Obama learned that in one of his 'Hahvahd' law classes on public policy and community activism!(See 1,1a and 1b below.)
General Hayden to Attorney General Holder - 'hold on there' Holder!
We are learning not only does experience count but it also counts when it comes to appointing others without experience. But then we have 'audacious hope' to fall back on and what's a little sloppiness - right?
It all comes with the territory! Suck it up America the best is yet to come. (See 2, 2a and 2b below.)
"On A Clear Day- You can See Forever" but not into the widow of the Oval Office. (See 3below.)
Paul Krugman throws in the towel? (See 4 below.)
A little humor at New Orleans and Democrat's expense. (See 5 below.)
Bret Stephens agrees with Chodoff and I agree with both.
I have heard our State Department's concern that if Iran is attacked it will cause Iranians, who are against the Ahmadinejad regime, to rally round the flag. I have also heard the other myths expressed by Stephens at one time or another. You could probably come up with other myths in order to remain with your head in the sand and I am sure Obama will be looking for them.
Stephens and Chodoff are both correct. Israel is being put in the place of having no choice by feckless Western leadership. (See 6 below.)
Amity Shlaes makes sense again.
What we are faced with is the consequence of inexperience, a radical policy thinker, a president unable to prioritize and out of his league.
As for Liberals, who excoriated GW for deficit spending and deservedly so, they now remain mute. I don't hear you! (See 7 below.)
Dick
1)Big bang gives way to busted budget
By: David Rogers
February 1, 2010 06:33 PM EST
President Barack Obama’s new $3.83 trillion budget is a chickens-come-home-to-roost moment for Democrats who skipped past the deficit to tackle health care last year and now risk paying a heavy price in November.
The great White House political gamble was to act quickly — before the deficits hit home — and institute major changes which proponents say will serve the long-term fiscal health of the country. Instead, a year of wrangling and refusal to consider more incremental steps have brought Obama and Congress to this juncture, where waves of red ink threaten to swamp their boat and drown reform altogether.
“It’s very important to understand, we won’t be able to bring down this deficit overnight given that the recovery is still taking hold and families across the country still need help,” Obama told reporters Monday. But with $5.08 trillion in deficits over the next five years, his spending plan seems also a cry for help in the face of what he sees as intransigent Republican opposition.
Not until 2014 to 2015 — midway through what Obama hopes will be his second term — is there any chance of approaching a sustainable budget. Even then, the president admits he will need the help of a bipartisan fiscal commission willing to tackle long-range issues like Social Security reform.
New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, called Monday for a bolder “game-changing budget that will turn things around.”
“I’m available if they need me, but I don’t think they’re thinking big,” Gregg told POLITICO, checking off his list of ideas, including a freeze on spending — ramped up by taking out all money now earmarked for lawmakers’ home-state projects.
More often, his colleagues competed to offer clever phrases: “They are sending a toy firetruck to combat a five-alarm fire,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).
The timing could not be harder for Democrats, who must complete passage of the $1.9 trillion debt ceiling increase this week.
Old party fissures are reopening. In the Senate last week, fiscal moderates, many of them junior senators, joined Republicans in backing what would be tougher spending limits than the president’s budget proposes. At the same time, the president’s increased war funding for Afghanistan has reopened the “guns vs. butter” divisions in his party.
To show discipline, the White House is betting heavily on the symbolism of a three-year freeze on domestic discretionary spending accounts totaling about $447 billion annually.
The Departments of Commerce, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, and Housing and Urban Development will face cuts — albeit often quite small. At the same time, six other Cabinet departments under the cap continue to grow, and State, Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs are all exempt.
The carve out doesn’t sit well with many liberals, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey (D-Wis.) pledged Monday to support Obama’s overall target for spending, but he is clearly not prepared to single out domestic programs versus defense and foreign aid.
“We will not exceed his requested level for appropriations,” Obey said. “But we will also not exempt any department or activity from review, including foreign aid and the Pentagon, because none of them are without waste.”
One of the chairman’s own priorities, the Great Lakes restoration initiative with the Environmental Protection Agency, would be scaled back from $475 million last year to $300 million — after a period of huge growth. And the Wisconsin Democrat has been among those most outspoken about what he sees as the crushing costs of Obama’s expanded commitment to Afghanistan.
“Defense is not off the table in terms of fiscal constraint but in terms of inclusion in the freeze,” White House Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag said in a briefing Monday. “We’re at war, and we need to make sure that we adequately fund our troops while we are at war. “
“Yes. Even war spending is subjected to the same scrutiny that the base defense budget and other spending is,” the director insisted at another juncture.
Just a year ago, the president’s 2010 defense budget requested $130 billion for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and only $50 billion in 2011. The new budget ramps up 2010 spending to $163 billion and, for 2011, requests $159 billion in overseas contingency funds for the military.
This reverses the drop in war-related spending seen in fiscal 2009, which ended Sept. 30 and was a transition year of sorts between the two administrations. When compared to the peak war spending of the Bush years, Obama is only about 10 percent below Bush’s annual average of $176 billion in fiscal years 2007 and 2008 — the time of the Iraq war surge.
Core defense spending is also feeling the strain, and the president’s $549 billion request reflects less than 2 percent real growth over inflation.
At a time when Obama is emphasizing job creation, this sets up what could be bitter election-year fights with Democrats about plans to halt C-17 and Humvee production important to employment in California and Indiana — two battleground states in the fall.
Obama’s greatest risk is that his “freeze” becomes only a symbol — more cute than cutting.
In designing its cap, the administration has a built-in cushion because about $6 billion in 2010 census spending won’t have to be repeated in 2011. It also took advantage of a scorekeeping convention allowing it to claim a $4.5 billion “savings” within the Justice Department by capping expenditures from the Crime Victims Fund.
In the case of Education, Pell Grants for low-income college students are treated as a mandatory cost outside the cap. And while NASA’s budget makes some high-profile changes — canceling the always-doubtful Constellation program — the agency’s budget still goes up by about $275 million.
All this can seem too clever against the great constant of a deficit that threatens to set new records, topping $1.55 trillion in 2010.
The $5.08 trillion in red ink over the next five years is $1.32 trillion, or 35 percent more than the White House predicted 12 months ago — worse even than current projections by the Congressional Budget Office.
Revenues continue to lag, even after Obama’s budget claims credit for about $120 billion in unrealized receipts from health care reform. In fact, two-thirds of the deficit deterioration can be traced directly back to lower revenues and the high cost of the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama can put on a brave face, but until heath care is resolved, the president’s budget options are limited.
Democrats have embraced major Medicare savings in the name of health reform, but this also keeps these programs off the table for deficit reduction.
Apart from the appropriations freeze, Obama’s biggest response is in the area of taxes. He would allow high-end Bush-era tax breaks to expire after 2010 for those earning more than $250,000, and a new levy on big banks would help recoup government losses from the Treasury’s financial industry rescue plan — and raise $90 billion over 10 years.
The administration is again targeting oil, gas and coal tax preferences worth about $40 billion over 10 years. On the international front, one new entry to the tax debate is to crack down on excess returns associated with the transfer of intangibles offshore by a U.S. company. This would raise as much as $15.5 billion over 10 years.
White House officials describe the budget as “pragmatic”— leaning neither to the left nor right. But on balance, it’s less restrictive on spending than lawmakers in both parties had anticipated.
‘The president should have a tougher plan to address our fiscal crisis,” Gregg said, “because this budget will solve nothing.”
© 2010 Capitol News Company, LLC
1a)Huge Deficits May Alter U.S. Politics and Global Power
By DAVID E. SANGER
In a federal budget filled with mind-boggling statistics, two numbers stand out as particularly stunning, for the way they may change American politics and American power.
The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country’s entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.
But the second number, buried deeper in the budget’s projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 — years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms — they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.
For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded.
Or, as Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, used to ask before he entered government a year ago, “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?”
The Chinese leadership, which is lending much of the money to finance the American government’s spending, and which asked pointed questions about Mr. Obama’s budget when members visited Washington last summer, says it thinks the long-term answer to Mr. Summers’s question is self-evident. The Europeans will also tell you that this is a big worry about the next decade.
Mr. Obama himself hinted at his own concern when he announced in early December that he planned to send 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan, but insisted that the United States could not afford to stay for long.
“Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power,” he told cadets at West Point. “It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people, and allows investment in new industry.”
And then he explained why even a “war of necessity,” as he called Afghanistan last summer, could not last for long.
“That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended,” he said then, “because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”
Mr. Obama’s budget deserves credit for its candor. It does not sugarcoat, at least excessively, the potential magnitude of the problem. President George W. Bush kept claiming, until near the end of his presidency, that he would leave office with a balanced budget. He never got close; in fact, the deficits soared in his last years.
Mr. Obama has published the 10-year numbers in part, it seems, to make the point that the political gridlock of the past few years, in which most Republicans refuse to talk about tax increases and Democrats refuse to talk about cutting entitlement programs, is unsustainable. His prescription is that the problem has to be made worse, with intense deficit spending to lower the unemployment rate, before the deficits can come down.
Mr. Summers, in an interview on Monday afternoon, said, “The budget recognizes the imperatives of job creation and growth in the short run, and takes significant measures to increase confidence in the medium term.”
He was referring to the freeze on domestic, non-national-security-related spending, the troubled effort to cut health care costs, and the decision to let expire Bush-era tax cuts for corporations and families earning more than $250,000.
But Mr. Summers said that “through the budget and fiscal commission, the president has sought to provide maximum room for making further adjustments as necessary before any kind of crisis arrives.”
Turning that thought into political action, however, has proved harder and harder for the Washington establishment. Republicans stayed largely silent about the debt during the Bush years. Democrats have described it as a necessary evil during the economic crisis that defined Mr. Obama’s first year. Interest in a long-term solution seems limited. Or, as Isabel V. Sawhill of the Brookings Institution put it Monday on MSNBC, “The problem here is not honesty, but political will.”
One source of that absence of will is that the political warnings are contradicted by the market signals. The Treasury has borrowed money to finance the government’s deficits at remarkably low rates, the strongest indicator that the markets believe they will be paid back on time and in full.
The absence of political will is also facilitated by the fact that, as Prof. James K. Galbraith of the University of Texas puts it, “Forecasts 10 years out have no credibility.”
He is right. In the early years of the Clinton administration, government projections indicated huge deficits — over the “sustainable” level of 3 percent — by 2000. But by then, Mr. Clinton was running a modest surplus of about $200 billion, a point Mr. Obama made Monday as he tried anew to remind the country that the moment was squandered when “the previous administration and previous Congresses created an expensive new drug program, passed massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and funded two wars without paying for any of it.”
But with this budget, Mr. Obama now owns this deficit. And as Mr. Galbraith pointed out, it is possible that the gloomy projections for 2020 are equally flawed.
Simply projecting that health care costs will rise unabated is dangerous business.
“Much may depend on whether we put in place the financial reforms that can rebuild a functional financial system,” Mr. Galbraith said, to finance growth in the private sector — the kind of growth that ultimately saved Mr. Clinton from his own deficit projections.
His greatest hope, Mr. Galbraith said, was Stein’s law, named for Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.
Stein’s law has been recited in many different versions. But all have a common theme: If a trend cannot continue, it will stop.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
1b)The President's Priorities: One of the greatest spend-while-you-can documents in American history
One rule of budget reporting is to watch what the politicians are spending this year, not the frugality they promise down the road. By that measure, the budget that President Obama released yesterday for fiscal 2011 is one of the greatest spend-while-you-can documents in American history.
We now know why the White House leaked word of a three-year spending freeze on a few domestic accounts before this extravaganza was released. No one would have noticed such a slushy promise amid this glacier of spending. The budget reveals that overall federal outlays will reach $3.72 trillion in fiscal 2010, and keep rising to $3.834 trillion in 2011.
As a share of the economy, outlays will reach a post-World War II record of 25.4% this year. This is a new modern spending landmark, up from 21% of GDP as recently as fiscal 2008, and far above the 40-year average of 20.7%.
.In the "out years" in mid-decade, the White House promises that spending will fall all the way back to 23% of GDP. Even if you choose to believe such a political prediction, that still means Mr. Obama is proposing a new and more or less permanently higher plateau of federal spending.
And here you thought the "stimulus" was supposed to be temporary. This is also before the baby boomers retire and send Medicare and Social Security accounts soaring.
If this budget is Mr. Obama's first clear demonstration of his long-term governing priorities, then it's hard not conclude that this spending boom is deliberate. It is an effort to put in place programs and spending commitments that will require vast new tax increases and give the political class a claim on far more private American wealth.
Despite talk of "tough choices" in yesterday's document, the Administration wants $25billion in new spending for states for Medicaid, $100 billion for yet another jobs "stimulus," big boosts in spending for low-income family programs, for health research, heating assistance and education. If Mr. Obama's priorities become law, federal outlays will have grown an astonishing 29% since 2008.
As further proof, the White House proposes to convert long-standing "discretionary" spending that requires annual appropriations into permanent entitlement programs. A case in point is the Pell Grant program for college, which the budget would shift into the "mandatory" spending column at a cost of $307 billion over 10 years. The political goal here is to make a college education as much of a universal entitlement as Social Security.
All of this spending must be financed, and so deficits and taxes are both scheduled to rise to record levels. The deficit will hit 10.6% of GDP this year, far more than Ronald Reagan ever dreamed of. The deficits are then predicted to fall but still to only a tad below 4% of GDP on average for the rest of the decade. We wouldn't mind those numbers if they were financing tax cuts to revive growth.
But the reality is that even these still-high deficits are based on assumptions for growth and revenue gains from record tax increases starting January 1, 2011. And what a list of tax increases it is—no less than $2 trillion worth over the decade. The nearby table lists some of the largest, all of which the Administration and its economists claim to believe will have little or no impact on growth. If they're wrong, the deficits will be even larger.
Our favorite euphemism is the Administration's estimate that it can get $122.2 billion in new revenue via a "reform" of the "U.S. international tax system." Reform usually means closing some loopholes in return for lower tax rates. But this is a giant tax increase on American companies that operate overseas, and it includes no offsetting cut in the U.S. 35% corporate tax rate, which is among the highest in the world. The Administration agreed last year to drop this idea when it was seeking the help of the Business Roundtable to pass health care. But so much for that, now that the White House needs the money.
Even these tax increases won't be enough to pay for the spending that this Administration is unleashing in its first two remarkable years. On the evidence of this budget, the Massachusetts Senate election never happened.
2)The Attorney and the General: General Hayden has it right on Obama’s war-by-subpoena.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Michael Hayden, the former CIA director, penned a superb op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday. Succinctly, he tallies the wages of having Attorney General Eric Holder make national-security decisions. Unlike the attorney general, Hayden is a real general, and very much worth heeding. He shows that these decisions have been premised on left-wing political calculations that always shortchange intelligence collection and the pursuit of American interests. Holder’s judgments are not based on what America’s safety requires or on what the law maximally permits U.S. intelligence to do in wartime.
As Hayden points out, the policy decisions that President Obama has allowed Holder to make are significant — not only taken one by one, but in their cumulative effect on the ethos of our intelligence agencies. “Intelligence officers,” he writes, “need to know that someone has their back.” After Holder forced the release in April of classified memos prepared by Bush Justice Department lawyers, laying out interrogation tactics and the legal rationale for permitting them, “CIA officers began to ask whether the people doing things that were currently authorized would be dragged through this kind of public knothole in five years. No one could guarantee that they would not.”
The paralysis wrought by this decision transcends the narrow subject of interrogations. All intelligence collection is infected. If you can’t/don’t collect intelligence in a war against a secretive, transnational jihadist network, you stand to lose — and a lot of Americans stand to die. Thus, Hayden concludes, “Some may celebrate that the current Justice Department’s perspective on the war on terrorism has become markedly more dominant in the past year. We should probably understand the implications of that before we break out the champagne.”
In connection with the attempted massacre of 288 Americans in the Christmas airplane attack by al-Qaeda agent Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, two other points should be made, in the nature of “It’s Even Worse Than He Says It Is.”
First, General Hayden writes, “After the first [brief, 50-minute interrogation] session, the FBI Mirandized Abdulmutallab and — to preserve a potential prosecution — sent in a ‘clean team’ of agents who could have no knowledge of what Abdulmutallab had provided before he was given his constitutional warnings. As has been widely reported, Abdulmutallab then exercised his right to remain silent.”
Believe it or not, the general is giving the Justice Department too much credit. The FBI did not send in a “clean team” to preserve the prosecution. It did so merely to preserve the statements. In fact, it did so not to preserve an actual confession, but something even more remote: the possible admissibility at trial of any statements Abdulmutallab might make — but had not made — once Miranda warnings were given.
To explain briefly, the FBI was trying to forestall an eventual objection by Abdulmutallab’s defense lawyer: namely, that the agents who obtained the 50 minutes’ worth of non-Mirandized confession were “tainted,” and that this taint would extend to any further, post-Miranda interrogation if they participated. But Abdulmutallab committed his “crime” (really, his act of war) in front of 288 people. It’s a slam-dunk witness case — they actually have about 286 witnesses more than they need.
Any prosecutor would like to have a confession. It usually means a defendant will plead guilty rather than put everyone through the burden and expense of a trial. But no competent prosecutor would need a confession to convict this guy.
Even if you’re a fan of the law-enforcement approach to counterterrorism (and I’m not), the Justice Department in this case was playing with house money. They had to know they did not need a confession. They could have dispensed with Miranda warnings entirely. They could have just kept interrogating Abdulmutallab, knowing the worst that could happen was that statements unnecessary to their prosecution would be ruled inadmissible. Instead, the Holder DOJ so obsessed over the case that everything was done with an eye toward getting any edge, no matter how slight, in the eventual trial. Through that upside-down prism, it is somehow more important to preserve the possibility that we can get an admissible confession we don’t need — to win the game 150–0 instead of just 100–0 — than to get information for such non-trial trivialities as saving American lives.
Second, General Hayden continues, “In retrospect, the inadvisability of this approach seems self-evident. Perhaps it didn’t appear that way on Dec. 25 because we have, over the past year, become acclimated to certain patterns of thought.” He’s clearly right about that, and he goes on to address those patterns of thought. Remember, though, that this is not a done deal. The Obama administration is treating what everyone now agrees was a mistake as if it were a bell that can’t be unrung. That is wrong, and it is irresponsible.
Right this minute, President Obama could designate Abdulmutallab an unlawful enemy combatant (or, as they now call it, an “unprivileged belligerent”) and proceed with his interrogation, unimpeded by a defense lawyer or Miranda restrictions. It is a power he has had every minute since Abdulmutallab’s capture five weeks ago. The case would still be there, and it would still be a slam-dunk, whether it were tried two, three, or five years from now. The only potential downside for the case is no downside at all: Prosecutors would not be able to use any statements he makes.
People can blame the attorney general, and there certainly is plenty for which he should answer. But Holder is a sideshow. These decisions are presidential decisions. The fact that Obama evidently delegates them to Holder does not change that. The policy of surrendering enemy combatants to the civilian-justice system and giving them all the rights of the American citizens whom they are trying to kill is an Obama policy being implemented by Holder; it’s not a Holder policy.
Moreover, we’re not merely rehashing past mistakes. This is an ongoing problem. After four months of al-Qaeda training in Yemen, Abdulmutallab has valuable information. President Obama still has the legal means to get it. Every day he fails to act — every day he elevates trifling trial strategy over vital intelligence collection — is a new, reckless failure to secure the nation.
— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).
2a)Obama's Poor Judgment on Terrorism
By Richard Cohen
There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, or whether it is reciting terrorists their rights, or whether it is the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists will be tried in military tribunals and some in civilian courts, what is missing is a firm recognition that what comes first is not the message sent to America's critics but the message sent to Americans themselves. When, oh when, will this administration wake up?
Bit by bit, circumstances are forcing President Obama and his aides to come to grips with reality. The original plan to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the so-called 9/11 mastermind, in New York City has apparently been aborted. It finally occurred to the Justice Department that cordoning off much of Lower Manhattan and placing a security perimeter around the financial district not only would cost something like $200 million a year, but would destroy the economy of the area. A trial there would give KSM, as he is called, a second shot at devastating downtown New York.
It is amazing that no one thought this through. Published reports say that the Justice Department informed Mayor Michael Bloomberg of its plan just about the time it was announced. This alacrity was clearly the product of some excitement down at Justice -- yet another chance to show the world that George W. Bush was gone and with him the odious attempts to treat terrorists as if they were, well, terrorists. A civilian trial! Right in the heart of Manhattan! Obama ought ask his friend Attorney General Eric Holder what in the world he was thinking -- just as we might ask Obama why he has such faith in Holder's judgment.
In a similar example of poor judgment, an undoubtedly delighted Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was told he had something called Miranda rights and could, if he so chose, cease talking about allegedly attempting to blow up a jetliner as it approached Detroit on Christmas Day. Abdulmutallab was Mirandized after just 50 total minutes of interrogation and he, having probably seen more than his share of "Law & Order" episodes, promptly shut up.
Administration officials defend what happened in Detroit and assert, against common sense and the holy truth itself, that they got valuable intelligence -- and so what more would you want? But Abdulmutallab went silent before terrorism experts from Washington could get to him. It has been more than a month since he last opened his mouth, and even if he resumes cooperating -- a deal may be in the works -- he now knows just a bit more about the present-day location of various al-Qaeda operatives than does Regis Philbin.
The announced closing of Guantanamo has also suffered from a peculiar Obama-style naivete. It is now apparent that there are some bad hombres there who should be detained way past the time they are eligible for AARP membership. It's true that the world does not like Guantanamo, but then it's also true that the world is not an al-Qaeda target.
KSM, Abdulmutallab and other accused terrorists should be tried. But these two are not Americans in any sense of the word and they are accused of terrorism, tantamount to an act of war -- a virtual Pearl Harbor, in KSM's case. A military tribunal would fit them fine. If it is good enough for your average GI accused of murder or some such thing, it ought to be good enough for a foreign national with mass murder on his mind.
No doubt George Bush soiled America's image abroad with what looked liked vigilante justice and Dick Cheney's hearty endorsement of ugly interrogation measures. But more is at stake here than America's image abroad -- namely the security and peace of mind of Americans in America. Bush stands condemned by the facts for 9/11 -- his watch, his responsibility -- and in all likelihood he bent over backward to ensure that nothing like those attacks would happen again.
The Obama administration, on the other hand, seems to have bent over backward to prove to the world it is not the Bush administration and will, almost no matter what, ensure that everyone gets the benefit of American civil liberties. But the paramount civil liberty is a sense of security and this, sad to say, has eroded under Barack Obama. Repeatedly, the administration has shown poor judgment. Abdulmutallab's silence is a scream that something is wrong.
2b)Politicians in Wonderland
By Thomas Sowell
There was a recent flap because three different members of the Obama administration, on three different Sunday television talk shows, gave three widely differing estimates of how many jobs the president has created.
That should not have been surprising, except as a sign of political sloppiness in not getting their stories together beforehand. They were simply doing what Barack Obama himself does -- namely, just pulling numbers out of thin air. However, being more skilled at creating illusions, the president does it with more of an air of certainty, as if he has gone around and counted the new jobs himself.
The big question that seldom-- if ever-- gets asked in the mainstream media is whether these are a net increase in jobs. Since the only resources that the government has are the resources it takes from the private sector, using those resources to create jobs means reducing the resources available to create jobs in the private sector.
So long as most people do not look beyond superficial appearances, politicians can get away with playing Santa Claus on all sorts of issues, while leaving havoc in their wake-- such as growing unemployment, despite all the jobs being "created."
Whatever position people take on health care reform, there seems to be a bipartisan consensus-- usually a sign of mushy thinking-- that it is a good idea for the government to force insurance companies to insure people whom politicians want them to insure, and to insure them for things that politicians think should be insured.
Contrary to what politicians expect us to do, let's stop and think.
Why aren't insurance companies already insuring the people and the conditions that they are now going to be forced to cover? Because that means additional costs-- and because the insurance companies don't think their customers are willing to pay those particular costs for those particular coverages.
It costs politicians nothing to mandate more insurance coverage for more people. But that doesn't mean that the costs vanish into thin air. It simply means that both buyers and sellers of insurance are forced to pay costs that neither of them wants to pay. But, because soaring political rhetoric leaves out such grubby things as costs, it sounds like a great deal.
It is not just costs that are left out. It is consequences in general.
With all the laments in the media about skyrocketing unemployment among young people, and especially minority young people, few media pundits even try to connect the dots to explain why unemployment hits some groups much harder than others.
Yet unusually high unemployment rates among young people is not something new or even something peculiar to the United States. Even before the current worldwide recession, unemployment rates were 20 percent or more among workers under 25 years of age in a number of Western European countries.
The young have less experience to offer and are therefore less in demand. Before politicians stepped in, that just meant that younger workers were paid less. But this is not a permanent situation because youth itself is not permanent, and pay rises with experience.
Enter politicians. By mandating a minimum wage that sounds reasonable for most workers, they put a price on inexperienced and unskilled labor that often exceeds what it is worth.
Mandated pay rates, like mandated insurance coverage, impose on buyers and sellers alike things that they would not choose to do otherwise.
Workers of course prefer higher wage rates. But the very fact that the government has to impose those wage rates means that workers were unwilling to risk not having a job by refusing to work for less than the wage rate that has been mandated. Now that choice has been taken out of their hands, with the hidden cost in this case being higher unemployment rates.
It is of course no secret that there is no free lunch. It is just an inconvenient distraction that gets left out of political rhetoric.
Copyright 2010, Creators Syndicate Inc.
3)Obama's transparency record appears cloudy
The president acknowledges that healthcare negotiations have fallen short of his standard for openness. He says it was a 'messy process.'
One casualty of President Obama's first year in office: the notion that he would transform a political system mired in gridlock and secrecy, opening a window to the legislative process.
That hasn't happened. Instead of healthcare negotiations broadcast on C-SPAN, as candidate Obama famously promised, the fate of the landmark bill is being hashed out in private on Capitol Hill. And recent polls indicate that the public has lowered its expectations about the prospect of a more open government.
In his State of the Union speech Wednesday, Obama signaled he isn't giving up on the idea that he can usher in greater accountability and transparency in Washington. But realities of governing have caused him to trim his ambitions.
In recent days, Obama made a surprising admission: the healthcare negotiations have fallen short of his standard for openness. He told ABC's Diane Sawyer that healthcare was an "ugly process and it looks like there are a bunch of backroom deals."
He said he wanted to "move forward in a way that recaptures that sense of opening things up more."
Up to that point, the administration's position had been that the public was sufficiently informed about healthcare, even though negotiations with doctors, drug manufacturers and other interest groups took place in private, often at the White House.
"The president feels very comfortable with the amount of transparency that we've had," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in July.
It isn't clear, though, what Obama plans to do to open things up.
The question came up again Friday, when Obama spoke to the Republican House caucus in Baltimore.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told the president that because of the failure to broadcast the healthcare talks, "I was disappointed, and I think a lot of Americans were disappointed."
Obama replied that C-SPAN had aired the "majority" of the proceedings through its coverage of committee hearings. The president conceded, though, that healthcare was a "messy process . . . so on that one, I take responsibility."
It might have been a promise Obama was unwise to make in the first place. Even advocates for open government say it's unrealistic to expect all government business to play out publicly.
Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group that pushes for more openness in government, said: "You can't have every negotiation, every discussion, be on camera if you expect productive results. The legislative process is one of horse trading and compromises. If you put that all on camera all the time, nothing would get done."
Obama's pledge to pry loose government information and share it with the public is showing mixed results on other fronts.
Government watchdog groups credit Obama for releasing names of visitors to the White House complex, including the release Friday of 75,000 records of visits in October.
"What they're doing is wiring openness as the default position in government," Miller said. "Hopefully, the genie of openness will never be put back into the bottle again."
In response to a directive from the White House on Dec. 8, federal agencies are also releasing information they judge to be of great interest to the public, posting it on the website Data.gov. Watchdog groups praise the exercise, but they've also found that some of what the government is disclosing is either a repackaging of old information or of marginal value.
According to the Sunlight Foundation, the Commerce Department posted rain and snow accumulation data that were already available online.
Nor is all of the information easy to interpret.
"It would also be nice to have a clearer description of what some of the codes mean in the document. What's a category code '97P 97R 57K 57B?' " read a blog post from a Sunlight staff member, referring to a document showing government-funded research and development projects.
Sean Moulton of OMB Watch, an advocacy group devoted to government accountability, said some reports "were so complex and specialized I couldn't even figure out if they were particularly useful or not."
Still, by elevating transparency as a national issue, Obama is influencing behavior elsewhere in the capital.
For example, the Senate Democratic leadership responded to criticism about the closed-door meetings on healthcare by posting large amounts of material on the Web -- and with uncharacteristic speed.
Shortly after Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) produced the healthcare bill that ultimately went before the Senate, the full 383-page text was up on the leadership's website.
4)A Depressing Budget
By Paul Krugman
I haven’t gone through the budget proposal in detail yet. But there’s no escaping the sense that this is a tremendous comedown from the hopes of a year ago.
As many have pointed out, the administration projects high unemployment for years to come:
So what’s the response to this dismal, family-destroying prospect? A brief, small additional stimulus, followed by a spending freeze. In essence, the administration is accepting mass unemployment as just one of those things we have to live with.
Now, we all know that this mainly reflects political constraints; this isn’t an Obama-bashing post. But think about how sick our political system is, if this is the best we can do. Nobody — not the Fed, not the administration, not Congress, is willing to do anything to create jobs despite dire projections.
Meanwhile, about that freeze: the budget conveniently lays out the budget categories for all to see:
Yep, we’re going to impose spending limits (which are highly unlikely to be feasible) on that little wedge off to the left, while ruling everything else off limits. Again, there are political reasons for this; I mean, Evan Bayh says that only left-wing blogs question whether that freeze is a good idea, so it must be true. But it’s depressing.
And not just emotionally: while the freeze won’t be a big deal, it will depress demand during a period in which, according to the administration’s own projections, unemployment will stay very high.
What we’re witnessing is an awesome national failure.
5)Everyone... Is implying with bad jokes
That Cajuns Aren't smart.
But anybody who would build a city 10 feet below sea level
in a hurricane zone and fill it with Democrats is a genius.....
"Can we Move Congress To Naw'lins???"
, as they have, say, Tibetan ones? Maybe when President Obama tells them to.
(7) Seven Myths About Iran:How long will it take for the lesson to stick?
By BRET STEPHENS
'We have been trying to negotiate [with the Iranians] for five, six years. We've tried everything. We have met every Iranian. We have tried to open every possible channel. We've had new ideas and the result is this: nothing."
Thus did a senior Western diplomat recently describe to me his country's efforts to reach a negotiated settlement with Tehran over its nuclear programs. In doing so, he also finally disposed of the myth, nearly a decade in the making, that Iran was ready to abandon those programs in exchange for a "grand bargain" with the West.
Let's dispose of a few other myths—and hope it doesn't take years for the lesson to stick:
(1) Military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities would accomplish nothing.
That's the argument made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who last year told a Senate Committee that "a military attack will only buy us time and send the program deeper and more covert."
Maybe so, but what's wrong with buying time? Israel's 1981 attack on Iraq's Osirak reactor also bought time while driving Saddam's nuclear programs underground. But it ensured that it was a non-nuclear Iraq that invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia nine years later, a point recognized by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney when he thanked the Israeli commander of the Osirak operation for making "our job much easier in Desert Storm."
(2) A strike would rally Iranians to the side of the regime.
The case would be more persuasive if the regime had any remaining claims on Iranian patriotism. It no longer does, if it ever did. It also would be more persuasive if the nuclear program were as broadly popular as some of the regime's apologists claim. On the contrary, one of the more popular chants of the demonstrators goes, "Iran is green and fertile, it doesn't need nukes."
Yet even if the nuclear program enjoyed widespread support, it isn't clear how Iranians would react in the event of military strikes. Argentine dictator Leopoldo Galtieri whooped up a nationalist fervor when he invaded the Falklands in 1982, but was ousted from office just a week after Port Stanley fell to the British. When a regime gambles its prestige on a single controversial enterprise, it cannot afford to lose it.
(3) Sanctions don't work, and usually wind up strengthening the regime at the expense of its own people.
That's only true when the sanctioned regimes have strong internal controls, relatively pliant populations, and zero interest in international respectability. It's also true that sanctions alone are never a silver bullet. But as Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies points out, they can be "silver shrapnel," particularly when the target country is as politically vulnerable as Iran is now, and when it is also critically reliant on the consumption of imported gasoline.
That's why the House was right when it overwhelmingly approved the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act in December, and when the Senate unanimously passed a similar bill (against the administration's objections) last Thursday. Over time, the regime will surely find ways to skirt the sanctions, which prohibit companies that do business in Iran's energy sector from also doing business in the U.S. But in the critical short term, these sanctions might provoke the kind of mass unrest that could tip the scales against the regime.
(4) The world can live with a nuclear Iran, just as we live with other nasty nuclear powers.
Assume that's true. (I don't.) Can we also live with nuclear Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey? The problem with the "realist" view is that it fails to take account of the fears a nuclear Iran inspires among the status quo regimes in its neighborhood. Containment was complicated enough during the Cold War. Now imagine a four- or five-way standoff among Arabs, Persians, Turks and Israelis, some religiously fanatic, in the world's most volatile neighborhood.
(5) The Iranian regime is headed for the ash heap of history. The best policy is to do as little as possible until it crumbles from within.
Communist regimes were also destined for the ash heap. Unfortunately, it took them decades to get there, during which they murdered tens of millions of people. It matters a great deal to Iran's people, and its neighbors, that the regime go quietly. But it also matters that it go quickly, and waiting on events is not a policy.
(6) The more support we show Iran's demonstrators, the more we hurt their cause.
This was the administration's view after the June 12 election, as it walked on tiptoes to avoid the perception of "meddling." The regime accused the U.S. of meddling all the same.
But protest movements like Iran's (or Poland's, or South Africa's) are sustained by a sense of moral legitimacy that global support uniquely conveys. When will American liberals get behind Iranian rights, as they have, say, Tibetan ones? Maybe when President Obama tells them to.
(7) Israel will ultimately dispose of Iran's nuclear facilities.
The more policy makers fall for the first six myths, the less mythical the seventh one becomes.
7)How to Make a Weak Economy Worse FDR's war against business showed that a president must choose between retribution and recovery
By AMITY SHLAES
You get the feeling President Obama is girding for battle with the financial sector. In last week's State of the Union address, he promised to regulate the industry. On Jan. 21, he was blunter, warning that he would not let companies that enjoyed "soaring profits and obscene bonuses" block his financial reforms. "If these folks want a fight," he said, "it's a fight I'm ready to have."
This declaration of war echoes that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1936, late in his campaign for a second presidential term, FDR spoke of the challenges of "business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking." Wall Streeters and businessmen hated him, he said, adding that "I welcome their hatred."
Then Roosevelt escalated: "I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and the lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master."
Mr. Obama might want to stick to a moderate approach. FDR's war against business played to the crowd, but it hurt the economy. While monetary policies impeded recovery in the late 1930s, it was the administration's assault on companies and capital that ensured the Depression's duration.
Roosevelt had initially opted for safety and picked relatively moderate advisers. His first Treasury Secretary, William Woodin, was a railroad executive. Roosevelt also kept over a Hoover-era official, Jesse Jones, at the TARP of the day, the Reconstruction Finance Corp. James Warburg, the son of Wall Street banker Paul Warburg, also joined the team.
In the crucial days before March 5, 1933, when FDR declared a "bank holiday" to halt the bank run, New Dealers worked with Republicans to resolve the financial crisis. When it came to reforming Wall Street, they were likewise measured. Yes, they created the Securities and Exchange Commission. But their regulation seemed designed to serve markets, not stamp them out. At least mostly.
Though there was nothing establishment about the centerpiece of the early New Deal, the National Recovery Administration, it was friendly to big business. Indeed, too much so. Under the NRA, the largest players in each industrial sector were judged too big to fail not because their failure would create systemic financial risk—the argument for banks today—but rather in the faith that firms of such scale could serve as engines of recovery.
And Roosevelt, like Presidents Obama and Bush, dumped billions in cash onto the country. There was, not surprisingly, a Roosevelt market rally, just as there has been an Obama rally.
But complete recovery proved elusive. The public spending programs had less effect than hoped. Smaller firms complained, accurately, that the NRA's minimum wages and limits on hours disadvantaged them. Unemployment was still high. FDR knew he could not keep asking Congress to authorize enormous outlays forever.
Frustrated, the president shifted to retribution. By 1935, FDR decided that firms, especially big firms, were impeding recovery. They must now redeem themselves and save the economy by sacrificing—or else.
The attacks started with taxes. In 1935, well before the "hatred" speech, FDR led Congress in passaging a law that replaced a flat rate on corporate income with a graduated rate—itself a penalty on larger firms. Personal income taxes went up, as did other rates. In 1936 FDR signed into law the undistributed profits tax, which aimed to force reluctant firms to disgorge cash as dividends or by paying higher wages. This levy too was graduated, with a top rate of 27%.
The 1935 Wagner Act was a tiger that makes today's union law look like a pussycat. It favored unions over companies in nearly every way, including institutionalizing the closed shop. And after Roosevelt's landslide victory in 1936, the closed shop and the sit-down strike stole thousands of productive workdays from companies, punishing earnings and limiting ability to hire.
Of particular relevance today was Roosevelt's switch on antitrust policy. The large companies once rewarded by the NRA now became targets.
The final front of the war was utilities, the country's most hopeful industry. FDR's 1935 law, the Public Utilities Holding Company Act, made it so difficult for private-sector firms in this industry to raise capital that it was called a death sentence.
The result of it all was the Depression within the Depression of 1937 and 1938, when industrial production plummeted and unemployment climbed back into the higher teens. Even John Maynard Keynes chided FDR for his attitude about businessmen: "It is a mistake to think they are more immoral than politicians."
Among themselves, the New Dealers acknowledged failure. FDR's second Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, eventually determined that the problem was lack of what he labeled "business confidence." Late in the decade, Morgenthau dared to call for tax cuts. He even placed a sign on his desk asking, "Does it contribute to recovery?" Roosevelt told him the sign was "very stupid."
Ultimately the war abroad required FDR to give up his war at home. Now the same industries that had been under prosecution were at the War Production Board, signing contracts. Scholars have argued that wartime spending ended the Depression. But the truce with business played an important role.
The 1930s story suggests not that any individual reform is wrong per se. It reminds us rather that frustrated presidents are inconsistent, that antibusiness policies are cumulative, and that hostility yields more damage than benefit. Presidents can choose between retribution and recovery. They cannot have both.
Miss Shlaes, a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations, is author of "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" (HarperCollins, 2007).
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