toward peaceful co-existence with Israel. They institutionalize corruption, eschew the rule of law, and use victimization as an excuse for their own internal failings. And yet, a vast majority of UN member nations think them worthy of their own state with borders carved out of a sovereign nation defined unilaterally (by the Palestinians).

But that’s no surprise. The majority of UN member nations can relate to the Palestinians because the majority see elements of themselves in the Palestinians. Human rights abuses abound, violence is a way of life, corruption is endemic, and a hatred of Israel is common.

And what of the European and Western nations who have supported the Palestinian move? In virtually every case, their support for Palestinian statehood is being driven by the international Left. In what can only be viewed as irrational thinking, the Left demonizes Israel—the only nation in the Middle East that is a liberal democracy with operating courts, full rights for women, a gay population that doesn’t have to hide, a booming economy, and a vibrant cultural scene. Ya think maybe the Left has another agenda?

David Harsanyi summarizes the upcoming UN debacle nicely when he writes:

Sure, the United Nations has historically vacillated between deep irrelevance and monumental ineffectiveness. But with all its prevaricating and impotence on genuine threats to human rights across the world, next week it will be actively precipitating violence and endorsing ethnic cleansing.

It is understood that one of the preconditions for the existence of a Palestinian state is the judenrein West Bank. It will be purified of Jews, regardless of their political inclinations, Zionist or not, because effectively speaking no Jew will be able to live in the West Bank or East Jerusalem safely. Palestine Liberation Organization’s ambassador to the United States, Maen Rashid Areikat, has admitted as much.

The Palestinians strategy is relatively transparent— embarrass Barack Obama by forcing a veto in the security council, and as a consequence, generate a “seething anger” in the “Arab street” that will provide cover for violent “protests” that are nothing more than Intifada III.

The Palestinians have decided to play hardball despite the efforts by the Obama administration. It’s time for the United States to do the same. If the Palestinians proceed with their move (it's possible that they'll still be derailed or postponed), all U.S. aid for the Palestinians should cease. More importantly, a resumption of aid and support for any further “negotiations” must be tied to true concessions, not on the part of Israel, but by the Palestinians.

Further, it’s time for the U.S. to re-examine its disproportionate financial support for the U.N. (currently, 22 percent of the U.N. regular budget and more than 27 percent of the U.N. peacekeeping budget). Say, to the average of the top 10 dues-paying countries—not one dime more.

With this travesty rushing at us this week, it’s time to play hardball with both the Palestinians and the demonstrably corrupt, biased, and ineffective organization that unconditionally supports them.

Solyndra

2011-09-15T20:33:00.003-04:00

Let me begin by saying that I’m a firm proponent of energy independence and back a strategy that develops both domestic fossil fuels and alternative energy sources (e.g., solar, wind, nuclear, tidal) to help us get there before the year 2020. I’m even in favor of government support for fledgling alternative energy companies with a really good idea and a solid business plan. But that support has to be based on solid due diligence and should never be driven by political considerations that trump solid business thinking.

But then there’s Solyndra—a California-based solar energy company that went bankrupt last month, putting over 1,000 employees on the street and frittering away a half-billion dollars in stimulus money.

The story of Solyndra appears to be an epic tale of government (in this case, the Obama administration) making very bad decisions that wasted vast sums of taxpayer money for purely political reasons.

In a nutshell, Solyndra made solar cells, but its pricing structure was uncompetitive and had been for a few years. A major private investor in the company, billionaire George Kaiser, was a major contributor to the Obama campaign in 2008. The company applied for government loan guarantees during the Bush administration, but no action was taken on their request. Once President Obama was in office, that changed. Leaked emails seem to indicate that the administration desperately needed a “green,” shovel-ready project after the $835-billion stimulus was passed. The administration decided to fast-track the Solyndra loan application so that they could use the company as a poster-child for the effectiveness of the stimulus. Barack Obama himself visited the company to tout them as a green jobs creator.

No one yet knows whether the fast track was also a case of crony capitalism or why in the final loan agreement, the government subordinated its $500+ million to George Kaiser’s private investment of $75 million. Or why the loan was allowed to be used to build new buildings when thousands of California industrial properties lay vacant. Or why George Kaiser made 16 visits to the White House in the year before the loan guarantee was granted. Or why the Obama administration didn’t listen to warnings by its internal watchdogs and outside accounting firms.

The OMB and Price Waterhouse raised flags about the company before the loan guarantee was granted. PW stated that the company “has suffered recurring losses from operations, negative cash flows since inception and has a net stockholders’ deficit that . . . raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.” Even members of the Obama's own administration warned, “This deal is NOT ready for prime time.”

But now the company is gone, and the taxpayer’s money is too. Half a billion dollars. Gone. For what?

The Obama Administration sacrificed due diligence and common sense to make a few political points. They’re certainly not the first administration to do that, but what they now have are the makings of a full-blow scandal.

Update (9/17/11):

As additional internal government emails are released, we learn more about this brewing scandal. The New York Post reports on an internal email from an OMB staffer:

“If Solyndra defaults down the road,” read one e-mail, “the optics will arguably be worse than they would be today,” because “additional funds [will] have been put at risk, recovery may be lower and questions will be asked as to why the administration made a bad investment, not just once ... but twice.”

The staffer, whose name was redacted from the published e-mail, tried to derail the extra Solyndra cash by making a political argument, suggesting that allowing Solyndra to shut its doors last January would let the White House “get some credit for fiscal discipline.”

But that suggestion was ignored -- little surprise, given how the Solyndra deal, now threatening to become Obama’s Enron, was steeped in politics from the start.

The Post characterizes information released to date as "the tip of the iceberg." It looks like this President and his administration exhibited remarkably bad judgment that was driven by political rather than business criteria. That's really not surprising given that few if any of Barack Obama's senior advisors have any private sector business experience whatsoever.

Dark Clouds

2011-09-13T10:02:00.003-04:00

Egypt is devolving into anarchy with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian military fighting to see who can be more anti-American and anti-Israel (so much for the vaunted “Arab-spring”). Libya stumbles forward as “freedom fighters” with al Quaida connections pilfer surface-to-air rockets and biological weapons from Qaddafi’s stash to be sold to international terrorist groups. The Palestinians go to a corrupt and clearly anti-Western UN asking that it unilaterally grant them a state, even though they cannot govern their own territory without massive international welfare.

In all three cases, the actions of the Obama administration have clearly exacerbated an already bad situation and made it significantly worse.

When President Obama came into office, he was ignorant of realities in the Middle East or simply chose not to care. His 2009 mea culpa speech to the Arab world in Cairo was intended to better relations with Islam, but instead, his words then and his subsequent actions projected weakness and indecision. Although the MSM is loath to tell you, President Obama’s current polling in the Middle East is 10 percentage points lower than President Bush’s poll numbers at the end of his term (when Obama’s supporters kept telling us that the world hates us because of Bush).

The President’s reaction to Egyptian and Libyan unrest is a clear indicator of the vacuity of his foreign policy in that region. Richard Fernandez addresses this when he writes:

Washington’s function has changed from that of a damper to that of an accelerant without even the virtue of knowing in which direction it is accelerating. It is for change, whatever it may be, because it sounds nice; because the administration cannot be seen to as behindhand even when it is.

Hope and change. That’s the problem. The Obama administration hoped that by suggesting that dictatorial Middle Eastern leaders be changed, a time of liberal ideals and attitudes would follow. In the Middle East, that’s a naïve and dangerous hope—one that is disconnected from reality. Worse, by repeatedly criticizing Israel, the President has given the Arab world a sense that it can overreach, that the U.S. will not stand by it’s long time allies.

Dark clouds are gathering in the Middle East. They are in no small measure the result of catastrophic mismanagement of our foreign policy in that region over the past three years.

Krugman's Shame

2011-09-11T14:33:00.007-04:00

Paul Krugman, the hard-Left columnist who writes regularly for The New York Times writes the following screed on this 10th anniversary of 9-11:

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te [sic] atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

In Krugman’s fevered imagination, the true heros of this event “raced to cash in on the horror.” Rudy Guiliani showed more leadership in one day than our current national leadership have exhibited in the past few years. But no matter—to Krugman, the Mayor of New York “cashed in” on the horror.

In Krugman’s warped view of reality, we should recognize that the aftermath of this event was “deeply shameful” for all of us. You’ll note that in his fantasy world, Krugman never even names the perpetrators of 9-11, because in his world they are but bit-players to a greater drama—the sins of the United States and why we drove these Islamist fanatics to attack us.

Krugman exemplifies a very troubling characteristic of those on the hard-Left—an extreme distaste for his own country.

At the end of his screed, Krugman writes: “I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.” The obvious reason is that at some core level he knows he’s wrong and is unwilling to hear others state why. That makes him a coward.

Krugman’s mind so distorted with a warped ideology that he borders on a form of dementia.” He's a pathetic ideologue who, unfortunately, has been given a platform by The New York Times. His analysis is illogical, his world view is irrational, and his ideas, if they were ever implemented, would do far more damage to our country than anything “Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush” ever did. Paul Krugman is a fool.

Update (9-12-11):

Not surprisingly, Krugman’s op-ed has generated a lot of blowback, none better stated that this by Pejman Yousefzadeh:

As Sa’adi noted, that collective sadness [sbout 9-11], this ability to feel the sadness of others, and to give expression to our sympathy, our empathy, and our grief makes us humans. And Paul Krugman’s inability to perceive it, his willingness–either due to moral myopia, or to an eager desire to give himself to the cause of repulsive propagandizing–to characterize our “subdued” state to the supposed “shame” that the country allegedly feels for not thinking exactly as Paul Krugman has thought for the past ten years makes him the archetypal brute. Allegedly, “in its heart, the nation knows” that Paul Krugman is super-correct about everything, and for the sin of not having listened, the nation is ashamed. And if you don’t believe in that theory, just ask Paul Krugman; he’ll be the first to tell you that you should buy into it with all of the dark thoughts you can muster.

This is a family blog, and so, I make sure not to cuss a blue streak when writing here. As a consequence, it will be impossible for me to use the only words in the English language that have so much as a candle’s chance in a cyclone of expressing the disgust, revulsion, and outrage that any decent individual ought to feel when reading Krugman’s words. How very ironic that the pundit who decries the lack of unity in the post-9/11 world should contribute so mightily to the sense of division that we are experiencing with his divisive and revolting thought that today should primarily be a day dedicated to attacking Paul Krugman’s enemies. How very egocentric of him to try to turn September 11th into “Why Paul Krugman Was Right” Day, with no cogent argument anywhere within fifty miles of his post for why the day should be re-branded as Krugman wishes it to be. “Brute”? The word will have to do to describe what Krugman is, though there certainly are other words I can think of to describe him.

Read the whole essay and watch the accompanying Youtube videos.

A Second Update (9-12-11):

Richard Fernandez talks about another kind of “shame” that a fool like Krugman is simply incapable of understanding. He also talks about forgiveness.

The story of September 11 must for all time become the story of how a certain date became unspeakable to al-Qaeda and its followers; a tale of how this day of all others, became the blackest day in the history of Islam. It should forever be a date that can never be mentioned without arousing a deep sense of shame throughout the Middle East so that in generations hence, people should still come up to strangers unbidden and say, “I’m sorry for September 11.“ Until then it is unfinished business.

We have no right to forgive. We have no right to forget. We have no right to move on until this final condition is met. That in the holy of holies of our civilization’s enemies, in the innermost recesses of their sanctum sanctorum they should say with heartfelt ardor: never again. Never again. Never, ever again.

9-11

2011-09-10T14:49:00.003-04:00

One decade.

There will be millions of words written about the 10-year anniversary of 9-11. As the writers should, they’ll praise the heroism of the FDNY, the NYPD, the passengers on Flight 93, and the thousands of others who stepped-up when it was needed.

They’ll recount the tragic events of that day and only peripherally discuss why so many Americans suffered the tragedy. They’ll tiptoe around the cause of the tragic events—a cowardly act of war against an office building complex filled with civilians, perpetrated by Islamic extremists who by their own admission, celebrate death as much as we celebrate life.

They’ll worry about why it happened, and some, at least, will place the blame on us. Instead, they might ask why over the past decade the worldwide Islamic community has done relatively little to condemn the fanatics who committed this act of war and virtually nothing to rid their religion of those who support the Islamists.

The MSM will be full of live broadcasts of memorial events in NYC and at other sites. But only a few will wonder why political correctness, hyper-sensitivity, and bureaucratic inertia has caused some of these memorial sites to remain incomplete 10 years after the event.

The media will recount the very personal and moving stories of the heroes and the families who lost loved ones. But few will ask why the anger we felt as a nation has dissipated into an amorphous feeling of ennui.

Immediately after 9-11, those on the Left who would normally decry any attempt at retribution, remained silent, shocked by the enormity of this heinous attack. That changed, and today, it’s not at all hard to find some in the media, the arts, and the body-politic who suggest that 9-11 was somehow our fault—that our hegemony, capitalism, and greed drove the Islamists to do what they did.

In our schools 9-11 will be discussed gently, with an emphasis on diversity, cultural acceptance, and understanding. That’s as it should be. But it would be okay for children too young to remember to be reminded that the world is full of many things—some good, and some evil. And no matter how much we’d like it to be so, the evil will not be eradicated by a better understanding of others or their culture.

But in this post modern world, evil is such a subjective concept, isn’t it? Then again, if 9-11 wasn't evil, if watching innocents leap to their death from 100 stories in the air wasn’t the result of evil, if flying airliners into tall buildings with hundreds on board—men,women, and children—wasn’t evil, please tell me what is.

Right Now

2011-09-09T16:15:00.002-04:00

After 960 days in office, President Obama pressed Congress to pass his jobs plan “right now.” The urgency that the President projected seemed rather odd, given that the new jobs plan is almost an exact duplicate of his ill-fated $800 billion stimulus package—a plan that resulted in unemployment hovering above the 9 percent mark for the past 15 months.

To be fair, there are aspects of the President’s new (old?) job plan that make sense. Improving infrastructure is a good idea, but it’s hard to understand how reductions in the payroll tax or extensions to unemployment comp duration will create jobs. These may be reasonable ideas, but they should not be part of a “jobs plan.”

Although the President’s words seem reasonable (if a bit tired) the actions of his administration tell a different story.

A few months ago, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), headed by hand-picked Obama appointees, attempted to block new work at a Boeing factory in South Carolina. Although the NLRB claims their action was procedural, it appears that the fact that Boeing moved some of its work on the new 787 aircraft to a right to work (non-Union) state had a lot more to do with it. If the administration succeeds (the case is in the courts), 1,000 jobs will be lost in South Carolina.

Last month, the Obama Justice Department raided Gibson Guitars and confiscated rosewood from India because it wasn’t finished by Indian workers in Indian. It’s worth noting that over the past year, Gibson has created 500 new jobs in both Memphis and Nashville and that some of those jobs undoubted were connected to the finishing of the rosewood. It’s also worth noting that Gibson’s CEO is a Republican fund-raiser and that Gibson is a non-union shop.

But those are side issues that provide some insight into the administration’s true positions, but don’t solve the problem of establishing an environment in which jobs will be created. The problem can be addressed by reducing onerous regulations, restructuring the tax code to make it more balanced and more inclusive (almost half of our citizens pay no income tax at all and loopholes allow some major corporations to do the same), and reducing the uncertainty associated with an administration that regularly attacks “big corporations” and the “rich.”

For a post-modern President, it’s truly remarkable how 20th century most of Barack Obama’s ideas are. For example, the President plays to his base by demanding that major corporations move manufacturing back to our shores and that the workers who do the manufacturing be union members. Is he honestly unaware that we now live in a global economy where widgets are manufactured where labor costs are lowest? Does he honestly believe that union shops make a manufacturer more competitive?

Bottom line: we cannot compete with China or South Korea or Vietnam in the manufacture of widgets, but we can compete when we derive “manufacturing jobs” in industries that cannot be exported or easily reproduced overseas.

One example of many is energy. How many jobs would be created if we tapped the 2000 acres of land on the north slope of Alaska and unleashed that state’s massive oil reserves? How many jobs would be created if the president declared an energy emergency and reduced the amount of regulation required to build nuclear power plants by 90 percent? How many jobs would be created if we reduced EPA restraints and allowed the production of oil sands and natural gas along with the resulting infrastructure to move those energy sources? And how much better off would our nation be, both domestically and internationally, if we became energy independent as a consequence?

These are not hard things to do, but they are ideologically difficult for Barack Obama. So they remain undone and the employment rate hovers around 9 percent.

True Believers

2011-09-08T09:43:00.004-04:00

Today’s New York Times makes still another tedious plea for humans to save the planet. Taking a de rigor swipe at the GOP presidential contenders, the editors write:

The Republican presidential contenders regard global warming as a hoax or, at best, underplay its importance. The most vocal denier is Rick Perry, the Texas governor and longtime friend of the oil industry, who insists that climate change is an unproven theory created by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.”

Never mind that nearly all the world’s scientists regard global warming as a serious threat to the planet, with human activities like the burning of fossil fuels a major cause. Never mind that multiple investigations have found no evidence of scientific manipulation. Never mind that America needs a national policy. Mr. Perry has a big soapbox, and what he says, however fallacious, reaches a bigger audience than any scientist can command.

Either the editors of the Times are woefully ignorant of: (1) the many scientific studies that bring current climate models into question; (2) the competing and equally compelling theories that question whether CO2 is a driving factor for warming; (3) the irrefutable fact that warming has slowed to negligible amounts over the past 20 years, and (4) the major scientific scandal that brings much of the true believers “scientific” data into question, or they are themselves true believers who will not question the catechism of the climate change religion.

There’s very little question that the latter explanation better explains their hysterical claims and ad hominem accusations of denial.

Walter Russell Mead presents a reasoned counterpoint:

While there are plenty of individual greens who are cautious in their policy advice and responsible in their use of evidence, the movement as a whole is driven by emotion. Most greens are not Vulcans, dispassionately calculating the best course of action by the dictates of reason. They are angry, frightened, committed true believers on a mission from Gaia, and many have a deep view that capitalism itself is a kind of cancer — uncontrolled growth that will sooner or later kill us all. (Sherri Tepper’s science fiction in which life-affirming, grounded, caring ecologically minded people frequently of the female persuasion overcome various male/science/capitalist/cancerous growth affirming death cults on planets around the galaxy portrays this core mindset pretty well.)

This is religion, not science, romanticism not reason. Add to that significant economic interests in subsidized industries (alternative power generation, ethanol, firms hoping to benefit from carbon trading) and one sees that the green movement as a whole is driven by anything but disinterested regard for the fruit of scientific research.

The simple fact is that despite the anger of Al Gore or the politically motivated rantings of the Times editorial board, the science is far, far from settled. It would be irresponsible to establish major public policy decisions when we have only hypotheses, not irrefutable scientific fact. Even the President, who is a true believer, rejected the latest EPA climate change mandates as job killers. He did this because of politics, but at the end of the day, he did the right thing for the wrong reason.

The Left, despite its moral preening, has no monopoly on its desire for a clean and safe environment. The difference is that green true believers are perfectly willing to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. Doing the wrong thing won’t solve the problem, and worse, it will create unintended side affects that may very well hurt us all.

Words

2011-09-07T19:21:00.002-04:00

On the eve of President Obama’s “jobs speech”, Republicans in Congress and virtually all of the GOP presidential contenders argue that in order to create jobs in meaningful numbers, the federal government should get out the way of the private sector. This can be accomplished by reducing onerous regulations, restructuring the tax code to make it more balanced and more inclusive (almost half of our citizens pay no income tax at all and loopholes allow some major corporations to do the same), and reducing the uncertainty associated with an administration that regularly attacks “big corporations” and the “rich.”

Tomorrow, I suspect that the President will imply that he’s in favor of some of those things, but his administration's recent actions belie any such implication.

A few months ago, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), headed by hand-picked Obama appointees, attempted to block new work at a Boeing factory in South Carolina. Although the NLRB claims their action was procedural, it appears that the fact that Boeing moved some of its work on the new 787 aircraft to a right-to-work (non-Union) state had a lot more to do with it. If the administration succeeds (the case is in the courts), 1,000 jobs will be lost in South Carolina.

Last month, the Obama Justice Department raided Gibson Guitars and confiscated rosewood from India because it wasn’t finished by Indian workers in India. It’s worth noting that over the past year, Gibson has created 500 new jobs in both Memphis and Nashville and that some of those jobs undoubted were connected to the finishing of the rosewood. It’s also worth noting that Gibson’s CEO is a Republican fund-raiser and that Gibson is a non-union shop. It’s also worth mentioning that many other guitar companies use similar wood, but they have not been raided—their CEOs are Democrats and they are union shops.

The President loves to use words in august settings, and his upcoming speech before a joint session of Congress projects the right atmospherics. But as he reads his teleprompter, remember that it's actions that matter. And if Boeing and Gibson are any indication, this administration’s actions relative to jobs are so incompetent, so partisan, and so misdirected that it will be hard to take the words seriously.

USPS

2011-09-06T19:56:00.003-04:00

Almost everything has changed in our digital world. Email has replaced snail mail—digital information of all kinds can be delivered instantly. As a consequence, many new companies have grown from nothing to become multi-billion dollar concerns. And one public-private partnership is threatened with extinction.

As it does almost every year, the management of the USPS appeared before Congress today and lamented the sorry state of their “company.” The USPS, they claimed, would be unable to meet its $5.5 billion pension obligation later this year and could cease operations within the next year. What to do?

That seemingly complex question can be answered in a single word: Nothing. The Congress should offer the USPS no bailout. They should pass no legislation that leads to indirect funding of their pension or their operations. They should let market forces take their course.

It is incumbent upon USPS management and unions to craft a plan that will save their company. To begin, the exceedingly generous pensions that postal workers receive will have to be re-evaluated. Both management and postal union leaders promised far more to USPS workers and retirees than they could deliver. Of course, they did so with the knowledge that the feds would bail them out when push came to shove. Unfortunately, the profligate spending by those same feds have lead to a deficit so deep that a bailout should be out of the question.

Management caved to a no-layoff contract for postal workers. Unfortunately, labor accounts for 82 percent of USPS expenses—as opposed to about 50% of expenses for UPS and Fedex. If your expense column has an 82 percent item, that’s where cuts must be made. But management negotiated with union leaders and promised far more to USPS workers than was realistic, again, with the knowledge that the feds would bail them out when push came to shove. That won’t happen.

If management and labor can craft a plan that enables the post office to survive, that would be great. But if they can’t, then the taxpayers and the Congress should do nothing. The USPS will declare bankruptcy, but in its place, a set of private sector companies will step in to take over many of its services.

The word changes. And just because the USPS has been around for over 230 years, does not give it the right to ask the taxpayers to perpetuate a business model that is unsustainable and anachronistic.

Update (7 Sep 2011):

Megan Mcardle comments in The Atlantic:

Congress has given the Post Office two incompatible mandates. It is to make money like a business . . . but it is not to have any of the freedom that businesses have to, say, close branch offices, cut its delivery area, or change delivery schedules.

This is, to put it mildly, lunatic.

9.20.11

2011-09-04T15:28:00.003-04:00

September 20th is rapidly approaching. What’s happening on September 20th? The Palestinians will petition the United Nations for statehood and will undoubtedly get what they want but do not deserve. A group of emerging nations, most dictatorships or worse, will define a state carved out of lands that were won by Israel as a consequence of wars conducted against them by the Arab states (including the Palestinians). The ownership of those lands has been debated for 60 years and the Palestinians have had numerous chances to make peace with Israel. But no. Israel must disappear, say the Palestinians. They are supported by many on the Left and virtually every dictatorship on the planet.

It would be as if a group of Mexican people demanded the creation of a new nation, Neuvo Mexico, on the land that is now Texas. After all, the Mexicans used to live there (many still do, just as “Palestinians” live peacefully in Israel). But the United States occupied Neuvo Mexico, over 100 years ago, and now the Neuvo Mexicans want it back.

David Warren puts it nicely when he writes:

The Palestinians, so far as they are a people, have now a long history of being able to do things without consequences. (They are not ethnically distinct from neighbouring Arabs, but defined by family ties to a given location.) Under the direction of a succession of "reformed" or unreformed terrorist leaders, from the Mufti of Jerusalem to Yasser Arafat to Hamas, they have "evolved" a polity which may itself be defined as "the Anti-Israel."

Israel is consistently held to account, both internally and externally, as an old-fashioned, formal nation state. When the Israelis respond to rocket attacks from Gaza, they are compelled to justify their action. But the people who sent the rockets are not. And supposing them to have been launched "freelance" by independent terror cells, the authority which governs Gaza is not held gravely responsible for having failed to stop them.

Imagine what the consequences would be, if Israeli citizens, acting independently, began lobbing missiles into the Palestinian territories, gratuitously at targets both civilian and military - whatever happened to be in range. And then, the Israeli authorities made no gesture to stop them. The diplomats of the world would spit up their sherry. Our peace-loving politicians would go berserk.

Yet they have nothing to say after each of many thousand Qassams comes down within Israeli borders of the strictest 1947 definition.

Take this mental exercise one step farther. What if a party in the Israeli Knesset - a party in a position to sweep any free election - announced in its very constitution that Israel's borders extend from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean, and include all deep-historical areas of Jewish settlement, including the entire West Bank. That, moreover, while Jews and perhaps a few quiet Christians are allowed to stay, all Muslims must get out. On pain of death.

Yet the reverse of this is the "final position" of Palestinian statecraft.

Hamas declares it openly, and swept the only election in which it was allowed to freely run. The operatives of the PLO used to declare it, but made an ambiguous recognition of Israel's "right to exist" - tactically, in exchange for substantial territories, and Israeli complaisance in their own "right" to enter and govern them.

If an identifiable Jew from Israel wanders, unguarded, into any part of the Palestinian territories, he is a dead man. This is a fact of life, and everyone knows it. Leftist and Islamist rhetoric about Israeli "apartheid" masks a very big truth: that more than a million Muslim Arabs live, work, and move freely around Israel, with full citizenship and protection under Israel's laws (enforced by very liberal courts). Whereas, the number of Jews enjoying this status under the Palestinian Authority is zero.

But the UN, a corrupt and ineffective world body, becomes the arbiter of what is and isn’t a “state.” That’s the same UN that has allowed Hezballah to rearm in the north, even though UN troops and sanctions are in place to stop just that.

The Obama administration is scrambling to have the Palestinians postpone their request. If they’re lucky, they may succeed. But what if they don’t?

What our President should do is suggest in no uncertain terms that this time there will be consequences. But of course, President Obama is loath to do just that. If the domestic political consequences weren’t so dire (can’t lose the Jewish domestic vote and political donations, after all), I suspect he would likely not wield a veto in the security council and allow the UN to impose a Palestinian state on Israel.

No matter that the Palestinians have never negotiated in good faith, have never renounced their stated position that Israel has no right to exist, and have never—not once—given up anything tangible in the never-ending quest for peace. But our President, purposely ignorant of realities on the ground, will cluck his tongue and voice disapproval. Words are cheap. Actions matter. Too bad.

Update (5 September 11):

A front-page report from The New York Times this morning uses off-the-record comments of “senior administration officials” regarding last ditch attempts to dissuade the Palestinians from their UN maneuver: “President Obama would be put in the position of threatening to veto recognition of the aspirations of most Palestinians or risk alienating Israel and its political supporters in the United States.”

Hmmm. You’d think that vetoing an attempt by a group that regularly lobs rockets over an international border with the primary intent of killing civilians would be an easy decision—because it is the right decision. You’d think that vetoing a proposal by a group that refuses to accept its neighbor’s right to exist would be an easy decision—because it is the right decision. You’d think that vetoing a blatant ploy at legitimacy by a group that violently abuses dissenters among its own people, that cannot apply the rule of law among its own people, and that is corrupt and thuggish would be an easy decision—because it is the right decision.

Apparently, the Obama administration is applying its post-modern view of the world yet again. There is no right and wrong—only what is politically expedient.

Ugly

2011-09-02T17:15:00.002-04:00

Although the Presidential Election is still more than a year away, it appears that President Obama and the DNC have already decided to adopt an old axiom that is used by successful defense lawyers during a criminal trial: “When your guy is guilty, change the subject by trying to pin the crime on someone else.”

The President of the United States owns the economy. But this economy is so breathtakingly abysmal—zero job growth this month, 9.1 percent unemployment, an anemic GDP, African American unemployment of 16.7 percent, a housing market that is the worst in two generations—that no one wants to own it. So the President changes the subject by trying to pin the crime on someone else.

For the first two and a half years years of Obama’s presidency, it was George W. Bush. Now with his upcoming “Jobs Speech” to a joint session of Congress, it appears that he’ll try to blame the intransigent Congress itself—actually the GOP members of the Congress.

After all, Barack Obama can’t cite a record of accomplishment. The President’s $1 trillion dollar stimulus, now more than two years old, has done nothing to create jobs. His immediate and naïve reliance on “green jobs” (a noble idea that will take a generation to evolve) has been embarrassed by the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar company that the administration loaned more than a half-billion dollars (obviously, the taxpayers are stuck with the bill) without proper vetting (this would become a major scandal, but the MSM has, as yet, treated it as a non-story). His health care program has inadvertently frozen hiring due to uncertainties that most businesses are unwilling to accept, and his demonization of corporations and the rich (the entities that tend to create jobs) has done little to inspire confidence in that sector.

So Barack Obama and his supporters will change the subject. They’ll blame the tea party “extremists” who simply want to reduce the size of government and reduce a deficit that the President has increased by more than 25 percent in less than 3 years. The temerity of those “extremists” to suggest that a balanced budget is a good idea or that spending has to be reduced now! And the GOP politicians who support them? “Obstructionists.” After all, what could be worse than suggesting that entitlements will bankrupt our country and that our children will be left in the fiscal debris that result?

And the evil Paul Ryan, the only politician with the courage to propose a detailed budget to reduce the deficit? The DNC tells seniors that Ryan wants to dismantle their Medicare, even though there isn’t a single word in his budget that would affect anyone on Medicare or likely to get Medicare within the next 10 years. But what about President Obama’s budget plan or the Democrat’s budget? Oh wait, they haven’t proposed one—not a word on paper. Nevermind, Ryan is “un-American” and its his fault that the economy is zeroed out.

In any venue, whether it’s Kindergarten or the Whitehouse, finger-pointing is unattractive. It suggests that the person blaming others is unable to control his own fate, that he or she lacks the competence, the understanding, and the self-awareness to recognize that failure cannot and should not be blamed on others.

So the President and the DNC will point their fingers, and as they become more desperate over the coming months, their claims will become increasingly more hysterical. And what is now simply unattractive, will become increasingly ugly.

Cosmic Rays

2011-08-29T17:58:00.005-04:00

Sure, “climate change” proponents have experienced many bumps along the way—a major scientific scandal that included doctored data, peer review shenanigans, climate models that do not comport with reality, and the purposeful exclusion of data that do not conform with the researchers (IPCC) notion of the politically correct result. But if you were to believe Al Gore, the vast majority of Left-leaning media, the President, and millions of true believers, anthropogenic global warming (AGW, a.k.a. “climate change”) is caused predominantly by human endeavors, with CO2 being the primary suspect.

Forget that no one—no one!—has been able to indicate precisely what percentage of climate change is due to human activity, the true believers still argue that humans provide a “substantial” component of climate change. But is it 2 percent, 10 percent, 20 percent or more? Even the IPCC doesn’t have the temerity to propose a hard, scientifically verifiable number.

Is there a number at all? Sure, there’s little debate that humans, a part of the ecosystem, contribute to changes in climate, but the contribution is probably quite small. So small, in fact, that draconian measures proposed by true believers would wreck an already weakened global economy while at the same time doing almost nothing to affect the climate.

Why not? It’s the science, stupid.

This month a major scientific paper has been published by scientists at CERN, one of the World’s most respected scientific laboratories, in the prestigious journal, Nature. Lawrence Solomon reports that “The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.”

I’ve discussed the impact of the Sun and it’s affects on climate in the Blog over the years, and the sun-based climate change theory is not new, but irrefutable proof is. Solomon provides some interesting (and for those of us who respect real science, not the nonsense that Al Gore spews) disturbing background:

The hypothesis that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate has been Enemy No. 1 to the global warming establishment ever since it was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” He then set about discrediting the theory, any journalist that gave the theory cre dence, and most of all the Danes presenting the theory — they soon found themselves vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite their impeccable scientific credentials.

The mobilization to rally the press against the Danes worked brilliantly, with one notable exception. Nigel Calder, a former editor of The New Scientist who attended that 1996 conference, would not be cowed. Himself a physicist, Mr. Calder became convinced of the merits of the argument and a year later, following a lecture he gave at a CERN conference, so too did Jasper Kirkby, a CERN scientist in attendance. Mr. Kirkby then convinced the CERN bureaucracy of the theory’s importance and developed a plan to create a cloud chamber — he called it CLOUD, for “Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets.”

But Mr. Kirkby made the same tactical error that the Danes had — not realizing how politicized the global warming issue was, he candidly shared his views with the scientific community.

“The theory will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century,” Mr. Kirkby told the scientific press in 1998, explaining that global warming may be part of a natural cycle in the Earth’s temperature.

The global warming establishment sprang into action, pressured the Western governments that control CERN, and almost immediately succeeded in suspending CLOUD. It took Mr. Kirkby almost a decade of negotiation with his superiors, and who knows how many compromises and unspoken commitments, to convince the CERN bureaucracy to allow the project to proceed. And years more to create the cloud chamber and convincingly validate the Danes’ groundbreaking theory.

The findings indicate that cosmic rays—a product of the Sun’s magnetic field—are the dominant catalyst of cloud formation. To quote from a supplement of the paper: “cosmic rays promote the formation of clusters of molecules that can then grow and seed clouds in the real atmosphere.”

But even CERN is susceptible to political pressure and pressure from the EU (CERN’s sponsor) on CERN's management was unrelenting. Again Solomon comments:

Weeks ago, CERN formerly decided to muzzle Mr. Kirby and other members of his team to avoid “the highly political arena of the climate change debate,” telling them “to present the results clearly but not interpret them” and to downplay the results by “mak[ing] clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.” The CERN study and press release is written in bureaucratese and the version of Mr. Kirkby’s study that appears in the print edition of Nature censored the most eye-popping graph — only those who know where to look in an online supplement (see bottom of article for .pdf link) will see the striking potency of cosmic rays in creating the conditions for seeding clouds.

If this sounds like the efforts of the church against the findings of Galileo, maybe that's because its a near perfect analogy. “Climate change” has become a religion for many, and when their beliefs are attacked, they respond viciously. That’s why those of us in the Center who might question the hysterical claims of the AGW hypothesis are termed “deniers.”

Oh, well, let’s see if the IPCC or Al Gore, or any other true believer can "deny" the CERN’s findings. But then again, they won’t have to, because CERN's findings will never be seen beyond a small group of readers. The main stream media will make sure of that.

Hurricane

2011-08-27T11:41:00.002-04:00

As I watch the media’s hypervenitilating coverage of the run-up to Hurricane Irene’s collision with the Northeastern United States, all I can do was shake my head and turn the TV off. I live in South Florida, a hurricane-prone area of the country, so I know something about these tropical cyclones. Yes, they can be dangerous. Yes, precautions must be made in advance, and yes, a category 1 storm can do significant damage and certainly causes enormous temporary inconvenience (e.g., power outages, gas lines, food shortages). But Cat 1 storms are rarely killers, rarely do anything close to catastrophic damage, and rarely leave long-lasting effects.

But the media’s coverage of Irene borders on hysteria—or at least, it is intended to create hysteria among those who are unable to think critically. Worse, in order to cover themselves politically, politicians play off the media coverage and use “an abundance of caution” and make decisions that are dubious at best (e.g., shutting down the entire NYC transit system hours before the storm will strike).

The media coverage of this event borders on irresponsible. Viewers are given no context, reports that the storm is weakening off the Carolina coast are either not mentioned or are presented with a follow-on the tag-line such as: “… but it could grow in intensity as it moves northward.” Yes, I suppose it could, but meteorological science and NOAA indicate that it probably won’t. In fact, NOAA believes it will probably continue to weaken.

Yet, intrepid reporters stand on windy beaches and tell us that we’re all doomed. Camera crews look for the one old wood pier that the waves smash to smithereens and suggest that the viewer’s house is next. It’s disgraceful, it’s misleading, and yes, it is irresponsible. But it does hold viewers, improve ratings, and increase ad dollars. And in the end, that’s what it’s all about.

Nothing

2011-08-24T16:39:00.003-04:00

Remember back in the heady days of the “Arab Spring” in Egypt. If you believed the media reports, idealistic liberal college students were about to turn a dictatorship into a liberal democracy. That was a time when progressives praised the leadership of President Obama in advocating the overthrow of Hosni Mubarek, and neo-cons celebrated the outbreak of democracy in the Arab world’s biggest country. Sadly, they were both wrong.

Now, as we watch Islamist elements fight with the Egyptian military to determine whether the country becomes a military dictatorship with questionable ties to the US or an Islamic fascist state that hates the US, one wonders exactly what the President is thinking as his administration waxes poetic about events in Libya.

Like Mubarek, Muammar Qaddafi is a thug, a tyrant, and a murderer, but for all of his negatives, he was probably a better option than the tribal thugs who will now battle for supremacy in Libya. While the intrepid ‘Anderson Coopers’ of the MSM report jubilation in the streets of Tripoli, other more sober observers provide a more realistic assessment of Qaddafi’s overthrow.

Margaret Wente comments:

The likelihood of a very bloody fight for Tripoli is high,” writes Middle East expert Adam Garfinkle, editor of The American Interest. “NATO is not in a position on the ground to do anything about it.” The problem, he explains, is cultural. European wars are fought by European rules, where the enemy is given an honourable way out and is therefore not obliged to fight to the last man. Tribal rules are different. The main rule is that the defeated tribe is “politically, socially, economically and, often to some extent, literally decapitated” in order to make sure its ranks will not rise up in revenge. Yet despite the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, Westerners seem oblivious to tribal rules. We still seem to think that with a helping hand from us, Libyans will start behaving the way we want them to.

Have we learned nothing? Evidently not. Just as with Afghanistan, the starry-eyed idealists who are all gung-ho over rescuing Libya have developed a serious case of mission creep. What started as a limited objective (defend the civilians of Benghazi) grew quickly to embrace regime change, and could yet metastasize into nation-building. You’d think we’d know by now that it’s awfully easy to get in – and much harder to get out.

Over the past few years, the reframe "Have we learned nothing?" can be applied to many things. Not the least is the Obama foreign policy in the Middle East. At best it can be called naive. At worst, it is antithetical to the long-term interests of the US, obvious to realities on the ground, and dangerously prone to errors that can result in unintended consequences that will lead to war.

George Jonas sums things up rather well when he writes:

For the West to welcome the replacement of a friendly despot with an unfriendly democrat may show altruism, but welcoming the replacement of a friendly despot with an unfriendly despot shows only naiveté. As for pursuing replacement policies without finding out who is about to replace whom — well, there’s a word for that, too. It’s called negligence.

Nah … it’s simply that the smartest guys in the room see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. They learn nothing.

EV

2011-08-21T15:52:00.002-04:00

Every week of so, a Right-leaning pundit feels compelled to write an article that lambasts electric vehicles (EVs) in general and the Chevy Volt in particular. Patrick Michaels at forbes.com is but one of many recent examples. Michaels revels in the Volt's poor early sales and criticizes (correctly, I might add) the government's bailout of GM. He then transitions into a critique of the Obama administration's support for alternative energy. Regular readers of this column know that I differ with the President on many things, but his support for alternative energy tech is not one of them.

I'm amused when I read pundits like Michaels criticize tax credits for EVs or government loans for their manufacturers. It's as if they're completely oblivious to the enormous incentives provided to the oil industry not only today, but for the past half century. They complain about a $7,500 tax credit for purchasers of EVs, but say nothing about tax credits to oil companies that defray as much as 70 to 80 percent of drilling costs for a new well.

I'm astonished that pundits on the right don't seem to recognize that our use of foreign oil is a national security concern of the highest order. It warps our foreign policy, it leads to ridiculous adventures like our current war in Libya. It forces us into unsound relationships with third-world thugocracies that are not our friends, and it subjects our economy to forces beyond our control. We're like a crack addict-- forced to do really bad or really dumb things -- all to maintain our addiction.

But week after week, some on the Right persist in their ill-founded critique of important new EV technologies, looking for every possible aspect of the new technology to criticize. Batteries aren't mature enough (really? Is that why the US military has adopted current EV battery tech for some its combat vehicles); the range is insufficient (really? It's only sufficient for about 60 - 70 percent of all commuters, say 70 million drivers); it's too expensive (yeah, just like the iPhone was too expensive in 2007 and now we have $49 smartphones). The critique: dumb, shortsighted, and just plain wrong.

I'm a strong proponent of smaller government, but that doesn't mean that even a small government can't incent new technology, particularly when it has such a significant upside. Forget green (if you must), EVs can lead to many new American jobs over the next decade, they can and will reduce our dependency of foreign oil, they will help us achieve a more stable foreign policy, and over the long haul, they will provide a more efficient and economically stable form of transportation.

By this time next year, I'll own one of those new-fangled EVs, and every time I drive by a gas station, I'll know just how wrong the pundits really are.

Extremes

2011-08-15T16:20:00.002-04:00

In 2008, those of us in the Center watched in dismay as the Democratic party rejected a moderate Center-Left politician (Hillary Clinton) for an ideologically far-Left candidate. Never mind that that candidate (Barack Obama) had absolutely no executive experience, no private sector experience, some very questionable associations, and few, if any, legislative accomplishments. He did however have charisma!

His empty hope-and-change narrative has done very little to solve the problems this country faces. In fact, many of us in the Center believe he has done much to exacerbate them.

Now, in 2011, we watch as the Republican party considers its candidates to unseat President Obama. We can only hope the Republicans don’t follow in the footsteps of the 2008 Democrats and select an ideologically extreme, inexperienced candidate. The early results are discouraging.

At the moment, we have seen Michele Bachmann gain a temporary advantage in the Iowa straw polls. Bachmann is about as inexperienced as Barack Obama was at the same point in time, and like the President, is ideologically extreme. She would not make a good candidate and would have little appeal for many in the Center. Then again, polls indicate that Barack Obama’s appeal for Centrists is sinking like a stone.

It is, of course, very early in the campaign, but James Taranto comments with his usual pithy humor:

Suppose Bachmann gets the nomination. She will be asking voters, in effect, to take a flier on a politically talented but inexperienced lawmaker with unusual religious views and a history of irresponsible statements. Last time they did that, they ended up with Barack Obama. This time, if they don't do it, they'll end up with Barack Obama.

I, for one, hope that neither result is the one the country has to live with.

Deeply Concerned

2011-08-10T16:37:00.003-04:00

As all eyes focus on the administration’s irresponsible approach to our domestic economic troubles, the State Department continues its dysfunctional approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In what now has become common practice for the Obama administration, the Israelis have once again been chastised for building apartments (actually approving permits to build apartments) in their capital city. The AP reports:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration says it is "deeply concerned" by Israeli approval of new housing construction in disputed east Jerusalem.

The State Department says such "unilateral actions work against efforts to resume direct negotiations" and the spirit of the peace process. In a statement, the department says it has raised its objections with the Israeli government.

Last week, an Israeli planning commission approved 930 new housing units in the Har Homa neighborhood in east Jerusalem. Actual building is at least two years off.

The President remains eerily silent as Hamas imports deadly rockets through the newly Islamicized Egypt (remember the President's moving words about the “Arab spring?”) and as Hezballah breaks myriad UN resolutions by importing weapons from Syria. Nah, those acts don’t warrant direct “concern,” by our state department. But Israeli building permits … oh, the horror! Given a President who seems obsessed with “balance,” this all seems rather odd.

Of late, the President has showed a startling level of incompetence in understanding the cause of our economic problems. He has not developed a solid plan going forward, and has suggested vague “solutions” that are demonstratively ineffective.

At the same time, he has shown a startling level of incompetence in understanding the true nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He has developed no workable plan going forward, and has suggested "negotiations" that are demonstratively unworkable.

At least the administration is being consistent in its domestic and foreign incompetence. That’s why we should all be “deeply concerned.”

Why?

2011-08-09T09:28:00.002-04:00

President Obama often suggests that our anemic economy, our stratospheric unemployment numbers, and our on-going debt crisis are the fault of tea party obstructionists and/or external events beyond his control. He often cites the financial stress in Europe as a drag on our economy.

Robert Samuelson discusses the European connections:

Europe may no longer be able to save itself. Too many countries have too much debt. Its economic growth -- which helps countries service their debts -- is too feeble. And nervous financial markets seem increasingly prone to dump the bonds of vulnerable countries. This is the real risk to the global and U.S. economic recoveries, far overshadowing Standard & Poor's downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt and Monday's sharp stock market decline.

Europe represents about one-fifth of the world economy and buys about a quarter of American exports. While Europe's debt crisis was confined to a few small countries, they could be rescued; other European countries supplied loans to substitute for the credit denied by private lending markets. In 2010, Greek, Irish and Portuguese government debt totaled about 640 billion euros (about $910 billion), less than 7 percent of the 9.8 trillion euros of debt of all members of the European Union.

With Spain, Italy and possibly France now under financial assault, the situation changes dramatically. There are more debtor nations and more debt at risk.

So the President is correct. Europe represents a major headwind for our recovery. But it fascinates me that the President and his political and media supporters never seem to ask and answer a key question—why? As in: “Why is Europe in such severe financial trouble?”

The reason the question is almost never asked and never answered by he President and his supporters is that the answer is obvious and irrefutable, and worse, it’s an answer that they don’t want to hear.

Over the past 60 years, Europe has become an experiment in big government. European social democracies have provided generous social welfare for all citizens, universal health care, government mandated vacations, government supported early retirement, and thousands of other entitlements. They accomplished this through confiscatory taxation, and as a consequence, suffered very low growth.

It actually worked for decades and became a model for the utopian big government dream of many on the American Left. The problem is that it couldn’t last forever. Stated simply, the money ran out. Growth came to a standstill, and taxes couldn't be raised any further. The result is what we see now in Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and soon, in France.

Young engineers are taught to understand the problem before they craft a solution. If the problem isn’t understood or is mischaracterized, there’s no hope of crafting a viable solution.

Barack Obama and many in his party appear to be uniquely uninterested in understanding the problem. Because they don’t ask “why?” and reject the answer when it is provided to them, we may soon add the USA to the list of countries on the critical list. Sad.

AA+

2011-08-08T09:04:00.003-04:00

I have relatively little respect for the credit rating agencies. S&P, along with Moody’s and Fitch, were prime movers in rating toxic mortgage debt derivatives as triple A, leading the the crash of 2008. Their work at that time was incompetent (some would say criminal).

But last Friday, S&P did nothing more than report the obvious. The Wall Street Journal comments in an editorial:

…is there anything that S&P said on Friday that everyone else doesn't already know? S&P essentially declared that on present trend the U.S. debt burden is unsustainable, and that the American political system seems unable to reverse that trend.

This is not news.

In that context, the Obama Administration's attempt to discredit S&P only makes the U.S. look worse—like the Europeans who also want to blame the raters for noticing the obvious. Treasury officials and chief White House economic adviser Gene Sperling denounced S&P for relying on a Congressional Budget Office scenario that overestimated the U.S. discretionary spending baseline by $300 billion through 2015 and $2 trillion through 2021.

It’s as if you went into a bank for a loan. The banker does a computer check and finds that your average credit scope is 450. He asks why. Rather than being honest about your profligate spending and subsequent debt and promising to radically modify your spending habits, you blame the credit agencies. You think the banker would listen?

One of the most troubling aspects of the administration's response to the S&P downgrade is that they've do what they always seem to do—blame someone else. Their shills—Senator John Kerry comes to mind—labels the action of S&P as the “tea party downgrade” and of course, the administration’s many supporters in the media pick up the sound bite and run with it.

It’s as if 30 years of profligate spending don’t matter a wit. It’s all the tea party’s fault.

The irony, of course, is that the tea party people were the first group to draw a line in the sand. Rather than the administration’s delusional suggestion that more spending will somehow result in reduced debt, the tea party simply said “stop.” And in the eyes of big government proponents, that makes them public enemy number 1.

The term “wake-up call” has been used repeated by those on the Right to characterize the down grade. But the President and the senate majority have taken sleeping pills and dream about massive increases in spending and untouchable entitlements. There dream then morphs into a class warfare theme in which the “rich” are ravaged and the “disadvantaged” are given the "millionaires and billionaires" money and live happily ever after. The S&P downgrade alarm is buzzing at the President's bedside, but in his drugged sleep, the sound goes unanswered. Sweet dreams.

Update (August 8. 2011):

This morning, Richard Fernandez of The Belmont Club writes darkly about the looming U.S debt crisis: "Like Europe the US seems locked into a course which inertia cannot change and yet which ultimately will lead to ruin. In the history of politics the choice has often been between rationality and ruin. Alas, ruin usually wins."

And the President, his rabid supporters, and many within his party close their eyes, embrace their dreams, and do nothing.

Heads I Win

2011-08-05T16:38:00.002-04:00

I visit a variety of media sources that argue the liberal (progressive) economic position. In general, writers at these outlets fervently believe that government can solve our economic woes and at the same time, mitigate the natural “unfairness” in a free and open society.

I’ve noticed that writers at these sites increasingly espouse arguments that might be called the “infallibility of liberal thought.” In other words, if a favorite liberal economic policy is applied and fails, it’s not because the policy is flawed, but rather that it wasn’t applied using enough dollars, with enough enthusiasm to communicate its merits, or in enough areas of the economy to make it work. There just wasn’t enough of it.

James Taranto notes this when he quotes a comment by Jacob Weisberg:

President Obama is trying to push a jobs agenda. But for the federal government to spur growth or create jobs, it has to spend additional money. The antediluvian Republicans who control Congress do not think that demand can be expanded in this way. They believe that the 2009 stimulus bill, which has prevented an even worse economy over the past two years, is actually responsible for the current weakness...

Some of the congressional Republicans who are preventing action to help the economy are simply intellectual primitives who reject modern economics on the same basis that they reject Darwin and climate science.

First it's important to emphasize that when the President crafted his stimulus, the Democrats controlled all of Congress and could have fashioned a stimulus of any size. But never mind. Let's focus on the core of Weisberg's statement.

Weisberg uses a common strategy among those on the left who struggle to present rational, fact-based arguments to support their positions—use ad hominem attacks to denigrate those who disagree. In this case, Weisberg suggests that those who question big government or the efficacy of Keynesian economics readily reject Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection. I’m certain some of his readers think that to be very clever. Sadly, it has absolutely nothing to do with his contention that the problem is that we spent too little.

Taranto responds:

Darwin is a red herring here. Although disparaging people for holding harmless religious beliefs as "intellectual primitives" is awfully uncivil, we agree with Weisberg that people who "reject" the theory of natural selection are mistaken.

But the comparison between Keynesian economics and global warmism is on target. Both are liberal dogmas disguised, increasingly thinly, as science. Both are supported by circular logic, and thus lack falsifiability, a necessary characteristic of a scientific theory. If the weather gets warmer, that's because of global warming; if it gets colder, that's "climate change" and proves the theory too. Had unemployment stayed below 8%, as the Obama administration promised it would, that would have proved the "stimulus" worked; since it peaked at 10% and has held steady above 9%, that proves the stimulus wasn't big enough. Heads I win, tails you lose.

Taranto’s comments are on target, but fail to mention two other key facts. (1) The vaunted stimulus used $1 trillion of borrowed money and objectively failed to create jobs to hold unemployment below 8 percent. (2) It did, however, increase the federal deficit noticeably, and that’s an objective fact.

The hubris of the “big government” argument is astounding. As we watch social democracies in Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland, and Portugal struggle to remain economically viable after sixty years of big government programs, you’d think that somebody as smart as Jacob Weisberg might ask himself why these countries are all approaching national bankruptcy.

I’m sure he’d answer that they didn’t spend enough.

A Very Small Slice

2011-08-04T16:43:00.003-04:00

You’d think that it would be hard to make substantive budget cuts and to modify entitlements so that they don’t bankrupt the country, but in reality, it’s not rocket science. What is hard is for Washington to find the political courage to make the structural modifications that will allow our children and grandchildren to avoid onerous tax increases as we spend irresponsibly and at the same time watch Medicare and Social Security go into default over the next few decades.

What’s also very hard is to combat the predictable demagoguing on any structural change to spending or large entitlements. True political courage and very blunt talk is required. Both are in very short supply in Washington.

As the new “select Senate (super)committee” is impaneled, here are my suggestions for entitlement reform (even though they won’t even broach the subject)and for spending cuts:

Social Security

Raise the retirement age to 72 over the next ten years. Begin right now by raising the age to 68 and continue with increases every two years. When you hear demagogues suggest that people would have to “postpone their retirement dreams” remind them that social security was never intended as a pension plan.

Set far more stringent conditions on “early retirement.” Except for cases in which the person has a severe illness or disability, or has extreme financial problems, early retirees must rely on other sources of income, not social security. You’ve heard people say that 62 is the new 45. No reason to live off the taxpayers if you’re only 45, right?

Eliminate the COLA for all but those who have gross retirement income (all sources including investments) that are less than 1/3 their FICA benefit. For those who argue that you’ll be starving granny, remind them that if granny has other sources of income, those sources should throw off more as the COL rises.

Means test social security benefits. Anyone with gross retirement income (all sources including investments) that are 1.5 times the maximum family FICA benefit (in today’s dollars, that's other income of about $60,000) cannot withdraw more than they paid into the system, plus 5 percent per annum interest for all years the individual paid in. For those who demand the money regardless because “I contributed,” remind them that they get all their money back with interest, but not one cent more. Also remind them that they have other sources of income and therefore, should not be eligible for a government welfare program.

Although I’m not the OMB, making these cuts would save a minimum of $150 billion each year or in Washington speak: $1.5 trillion in 10 years. Helpful to be sure.

Medicare

Increase medicare premiums (max of, say, 1.5 percent a year) as system costs increase. For demagogues who suggest that grandpa will go without medical care, ask why every other living expense (e.g., car insurance, electric bill) increases over time and whether grandpa goes without a car or electric lights because costs go up. Medical care is a life long expense that you have to pay, except in cases of extreme financial hardship.

Means test all medicare recipients and increase premiums for those with the ability to pay. It is patently ridiculous to pay $600 a month for medical coverage when you’re 64 and then have the taxpayers subsidize even better coverage for $320 per month. If you could afford $600 a month at 64, you can afford it at 65.

Eliminate dollar one coverage for all non-hospital medical visits and procedures. That is, charge a 3 – 5 percent co-pay unless the person can demonstrate extreme financial distress. This would do much to have seniors self-police their medical care and eliminate unnecessary tests and procedures. For example, the doc recommends an $800 MRI for a sore shoulder? If it costs a senior $40, it just might be something that he or she will forgo. In today’s environment, the natural reaction is “why not? It’s free anyway.”

Making the Medicare cuts noted above would result in at least $100 billion each year or in Washington speak: $1 trillion over a 10 year period. By the way, applying analogous cuts to Medicare could easily save more than $30 billion each year.

I know … anyone who could even suggest such changes is “heartless.” After all, there’s no threat of insolvency in these programs. Right? And even if they do become insolvent, we’ll just tax our kids and grandkids mercilessly to make it all right. That seems balanced, doesn’t it?

And for those demagogues who will scream that we’re “balancing the budget on the backs of the elderly or the poor,” consider this: Programs for the elderly and "disadvantaged" account more than half (21% Social Security and about 24% for Medicare alone) of all government expenditures. Since seniors and the disadvantaged are eating more than half of the budget pie, it would seem only reasonable that in times of extreme economic stress, they’d give back a very small slice to their children and grandchildren.

Discretionary Domestic Spending Cuts

Defense. Republican hawks seem to think that the DoD budget is sacrosanct. That’s unmitigated nonsense. There is so much mismanagement, redundancy, and outright waste that a cut of 10 percent would do little to affect our combat readiness. There are some very bright and competent officers in the US military. If tasked with prioritizing needs with 90 percent of current dollars, I’m confident they'd figure out a way to do it, if politicians simply stay out the way. Savings: $70 billion per year.

Pensions. Effective tomorrow, every new federal employee is provided a 401K—not the ridiculously generous federal retirement program. Every civilian federal employee with less than 20 years of service will be provided with a 401K. All pension funds accrued by the employee plus interest will be transferred to the 401K on day one. Savings: at least a trillion dollars long-term.

Foreign Aid. Cut foreign aid across the board by 20 percent. That's a modest saving of about 9 billion a year, but you know what, that’s 9 billion that won’t enrich tin-pot dictators, or worse, fall into the hands of our enemies (a la Iraq and Afghanistan).

There’s a lot more we could cut, but let’s take a quick look at the revenue side. We need to restructure the entire tax system. It is hardly “balanced” (as our President is so fond of saying) to have 47 percent of the public pay no income taxes at all. We need a tax system that broadens the tax base, eliminates tens of thousands of pages of special deductions that benefit only a few, eliminates some major deductions, and therein, raises more revenue.

Impossible? Hardly. But to do it all we need leadership, not ideologically delusional thinking. I guess that’s why it won’t get done.

Done Deal

2011-08-02T15:32:00.004-04:00

The debt limit deal is done. A “crisis” manufactured by the White House has passed and a hypothetical “default” has been averted. Whoopee! Not.

In reality, Democrats and Republicans did not get spending under control, did not do anything meaningful to reduce the deficit, did not address the correct deficit problem—entitlements, and did absolutely nothing to restructure a tax system that is so broken that 50 percent of the populace pay no income taxes whatsoever (and yes, “millionaires and billionaires” use unnecessary loopholes to reduce their already significant tax burden).

No wonder the legislation was signed with little fanfare by the President.

But in the background, moral preening has already begun. Liberal commentators like Tom Friedman call tea party participants—the only principled participants in this charade—the “Hezballah factor of the GOP.” Vice President Biden calls them “terrorists” although his office now denies he said that. Another Democratic congressman calls the deal a “Satan sandwich.” The deal "trades people's livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals," stated Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz. And the left-leaning MSM? Already they’re running stories of little children who won’t get heart transplants, yadda, yadda, even though they are clearly untrue.

My goodness, the politicians must have cut, really cut, deeply to get that many people that exercised.

The Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) did a little analysis and here’s what they determined:

According to IBD's analysis of available budget numbers, the deal's $2.4 trillion in 10-year cuts amounts to a mere 5% trim off total projected federal spending during that time. It's like a 400-pound man boasting that he plans to drop 20 pounds over a decade, while his doctors warn about the risks of losing weight so fast.

Even calling these "cuts" is a bit of a stretch, since spending will continue to increase, just at a slightly slower pace. (See charts below.) By 2021, federal spending would still equal 22% of the nation's economy, above the post-World War II average of 20%. Not really a cut, is it?

Plus, in the short term, these "deep," "sharp," "slashing" cuts would still leave the federal government spending roughly 4% more in 2012 than it did in 2010, and 20% more than it did in 2008.

Shorn of all the hyperbole, what this agreement really demonstrates is why it's so hard to get federal spending under control. Both sides routinely use budget gimmicks to exaggerate spending cuts, while armies of special interests swarm Washington to make sure their pet programs don't get touched.

Can you imagine what the reaction would be if we actually made substantive cuts, not small reductions in the increase of spending?

Sadly, you won’t have to.

Because in 3 or 5 or 10 years, Washington's irresponsible inaction on spending and the deficit will come back to haunt us all. Then the cuts will be real. Then there will be pain. And then, every supporter of the status quo will get a convenient case of amnesia and rail against the heartless politicians who will be left with no more choices. It’s gonna happen, and it won’t be pretty.

Real Pain

2011-08-01T16:10:00.003-04:00

Now that debt limit legislation has finally been proposed by the Senate and approved by the President, the extreme right and left end of the political spectrum are both upset. On the Right, there is the justifiable feeling that approving still more debt is not the way to reduce debt and that “cuts” are really nothing more than postponed reductions in the increase in spending. It is on the far Left, however, where heads are ready to explode.

Those on the far-Left, like Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker are upset with the President because he agreed to a compromise. He simply wasn’t ideological enough for their taste. The meme recurs in other liberal media outlets (e.g., Salon, The New York Times, MSNBC)

Peter Wehner comments on this reaction:

This is sheer nonsense, of course. But Hertzberg’s comments are instructive. Rather than take into account the economic (and empirical) failure of Obama’s Keynesian approach, those who take a dogmatic, faith-based approach to American politics engage in intellectual contortions in order to try to innoculate their ideology from damage. People like Hertzberg begin from what is, for them, an unassailable proposition: liberalism is right because it is right and so it can never be wrong. And what happens when, by any objective standard, liberal policies fail? The problem is, they weren’t sufficiently liberal.

There are certain advantages to this approach. Those whose minds are obdurate and canonical –regardless of the philosophy they hold — don’t need to grapple with inconvenient facts. They have a reflexive response to every set of facts that challenges their worldview: ignore the facts. This doesn’t help one ascertain the truth. But it does avoid the hard work of facing up to the false assumptions on which their intellectual structure rests. Call it the comforting life of an ideological fanatic.

That’s why Nancy Pelosi suggests that spending cuts will “end life on our planet as we know it.” That’s why Barack Obama keeps insisting that taxing millionaires and billionaires will somehow reduce our indebtedness in a meaningful way (It. Will. Not.)

The only solution is to implement real and significant spending cuts. The current legislation doesn’t really do that, but it is a modest start—and yet, those on the far Left are apoplectic.

They choose to “ignore the facts” which are stark and growing worse. We cannot sustain our rate of domestic discretionary and entitlement spending—not even if we confiscate the entire net worth of “millionaires and billionaires.” Not even if we double the corporate tax rate. We can’t do it. It’s math. But those on the Left seem mathematically challenged and prefer to “engage in intellectual contortions in order to try to innoculate their ideology from damage.”

When backed to the wall, Leftists suggest that heartless “extremist” tea partiers driven by a demonical Grover Norquist want to starve children, push grandma off a cliff, and balance the budget on the backs of those who are least fortunate. They seem unable to conceive of concepts like means testing for government entitlements, or the establishment of spending priorities that would insulate the most vulnerable while significantly reducing spending overall.

If we don’t act now, we’ll be forced to act in 3 or 5 or 7 years. And when that time comes, all the moral preening in the world won’t protect the most vulnerable from draconian cuts in taxpayer support.

It’s ironic that by acting irresponsibly now, by suggesting that we can spend without limit, it is the Left who truly are heartless “extremists.” Because if the Left wins this debate, that victory sets the stage for real pain among the constituency they purport to care so much about.

BBA

2011-07-29T16:36:00.002-04:00

As the continuing saga of our national debt unfolds, it’s truly remarkable to observe the violent—almost hysterical—opposition to a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) to our constitution. The Republicans passed their second bill (the Democrats have yet to pass even one) earlier today in which a request for a BBA was included along with an increase in the debt limit. The left-wing of the democratic party criticized the legislation using every pejorative it could think of. Mild criticism calls it “irresponsible,” while more colorful descriptions called it “extremist,” and the truly unhinged called it “terrorism.” But why?

What’s irresponsible about spending within your means? What’s extreme about suggesting a proposal that 60-plus percent of the American people (according to recent polls) want? What’s terroristic about forcing our “leaders” to prioritize their spending?

Maybe the reason that some on the Left become unhinged when a BBA is proposed is because it’s a harbinger of the end of their big government dream. It’s also a collision with reality—there is no more money to support uncontrolled spending in our budget and entitlements. Finally, it’s a signal that they’ve lost the philosophical debate of what America is to be.

In November, 2010, the electorate provided a clear signal that they do not want to become a social democracy in the European mold. They’ve observed the Euros and really don’t want to become Greece, or Spain, or Ireland, or Portugal. More recently, they’ve looked at the U.K and watched as that country made painful budget cuts to save themselves from default. The world didn’t end.

Remember, all the Republicans are requesting is that the Congress bring the BBA up for a vote among the states. It would take years to enact, but it would be a clear signal to the rest of the world that we’re serious about getting our economic house in order. You’d think that President Obama and the vast majority of Democrats would be in favor of that. They aren't, and now you know the reason why.

Huge Discrepency

2011-07-29T09:03:00.004-04:00

The ranks of anthropogenic global warming (excuse me: “climate change”) alarmists have been winnowed by major scandals associated with the manufacture or modification of purported warming data and a continuing stream of true scientific data that indicate no significant warming in the past decade. The media, it appears, has moved on, although every weather pattern that leads to high temperatures (it is, after all, summer) gives a few commentators still another opportunity to imply that anthropogenic climate change is the villain.

Now, Forbes.com reports on a recent NASA study:

Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is "not much"). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds. Alarmist computer models assume human carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are very effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted.

The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA's ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.

In short, the central premise of alarmist global warming theory is that carbon dioxide emissions should be directly and indirectly trapping a certain amount of heat in the earth's atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space. Real-world measurements, however, show far less heat is being trapped in the earth's atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict.

When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a "huge discrepancy" between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are.

Of course, for true believers like Al Gore and Barack Obama, “the scientific debate is over.” But for those of us who respect the scientific method, there is increasingly compelling evidence that the alarmists were incorrect.

The growing body of scientific evidence that questions original warming assumptions indicates that public policy (e.g., the ill-fated cap and trade legislation) should never be based on the unsubstantiated opinions of true believers and the data of a small, closed group of scientists who have a vested interest in only one outcome.

Unfortunately, because the NASA study does not fit the prevailing narrative, the legacy media gave it little or no play. Not surprising.

Convenient

2011-07-27T16:27:00.003-04:00

If you have been spending time listening to President Obama and his supporters, you’d think that the President and his party were deficit hawks. In fact, in his recent prime-time address, the President intimated that he inherited the deficit mess and that he is a victim, rather than a prime perpetrator of out-of-control government spending and the deficits it creates.

Unfortunately, like much of what the President says in public, that assertion is factually challenged. According to the U.S. Treasury, the public debt when Barack Obama took office (January, 2009) stood at $6.3 trillion. Very bad to be sure. In fact, you’d think that our newly-elected deficit-hawk-in-chief would have acted to reduce it immediately, correcting the profligate ways of George W. Bush and the Democratic congress. He did not.

As of August, 2010, after 18 months in office, the public debt stood at $8.8 trillion, an increase of $2.5 trillion—one third of the total debt—in just a year and a half! In that short time, Barack Obama increased the debt more than the first 40 presidents of the United States—combined.

And now, with an election less than 15 months away, the President has become born again. His concern is a “grand bargain”—that’s a deal in which the debt ceiling is raised, taxes on “billionaires and millionaires” are collected right now, and spending cuts (“savings”) are postponed until well after the election. Convenient.

Even Senate Democrats recognize that any rise in the debt ceiling must be accompanied by equivalent spending cuts. They also recognize that taxes on “billionaires and millionaires” have fine as class warfare symbolism, but do very, very little to solve our deficit problems. Their last minute “plan” does not contain any tax increases (a good thing during a recession) but postpones budget cuts until well after the election. Convenient.

The Republicans remain wedded to the notion that a balanced budget amendment is the right way to go, even though their latest plan does not incorporate it. Hence, pushback from congressional freshmen. Oddly, the Democrats and the President are violently opposed to such an amendment. Those of us in the Center have to ask, why? After all, requirements to balance state budgets are common, and serve to keep at least a few politicians honest. Why not apply the same idea to the federal government?

It’s likely that some accommodation of the debt limit will be reached at the eleventh hour. It’s equally likely that it will not cut sufficiently, will avoid structural changes to entitlements, and will not address a restructuring of our tax code. In other words, it will be a Washington "success." For the rest of us, it will fail to provide any meaningful solution to the problems we face.

Déjà Vu

2011-07-26T08:45:00.004-04:00

The President and just about everyone else tells us that the sky will fall if a deficit reduction plan is not implemented by Aug 2nd. Am I the only one who gets a feeling of déjà vu?

Think back about three years when the Bush administration told us all that the sky would fall if we didn’t immediately bail out the Wall Street firms whose criminal irresponsibility sunk the economy. Government officials (most coming from those same Wall Street firms) stampeded Congress (who were as complicit as Wall Street) into approving the too-big-to-fail legislation. The taxpayer’s money went down the drain.

The sky didn’t fall, but maybe, just maybe, if wouldn’t have fallen had no bailout occurred. Maybe, just maybe, the Wall Street titans and major bankers who played fast and loose with our money would have learned the true meaning of moral hazard—investment firms would have closed, bond traders would have lost their jobs, and the economy would have corrected over the long term. It would have been brutal, but I suspect lessons would have been learned. But then again, maybe not. So in an abundance of caution, we pissed away a $1.5 trillion over two administrations.

Now, we again hear that the sky will fall if the debt limit isn’t extended. “We won’t be able to pay our bills,” states a concerned President. Really?

The federal government has between $170 and $200 billion of revenue each month without borrowing a nickel—more than enough to pay our debt obligations, to print social security checks (Wait, wasn’t there supposed to be a separate lock-box somewhere? Okay, never mind), to pay the military and meet our contractual obligations. Sure, we’d have to furlough a significant percentage of federal employees, but I suspect the country could get along just fine if say, 30 or 40 percent of all non-military employees were furloughed until the debt limit debate was settled. For those who might worry that federal offices would be empty, note that even after the furlough, there would still be 1.5 million federal workers on the job!

Private sector employees have gone through layoffs and furloughs repeatedly over the past two years. In the interest of “balance” and “fairness” (terms the President uses ad nauseum) a temporary work force reduction at the federal level would seem appropriate. After all, to quote the President, "We’ve got to pay our bills."

More important, the capital markets would respond favorably to such a serious move. It would demonstrate that we’re serious about debt reduction, not with words, but with actions.

And maybe we’d discover that some percentage of those federal employees would be better off in the private sector, and through retirements (some forced), attrition, layoffs, and the like, we’d reduce federal employment for the first time in, oh, 70 years.

We are at a tipping point.

If we follow the President’s lead and continue to spend, we become Greece, where class warfare proved to be an ineffective tool when used to combat irresponsible government spending and out of control entitlements.

If we truly do strive for a smaller government, we’ll have a chance to rebuild America. And that’s the only way our children and grandchildren will ever recapture the American dream.

Part of the Problem

2011-07-25T11:20:00.002-04:00

President Obama’s legion of supporters in the legacy media (a.k.a. main stream media) spend very little time reporting on Greece's on-going fiscal crisis and imminent default. When they do report the story, they treat the riots in the streets, the delusional demands of trade unions, and the irrational shouts of significant portion of the entitled Greek electorate as an abstraction. Don’t worry, the media seems to conclude, the hard-pressed Euros will bail out Greece in the 11th hour. Or not.

The reason that Obama’s media refuses to cover the story is obvious. It’s a harbinger of our story here in the good ol’ US of A. At the current rate of federal spending and the current trajectory of US budget deficits, we’ll become Greece in 5 or 10 years—entitlement riots, union shutdowns, and real draconian cuts on those who do need assistance. Greece is a look into our future, and the left-leaning media would prefer not to allow the American public to look in that direction.

Meanwhile, our debt limit talks grind on. The President and his party have proposed no written plan (The opposition has proposed two in the last 6 weeks)and appear to be more concerned with frightening the American public with ridiculous and misleading suggestions that social security checks will not be delivered post-August 2nd. They working hard to demonize the opposition and have laid the foundation for blame, but have shown virtually no leadership on the important matter.

Philosophically, the President seems committed to more spending (“investments”) now and “savings” (he has trouble uttering the phrase “spending cuts”) sometime in the distant post-election future. Grinding debt? No worries. Greece? Can’t happen here.

The Wall Street Journal says it all:

… it has long been clear that Mr. Obama isn't interested in spending reform. In February he proposed a budget that spent more than any in U.S. history. In April he demanded that Congress pass a "clean" debt ceiling hike that included no spending cuts whatsoever. Only after House Republicans unveiled their own sweeping budgetary reforms did the White House rush to also claim it wanted deficit reduction as part of the debt-ceiling debate.

In June, the President dispatched Joe Biden to negotiate spending cuts, only to have the White House insist at the last minute that modest trims be accompanied by significant new taxes. Mr. Boehner and the Senate's bipartisan Gang of Six produced plans that would have acceded to that White House demand in exchange for substantive tax reform that would have lowered individual and corporate rates. Yet last week the White House backtracked on its agreement for the lower tax rates and demanded another $400 billion in tax revenues above the $800 billion the Speaker had already conceded.

The President insists his party is offering serious spending cuts and entitlement reform. He also likes to talk about "balance," which to him means real tax increases immediately and speculative spending cuts some time in the distant future. Behind the scenes the White House has only ever agreed to token reform and cuts. Here's a number for the debt history books: Mr. Obama's final offer in the Biden talks was a $2 billion cut in 2012 nondefense discretionary spending. The federal government spends more than $10 billion a day.

Now we're days from the August 2 default deadline set by the Treasury Department, and the President's only response has been to blame everybody else for deficient seriousness.

Never in my lifetime have I seen a president—any president—abrogate his leadership position as completely as Barack Obama. Never in my lifetime have I seen a president—any president—angle so obviously for partisan advantage to the detriment of the country he should be leading. Never in my lifetime have I seen a president—any president— stretch the truth as blatantly as this one (e.g., Obamacare will us save money or taxing “millionaires and billionaires” will have a substantive impact on our deficits, or the military will not be paid after August 2nd.

The economy and the country are in trouble. And whether he likes it or not, Barack Obama is part of the problem, not part of the cure.

Day of Reckoning

2011-07-19T19:03:00.005-04:00

Bret Stevens writes for The Wall Street Journal, a publication that is arguably the best newspaper in America. With a circulation of just under 2.1 million readers (compared to The New York Times circulation of 950,000) it is also one of the most widely read publications in America. But according to many in the media, the Journal has a problem. It is owned by Rupert Murdock, the British mogul who is now embroiled in a media scandal in the U.K.

In what can only be described as a despicable abuse of journalist power, one of Murdock’s U.K. newspapers, the tabloid News of the World bugged phones, invaded the privacy of politicians and average citizens and clearly broke the law. Murdock closed the newspaper and has apologized, but the left leaning media in both the U.K and the U.S. see an opportunity to destroy a right-wing billionaire.

Bret Stevens agrees that the tabloid News of the World should have been shuttered. He agrees that what they did is a dramatic departure from decency and journalist ethics. But then he asks:

How does this year's phone hacking scandal at the now-defunct British tabloid News of the World—owned, I hardly need add, by NewsCorp, the Journal's parent company—compare with last year's contretemps over the release of classified information by Julian Assange's WikiLeaks and his partners at The New York Times, The Guardian and other newspapers?

At bottom, they're largely the same story.

In both cases, secret information, initially obtained by illegal means, was disseminated publicly by news organizations that believed the value of the information superseded the letter of the law, as well as the personal interests of those whom it would most directly affect. In both cases, fundamental questions about the lengths to which a news organization should go in pursuit of a scoop have been raised. In both cases, a dreadful human toll has been exacted …

And yet, many elite journalists in the U.S. celebrated The New York Times when it published Wikileaks information, even though it was acquired through a hack that was not all that different that what News of the World did.

Steven comments:

Both, in short, are despicable instances of journalistic malpractice, for which some kind of price ought to be paid. So why is one a scandal, replete with arrests, resignations and parliamentary inquests, while the other is merely a controversy, with Mr. Assange's name mooted in some quarters for a Nobel Peace Prize?

Obviously there’s an agenda here. Because Murdock is an unabashed conservative, he’s fair game for a narrative that depicts him and his media empire as “evil.” After all, NewsCorp owns the WSJ and FoxNews, two voices that dissent from typical MSM memes. Outlets such as the NYT and CNN dedicated more content today to the NewsCorp scandal than they have to the debt limit negotiations. One has to wonder which story is more important to the American public.

Stevens concludes:

As for News of the World, the media has alighted on one of its convenient little narratives, this one about the all-powerful media mogul, his lidless eyes gazing over every corner, closet and cellar of his empire, his obedient minions debasing everything they touch. That this media Sauron has now begged forgiveness of the Dowler family, shut the offending paper down and accepted the resignations of his top lieutenants hardly seems to have made an impression. But as someone noted recently in connection to L'Affaire DSK, few things are as unstoppable—or as prone to error—as a stupid media narrative.

It's probably inevitable that this column will be read in some quarters as shilling for Rupert Murdoch. Not at all: I have nothing but contempt for the hack journalism practiced by some of the Murdoch titles. But my contempt goes double for the self-appointed media paragons who saw little amiss with Mr. Assange and those who made common cause with him, and who now hypocritically talk about decency and standards. Their day of reckoning is yet to come.

If history serves, the day of reckoning for abuses by the legacy media never seems to come.

The Buck Stops

2011-07-15T15:15:00.002-04:00

As I watch the country lurch toward a debt-limit crisis, I’m not the least bit surprised by the seemingly intractable positions of both parties. The Democrats are averse to any substantive, meaningful, close-term budget cuts and aggressive about increasing “revenues” (i.e., more taxes). The Republicans are averse to any tax increases and are aggressive about substantive, meaningful, and close term budget cuts.

The President says the right things in public, but in what has become a now long-standing tradition, what he says publicly and how he acts in reality are two rather different things. Charles Krauthammer (certainly no friend of Barack Obama) discusses this discrepancy:

President Obama is demanding a big long-term budget deal. He won’t sign anything less, he warns, asking, “If not now, when?”

How about last December, when he ignored his own debt commission’s recommendations? How about February, when he presented a budget that increases debt by $10 trillion over the next decade? How about April, when he sought a debt-ceiling increase with zero debt reduction attached?

All of a sudden he’s a born-again budget balancer prepared to bravely take on his own party by making deep cuts in entitlements. Really? Name one. He’s been saying forever that he’s prepared to discuss, engage, converse about entitlement cuts. But never once has he publicly proposed a single structural change to any entitlement.

Hasn’t the White House leaked that he’s prepared to raise the Medicare age or change the cost-of-living calculation?

Anonymous talk is cheap. Leaks are designed to manipulate. Offers are floated and disappear.

At the end of the day, the responsibility to craft an agreement sits with our head of government—the President. A true leader sets aside his personal ideology and does what he needs to do to avoid immediate risks to the country and its people. Long before the current crisis materialized, Barack Obama could have adopted the non-partisan recommendations of the debt commission he appointed for deficit reduction. He did not. It seems that he can’t pull the trigger and take responsibility for a major decision in this area.

He could have proposed a detailed plan of his own. He did not. Instead, he talks about the need to reduce the deficit, and talks, and talks. A true leader is measured by his actions, not his words.

He should recognize that demonizing the folks who sit across the table during a crucial negotiation is not a sound strategy. By how could he? He never negotiated anything of substance before he became President.

It seems that Barack Obama is triangulating, believing that if August 2nd comes and goes without an agreement, he’ll win by further demonizing the opposition and pointing the finger of blame directly at them. He’ll maximize public discomfort by cutting off social security checks or some other draconian and wholly unnecessary measure. I suspect the President and his supporters in the media feel certain they can blame the Republicans.

In fact, it appears that he’s betting his re-election on this, because the last thing he wants to discuss next year is his overall performance and the abysmal performance of the economy over the last two and half years.

He’s making a fool’s bet, because in the end, he owns this. More importantly an increasing number of the public and a significant percentage of his past supporters know the game and are beginning to question it.

A Democratic President, Harry Truman, had a famous little sign on his desk, “The Buck Stops Here.” Barack Obama seems to think that doesn’t apply to him. He’s wrong.

Grinding On

2011-07-12T11:48:00.002-04:00

As the war in Libya grinds on, it’s almost as if the media has forgotten the President’s promise of to end the conflict in “days, not weeks” —a promise made many months ago.

No doubt Barack Obama and his foreign policy advisors believed that the conflict would end quickly. As it turns out, that belief was both naïve and incorrect. There’s also little doubt that in his rush to stop a “humanitarian disaster,” the President and his advisors hoped to use the full force of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague as a lever to remove Mohamar Gadhafi from power and bring him to justice. Sadly, they didn’t realize that the ICC is part of the problem.

Stratfor provides its usual insightful analysis:

Regardless of what a country’s leader has done, he or she holds political power, and the transfer of that power is inherently a political process. What the ICC has done since 2002 — and the ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ]to an extent before that — is to make the political process moot by making amnesty impossible. It is not clear if any authority exists to offer and honor an amnesty. However, the ICC is a product of the United Nations, and the authority of the United Nations lies in the UNSC [UN Security Council]. Though there is no clear precedent, there is an implicit assumption that the UNSC would be the entity to offer a negotiated amnesty with a unanimous vote. In other words, the political process is transferred from Libya to the UNSC, where any number of countries might choose to abort the process for their own political ends. So the domestic political process is trumped by The Hague’s legal process, which can only be trumped by the UNSC’s political process. A potentially simple end to a civil war escalates to global politics.

And this is not simply a matter of a leader’s unwillingness to capitulate or negotiate. It aborts the process that undermines men like Gadhafi. Without a doubt, most of the men who have surrounded him for years are guilty of serious war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is difficult to imagine anyone around Gadhafi whose hands are clean, or who would have been selected by Gadhafi if their hands weren’t capable of being soiled. Each of them is liable for prosecution by the ICC, particularly the senior leadership of the military; the ICC has bound their fate to that of Gadhafi, actually increasing their loyalty to him. Just as Gadhafi has nothing to lose by continued resistance, neither do they. The ICC has forged the foundation of Gadhafi’s survival and bitter resistance.

And while Libya comes no closer to resolution, a true humanitarian crisis has exploded in Syria, where government troops are using military weapons to kill thousands and applying military force to imprison an order of magnitude more. We have chosen not to act militarily in Syria—the right move, in my opinion. But then why on earth are we spending a million dollars a day in Libya?

The Republicans have demanded that the President abide by the war powers act (something he refuses to do) for Libya, but they’ve said relatively little to question our current involvement there. Projecting a flawed neocon ideology into a place that simply doesn’t support it, they seem confused.

Even worse, most Republicans insist that we slog on in Afghanistan (most Democrats are uneasy with this approach, but refuse to question the President). This on-going war in an 8th century tribal society is unwinnable by any reasonable measure. Most Republicans (with a notable exception of candidates Ron Paul and John Huntsman) claim it is in our national interest to remain there,expending blood and money in a vain effort to blunt the spread of Islamist control. If only it was that simple.

If we leave Afghanistan tomorrow, bad things will happen. If we leave 10 years from now, bad things will happen. In a country with literacy rates at 23 percent, a culture that stands in the way of modernity, corruption as a way of life, and an economy that is driven almost totally by heroin sales, we face an intractable problem–we should leave Afghanistan in orderly manner, and leave sooner rather than later. We should extricate ourselves from Libya in an orderly manner, and do it sooner rather than later.

Flotilla

2011-07-04T17:05:00.003-04:00

The inimitable Christopher Hitchens dissects the motives of the “activists” who have decided once again to invade Israeli territorial waters and attempt to breach a security cordon around the Hamas-lead government of Gaza. In what can only be characterized as a classic example of moral preening, the denizens of the far-Left who comprise the "flotilla" activists have decided that the only liberal democracy in the Middle East—Israel—is an oppressor that must be stopped.

But let’s let Hitchens comment:

The tale of the Gaza "flotilla" seems set to become a regular summer feature, bobbing along happily on the inside pages with an occasional update. A nice sidebar for reporters covering the Greek debt crisis: a built-in mild tension of "will they, won't they?"; a cast of not very colorful characters but one we almost begin to feel we know personally. Such cheery and breezy slogans—"the audacity of hope" and "free Gaza"—and such an easy storyline that it practically writes itself.

The “audacity of hope” has a familiar ring, doesn’t it? Oh yes, that was a book written by none other than Barack Obama, who is, ideologically at least, little different from those who populate the flotilla. Sure, he’s back-filling now, letting us all know how much he supports the state of Israel. But that’s because he is worried about polls that indicate shrinking support among one of his base constituencies—American Jews. But if we examine his actions as President over the past two years … well, let’s just say that the flotilla label is apt.

The International Left has a hatred of Israel that is difficult to understand, but not difficult to observe. Whether in parliamentary resolutions, European boycotts, or delusional (not to mention, idiotic) accusations of “apartheid,” the left has aligned themselves with Islamists at every turn.

Hitchens asks a few questions of the flotilla “activists.”

It seems safe and fair to say that the flotilla and its leadership work in reasonably close harmony with Hamas, which constitutes the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. The political leadership of this organization is headquartered mainly in Gaza itself. But its military coordination is run out of Damascus, where the regime of Bashar Assad is currently at war with increasingly large sections of the long-oppressed Syrian population. Refugee camps, some with urgent humanitarian requirements, are making their appearance on the border between Syria and Turkey (the government of the latter being somewhat sympathetic to the purposes of the flotilla). In these circumstances, isn't it legitimate to strike up a conversation with the "activists" and ask them where they come out on the uprising against hereditary Baathism in Syria? .

It’s interesting that the flotilla activists as well as the one-time activist who currently occupies the White House seem unusually mute when it comes to Syria’s human rights abuses. The threat of violence in Libya required “kinetic military action (war),” but the actual murder of thousands in Syria (not to mention Hamas’ continuous rocket attacks against Israeli civilians) result in nothing but the quiet clucking of tongues.

But the media, who could ask a few interesting questions of the “activities,” chooses to be mute. Again from Hitchens:

Hamas is listed by various governments and international organizations as a terrorist group. I don't mind conceding that that particular word has been used in arbitrary ways in the past. But what concerns me much more is the official programmatic adoption, by Hamas, of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This disgusting fabrication is a key foundational document of 20th-century racism and totalitarianism, indelibly linked to the Hitler regime in theory and practice. It seems extraordinary to me that any "activist" claiming allegiance to human rights could cooperate at any level with the propagation of such evil material. But I have never seen any of them invited to comment on this matter, either.

The far-Left chooses to ignore reality, believing instead that it is acting morally, oh so morally. The little boats of this little “flotilla” provide nothing useful for Gaza—except the deep symbolism of the Left’s support for the "oppressed." The only thing useful about these activists is the simple reality that they are useful idiots, co-opted by a violent, genocide gang of terrorist thugs who would slit their infidel throats in a heartbeat if the need arose.

Mickey Mouse

2011-07-02T09:40:00.003-04:00

Did you know that there has been a second Islamic cartoon controversy? This one occurred in Egypt just a few weeks ago. Our legacy media has chosen to avoid the controversy entirely or present it in passing without provided a broader context. No surprise.

A wealthy Egyptian Coptic Christian published a cartoon of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Eric Tragerexplains:

On his well-followed Twitter feed, the Coptic Christian [Naguib] Sawiris posted an image of a bearded, kaffiyeh-clad Mickey Mouse and a face-covered Minnie Mouse, alongside the comment, "Micky [sic] and Minnie after . . . " - in other words, "after" the Islamists gain power. It was a fairly pedestrian, if pointed, piece of political humor, but the anti-ironic Islamists didn't see it that way.

On Monday, 15 Islamic lawyers associated with the puritanical Salafists submitted a complaint to Egypt's general prosecutor, alleging that Sawiris "ridiculed the Islamic faith" and violated a penal code that criminalizes speech attacking "heavenly religions." If convicted, Sawiris would face six months to five years in prison, plus a fine.

And so, the much vaunted “Arab Spring” continues to evolve into Islamist tyranny masquerading as democracy.

Much to the dismay of the liberal Egyptian “college students” who our media praised as a new wave of secular democratic hope and change in Egypt, it appears that the virulently Islamist Muslim Brotherhood (do not for one minute believe they are “moderate’) is set to take over the country.

Trager comments:

It hardly matters that the Islamists are pursuing power through elections. While it goes without saying that Egypt's Islamists are preferable to Hamas and Hezbollah, all three are united by the undemocratic aim of building political systems in which legal debates are inherently religious. And despite the Muslim Brotherhood's promise to create a "state of all its citizens," a legal system based on Islamic law would surely exclude Egyptian Christians, who comprise 10% of the population, as well as the millions of Muslims who want a secular body politic.

Sadly, Islamist authoritarianism appears likely to determine Egypt's political future. The Islamists possess such superior mobilization capabilities, that many liberal parties are joining with, rather than challenging, them. Even the powerful Sawiris has been cowed. In the aftermath of a Facebook campaign to boycott his company, which drew over 90,000 supporters, the billionaire apologized for the cartoon.

It would seem that our State Department and the White House would speak out forcefully in support of Egyptians liberals and against the Islamist parties like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists that are as anti-democratic as they come. It would seem that our State Department and the White House would clearly recognize that Sharia law (the goal of the Islamists) and democracy cannot co-exist. When thinking about our foreign policy approach in Egypt (and analogously in Iran almost two years ago) the phrase “Mickey Mouse” comes to mind.

Forbidden Knowledge

2011-07-01T10:52:00.002-04:00

As I observe Barack Obama in full campaign mode more than 15 months before the Presidential election, I wonder whether I’m the only American to think that his partisan campaign talk is unseemly for the President of the United States. At a time when the nation is suffering through the worst economic period of the past 70 years, the sitting President has seen fit to criticize his opponents for lack of work, but has found time to make campaign stops in 30 locations over the past 60 days. Is that really the best use of his time at this critical juncture in our history?

I know that the President had no executive experience when he was elected. In fact, he never ran any enterprise or managed anything other than his campaign. But you’d think that he’d recognize that his time might be better spent in talks with those who might actually help him craft an economic plan going forward.

And speaking of a “plan,” it’s interesting to note that the President was among the first to criticize the detailed economic plans proposed by his opponents, but has not proposed a plan of any kind himself.

In his recent press conference, the President again adopted the rhetoric of class warfare, suggesting that “millionaires and billionaires” do not pay their fair share and are getting unfair tax breaks. He also exhibited a frightening ignorance of what the catalysts for improved economic activity are, demonizing the very people and entities that create jobs.

Is he really that ignorant of economic reality, or are his campaign speeches a cynical political ploy? Robert Tracinsky provides an explanation:

So what explains the deep-seated ignorance of economics on display in his [Obama’s] public comments? Why does he demonstrate such a lack of practical appreciation of how business works?

The answer is that he lacks it because it is forbidden knowledge.

Consider Obama's background. He grew up among leftists, his childhood mentors were outright communists, and he then went off to academia, where he spent his formative years in an environment where business and profit-making are looked down upon as ugly, dirty, rapacious, immoral. Is it any mystery why he doesn't know about business or economics? Asking him to study the economics of the free market is like asking one of the old New England Puritans to thumb through a manual on sex education. Why immerse oneself in a subject that is so unseemly? Why make a study of how to be immoral?

It is for this attitude that Obama was elevated in American politics. He won the Democratic primaries because, unlike Hillary Clinton, he really seemed to believe in all of the old "liberal" pieties. He projected the sense that he still regarded big government as an untried new idea that would do better than the free market. But to believe that, he had to resist the contamination of pro-free-market economics or any independent observation of the workings of the economy.

The President blithely suggests that we will lose standing among the nations of the world if we do not raise our debt limit. He is unable to absorb the fact that we have already lost options and standing because of our indebtness.

His desire to increase our ability to become even more indebted—without serious and potentially painful reductions in spending—will not help us as a country. It will, over time, move us ever closer to a Greek-like scenario in which those who are the beneficiaries of entitlements—the old, the uneducated, the sick, the poor—are forced to face draconian cuts in their government support.

Barack Obama seems unable to absorb the simple idea that serious but manageable cuts today are far better than forced, draconian cuts tomorrow. Maybe it’s because that simple truth is “forbidden knowledge” among those who have adopted the fantasy ideology that there can be no limits to our spending and “millionaires and billionaires” are the core of the problem.

Corporate Jets

2011-06-30T17:07:00.005-04:00

No less than six different times during yesterday's news conference, President Obama suggested that we must—absolutely must—eliminate tax loopholes for the fat cats who own corporate jets. [It's worth noting in passing that an extension of the loophole for corporate jets was part of the President's very own stimulus bill in 2009]. No matter that eliminating these loop holes would result in a deficit reduction of 1/10th of 1 percent—symbols matter.

Okay, I get it.

So here’s a set of modest suggestions that will allow the President to create other symbolic cuts. The Executive Office of the President (EOP) currently employs 1800 people. How about a symbolic gesture of a 10 percent staff reduction—all in the name of decreasing the cost of government. After all, these bright, hard-driving folks at EOP will have no problem finding jobs in the private sector, and with a burdened pay rate of at least 100,000, that would save the federal government 18,000,000 bucks annually.

But lets not stop there. There are in the neighborhood of 30,000 employees in the legislative branch. You read that correctly—30,000. How about the President suggesting a 10 percent staff reduction to his Democratic colleagues and to the Republicans as well. After all, the best and the brightest who work for Congress would have no trouble landing a private sector job, would they? The savings—a cool $300 million annually.

Of course, I could go on to the various government departments where there are far too many political appointees and lifetime bureaucrats and not enough real work (plenty of made-up work, though) to keep them busy, but you get the point.

Or how about this? Most of Barack Obama’s admirers among the Hollywood A-list have acquired a wide array of tax loopholes that benefit the entertainment business. For example, deductible plastic surgery for actors or accelerated depreciation schedules for moguls. How about eliminating those?

Nah, strident class warfare is much more fun for the President. After all, corporate jet owners are such an easy target. The problem, I guess, is that the President is only too willing to look at the easy targets, but does not have the political courage or the leadership ability to address the difficult ones—you know, the spending cuts that will actually reduce the deficit in a meaningful way.

Update (6/30/11):

Even Gloria Borger of CNN (certainly no enemy of Barack Obama) is beginning to become frustrated with the President’s leadership approach:

What might actually have counted as news is if the president, as the nation's leader, had proposed a definitive way out of the budget mess -- or at least drawn some lines in the sand.

Instead, we learned that we need a "balanced approach" to the debt mess. That Obama is willing to "tackle entitlements" (presuming, of course, that nothing is done to touch Medicare beneficiaries). And that taxes -- the kinds that affect "millionaires and billionaires," corporate titans and their personal jets -- should be on the table.

Just for the record, getting rid of a tax break for corporate jets may be a fine idea, but it isn't going to solve the deficit problem since it will amount to only about $3 billion over the next decade. But it's a good line.

Earlier today on rabidly pro-Obama MSNBC, Mark Halperin of Time [a clear media friend of the President] referred to the President's demeaner during the news conference in markedly unflattering terms. He was pulled from the air.

Richard Fernandez of The Belmont Club provides useful insight: "A political enterprise is in real distress, not when it is attacked by its enemies which is normal, but when it can no longer be praised by its friends. And when those friends must deliver praise or respect through gritted teeth then the incipient trouble is all the greater."

The Obama presidency is in trouble, not because of the GOP "obstructionists" as the Left would have you believe, but because of the President's obvious inexperience, his extreme ideology, his hyper-partisan approach to just about everything, and his inability to lead all the American people. Even his friends are becoming disillusioned.

Marriage

2011-06-28T10:26:00.002-04:00

Over the years, I have written about the class warfare fantasy ideology that is a mainstream meme among those on the Left. But those on the Right are not immune to their own illogical (some would say, irrational) ideologies. This week, one of the Right’s favorites was in full bloom as New York state passed legislation to legalize gay marriage. Within seconds, most Republican presidential candidates, many right-leaning senators, and the vast majority of conservative commentators robotically stated: “marriage is defined as a union between and man and a woman,” as if somehow, that justifies direct blatant discrimination again a particular class of people.

Most of these same conservatives then go on to suggest that gay marriage is a “threat” to the institution of heterosexual marriage. How exactly? Does gay marriage somehow abridge the rights of heterosexual couples to be married? Does it cause marriages to end in divorce? There is never any answer to how the “threat" manifests itself, but otherwise logical people state it anyway.

Mona Charen considers a real “threat” that both liberals and conservatives prefer not to address because discussion of it is politically incorrect:

The statistics are familiar. In 1970, 85.2 percent of children under 18 lived in a two-parent family. In 2005, it was 68.3 percent and dropping. Forty percent of births in America are to unwed parents. Broken down by ethnic group, the figures are 30 percent among whites, 50 percent for Hispanics and 70 percent for blacks.

Single mothers (and occasionally fathers) find it much more difficult to be the kind of autonomous, self-supporting individuals that our system of government was designed for. Single parents turn to the government for assistance in dozens of ways. Pearlstein [author of the book, From Family Collapse to America's Decline] cites economist Benjamin Scafidi, who has offered a rough calculation of how much family breakdown costs American taxpayers annually. Scafidi considered TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), Food Stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid, S-Chip, child welfare services, justice system costs, WIC, LIHEAP (Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program), Head Start, school breakfast and lunch programs, and foregone tax receipts. The annual bill to taxpayers: $112 billion.

But Scafidi was being conservative, Pearlstein argues. He didn't include the Earned Income Tax Credit, the costs to schools that accrue from additional discipline problems, the special education costs that increase in lock step with chaotic family environments, and the added burdens on Medicare and Medicaid that result from more unmarried older Americans. Scafidi explains that "high rates of divorce and failure to marry mean that many more Americans enter late middle age (and beyond) without a spouse to help them manage chronic illnesses, or to help care for them if they become disabled."

The flight from marriage is transforming the complexion of American society -- increasing inequality and decreasing self-sufficiency.

So the next time you hear a conservative talk about marriage definitions and threats, recognize that cultural definitions, like all things, evolve over time and that threats are real only when they can be demonstrated with tangible evidence, not shrill counter-factual proclamations. The conservative fantasy about same sex marriage is abject nonsense.

Antirocket

2011-06-26T15:24:00.003-04:00

The New York Times reports:

GAZA — Two luxury hotels are opening in Gaza this month. Thousands of new cars are plying the roads. A second shopping mall — with escalators imported from Israel — will open next month. Hundreds of homes and two dozen schools are about to go up. A Hamas-run farm where Jewish settlements once stood is producing enough fruit that Israeli imports are tapering off.

But according to a “report” that is so biased that it is laughable, the NYT uses progress in Gaza to further the meme that all Palestinian problems are due to Israeli transgressions. A few paragraphs into the “report,” the NYT's intrepid reporter (editorialist?) comments:

Thousands of homes that were destroyed in the Israeli antirocket invasion two and a half years ago have not been rebuilt. Hospitals have canceled elective surgery for lack of supplies. Electricity remains maddeningly irregular. The much-publicized opening of the Egyptian border has fizzled, so people remain trapped here. The number of residents living on less than $1.60 a day has tripled in four years. Three-quarters of the population rely on food aid.

“Israeli antirocket invasion?” I actually laughed out loud. In a 1200 word article that castigates Israel for its “blockade,” the NYT sees fit to mention the reason for the “blockade” with a single adjective—“antirocket.” Not a word of context or a description of magnitude, not a word about historical background or an explanation of Hamas’ murderous charter calling for the destruction of a sovereign state—nah, the Left wing editors of the NYT (not to mention its “reporter”) consider a single word—antirocket—to be sufficient.

Four thousand rockets fired randomly by the sainted Hamas at civilian targets in Israel? No worries. After all, the Left has adopted Hamas as its poster child for “the oppressed.” And the oppressed can be as murderous as they like.

More from the Times:

“We have 100 percent vaccination; no polio, measles, diphtheria or AIDS,” said Mahmoud Daher, a World Health Organization official here. “We’ve never had a cholera outbreak.”

The Israeli government and its defenders use such data to portray Gaza as doing just fine and Israeli policy as humane and appropriate: no flotillas need set sail.

Israel’s critics say the fact that the conditions in Gaza do not rival the problems in sub-Saharan Africa only makes the political and human rights crisis here all the more tragic — and solvable. Israel, they note, still controls access to sea, air and most land routes, and its security policies have consciously strangled development opportunities for an educated and potentially high-achieving population that is trapped with no horizon. Pressure needs to be maintained to end the siege entirely, they say, and talk of improvement is counterproductive.

The “reporter” for the NYT conveniently fails to mention why Israel “still controls access to sea, air and most land routes …” Again, those silly 4,000 rockets landing in Israeli towns, schools, and shopping districts, and Hamas' refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist might have just a little something to do with it. Nah, not possible, implies the NYT “reporter.” After all, those steel bars, the cement, and the other 3,000 tons of construction supplies per day that are smuggled into Gaza are applied only for peaceful purposes. No chance, whatsoever, that some of the materials are siphoned off to build fortified rocket launching sites, After all, if that were the case, the NYT's intrepid “reporter” would have found evidence of it … right?

So from the NYT we learn that luxury hotels are being built in Gaza, medical care is better than most of the developing world, BMWs and Kias are becoming commonplace on the streets, restaurants are booming, but wait … “all of this belies the misery that lies beneath.” It looks like the Palestinians—the world's most vocal victims—aided and abetted by the blatant bias of the NYT, want us to believe that even when things improve, they really don’t. That’s standard practice for the Palestinians, and the blatant media bias? That’s standard practice for The New York Times.

Modern Depression

2011-06-22T17:59:00.003-04:00

Over the past month, supporters of the President have developed an oft-repeated narrative that claims that the administration has “created 2.1 million jobs” over the past 30 months. Like many claims that come from this administration, this claim is highly questionable.

Mort Zuckerman provides more honest (and gloomy) economic numbers:

In the face of the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policies in our history [almost 1 trillion dollars in administration spending], we have experienced the loss of over 7 million jobs, wiping out every job gained since the year 2000. From the moment the Obama administration came into office, there have been no net increases in full-time jobs, only in part-time jobs. This is contrary to all previous recessions. Employers are not recalling the workers they laid off from full-time employment.

The real job losses are greater than the estimate of 7.5 million. They are closer to 10.5 million, as 3 million people have stopped looking for work. Equally troublesome is the lower labor participation rate; some 5 million jobs have vanished from manufacturing, long America's greatest strength. Just think: Total payrolls today amount to 131 million, but this figure is lower than it was at the beginning of the year 2000, even though our population has grown by nearly 30 million.

These numbers are very troubling, but they are not the end of the bad news.

For an administration that promoted hope and change, it’s ironic that the President seems unable to change his failed approach to the economy. He needs to create an atmosphere in which the private sector has the confidence to begin expanding their business and hiring people to accomplish that goal. But business confidence only occurs when stability is present, not when threats of more taxes, more government spending, more deficits, more regulation, more health care burdens, and more ill-conceived and scientifically dubious environmental constraints are the daily narrative coming from the white house.

I suspect that part of the problem is that the President simply does not understand the private sector. He has never started a company, never met a payroll, never lead a private enterprise, and never managed a private sector project. In fact, he has never worked for any meaningful length of time in the private sector and has had very little actual experience in it.

Therefore, he leads from behind, offering no detailed plan for moving forward. He is, however, perfectly happy to criticize those that do provide such plans.

As a consequence, an ever increasing percentage of the American public have the feeling that we’re adrift—that our current leadership doesn’t have a clue. As they say, “hope” is not a plan.

At the conclusion of his lengthy article, Zuckerman writes:

Clearly, the Great American Job Machine is breaking down, and roadside assistance is not on the horizon. In the second half of this year (and thereafter?), we will be without the monetary and fiscal steroids. Nor does anyone know what will happen to long-term interest rates when the Federal Reserve ends its $600 billion quantitative easing support of the capital markets. Inventory levels are at their highest since September 2006; new order bookings are at the lowest levels since September 2009. Since home equity has long been the largest asset on the balance sheet of the average American family, all home¬owners are suffering from housing prices that have, on average, declined 33 percent (compare that to the Great Depression drop of 31 percent).

No wonder the general economic mood is one of alarm. The Conference Board measure of U.S. consumer confidence slumped to 60.8 percent in May, down from 66 percent in April and well below the average of 73 in past recessions, never mind the 100-plus numbers in good times. Never before has confidence been this low in the 23rd month of a recovery. Gluskin Sheff's Rosenberg captured it perfectly: We may well be in the midst of a "modern depression."

Indeed.

Looking at Fannie

2011-06-17T13:20:00.003-04:00

In November of 2008, our economic house of cards began to topple. At that time I wrote:

All of us who have temporarily seen our balance sheets spiral downward have real reason to question the rank stupidity, voracious greed, and total lack of responsible behavior by everyone involved in the sub-prime credit scandal. Whether it’s the California farm worker whose $14,000 per year salary justified a $500,000 delayed interest home loan; the dishonest mortgage broker who gave it to him; the regulators and politicians who looked the other way; the Wall Street investment banker who consolidated that dysfunctional loan with millions of others and sold them to insurance and banking executives who were more interested in year-end bonus than in fiduciary responsibility, we have good reason to condemn them all.

The thrust of that post was optimistic, suggesting that our problems were transitory and that as soon as we got our spending and debt under control, things would begin to improve. Little did I know that the incoming Obama administration would increase spending and debt to levels that were unprecedented in our history.

But that’s not the topic of this post.

One of the real culprits of the economic collapse—Fannie Mae—often goes unmentioned. A new book, Reckless Endangerment, by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, outline the scandalous behavior of well-connected Washington Democrats who used Fanny Mae to enrich themselves, fund their pet activist projects, and put the entire home mortgage system at risk. David Brooks reports:

The story centers around James Johnson, a Democratic sage with a raft of prestigious connections. Appointed as chief executive of Fannie Mae in 1991, Johnson started an aggressive effort to expand homeownership.

Back then, Fannie Mae could raise money at low interest rates because the federal government implicitly guaranteed its debt. In 1995, according to the Congressional Budget Office, this implied guarantee netted the agency $7 billion. Instead of using that money to help buyers, Johnson and other executives kept $2.1 billion for themselves and their shareholders. They used it to further the cause — expanding their clout, their salaries and their bonuses. They did the things that every special-interest group does to advance its interests.

Fannie Mae co-opted relevant activist groups, handing out money to Acorn, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and other groups that it might need on its side.

Brooks characterizes this as “the most devastating scandal in recent history,” and yet, we hear very little about it in the legacy media. Part of the problem is that most of the players are Democrats who did nothing illegal. They provided members of congress with large campaign contributions, they lowered borrowing standing to assist the poor achieve home ownership and then branded as “racist” those who worried about the quality of the resultant loans. Their champion, democratic Congressman Barney Frank, fought regulators who raised warning flags, and to quote Brooks: “… was arrogantly dismissive when anybody raised doubts about the stability of the whole arrangement.”

The bottom line:

Fannie was a cancer that helped spread risky behavior and low standards across the housing industry. We all know what happened next.

Why does the legacy media spend enormous time on the salacious activities of a junior (now ex-) congressman from New York, but doesn’t mention Morgenson and Rosner’s new book or interview them on it? Could it be that Fannie Mae—a darling of Left-leaning politicians including the President—is considered untouchable because of it underlying politics? Possibly. But the silence might also be due to a tacit understanding that the elite of Washington know best. These masters of the universe (Washington style) can and do play fast and loose with hundreds of billions of our tax dollars, and no one is held accountable. It’s a travesty.

49 Percent

2011-06-16T19:52:00.003-04:00

With 16 months to go before the 2012 presidential elections, it’s silly to rely on polls to provide any insight whatsoever into the public’s view of the candidates. However, one thing is clear—polls can be used as propaganda tools. After all, if you work to convince the public that a candidate is popular or unpopular, it may sway those on the fence.

When the latest NBC/WSJ poll was released yesterday, I was surprised to see that President Obama had a 49 percent overall approval rating. After all, his administration’s performance on the economy has been abysmal, and people normally vote their pocketbooks.

But then I took a look at the population of people who participated in the poll, and things became very clear indeed. The datatechguy blog reports:

We’ll start with the splits [of those who participated in the poll]:
Strong Democrat …………….. 19
Not very strong Democrat ….. 13
Independent/lean Democrat …10
Strictly Independent ………….14
Independent/lean Republican ..10
Not very strong Republican ….11
Strong Republican …………….13
Other (VOL) …………………… 8
Not sure ……………………….. 2

So this means that the skew of the poll to begin with is 42% dem vs 34% GOP. Gee do ya think an 8 point difference in party affiliation might have something to do with the numbers? I’d say polling nearly 25% more democrats than republicans might help the democrats bottom line figures a tad.

Now lets see how those people voted last time
Voted for Barack Obama ….. 42
Voted for John McCain ……. 32
Voted for someone else ……. 5
Not sure ……………………… 3
No, Did Not Vote …………… 18
Not sure ………………………. -

The spread of Obama voters vs McCain voters in this sample is 3 points greater than his actual 2008 election spread but lets look deeper:

Nearly 1 in 5 of the people who answer claimed they did not vote last time in an election that drew huge turn out, so lets extrapolate those figures without the 18% that claim they didn’t vote. What kind of spread does that leave us compared to the actual 2008 results (52.9 Obama vs 45.7 McCain)?
Voted for Barack Obama ….. 52
Voted for John McCain ……. 40
Voted for someone else ……. 6%

In the last election President Obama got 52.9% of the vote so the poll reflects that figure within 1% but John McCain got 45.7% of the vote. This means this poll under-represents McCain voters by over 11%

Hmmm. The 49 percent approval number is misleading and clearly biased.

I’m not the least bit surprised that NBC reported the 49% result without providing context. After all, NBC has been a shill for President Obama since his 2008 campaign. But The Wall Street Journal allowing it’s name to be connected with this result is both surprising and disappointing. Someone dropped the ball at WSJ.

The Nation

2011-06-13T08:33:00.002-04:00

The Nation is a magazine and website that is unabashedly pro-Obama. Its editorial content is an excellent window into the thinking of those on the Left of the political landscape. It was something of a surprise, therefore, to see the following comment from The Nation’s Editors:

Barack Obama is trapped in ominous economic circumstances, partly of his own making, and time is running out for his presidency. The character traits that got him to the White House—the cool style of avoiding sharp-edged conflict and mediating political differences—threaten now to make him a one-term president. Character is destiny. At this point, only Obama can save Obama, but to do that he must change himself.

This grim prognosis may sound premature, but bad economic news confirms what we have been warning for months: the president’s strategy is failing. People know this. The longer Obama persists in claiming things are on the right track, the more he damages his credibility. Severe economic distress is what defeats incumbent presidents (cf. George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter).

The editors are realistic in their assessment, but they then diverge from reality and place blame on the hated Republicans who they argue would “obstruct” more stimulus spending. Following the lead of Leftist economists such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, the editors are convinced that more spending and even bigger government are the only road that will avert economic calamity. They write:

He [Obama] has to force his opponents out into plain view and turn their vicious behavior into a political asset for himself. He can achieve this by demonstrating concretely whose side he is on. First, he must acknowledge that although his original stimulus helped avert a depression, it failed to produce a robust recovery. Next, he must propose a battery of emergency measures that deliver directly to citizens who are suffering—job creation, foreclosure avoidance, prosecution of fraudulent bankers and other interventions that will help ordinary citizens survive the hard times. He shouldn’t overpromise on results, already a mistake of his presidency. But he should make it clear that he intends to help people stay above water, however long the troubles last.

Let’s consider this for just a moment. Since by their own admission, a three quarter trillion stimulus “failed to produce a robust recovery,” we need to do more of it? Since “emergency measures that deliver directly to citizens who are suffering—job creation, foreclosure avoidance, prosecution of fraudulent bankers and other interventions” have failed to create jobs, have failed to stem the tide of foreclosures, have allowed the financial sector to continue business as usual, we should try them all again? And “other interventions” are what exactly? Following the lead of the President, no details or specificity is provided. In the view of the editors, lets make believe the deficit isn't a very serious problem and adopt the fantasy that we can use taxpayer money to spend our way out of it.

On the other hand, the President’s opponents believe that when tactics fail demonstrably, you must change tactics.

The President’s opponents have committed another crime as well. They have produced detailed plans to revive the economy. These plans rely on different tactics to be sure, but when a country is faced with “severe economic distress” it would seem reasonable to try something different when the current approach is an abject failure.

President Obama, democratic leaders, and the editors of The Nation have criticized Paul Ryan’s and Tim Pawlenty’s plans as “the failed policies of the past.” I guess the Nation's editors fail to see that the very policies they suggest are demonstrably “the failed policies” of the past two years.

You've Got Mail

2011-06-12T11:13:00.002-04:00

As the 2012 presidential election moves closer, it’s fascinating to watch the main stream media as they circle the wagons to promote and protect their chosen candidate. They are largely unwilling to present in-depth analysis of the President’s dismal record on the economy, on unemployment, on federal spending, and on the deficit. Sure, they report the basic facts, but they assiduously avoid delving deeper.

Can you just imagine the media coverage if a Republican President had failed as badly in resurrecting a moribund economy. The focus would be relentless. After all, that hypothetical administration would have presided over the distribution of almost a trillion dollars of borrowed taxpayer money to “stimulate the economy.” All to no effect. Human interest stories on the unemployed would be daily fare, with subtle condemnation of the phantom administration’s ineffective policies.

Today, four million people have been out of work for more than a year. Worse, half of the private jobs that were created last month (54,000—a paltry number indeed) were created by McDonalds—one of the companies that was exempted from Obamacare, thereby allowing them to hire without the negative mandates imposed on other large employers. One wonders how many large companies that were not exempted are holding back on hiring because the provisions of the President’s ill-conceived healthcare program are onerous. We’ll never know.

So if the MSM is not covering the President’s failures, what are they doing? Two of the flagship newspapers in the country (The NYT and WaPo) seem to be obsessed with Sarah Palin and her 25,000 emails. So obsessed, in fact, that both papers have enlisted hundred of readers to pour through the emails looking for juicy tidbits that can be used to further denigrate the former governor. But why? Sarah Palin is not a presidential candidate nor is she likely to become one.

The answer is really pretty simple. By spending thousands of column inches or minutes of airtime on Palin (or another non-candidate, Donald Trump), the MSM can avoid presenting the ideas of other serious candidates who might challenge their guy. After all, if they can make Palin look bad (that’s not hard to do!), they hope that the stink will rub off on other serious Republican candidates. For example, if they focus on Palin, they can keep the public from learning about people like Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, and a serious contender for the Republican nomination.

Unlike the President, who has studiously avoided presenting a detailed plan for federal spending and the economy, Pawlenty (and Congressman Paul Ryan) had the courage to propose a detailed plan. But rather than present Pawlenty's plan and discuss its impact, the MSM would rather look at Sarah Palin’s emails.

I suppose you could argue that the MSM paid as little attention the the President’s economic plan. But there was a different reason—they wanted to avoid embarrassing him. President Obama’s budget proposal in April was so bad that it was voted down in the Democratically-controlled Senate 97 – 0!

Did the MSM spend meaningful time dissecting the President's proposal or the overwhelming vote against it. Did they ask whether the President was less than serious about the economic catastrophe that has befallen our country? Did they ask why every Democratic Senator voted against the President’s plan? Every single one? Did they ask why the Presdient isn't leading on this critical issue?

Nah, they’d rather obsess about Sarah Palin.

HealthScare

2011-06-10T14:45:00.002-04:00

With all of the negative economic news, most of the media has seemingly forgotten about the specter of Obamacare and is unwilling to discuss its negative impact on the economy, federal spending, and the debt. In general, the media prefers to recycle the administration’s spin, that the new health care law will “reduce” overall health care costs and improve healthcare. This spin occurs despite a growing body of nonpartisan evidence that indicates otherwise.

The Boston Herald comments:

Even as yet another federal court ponders the constitutionality of Obamacare, the bad news about its impact just keeps on coming.

This week a report by the respected McKinsey & Co. found that at least 30 percent of employers are likely to stop offering their workers health insurance as a routine benefit once the federal law kicks in.

As many as half of those 1,300 companies surveyed said they would “definitely” or “probably” drop such coverage even with a government imposed penalty of as much as $2,000 per worker for companies with more than 50 employees.

We have already seen the first of wave of Obamacare’s unintended consequences with the government granting more than 1,372 waivers to companies, unions and insurers who wanted to continue to offer low cost plans that didn’t necessarily meet the new and rather expansive and expensive Obamacare guidelines.

For a moment, let’s discount the health care waivers that have, by and large, been granted to politically correct constituencies or employers who might otherwise drop insurance altogether right now. If 1,372 companies and unions are asking to be waived, there’s something in the new law that tells them that (1) it will cost them money and/or (2) that it will not improve care. Even more concerning is McKinsey’s projection that 30 percent of all employers will drop health coverage altogether.

Of course, some people believe that forcing companies to drop coverage was the covert objective of Obamacare all along. Once companies bail, universal health care would follow as the crisis deepens. That may be a bit extreme, but it does make you wonder.

After all, the federal government does such a good job controlling costs in Medicare—an entitlement that cost hundreds of times more than original projections when it was instituted in the 1960s and will be in default in less than 14 years. All we need to do, according to Democratic proponents who are currently using “healthscare” tactics to frighten seniors, is eliminate fraud and abuse and of course, tax the rich. Yeah, that’ll work.

Taking a Risk

2011-06-08T17:36:00.003-04:00

I have studiously avoided any direct comment on Congressman Anthony Weiner’s behavior. I will continue to do so. However, the broader lessons to be learned are noted by Dana Milbank:

To make it to Congress, lawmakers have already been successful, and lucky. They stood out in their state legislatures, their businesses or their military careers. Once in office, they are surrounded by sycophantic staffers and lobbyist supplicants. Their members-only perks include drivers, special treatment on airplanes and the power to skip metal detectors. Because so few of them come from competitive districts, their lopsided victories and adoring supporters make them more and more impressed with their own might.

To amuse themselves, and to test their power, many of them take risks — a small gift, a playful remark, a bit of rhetorical excess — and, each time they get away with it, they become more convinced of their invincibility. They become thrill-seeking adolescents, taking ever-greater risks until they retire or get caught.

Milbank goes on to state that lawmakers take risks, not only in their sexual endeavors, but in the leadership roles we’ve elected them to perform.

This morning I listened to democratic Senator Dick Durbin expound on the economy, the debt, and solutions he might have to the economic problems we face. In what is becoming a distressingly common answer among Democrats, Durbin proceeded to criticize concrete proposed solutions by Republicans, claiming that they were policies that “got us into these problems in the first place.” That’s a meme you’ll be hearing frequently as the election season approaches.

But what you won’t be hearing are viable alternative solutions. Durbin, along with President Obama and most members of the Democratic leadership, has decided to take a risk. He talked about eliminating waste and abuse, and other peripheral cost cutting measures, even though these would do virtually nothing to reduce the deficit. He avoided providing any real solutions of his own.

Durbin and his brethren have decided to put the country at risk—all in the name of preserving profligate programs that they adore. No matter that these programs—from social security to Medicare, from social spending to jobs programs—are going to bankrupt this nation if nothing is done, they believe it’s worth the risk to delay, hoping that it provides political advantage.

I honestly don’t care whether Congress Weiner resigns for taking the risk he took. He put none of us at risk in doing so. But Durbin, the President and others who have decided to play chicken with the economy? They are taking a risk that puts all of us at risk—and that’s unacceptable.

The Doctor

2011-06-05T20:24:00.002-04:00

After a dismal set of employment figures was released this week, followed by housing numbers that are even worse, Barack Obama gave a speech in which he used a medical metaphor. He suggested, as he often does, that he is a victim of George W. Bush’s mismanagement of the economy. There’s nothing new there.

“It’s as if the economy got hit by a truck,” he said (paraphrasing slightly). He went on to say that the patient (the economy) will need still more time to heal. He asked for patience and noted that it could have been a lot worse if he didn’t step in.

Apparently two and a half years of care and the force-feeding of “medication” worth well over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money were inadequate to effect a cure.

Since President Obama has chosen a medical metaphor, I’ll be so bold as to continue it.

Initially, the President was the emergency room physician that worked to treat the patient that was “struck by the truck.” He called in specialists (his advisors) who prescribed an ineffective course of treatment (i.e., the ill-fated stimulus, the cash for clunkers plan, the first time home-buyer tax credit, the bailout of GM, etc.) all costing the patient huge sums of out-of-pocket and borrowed cash. Although the attending physicians predicted recovery in 18 months, things got progressively worse for the patient (it was, after all, a very big truck).

Today, President Obama is playing the role of the internist who is managing the case of the still suffering patient. With each passing month, the patient’s condition changes, but overall, the trend is not good. Recovery is nowhere in sight.

Relatives of the patient (all of us) are becoming frustrated and have asked the internist for some new ideas, for a concrete plan of treatment. The internist refuses to propose a concrete plan and at the same time dishonestly criticizes another physician (Rep. Paul Ryan) who does.

Would you stay with the internist or look for another doctor? That’s a decision that all of us will have to make in 2012.

Words

2011-06-02T12:18:00.004-04:00

You’d think that President Obama would be at the forefront of those who would oppose an increase in the debt limit without a concomitant reduction in Federal spending. After all, his re-election pivots on the economy. But Barack Obama is driven by a “big government” ideology that grows the scope and control of the federal government. In order to achieve his extreme view of social justice, he must spend, let the debt be damned.

This week’s economic numbers continue to be dismal. In an editorial, Investor’s Business Daily quotes Michael Pento, senior economist at Euro Pacific Capital, "genuine government stimulus comes from low taxes, stable prices, reduced regulation and low debt. Our economic policymakers have scrupulously avoided such remedies."

Not only has the Obama administration and its supporters “avoided” these things, they have viciously attacked those who recommend them. Worse, they have been profligate spenders.

Again from IBD:

From 2008 to 2010, the U.S. borrowed over $3.1 trillion. It will borrow another $1.5 trillion this year.

At the same time, the Fed has added $2 trillion to its balance sheet, mostly to buy all that new debt.

There are dozens of economic indicators, and virtually all of them present bad news, some suggesting that we’re headed for a double-dip recession. And who gets hurt the most? The President’s core constituencies, that’s who. College students graduated last month and cannot find jobs. Minorities have unemployment rates that are 5 to 10 points higher than the already staggering national average of 9 percent. The poor watch state programs being cut because business activity is sluggish and sales tax revenues are down. Union members see jobs evaporate, and private sector job growth remains almost non-existent. And the President tells us he cares.

If that we the case, he’d forget about “taxing the rich” and growing the debt and take the steps that Michael Pento suggests. He and his surrogates give speeches intended to frighten the most vulnerable so they’ll oppose measures that are not only necessary but crucial for their own long-term interests.

Daniel Henninger comments:

The day before that speech [Obama’s major economic address at GWU in April], all Washington expected Mr. Obama to make a major policy statement about the big deficit-reduction debate then unfolding. Agree or disagree, Paul Ryan's budget released the week before was all about policy. The Republicans were actually offering to take part-ownership of the economy by spending the year in dense discussions about the deficit and spending.

Expectations raised, the president contributed nothing. Instead he dumped ridicule and derision on the Republican leadership seated before him. With that speech, Mr. Obama kicked off his 2012 presidential campaign, and in so doing politicized the economy.

It seems that our President thinks that words are all that matter. But he’s wrong. Solid plans, concrete actions, and presidential leadership are what matter. Where are they?

Oh, Canada

2011-05-31T13:01:00.001-04:00

For the past 50 years, American anti-war activists have threatened to move to Canada when they disagreed with government policy or a sitting president. I never quite understood that position until today.

Reuters reports:

DEAUVILLE, France (Reuters) - Group of Eight leaders had to soften a statement urging Israel and the Palestinians to return to negotiations because Canada objected to a specific mention of 1967 borders, diplomats said Friday.

The government has adopted a staunchly pro-Israel position in international negotiations since coming to power in 2006, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper saying Canada will back Israel whatever the cost.

Diplomats involved in Middle East discussions at the G8 summit said Ottawa had insisted that no mention of Israel's pre-1967 borders be made in the leaders' final communique, even though most of the other leaders wanted such a reference.

The communique called for the immediate resumption of peace talks but did not mention 1967, the year Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza from Jordan and Egypt during the Six-Day War.

Americans often view Canada as our little sister, protected by its proximity to a superpower, sharing (in the main) the same language and culture, and taking the same geopolitical stance. But that was then.

In a compelling rebuke to the anti-Israel stance taken by President Obama in his recent “1967 borders speech,” Canada rejected the notion that negotiation begin with tangible concessions by Israel while the Palestinians are asked to do nothing. Unlike our President, who appears stuck in a Left-wing ideology that demonizes Israel, Prime Minister Stephen Harper took a remarkable stand, and he won. Unlike our President who gave a speech and then needed to “clarify” it once the uproar began, Harper was unequivocal in his support of the tiny Jewish state in the midst of a 100 million Arabs.

Harper, unlike Obama, stood by a long-time ally, a staunch Western democracy, and the only bright spot in the Middle East. Obama threw Israel under the bus and then needed to “clarify” his positions by weaseling the meaning of his words. To be honest, it seems that Barack Obama is more interesting in appeasing 100 million Arabs (ironically, he failed at doing even that) than remaining true to our ally and friend.

So now I get it. In a gesture that can only be characterized as anti-war (because rest assured, the current stance of this administration will lead to war), I’d like to move to Canada.

Yeah, I know, it’s an empty gesture and I won’t really do it. I like the USA too much. It’s just the mistaken policies of current president that I have trouble with.

Content-Free

2011-05-31T09:16:00.002-04:00

On CBS’s Face the Nation, Harry Smith asked DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz the following question (video):

Smith: ... the Trustees [of the Medicare program] also said a couple of Fridays ago that this thing (Medicare) could be insolvent in the next decade. Doesn’t something really dramatic have to happen, and as the Congressman suggested, Republicans have a plan, do the Democrats have a plan?

Conforming exactly to the Democratic narrative, Wasserman-Schultz provided no inkling of what a Democratic plan might be, but she did attack:

Wasserman Schultz: Like I said, the Republicans have a plan to end Medicare as we know it. What they would do is they would take the people who are younger than 55 years old today and tell them You know what? You’re on your own. Go and find private health insurance in the healthcare insurance market, we’re going to throw you to the wolves and allow insurance companies to deny you coverage and drop you for pre-existing conditions. We’re going to give you X amount of dollars and you figure it out.

It might be worth parsing Wasserman-Schultz’ response:

“Like I said, the Republicans have a plan to end Medicare as we know it.”

Actually, Medicare will end as we know in little more than a decade—on its own. The Republican plan, however flawed, is an honest attempt to allow Medicare to continue for those who are 55 and younger. By the way, for those who are 55 and older, nothing changes under the Republican plan. However, if the system is allowed to go bankrupt in 2024, it will end for everyone. It appears that Wasserman-Schultz is unable to understand that harsh reality and unwilling to propose a solution because in her view, it’s politically effective to demagogue the issue and frighten seniors.

“You’re on your own. Go and find private health insurance in the healthcare insurance market, we’re going to throw you to the wolves and allow insurance companies to deny you coverage and drop you for pre-existing conditions.”

But wait, that’s exactly what Medicare recipients do right now for 20 percent of their coverage. It’s called Supplemental Coverage, paid for by the senior and purchased from the hated “private health insurance market.” And guess what? No one is denied coverage and no one is excluded because of pre-existing conditions. In fact, insurers compete and the individual—not the government—can pick and choose the price/performance that is best for him/her.

As I understand it, the Republican plan would effectively expand Supplemental Coverage to 100 percent of coverage for those under 55, but would subsidize the cost. Insurance companies would compete using government-mandated coverages.

We’re going to give you X amount of dollars and you figure it out.

Why is it that the DNC chair is so worried about allowing seniors freedom of choice? Why is it that the freedom to “figure out” what is best for you is somehow allowing yourself to be “thrown to the wolves?” Why do Ms. Wasserman-Schultz and many in her party believe that doing nothing will magically make the looming Medicare bankruptcy go away?

The sad thing is that there’s no point in asking her. Harry Smith tried it and got a content-free answer. Maybe content isn’t important to the Democrats in Congress, but I can guarantee you that it’ll become very important to every senior in 2024.

Mexico is Watching

2011-05-29T14:02:00.003-04:00

CNN reports:

(CNN) -- The Arab League plans to ask the United Nations to grant full membership to a Palestinian state based on borders with Israel that existed before the 1967 Middle East war, according to the state-run Qatar News Agency.

The move comes after President Barack Obama made official the long-held -- but rarely stated -- U.S. support for a Palestinian state based on those borders, a position that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said can never happen.

Of course, CNN is egregiously incorrect in suggesting that Barack Obama’s position is “long-held” by other American Presidents. They also conveniently forget to mention that Obama’s position is inconsistent with mainstream political thinking, or that the counter position, as presented by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to a joint session of Congress, received 27 standing ovations. But no matter. Left-leaning media sources will lie shamelessly and distort context to protect the candidate of hope and change.

So, we move on to other matters …

I’ve heard unsubstantiated rumors that Mexico is going to school on each move by the “Palestinians” and the Arab League. After all, the state of Texas was once theirs and if the Palestinians succeed , there’s no reason why the Mexicans can’t make their own bid for land lost. A brief history from Wikipedia is in order:

When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, Mexican Texas was part of the new nation. To encourage settlement, Mexican authorities allowed organized immigration from the United States, and by 1834, over 30,000 Anglos lived in Texas,[1] compared to only 7,800 Mexicans.[2]

After Santa Anna's dissolution of the Constitution of 1824, issues such as lack of access to courts, the militarization of the region's government (e.g., response to Saltillo-Monclova problem) and self-defense issues resulting in the confrontation in Gonzales, public sentiment turned towards revolution. Santa Anna's invasion of the territory after his putting down the rebellion in Zacatecas provoked the conflict of 1836. The Texian forces fought and won the Texas Revolution in 1835–36.

Hmmm. I’d have to say that Mexico has a much stronger claim to Texas than the Arabs have to Israel. After all, there actually was a country called Mexico that actually did hold the territory that became Texas. In fact, Mexico existed as a Spanish colony and as an independent country long before the United States came into being. On the other hand, there was never a country controlled by today’s Palestinians, never a king, never a governing body—nothing. Ironically, today, after the Israelis unilaterally gave the Palestinians Gaza, the region is exemplified by (to quote Wikipedia) a “lack of access to courts, [and] the militarization of the region's government.”

But no matter, according to many people, including a significant percentage of President Obama’s advisors (and the President himself), the UN is the icon for worldwide moral governance. So the President may cluck his tongue and publicly disapprove of the Arab’s UN bid, but one wonders what he really thinks.

It doesn’t matter if the Arabs’ claims are counter-historical, it means nothing that the Jews lived in Israel for millennia before Islam existed, it’s irrelevant that the Arabs initiated a war and lost, it’s uninteresting that the Palestinians commit more human rights abuses in one week than Israelis are falsely accused of committing in one year, it’s not worth mentioning that in 1948 the same UN (well, actually its predecessor) gave the “Palestinians” a land of their own and the Arabs spurned the UN’s offer and attacked the infant Jewish state that was to be their neighbor. We live in a new day of blatant anti-Israel bias subtly supported at the very highest levels of our own government.

If the UN says that Israel must give back land to the Arabs, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t do the same for Mexico.

So you ought to visit Dallas while you still can. After all, the football field at Dallas stadium might be limited to 50 yards, with the remainder of this “Jerusalem of the NFL” being partitioned by the UN into a soccer field.

Malaise

2011-05-27T23:07:00.002-04:00

President Obama has been spending a lot of time addressing foreign policy issues and even more time overseas on a variety of visits. That’s what Presidents do when their domestic agenda and accomplishments are in serious trouble.

In just over two years, Barack Obama has spent close to a trillion dollars in a misguided effort to stimulate the economy. Investor’s Business Daily reports the frightening status of our economy:

• Businesses last month slashed orders for autos and other durable goods by the largest amount in six months.
• Industrial output dropped the most in April for any month since the start of the recovery, indicating the manufacturing sector may be rolling over.
• Jobless claims last week unexpectedly shot up and topped 400,000 for the seventh straight week, signaling that payroll growth remains soft — in fact, the pace of hiring may be slowing.
• April housing starts plunged 11%, confirming the housing industry remains moribund.
• Foreclosures last quarter accounted for 28% of all home sales — the highest share in a year and nearly six times above the normal rate.
• Consumer spending last quarter expanded just 2% after rising at a 4% clip in the fourth quarter.
• Net corporate profits last quarter fell 1% after rising 3% in the fourth quarter, and weaker earnings continue to act as a drag on stocks.
• The overall economy last quarter grew a lower-than-expected 1.8% vs. 3.1% in the fourth, showing gross domestic product growth is braking hard.

For those who are old enough to remember, these data are reminiscent of another failed presidency—the Carter administration. In those days, people referred to this as “malaise” or “stagflation.”

In fact, the only thing that seems to have increased significantly is our indebtedness as a nation. In response, the President presented a 2012 budget that was so bad that Democrats and Republicans in the Senate voted against it by an astounding 97 – 0.

Worse, President Obama has shown absolutely no leadership in addressing a need for entitlement reform. Although he’s quick to criticize other proposals and hesitant to condemn the blatant and dishonest scare tactics adopted by his party, he has avoided developing his own proposals to reform Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

So when I hear Obama supporters castigate Republicans for their “weak” field of presidential contenders, I can’t help but wonder why they don’t pause for a moment and realize that they have a very weak contender themselves.

Concerned?

2011-05-26T09:05:00.002-04:00

It’s fascinating to watch President Obama’s supporters in the media work hard to provide cover for his continual and ill-conceived pressure on Israel. This morning the AP (a clear Obama cheerleader) reports:

Middle East envoy Tony Blair says Barack Obama launched his peace initiative because he's concerned about what might happen to Israel if Palestinians unilaterally declare statehood.

Blair told an audience of business leaders gathered in central London on Thursday that Obama is "frankly worried about the position that Israel is in."

So, if we are to believe the AP, Barack Obama is so concerned about Israel that he’s asking them to (1) adopt indefensible borders with “swaps,” (2) negotiate with a group that cannot even state that Israel has a right to exist, (3) make no concrete demands of the “Palestinians” – none.

It’s also very troubling (but not surprising) to learn that the President reacts to Palestinian threats of unilateral statehood with appeasement. If the President is concerned that the Palestinians are wrong in their efforts to attain statehood via fiat, how about dealing directly with them?

For example, he could suggest that if the Palestinians proceed in this fiasco (which will likely succeed) that the United States will cut off all aid to them on the day their pseudo-state is declared. He could further note that when the new Palestinian “state” launches any attack across its border against Israel, it is an act of war and that Israel has every right to counterattack. He could state that he would encourage our allies and NGOs to observe and report human rights abuses (there will be many) inside the new Palestinian state and move toward sanctions once they begin. He could do all of that and much more, but instead, he asks Israel to act “boldly.”

Why not ask the Palestinians to act boldly?

A commenter at RealClearPolitics suggested a few bold moves that the President could suggest

Full and unconditional diplomatic recognition of Israel.

Full and unconditional recognition of Israel’s right to exist within secure borders.

Full cessation of all acts of war against Israel, including but not limited to: full cessation of all economic boycotts and embargoes against Israel; full cessation of military action against Israel by independent states (Syria, Iran) AND their proxies: Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, ET. AL. (that is, EVERY single proxy).

The fact that President Obama does none of this belies the suggestion that he only has Israel’s best interests at heart. In fact, it makes that notion completedly laughable—except it’s not the least bit amusing to the people of Israel.

Two Things

2011-05-23T16:41:00.002-04:00

Two things are pretty much guaranteed every time the President gives a foreign policy speech on the Arab-Israeli conflict: (1) he will backtrack (I know, the operative word is “clarify”) his remarks after the hard-left ideological nature of his biases surface, and (2) his myriad supporters will work very, very hard to convince us all that (a) he was brave to confront the problem directly and (b) his support among the Jewish community is as solid as ever.

In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Joseph Sargent does yeoman’s work to argue part 2b above. Using a tone that can only be characterized as whistling through the cemetery, Sargent writes:

The claim that Obama is on the verge of losing crucial Jewish support is at this point a Golden Oldie of sorts. Back in 2008 — after Obama said that “nobody’s suffering more than the Palestinian people,” and after Obama suggested he’d be open to unconditional talks with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the destruction of Israel — there were reams of stories about how McCain would be able to make successful inroads with this core Democratic constituency. In the end, according to exit polls, Obama won around 78 percent of the Jewish vote.

Sargent’s wishful thinking is actually amusing and at the same time insulting to Jewish voters.

Jewish voters have had a lot of time to think about the President’s hard left view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, his distain for Israeli leaders (who the media conveniently characterize as far-right), about his long-time association with people (think: the Reverend Wright) who are blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel, about his close advisors like Samantha Power who have had a long and virulent anti-Israel stance, about his continual attempts to draw moral equivalence between apartment buildings in Jerusalem and terrorist rocket attacks by the Palestinians, about his selective memory when it comes to the Palestinians rejection of Israel's right to exist and their inculcation of anti-Semitic hatred in their schools. A lot of time to think -- and reconsider.

The political reality is simple. There's only one state where Jewish voters matter in 2012, and that's Florida. In fact, there's only one part of Florida where Jewish voters matter, and that's in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. If Obama loses support in those counties, Florida swings red.

And after this speech (if anecdotal evidence means anything), Jewish voters in those three counties have taken their true-blue blinders off and are now aware that the President is more transparently sympathetic to the Palestinians than any U.S. President in history, including Jimmy Carter!

Sure, following item 1 in the first paragraph, President Obama has now backtracked at AIPAC, telling us all what a great supporter of the Jewish state he really is and how his speech was mischaracterized by his opponents. All in an effort to shore up eroding support that Mr. Sargent claims doesn’t exist.

We just had dinner with a typical true-blue Democrat couple in South Florida -- party donors, activists for Democrat candidates, the typical M.O. And you know what, Mr. Sargent, they've had it. No money this time, and no vote in 2012. And they're not alone. Not by a long shot. They’ve had enough time to think and the “idea” of Obama just doesn’t match up with the deeds of the man.

Jewish Florida Democrats -- with the exception of mindless partisans like Debbie Wasserman Schultz -- are beginning to realize that hope and change don't make for particularly effective foreign policy. So go ahead, Mr. Sargent, whistle through the cemetery. If Obama doesn't win Florida, he's toast.

Echos

2011-05-21T12:16:00.003-04:00

The echos of Barack Obama’s Middle East speech continue unabated. His stated position, although strongly supported by many in the Western Left and much of his beloved “international community,” is counter to American interests, historically tone-deaf, and completely devoid of any connection with the realities on the ground. Richard Fernandez comments on the “asymmetry” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

There was a certain asymmetry in the confrontation that often went unremarked. Israel was the world’s only Jewish state while the Palestinians were part of a larger community in the region, some would say indistinguishable from it. Israel’s existence was its all-in-all. On the other the hand, the Palestinian state was in the final analysis, optional to the Arabs in the region as a whole. Israel non-negotiably needed to live. Palestine’s nonnegotiable demand was that Israel needed to die.

What Barack Obama refuses to acknowledge is that the “Palestinian people” did not exist as a named entity prior to 1948. They were, and they remain, part of the 100 million Arabs that inhabit the entire Middle East. There was never a Palestinian monarch, never a Palestinian legislature, never a Palestinian President, never a Palestinian flag … so how can there be “Palestinian” refugees? The answer is that the surrounding countries have refused to absorb the “Palestinians.”

Jennifer Rubin comments on the refugee problem that the President seems unwilling to address directly by quoting the inimitable Alan Dershowitz:

Any proposed peace agreement will require the Palestinians to give up the so-called right of return, which is designed not for family reunification, but rather to turn Israel into another Palestinian state with an Arab majority. As all reasonable people know, the right of return is a non-starter. It is used as a “card” by the Palestinian leadership who fully understand that they will have to give it up if they want real peace. The Israelis also know that they will have to end their occupation of most of the West Bank (as they ended their occupation of Gaza) if they want real peace. Obama’s mistake was to insist that Israel give up its card without demanding that the Palestinians give up theirs.

Obama’s mistake is a continuation of a serious mistake he made early in his administration. That first mistake was to demand that Israel freeze all settlements. The Palestinian Authority had not demanded that as a condition to negotiations. But once the President of the United States issued such a demand, the Palestinian leadership could not be seen by its followers as being less Palestinian than the President. In other words, President Obama made it more difficult for the Palestinian leadership to be reasonable. Most objective observers now recognize Obama’s serious mistake in this regard. What is shocking is that he has done it again. By demanding that Israel surrender all the territories it captured in the 1967 war (subject only to land swaps) without insisting that the Palestinians surrender their right of return, the President has gone further than Palestinian negotiators had during various prior negotiations. This makes it more difficult for the Palestinian leadership to be reasonable in their negotiations with the Israelis.

Dershowitz is shocked that the President has repeated the same foreign mistake yet again. I’m not. The President is an inexperienced leader who takes advice from ideologically-driven advisors who believe that the “oppressed” Palestinians have rights that are non-existent in international law. In the fantasy world of Obama’s advisors, Palestinian Arab “refugees” and Jews can live side-by-side inside a post-modern Israel. They have neither the time nor the inclination to worry about Israel’s right to exist—in fact, I suspect that many of the President’s advisors such as Samantha Powers and possibly Susan Rice, aren’t convinced that Israel should continue to exist in its current state. If they and the President believed otherwise, they wouldn’t have thrown Israel under the bus.

Update 5/21/11
Richard Fernandez provides the following summary of the real problem (as opposed to Obama's fantasy viewpoint):

The key thing to remember is that Middle Eastern politics is about one faction imposing control over another faction. The Jews are but one of several minorities in the Middle East. But the Copts, the Druze, the Maronites and the sundry others are substantially in the same boat. President Obama isn’t doing anything to Israel he hasn’t already done to Lebanon. See where that got him?

Policy has fed the Levant to Syria in the hopes of peeling it off Iran and it has had failed. You can’t buy off the wolf. [a piece of wisdom that seems to elude the President]. It just makes them hungrier. Every minority is fair game. Even the Palestinians. Remember Black September? Done by Jordan, revenged on Israel.

Minorities are there to beat on . The worse things become in Egypt the more the Copts will be blamed. The harder the factional fighting in Iraq, the more the Christians will be bombed. The worse things are for Islamic states in the region, the more the Jew will be hated. Because the basic political idea in the region is to find someone to focus hate upon to divert the attention from the real problem. You are to blame because you either accept the blame or cannot refuse it. It has nothing to do with actual culpability.

But scapegoating doesn’t work in the long run. That’s why Obama’s ploy is doomed. Forcing Israel back to the 1967 boundaries does nothing to fix the dysfunction of the region. It is as irrelevant as astrology is to the stock market.

Borders

2011-05-19T16:55:00.003-04:00

Ideologically driven fantasy is fascinating to observe—butterflies and rainbows, soft music, whale sounds, and … two countries living side-by-side in peace. That’s President Obama’s ideological fantasy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or at least that’s what one could conclude after listening to his major speech delivered this afternoon at the US State Department. The problem, of course, is that fantasy has a way of colliding head-on with reality—something that the President prefers not to consider when pontificating on a conflict that has stymied every attempt at resolution since 1948.

But it gets worse. The President stated:

So while the core issues of the conflict must be negotiated, the basis of those negotiations is clear: a viable Palestine, and a secure Israel. The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.

As an outspoken opponent of anything “unilateral,” it’s troubling that Barack Obama has unilaterally decided that the pre-1967 borders are appropriate for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. And this after noting that "the core issues of the conflict must be negotiated." Are the borders not a core issue?

Never mind that those borders were not annexed via unprovoked aggression, but rather as a consequence of a war that was initiated by the Arabs, who lost. To the victor goes the land, or at least a very tiny part of it that (1) unified Jerusalem and (2) provided a necessary buffer for the tiny Jewish state that is surrounded by 100 million hostile Arabs.

Now, Obama has provided a perfect excuse for the Palestinians to demand pre-1967 borders, even if they may have been willing, at some time in the far distant future, to settle for less. After all, the President of the USA says it’s the right thing to do, how can Abbas or his successor settle for anything less.

The incompetence of the Obama administration with respect to the Middle East is matched only by the Carter administration. Carter jettisoned an American ally, the Shah of Iran, all in the name of human rights and “freedom” for the people of Iran. The result was, well, something less than optimum. Obama jettisoned an American ally, Hosni Mubarrak all in the name of human rights and “freedom” for the people of Egypt. Tony Blankley comments on the result:

That "democratic revolution," as the administration persistently called it, seems to have settled down into an ugly accord between the Army-run government, the Muslim Brotherhood and the fanatical salafists -- which the new regime has been releasing from the prisons into which Mubarak very usefully had sent those dreadful men. Killing Coptic Christians, attacking women on the street for non-Muslim garb and other pre-Mubarak attitudes are thus now back in vogue in "democratic" Egypt.

And now, the President unilaterally blind-sides our ally Israel by dictating absurd constraints on any settlement that might occur in the future. With this speech, the President has yet again demonstrated that he is either spectacularly naïve or dangerously ideological when it comes to the Middle East. He is no friend of Israel.

Intent

2011-05-17T13:51:00.002-04:00

The New York Times is certainly no friend of Israel—the only democracy and steadfast ally of the United States in the Middle East. In its news and editorial pages, the NYT subtly and repeated characterizes Israel as an oppressor of the beleaguered Palestinians—a people, the Time claims—that simply want to live in peace. When Israel defends itself from wanton Palestinian terror attacks against civilian targets, the NYT leads the left-wing media in sensationalizing Israel’s defensive attacks. But when the terrorist group Hamas, now a partner of Fatah, launches rockets across the border, when it murders innocent families, when it calls for all its people to pray for the destruction of Israel, the NYT is strangely silent. If the news is reported, it appears under the fold on page 23.

Today, the NYT provides op-ed space for Mahmoud Abbas, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In what is nothing more than a propaganda piece, Abbas states:

The State of Palestine intends to be a peace-loving nation, committed to human rights, democracy, the rule of law and the principles of the United Nations Charter. Once admitted to the United Nations, our state stands ready to negotiate all core issues of the conflict with Israel. A key focus of negotiations will be reaching a just solution for Palestinian refugees based on Resolution 194, which the General Assembly passed in 1948.

It the stakes weren’t so serious, that statement would actually be funny. The Palestininian authority (Fatah) has given no sign that it “intends” anything of the sort. Its new partner, Hamas, calls for the outright destruction of Israel. Both Hamas and Fatah refuse to even agree that Israel has a right to exist. Abbas blithely avoids any mention of the terrorist atrocities committed by his organization and its new partner, avoids mentioning that the Palestinians have walked away from offered peace deals repeated over the past 50 years, and avoids and admitting that they have offered nothing tangible—absolutely nothing—except broken promises in return for very tangible concessions made by the Israelis (e.g., unilateral land concessions, housing freezes). And UN resolution 194—a 70 year old document that has no bearing in modern times—mandates a return of all “refugees”—a move that would, in itself, destroy Israel (oh wait, that’s exact what the Palestinians want).

Abbas also distorts history suggesting that the “refugees” were forced to flee. In reality, the Arab armies of 1948 were so sure they’d push the infant country of Israel into the sea, that they asked Arab residents to leave, promising that they’d be able to return and take over confiscated Jewish property. When that didn’t happen, the “refugees" were allowed by their Arab brothers to fester in camps that soon became small cities. Their suffering is wholly self-inflicted. And those many "Palestinians" who remained in 1948—they are now third generation Israeli citizens and lead productive lives.

This week President Obama will likely continue to champion the Palestinian cause and pressure Israel into still more tangible concessions, matched by empty Palestinian promises, or more likely, nothing at all. The President cannot accept the hard reality that the Arabs want to see Israel go away. They will stop at nothing—including using the Palestinians—to accomplish that goal, including creating an alternative history. But what is really shocking is that Barack Obama appears to believe the Abbas' distorted history, and defines his policy based on it.

Arab Winter

2011-05-14T19:25:00.002-04:00

President Obama is set to give a major speech on the Middle-East and on America’s relationship with Islam later this week. In the post Osama bin Laden era, it seems that the President is again relying on his oratorical skill to reset our relationship with the Muslims in that part of the world. No matter that his Cairo speech accomplished exactly nothing, he’ll try and try again.

Although we don’t yet know what he’ll say, it’s likely he’ll make allusions to the “Arab Spring”—a fantasy conjured up by the media and the President’s supporters in an effort to put the best face on what is becoming a debacle in many Arab countries.

Take Egypt—a dictatorship prior to the Arab Spring, but also one of only two Arab countries at peace with Israel. Egypt certainly wasn’t perfect, but it did project a moderate stance toward the world. Many of us in the Center warned that the President’s enthusiastic support for the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak might have unintended consequences. It has.

In the first vote after Mubarak was deposed, the Egyptian people, by a vote of 78 – 22 percent, voted to position the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood (the progenitor of al Qaida) as the dominant political party. The freedom loving Egyptian college kids, the ones who espoused liberal politics, yearned for “freedom,” and used Facebook and Twitter to topple the dictator (if we’re to believe the hyperbole of our own media) got 22 percent! Not a good sign.

The interim military leadership of Egypt now allows weapons to be smuggled into Gaza and has suggested that the peace treaty with Israel be abrogated. But it gets worse.

Andrew McCarthy reports:

Screaming “With our blood and soul, we will defend you, Islam,” jihadists stormed the Virgin Mary Church in northwest Cairo last weekend. They torched the Coptic Christian house of worship, burned the nearby homes of two Copt families to the ground, attacked a residential complex, killed a dozen people, and wounded more than 200: just another day in this spontaneous democratic uprising by Muslim hearts yearning for freedom.

In the delusional vocabulary of the “Arab Spring,” this particular episode is known as a sectarian “clash.” That was the Washington Post’s take. Its headline reads “12 dead in Egypt as Christians and Muslims clash” — in the same way, one supposes, that a mugger’s fist can be said to “clash” with his victim’s face. The story goes on, in nauseating “cycle of violence” style, to describe “clashes between Muslims and Coptic Christians” that “left” 12 dead, dozens more wounded, “and a church charred” — as if it were not crystal clear who were the clashers and who were the clashees, as if the church were somehow combusted into a flaming heap without some readily identifiable actors having done the charring.

It’s interesting that the President—a staunch defender of human rights—has said relatively little about this. I wonder whether he’ll mention it in his speech.

A commentator noted that maybe we should call the “Arab Spring” the Arab Winter.” All things considered, that may be too optimistic a phrase as well.

Victory?

2011-05-04T17:20:00.002-04:00

In his speech announcing that US special forces operatives killed Osama bin Laden, President Obama, like his predecessor, was careful to emphasize that the United States was at war with al Qaida, not Islam. Although this statement is appropriate, voices on the Left, such as Matt Yglesias, are already claiming victory—theiur (il)logic works sonething like this: if Osama is dead, al Qaida is defeated, and if al Qaida is defeated, then the war on terror can be deemphasized.

The problem, of course, is that the “war” we’re fighting isn’t against al Qaida, but rather against Islamism—an ideology that encompasses myriad extremist Muslim groups in almost every country with Muslims and millions upon millions of sympathizers around the world.

Ironically, where al Qaida planned and executed isolated terrorist attacks, Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezballah take over entire governments. They, not al Qaida, are who we must fight.

Barry Rubin comments:

An Islamist regime rules Turkey and has seized control of most institutions and is gradually crushing democracy. This regime has aligned itself with Hamas, Hizballah, Iran, and Syria.

An Islamist regime rules the Gaza Strip and has already set off one war and will no doubt do so again. Its patrons are Iran, Syria, and now Egypt. This government now exercises veto power over any Israel-Palestinian peace which means there won’t be an Israel-Palestinian peace.

An Islamist-oriented regime rules Lebanon, backed by Iran and Syria. It has already set off one war and will no doubt do so again.

The Iranian regime has weathered a major internal upheaval and is heading full-speed ahead toward nuclear weapons.

With Western help the regime in Egypt — one of the main bulwarks against revolutionary Islamism — has fallen, and whether or not Islamists there take over they will be a lot stronger, able to act freely, and direct a movement of millions seeking to Islamize and eventually make Islamist the largest Arab country of all.

Revolutionary Islamism is also a serious threat, though so far has been kept at bay, in countries like Yemen, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan while in other parts of the world it has spread to places like Chechnya, the northern Caucasus, the Balkans, Nigeria, Somalia, southern Thailand and the southern Philippines, and Indonesia. The resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan seems far from impossible, as does a revolutionary Islamist upheaval in Pakistan.

Serious Islamist movements have gained political hegemony over growing Muslim communities all over the West. While many Muslims are indifferent to the movement and a few courageous dissidents combat it, Western governments and elites often blindly favor the Islamists.

Parenthetically, these same Islamist groups—The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezballah— all expressed "outrage" when bin Laden was killed.

The death of bin Laden is something to celebrate—long delayed justice delivered unequivocally and without mercy. But the war is hardly “over,” and any implication to the contrary is either naive or dishonest.

Tasted Cold

2011-05-02T10:59:00.002-04:00

There’s an old Spanish proverb that goes something like this: “Revenge is a dish best tasted cold.”

In the case of Osama bin Laden, it took well over 10 years of grinding intelligence gathering, continuous analysis by hundreds of intelligence officers, and in the end, outstanding effort by a special forces team to bring down the world’s most infamous terrorist thug.

Most of the lessons here are symbolic and bin Laden’s demise telegraphs one very important message. Those who succeed in doing grave harm to the USA and those who try will be hunted down and killed. No matter how long it takes, no matter how many resources must be expended, no matter how much it antagonizes other terrorists.

The leader of a dominant Islamist movement has been brought to justice, but the movement itself will persist. For Islamist groups worldwide, the death of bin Laden will become a rallying cry for more violence. Al Qaida and its spawn will continue their cowardly attempts to harm innocents Some terrorist groups, notably the Palestinian group Hamas, have already condemned our work to eliminate bin Laden.

I found it interesting that Bin Laden was “buried at sea.” A nice touch by the President and his people. The last thing bin Laden deserved was a memorial in some Islamist stronghold where pilgrims could visit. Instead he sits at the bottom of the ocean—alone, anonymous, and invisible.

Congratulations to the administration, the national intelligence agencies, and the military for a job well done. The dish was tasted cold, but it was delicious nonetheless.

Alternatives

2011-04-22T13:56:00.003-04:00

Although I differ with President Obama on many domestic and foreign policy matters, I do agree that the United States needs to eliminate it dependence of foreign sources of energy. I also agree that alternative energy sources—wind, solar, tidal, and others (specifically excluding ethanol which is a massive boondoggle that does little, if anything to help)—represent significant potential in the long term. They must be developed, and it’s not a bad idea to provide intelligent and targeted government subsidies for these new technologies.

But what about the short term? There is little debate (except among radical “greens”) that fossil fuel energy sources (i.e., oil, natural gas, shale, and coal) will remain important for the next two decades and possibly longer. A recent report indicates that the United States has the largest fossil fuel reserve in the world. But it seems the Obama administration is doing everything possible to retard development of that reserve. The consequence will soon be $5.00 per gallon gasoline, with its negative impact on the poor, the economy as a whole, and our national security.

Given the continuing stream of development restrictions that the White House has implemented, domestic oil production is down 13 percent from a year ago. That means we import 13 percent more oil from folks like Hugo Chavez and the Saudis. The Washington Examiner comments:

At today's prices, the Obama-induced loss of production represents $40 million per day in lost oil revenue. Spread over a full year, that comes to $14.6 billion that could be supporting thousands of sustainable, good-paying American jobs at no cost to the taxpayer. That is a much better deal than Obama's $800 billion stimulus package, which appears to have added far more to the national debt than it ever will to national employment. It seems clear that ideological and not economic considerations are at work in this administration's energy policy. The same politician who once said that energy prices would "necessarily skyrocket" under his plan seems less intent on job creation or energy security than he is on putting oil producers in a regulatory straitjacket and browbeating Americans into accepting the lower standard of living that inevitably results from energy scarcity.

The Obama adminstration seems to allow ideology, rather than good strategic judgment, to guide its decision making in a wide array of domestic and foreign policy matters. That’s not uncommon for any administration, but this administration’s ideology seems to be couched more in fantasy than reality.

We can all wish that solar and wind would eliminate the need for fossil fuels tomorrow, that "green jobs" will proliferate, and that clean energy with become dominant over the next few years. Sadly, it won’t happen, and soaring speeches or wishful thinking won't change that harsh reality. Now that nuclear power is dead (think: Japan) our only viable option in the short and mid-term is the domestic development of fossil fuel sources. There are literally hundreds (possibly thousands) of opportunities.

The White House should be working hard to facilitate the development of these domestic energy sources, rather than placing a wide array of regulatory roadblocks in their path.

Birthers

2011-04-21T15:00:00.002-04:00

Let me start by being perfectly clear—the “birther” issue is ridiculous. Barack Obama is President and arguments about his country of birth will not change that fact.

I do find it interesting, however, that the MSM seems to be doing everything it can to keep the topic alive. Commentators on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and the NYT can’t seem to stop commenting on the “racist, zenophobic” mentality of the “birthers.” They crow over polls showing that “birthers” are far more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. They repeatedly suggest that birthers are really “tea partiers” who are doing the country great harm.

Edward Tenner writes in The Atlantic:

The birthers' fixation on origins might be related to antipathy to immigrants and racial minorities. But it also reflects a xenophobia of cultural differences. This paragraph suggests that when Obama was at a formative age, Javanese customs helped shape his celebrated style. But those values regarding expression of emotion were and are the opposite of what prevails at American schools. Birtherism is like other urban legends. It expresses an anxiety -- not mainly, I think, about race, Islam, or even immigration, certainly no longer about leftism, but about his brand of coolness as a threatening alien value. It's part of Americans' ambiguity about self-control.

Tenner expresses surprise that of those polled “fully 20 percent of Americans accept the story [that Obama was born outside the USA] and almost a quarter are unsure, apparently taking it seriously.”

The unhingered behavior of birthers provides the media with an attractive target, and they simply won’t let go as the election year approaches. Rather than allowing the story to remain at the fringes, as they’ve done with the “truthers” on the Left who believe that the U.S. or Israel were complicit in planning and executing the 9/11 attacks, the media insists on keeping the birther story alive.

The real question, though, is why? Why the media obsession with the birther story?

As the presidential election year approaches, the MSM is closing ranks around their chosen candidate. The “birther” story, they believe, can be an effective bludgeon used to discredit anyone who disagrees with the policies of the President. No matter how tenuous the connection, just show some association of the President’s critics to the birther movement and their arguments can be dismissed out of hand.

After all, birthers are “stupid, racist, zenophobes.” Anyone even remotely connected to them (e.g., birthers are predominantly Independents or Republicans, so those political affiliations are suspect) has racist and/or zenophobic tendencies.

In the end, if those of us who think that Barack Obama is making serious mistakes in both domestic and foreign policy can be connected to a group of fringe conspiracy theorists, then, even honest criticism is “extreme” and unjustified. After all, if we’re to believe the implied narrative, it’s just as “crazy” to have reservations about uncontrolled domestic spending and exploding deficits or the wars in Afghanistan and Libya. It’s just the same as claiming that the President wasn’t born in the USA. Isn’t it?

Downgrade

2011-04-19T09:27:00.002-04:00

Those of us in the Center have worried that our federal deficit spending would ultimately lead to financial ruin and have argued that we need to reduce spending dramatically and work hard to bring down our debt. For those who think our concerns are unfounded, government debt has historically been between 2 and 5 percent of GDP. Today, it has risen to 11 percent of GDP—more than double the historic maximum.

Yesterday, for the first time in the history of our country, Standard & Poor's downgraded the U.S Credit rating from “stable” to “negative.”

Is this the end of the world? No, it is not, but it is a frightening indicator of just how serious our situation is.

In order to change course, we desperately need leadership and political courage in Washington over the next two years.

In Europe, a region that seems to be a role model for many in this Administration, countries like the U.K., Spain, Greece, and Portugal have drastically cut government spending to avert a financial crisis. The cuts were politically unpopular, but they were made because they has to be made.

We need to do the same thing. But given the current state of affairs in the Congress and the administration, it’s doubtful that real solutions will be implements. The can we continue to be kicked down the road. Very, very disheartening.

GPA

2011-04-17T11:06:00.002-04:00

Think back to your days at college or university. You studied hard and tried to get good grades. Why?

Well, probably because the grades you earned at university provided an indication of your ability to master a variety of topics that might be useful as you entered the real world. Your grades provided insight into your work ethic, and as a consequence, gave potential employers insight into your ability to do productive work for them. Although it’s not politically correct, in most cases grades correlate with intelligence, and intelligence correlates reasonably well with success in many employment spheres.

But that creates a problem. Since college (or high school) graduates with good grades have broader opportunities than graduates with poor grades, they also have an unfair advantage. After all, all other things being equal (even though they never are), most employers would opt for a person with a 3.8 GPA over a 1.7 GPA.

Here’s a thought experiment: In the interest of fairness, why not ask those who have 3.8 GPAs to share a percentage of their grade point with those students who have lower grade point averages. Redistribute the grade “wealth” as it were.

After all, does anyone really need a 3.8 GPA? Why not establish a “grade tax” administered by the university for the upper 10 percent of all students and ask them to share, say, 10% of GPA with those who are less fortunate. After all, those with 1.7 GPA would get the redistributed grade points, see their GPA rise above 2.0, and as a consequence have better opportunities going forward.

If you asked college students if the top 5 percent of wage earners should be taxed more heavily so that the less fortunate could benefit, I suspect that the vast majority would agree. But would those same college students agree to redistribute grade points?

Informal polling indicates that the vast majority would be against the idea, but many respondents argue that it’s not fair to compare earnings with grade points. They might say that putting in the hours required to achieve a high GPA is somehow different than putting in the hours required to earn a good income. But how is it different? And why is a special added tax on high earnings really any different than a special added “tax” on high GPA holders? After all, it’s all about fairness, isn’t it?

Third World

2011-04-16T12:52:00.002-04:00

In the classic pattern of political demagogues, President Obama recently suggested that those of us who want to see substantial spending cuts across all federal programs and meaningful steps to reign in the enormous (and growing) federal deficit are defining a path that will lead the United States to “third world” status. Really?

Investor’s Business Daily recounts the current status of the economy and the President’s role in it:

Real earnings have fallen for five straight months, and are down 1% since the end of last year.

Consumer price inflation is growing at a 6.1% annual rate over the last three months, while producer prices are rising an even-faster 13%. According to John Williams of the Shadow Government Statistics website, if we measure consumer prices the way we did before 1992, inflation is now running at 10% a year.

The U.S. has added $6 trillion to its debt under Obama, a sure sign of being on the road to Third World status. Three years ago, the U.S. had $7.9 trillion in debt. Today, we have $14 trillion. Bankrupt, hyperinflated Zimbabwe couldn't do any better.

The U.S. dollar has fallen so much and foreign nations have so little confidence in our ability to run our fiscal affairs that the "BRIC" nations — the mostly fast-growing former Third World nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China — are talking about replacing the U.S. dollar in foreign trade with the Chinese yuan.

Just 45.4% of Americans had jobs last year, the lowest since 1983, according to census data crunched by USA Today. Among men, just 66.8% had work last year, the lowest ever.

Obama touts the "recovery" that supposedly began in June of 2009, but a look at the data show that last year's real private sector GDP was in fact still down 1.1% from its peak in 2007 — so all of the "expansion" has been in government, not the private sector.

While we're at it, under Obama, spending has risen farther and faster than under any president in history. At current rates, government at all levels will take up more than half of all economic activity by 2050.

Can't happen here, you say? In 1920, Argentina was one of the five richest countries on Earth. Then it followed policies similar to Obama's — kowtowing to unions, government control of industry, price controls. It crashed, burned and never really recovered.
We're headed down that road. Today, government spending is at a record 25% of GDP, while government regulation costs the U.S. economy $1.7 trillion a year.

Yeah, I know, the President’s supporters argue that he inherited this mess from the evil George Bush. They argue that nefarious banks and Wall Street types are to blame, and that Barack Obama is an innocent victim in it all. Sorry, although there is some truth to those statements, the President has adopted an economic view that is unhinged, and it’s beginning to hurt the country.

Barack Obama, not GWB, added $6 trillion to our debt and did this without any discernable improvement in jobs, government services, or the housing market. He, not GWB, paid little attention to his own debt reduction commission until forced to do so by a debt reduction plan proposed by Paul Ryan while at the same time trashing Ryan and his plan in a hyper-partisan manner that does not befit a President of the United States. He, not GWB, stayed on the sidelines while the 2010 majority Congress spent in excess.

And now he has the audacity the couch himself as a deficit hawk. Please.

(un) Balanced

2011-04-14T08:59:00.004-04:00

It was fascinating to listen to President Obama provide us with the latest iteration of his position on deficit reduction. A significant portion of his speech—a speech that sounded more like a campaign speech that a serious discussion of policy by the President of the U.S.—focused on class-warfare. Using his latest euphemism for taxing the rich, the President talked about “balance.” But it appears that when the President is forced to discuss reducing the size of government, he loses his balance.

To be charitable, the spending “reductions” he proposed were tenuous at best. They made assumptions that were absurd (that economic growth would average 5 percent over the next 12 years), claims that were dishonest (e.g., that Obamacare would reduce the cost of medicare), and arguments that were beneath the dignity of the office that he holds (e.g., that the “rich” somehow don’t contribute enough to this country). He attacked Paul Ryan (the first politician in a generation who had the courage to propose substantive deficit reduction measures), suggesting dishonestly, that Ryan’s proposals would starve little children and hurt grandma. Demagoguery of this type accomplishes nothing of value.

The Wall Street Journal (certainly no friend of the President’s) comments:

Did someone move the 2012 election to June 1? We ask because President Obama's extraordinary response to Paul Ryan's budget yesterday—with its blistering partisanship and multiple distortions—was the kind Presidents usually outsource to some junior lieutenant. Mr. Obama's fundamentally political document would have been unusual even for a Vice President in the fervor of a campaign.

The immediate political goal was to inoculate the White House from criticism that it is not serious about the fiscal crisis, after ignoring its own deficit commission last year and tossing off a $3.73 trillion budget in February that increased spending amid a record deficit of $1.65 trillion. Mr. Obama was chased to George Washington University yesterday because Mr. Ryan and the Republicans outflanked him on fiscal discipline and are now setting the national political agenda.

Mr. Obama did not deign to propose an alternative to rival Mr. Ryan's plan, even as he categorically rejected all its reform ideas, repeatedly vilifying them as essentially un-American. "Their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America," he said, supposedly pitting "children with autism or Down's syndrome" against "every millionaire and billionaire in our society." The President was not attempting to join the debate Mr. Ryan has started, but to close it off just as it begins and banish House GOP ideas to political Siberia.

Mr. Obama then packaged his poison in the rhetoric of bipartisanship—which "starts," he said, "by being honest about what's causing our deficit." The speech he chose to deliver was dishonest even by modern political standards.

What's most disturbing is that the President actually believes his own ideological delusions. If only the “rich” paid a more “balanced” share of taxes, we’d be fine.

The simple reality is that even if we confiscated the wealth of every millionaire, we would not solve our deficit problems—problems so severe that the country is headed for default in decades to come; problems so profound that the legacy we leave to our children and grandchildren is frightening, problems so all-encompassing that the most vulnerable in our society (a phrase much used by the President) will be the first to suffer when the real reckoning starts in about a decade.

But the President and his shrinking coterie of supporters don’t seem to care. Instead of proposing real solutions, they look for someone to blame. I wonder who our grandchildren will blame in the year 2040.

3s and 2s

2011-04-12T16:40:00.003-04:00

There’s an old saying the the business world that applies to executives in organizations large and small. “9s hire 10s, and 3s hire 2s.” The numbers of course, pertain to the executive’s relative ability, intelligence, and management skill. A 3 is a poor manager, but worse, a very poor decision maker. Feeling threatened by more skilled underlings, he tends to hire ideological clones—people just like himself—as poorly prepared to lead as himself.

Keeping this aphorism in mind, let’s talk for just a moment about Barack Obama and Samantha Power. Ms. Power, in case you’re unfamiliar with the name, is the President’s “Special Assistant and runs the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights as Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs on the Staff of the National Security Council.” (Wikipedia) Her primary focus is on foreign policy as it is applied to genocide, and it is obvious that her imprint is all over the President’s ill-conceived intervention in Libya. Forget U.S interests, forget asking who the “Libyan freedom fighters” really are. We needed to act because a “humanitarian crisis” was in the offing.

Ms. Power is a hardcore Leftist , who in past interviews has suggested that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. She is on record as stating that the United States should use military force to stop the Israeli’s from defending themselves (she makes no comment on Palestinian atrocities against Israelis).

Now, as if following her lead, the Arab league has suggested that the UN create a “no fly zone” over Gaza to stop Israel from responding to rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. Of course, the only UN member that could implement a no fly zone would be the United States. One wonders what Barack Obama’s position on this might be and what counsel Samantha Power is giving him.

“Barry Meislen” correctly believes that Samantha Power would enthusiastically support the Arab league's “no fly zone.” In doing so, he suggests that her delusional world view will force her to ignore a few things:

It is in Israel’s interest for their to be an agreement, and to this end, Israel has made several offers, all of which have been rejected by the Arab leader of the time

Because it is in Israel’s for there to be an agreement, there will NOT be an agreement

The Palestinians have broken practically every major and minor agreement they’ve signed with Israel, whether it be not to engage in hostilities—”No more bloodshed” (while all the time preparing for the second intifada)—or not to sanction incitement against Israel in the media (while all the time showing maps of “Palestine” covering the entire region and referring to Haifa and Tel Aviv and Beersheva and Jerusalem (etc.) as “occupied cities”, etc.), etc…

The Palestinians continue to voice support for a Palestinians state “from the River to the Sea”

The Palestinians have thus far refused accepting a Palestinian state

The Palestinians do not want a state of it means having to accept living side by side with a Jewish state of Israel

The Palestinians will continue to refuse a state

The Palestinians have not given up their demand for the “right of return” of Palestinians to within pre-1967 Israel

The Palestinians have no intention of agreeing to UN Resolution 242

The Palestinians have no intention of demilitarizing any future Palestinians State (to which, as mentioned above, they do not want as long as Israel exists)

The Palestinians have been waging an ongoing war against Israel’s legitimacy, stooping at no effort, telling any possible untruth, to erode Israel’s position, diplomatically

The Palestinians are locked in a civil war with each other

One of the Palestinians groups, Hamas, is pledged to destroy Israel; while the other, the Palestinian Authority has no intention of coming to an agreement with Israel

That both the PA and Hamas are despotic groups that trample their people’s human rights and freedoms

That the entire strategy of both groups, together, is either to wear Israel down military and/or diplomatically and in terms of Israel’s morale.

But there’s a deeper issue at work here. “9s hire 10s, and 3s hire 2s.” In appointing Samantha Power, Barack Obama has hired someone who he’s comfortable with—an ideological clone. And if Power is a clone, it’s reasonable to worry that the President’s world view is as delusional as Samatha Power's. Not a comforting thought.

Really Dumb Things

2011-03-31T09:22:00.002-04:00

When supporters of the President and his many media spokespeople gushed about the so-called Egyptian “freedom revolution,” a few of us in the Center suggested that throwing pro-Western dictator Hosni Mubarak under the bus might not be such a good idea. I wrote at the time that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) would be the likely beneficiary and that counter to the prevailing media narrative at the time, the MB is anti-Western and Islamist to the core. There are no moderate members of the MB.

Sadly, the President and his team of advisors seemed unable to process this simple fact. Mubarak is now gone and MB has already won major political referenda and is the front runner to take over Egypt in September. Most of the media, like ADD childrem arer now busy thinking of reasons to support the President’s ill-conceived intervention in Libya, and have forgotten about Egypt.

The Richmond Times Dispatch is an exception. In an editorial, they write:

The Egyptian Revolution inspired hopes and summoned memories. During the heady days of protests against Hosni Mubarak's regime, Cairo's Tahrir Square seemed to resemble images from Czechoslovakia and other satellites that rose against communism in the Velvet Revolution. Reports suggested Egypt was experiencing a liberal uprising relatively free of religious fundamentalism and ideological stridency. It might have been.

During a recent visit to Egypt, The Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens met with a friend he described as Muslim by birth but secular by choice. The friend and others told him that Americans have no idea of what is happening on the ground. Experts indeed remain innocents abroad. There is no progressive influence to speak of; the military and Islamist factions command the field. The Muslim Brotherhood is not the most extreme player, either.

It seems that the identical mistakes made in Egypt are being made in Libya and at the same time, countries where intervention might be warranted (e.g., Syria, Yemen) are being ignored by our strategists (I use that term very, very loosely). In Libya, it appears that at best we don’t know who the rebels really are. At worse, they have been infiltrated by Al Qaida and other extremists.

Now the President suggests that it might be necessary to provide the Libyan rebels with weapons. Wasn’t it the President’s supporters on the Left who roundly criticized U.S policy that armed the radical, Islamist Taliban in Afghanistan during the 1990s? Looks to me like Barack Obama is doing the same thing, but this time ignoring hindsight provided by recent history. And I keep being told that he’s such a smart guy.

It is true that the Middle East is in turmoil and that there are no easy answers. No question. But doing really dumb things, supporting really bad guys in their efforts to displace other really bad guys, and ignoring strategic opportunities while conducting war in the name of “humanitarianism,” is just plain dumb. It doesn’t serve the interests of the United States and does nothing to help the Middle East climb out of the cesspool that has flooded the entire Arab crescent.

Kinetic Miliary Action

2011-03-28T10:52:00.003-04:00

Tonight, the President will explain to the American people why we are at war in Libya. With teleprompters rolling and eloquent words spoken, he'll try to explain the inexplicable.

At the moment Barack Obama and his advisors have committed us to a limited war, one that is justified not based on national strategic interest, but on the fact that the “international community” has decided that Mohamar Gaddafi is creating a “humanitarian crisis” in Libya.

So we drop bombs on Libyans and launch cruise missiles (at a million dollars a pop) in an effort to defeat Gaddafi’s troops (oops, I mean avert a humanitarian crisis). And if we’re successful and the “rebels” or “freedom fighters” prevail, we have accomplished what exactly?

Increasing evidence indicates that the Libyan freedom fighters we’re protecting have strong ties to fanatical Islamist movements. Some of the “leaders” of Gaddafi’s opposition are members of the Muslim Brotherhood and others have direct and irrefutable ties to al Qaida. Of course, our broadcast MSM avoids these uncomfortable details because they might embarrass the President (a man who can do no wrong in their eyes).

But the facts remain. Our “kinetic military action” (in the words of Obama’ Deputy National Security Adviser, Ben Rhodes) will assist Islamists in a takeover of Libya. It’s crazy, but it just might happen. And the reason for this is … what? The justification for it is … what? The strategic rational is … what?

Meanwhile Syria, dictator, Bashar al Assad, slaughters opponents on a wholesale level and we turn away. The irony is that intervention in Syria might actually have merit strategically. If Assad falls, Hezballah in Lebanon is weakened and as a consequence, the real strategic bad guys in the region, the Mullahs of Iran, lose influence and access to a proxy army.

But apparently, that level of strategic thinking is far too deep for the President, Hillary, and the foreign policy geniuses who populate the White House’s back offices. “Kinetic military action” (the President’s folks avoid the word “war” at all cost) can only occur to avert a humanitarian crisis, never to weaken our sworn enemy (Iran). No matter that Iran violently represses its own people and is sowing the seeds of havoc in the region. No matter that they're actively pursuing the development of WMDs.

Weakening Iran would be so imperialistic, so 20th century, so … yucky. Better to attack Libya, right?

Dementia

2011-03-22T12:31:00.001-04:00

Caroline Glick has little use for Barack Obama's Middle Eastern foreign policy. Her caustic comments are presented in an in-depth article entitled America’s Descent into Strategic Dementia . She writes:

Traditionally, states have crafted their foreign policy to expand their wealth and bolster their national security. In this context, US foreign policy in the Middle East has traditionally been directed towards advancing three goals: Guaranteeing the free flow of inexpensive petroleum products from the Middle East to global market; strengthening regimes and governments that are in a position to advance this core US goal at the expense of US enemies; and fighting against regional forces like the pan-Arabists and the jihadists that advance a political program inherently hostile to US power.

Other competing interests have periodically interfered with US Middle East policy. And these have to greater or lesser degrees impaired the US's ability to formulate and implement rational policies in the region.

These competing interests have included the desire to placate somewhat friendly Arab regimes that are stressed by or dominated by anti-US forces; a desire to foster good relations with Europe; and a desire to win the support of the US media.

Under the Obama administration, these competing interests have not merely influenced US policy in the Middle East. They have dominated it. Core American interests have been thrown to the wayside.

Nothing exemplifies strategic dementia more than Barack Obama’s approach to Libya—a country in which both sides of an internal conflict have been and will continue to be our enemy. In the name of “humanatarian concerns”, the White House—oddly supported by many neo-conservatives—has backed a group of “freedom fighters” that are far from friendly to the United States.

Glick comments on the composition of the forces that our MSM has romanticized as rebels:

One of the most astounding aspects of the US debate on Libya in recent weeks has been the scant attention paid to the nature of the rebels.

The rebels are reportedly represented by the so-called National Transitional Council led by several of Gaddafi's former ministers.

But while these men - who are themselves competing for the leadership mantle - are the face of the NTC, it is unclear who stands behind them. Only nine of the NTC's 31 members have been identified.

Unfortunately, available data suggest that the rebels championed as freedom fighters by the neoconservatives, the opportunists, the Europeans and the Western media alike are not exactly liberal democrats. Indeed, the data indicate that Gaddafi's opponents are more aligned with al-Qaida than with the US.

And then, there’s Egypt. Remember Egypt now that the media has moved on? It hasn’t gone away, and what’s happening there is not good. Again Glick helps us understand:

Under Mubarak, Egypt advanced US interests in two main ways. First, by waging war against the Muslim Brotherhood and opposing the rise of Iranian power in the region, Mubarak weakened the regional forces that most threatened US interests. Second, by managing the Suez Canal in conformance with international maritime law, Egypt facilitated the smooth transport of petroleum products to global markets and prevented Iran from operating in the Mediterranean Sea.

Since Mubarak was ousted, the ruling military junta has taken actions that signal that Egypt is no longer interested in behaving in a manner that advances US interests.

Domestically, the junta has embarked on a course that all but guarantees the Muslim Brotherhood's rise to power in the fall.

Saturday's referendum on constitutional amendments was a huge victory for the Brotherhood on two counts. First, it cemented Islamic law as the primary source of legislation and so paved the way for the Brotherhood's transformation of Egypt into an Islamic state. Under Mubarak, that constitutional article meant nothing. Under the Brotherhood, it means everything.

Second, it set the date for parliamentary elections for September. Only the Brotherhood, and remnants of Mubarak's National Democratic Party will be ready to stand for election so soon. The liberals have no chance of mounting a coherent campaign in just six months.

In anticipation of the Brotherhood's rise to power, the military has begun realigning Egypt into the Iranian camp. This realignment is seen most openly in Egypt's new support for Hamas. Mubarak opposed Hamas because it is part of the Brotherhood.

When I listen to the President’s supporters praise his foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East, I can’t help but wonder whether they’re even paying attention. Or whether, still blinded by Barack Obama’s star power, they suffer a self-induced dementia of their own.