Unfavorable Demographics.Natanyahu Means Business!
Not too late to hear a fabulous speaker.
Skidaway Island Republican Club
John Fund is the SIRC President's Day speaker, Feb., 18, 2013
John Fund is currently a National Affairs Columnist for National Review magazine and a contributor to the Fox News Channel. He is considered a notable expert on American politics and the nexus between politics and economics.
John previously served as a columnist and editorial board member for The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books, including Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books, 2012) and The Dangers of Regulation Through Litigation (ATRA Press, 2008).
He worked as a research analyst for the California Legislature in Sacramento before beginning his journalism career as a reporter for the syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.
Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill, called John "the Tom Paine of the modern Congressional reform movement."
He has won awards from the Institute for Justice, The School Choice Alliance and the Warren Brooks award for journalistic excellence from the American Legislative Exchange Council.
John will be speaking at The Plantation Club,Feb 18th.
Cocktails at 6: followed by dinner at 6:30.
Cost is $100/person.
His Topic:
"Visitor's Guide to an Alien Planet: Washington, D.C." that should intrigue some people
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Demographics generally trump economics when it comes to predicting with certitude. (See 1 below.)
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More on the Netanyahu-Obama relationship. (See 2 below.)
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Gross has been consistent. (See 3 below.)
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This should grab your attention. (See 4 below.)
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When it comes to Israel's security, Netanyahu will not flinch. Obama you could take a lesson.
When Assad goes, as he most surely will, it is doubtful the successful rebels in Syria will give much a damn regarding Hezballah. This is why it is critical for Israel to thwart arms shipments to Hezballah beyond what they already have. (See 5 below..)
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As I have already warned. (See 6 below.)
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Our major public policies are based on the assumption that America will continue to enjoy growth. Economic growth and population growth.
Through most of our history, this assumption has proved to be correct. These days, not so much.
Last week, the Commerce Department announced that the gross domestic product shrunk by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012. And the Census Bureau reported that the U.S. birth rate in 2011 was 63.2 per 1,000 women age 15 to 44, the lowest ever recorded.
Slow economic growth and low population growth threaten to undermine entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. Despite contrary rhetoric, they are programs in which working age people pay for pensions and medical care for the elderly.
When Medicare was established in 1965 and when Social Security was vastly expanded in 1972, America was accustomed to the high birth rates of the post-World War II baby boom. It was widely assumed that the baby boom generation would soon produce a baby boom of its own.
Oops. The birth rate fell from the peak of 122.7 in 1957 to 68.8 in 1973 and hovered around that level until 2007. The baby boom, it turns out, was an exception to a general rule that people tend to have fewer babies as their societies become more affluent and urbanized.
Social Security had to be tweaked in 1983 when it became clear there weren't enough working age people to fund benefits promised to the elderly. It needs tweaking again today for the same reason.
Medicare presents even greater problems. Health care costs have generally been rising at rates above economic growth.
By itself this is not necessarily a problem. Economic growth and market competition have enabled Americans to spend smaller percentages of their incomes on food and clothes, with more left over to spend on other things.
Spending more on health care is a sensible thing for an affluent society to do -- especially as new medical procedures and drugs mean that health care can deliver more than it used to.
But in a society in which the elderly are an increasing share of the population and working age people are a decreasing share, it becomes increasingly difficult to fund these programs.
These problems are exacerbated when the economy fails to grow as rapidly as the working age population.
Birth rates fell sharply during the Depression of the 1930s. They have fallen significantly since the housing collapse, from 69.3 in 2007 to 63.2 in 2011. The steepest decline in births since 2007 has been among Hispanic immigrants, who were also hit hard by housing foreclosures.
We don't know whether this trend will continue. But if it does, the consequences will resemble the subtitle of Jonathan Last's newly published book, "What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster."
Last points out that our fertility rate -- the number of children a woman has over a lifetime -- has been below the replacement level of 2.1. Over time, a below-replacement-level fertility rate means population decline.
To see what that means, look at Japan. Its fertility rate is 1.4, its population is declining, and it has had essentially zero economic growth since 1990.
We are not in such a bad position, yet. Since the end of the recession in June 2009, quarterly GDP growth has averaged 2.1 percent.
That has left job growth way below the historic trend line. Four years ago, the incoming Obama administration's economists promised that we would be heading back up to the trend line, with unemployment down to a little above 5 percent now.
Instead, it was 7.9 percent in January, and that's with millions no longer even looking for work. Labor force participation is the lowest it's been since 1981.
The danger is that all this can come to seem the new normal. Low birth rates, as Last argues, can persuade others to want fewer children.
Low economic growth or even decline can shape expectations and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. "An economic recovery has begun," Obama said in his inaugural speech last month. The implication: This is all you're going to get.
In the 1990s, Canada and Sweden faced economic crises similar to ours. In response, they sharply cut public spending. Their economies have done well since, and their governments have been running budget surpluses.
We did something like the opposite. The consequences could be enduring.
Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com), is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
No PM has so successfully resisted the pressure from the leader of a country he loves so much for a country he loves even more.
Netanyahu and Obama shake hands Photo: REUTERS
I’m sure Jeffrey Goldberg got it right. Whatever the reason the President leaked his unhappiness with Bibi to Goldberg just a few days before the Israeli election – whether in an effort to influence the vote against Bibi, serve payback to Bibi for a perceived preference for Romney, or because the President could simply no longer suppress his dissatisfaction – it must indeed be unnerving to be the most powerful man on earth and have the elected leader of a tiny Middle Eastern country defy you. Especially when that country, in your opinion, owes you so much! You are their only reliable friend who watches helplessly as that little nation continues to isolate itself through its self-destructive policies. According to Goldberg, Obama has “become inured to what he sees as self-defeating policies of his Israeli counterpart… Obama said privately and repeatedly, “Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are… Netanyahu is moving his country down a path toward near-total isolation.”
If only Israel would recognize the President’s genius. If only it would stop building in Jerusalem and E1 and allow the President to sprinkle his magic peace dust, then Hamas would beat its rockets into ploughshares and Hezbollah would turn its bombs into pruning hooks. But no. Ungrateful to the last, Bibi insists on disobeying the President and claiming all of Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capitol.
No doubt the President is likewise mystified at the Israeli people as well. How could the Israeli people have re-elected the intransigent Prime Minister who is doing so much to harm their country? The most powerful man on earth is reduced to watching from the sidelines and complaining to journalists that he knows how to protect Israel far better than the Israelis themselves.
Such an ungrateful nation.
And yet, perhaps the Israelis have finally figured out that they are a sovereign people whom, while immensely grateful to America for its friendship and support, are still best qualified to judge their security needs better than anyone else. Perhaps they have come to understand that another Democratic president named Bill Clinton, whom noone would argue has a sincere love of the Jewish people and a Jewish son-in-law, still pushed Israel into the Oslo agreements that left a thousand Israeli civilians blown to bits. Perhaps they have come to understand that if Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, was correct that, as a legislator from Nebraska he was “not an Israeli senator. I'm a United States senator," then the Prime Minister of Israel is the likewise the leader of the Jewish state who must put the security of the Israeli people even before a nod of approval from the President of the United States.
Over the past four years Bibi has grown into one of Israel’s truly great leaders. Yes, he lost seats in the election and the country may be insisting on a more centrist course. But that does not change the fact under Bibi the country is booming economically and in terms of security. Cranes dot the skyline of expanding Israeli cities, terror incidents are negligible compared to the Clinton era, and unlike the anemic American economy, Israel is humming along at about four percent annual growth. And if President Obama is right that, in spite of this prosperity, Israel is isolated in world opinion, then it is arguably no more so than it has been in the past, and, besides, what is better, a popular Israel riddled with dead Jews or an unpopular Israel filled with living ones?
But what President Obama does not understand about Netanyahu is that the inflexibility he accuses him of is born not of a narrow-minded obstinacy but rather of a confident Jewish pride and deep-seated conviction that has been Bibi’s lifelong hallmark.
In my desire in 1990 to launch a robust response to anti-Israel speeches at the Oxford Union, I booked Netanyahu to lecture at the University. Bibi, just 41 years old, had already electrified the world as Israel’s most capable defender at the UN. Bibi agreed to come with a single stipulation: “If I’m already making the trip, then work me like a horse.”
We obliged.
We picked him up in a special branch police car and as we drove through the grandeur of Oxford’s ancient center, he commented on the majesty of British academia and its incongruence with some of the petty anti-Israel sentiment that is often expressed within its halls. Arriving at St. Antony’s College for a private forum with Oxford Middle East experts, Bibi put one foot on a chair and for the next 90 minutes held forth on the justice of Israel’s cause, surrounded as it was by nation’s sworn to its destruction. As he finished, the attacks came in fast and furious in what had to be one of the most hostile audiences he ever addressed. He did not blink, he did not flinch, he did not bend. When the last question ended, he turned to me to ask what next. After two more speeches, we took him to my home where we had arranged a dinner with Rhodes Scholars, many of them Jewish, most critical of Israeli policy. This time Bibi was softer in presentation but just as firm in conviction. Israel was a righteous nation, focused on maintaining democracy and human rights while facing existential threats on nearly every border. He spoke to the students of their responsibility to be proud defenders of their people and never bend in the face of opposition. The climax of the day was a lecture at the Union itself. Palestinian and Jewish protesters rallied outside in their hundreds with the rallying cry: “Net-an-ya-hu you should know, we support the P-L-O.” Bibi left his security bubble and walked over to the protesters. “Come inside and listen. Then you can protest. I’ll answer every question you ask.”
Many left their barricades and joined the large crowd inside. What followed was one of the great speeches I have heard, a mesmerizing presentation of the need for democracy across the Middle East and the liberalization of Arab governments that deny their citizens their God-given human rights. At its high point Bibi said, “Many of us in Israel have buried children and lost brothers, in fulfillment of a simple dream for Jews to finally live and prosper in a country of their own in peace.” He did not have to mention whom he was referring to as even his detractors knew of Entebbe and the hero-brother he had lost.
Again he was bombarded with hostile questions. He responded patiently but forcefully. When he finished he was given a standing ovation by most of the students in the hall. It was a night few of us would forget.
No Israeli Prime Minister has ever been as American as Bibi. And yet no Prime Minister has so successfully resisted the pressure from the leader of a country he loves so much for a country he loves even more. And the Israeli people, in reelecting Bibi, presumably amid the consternation of President Obama, are finally realizing that Israel cannot ultimately be protected from Washington but Jerusalem, especially when the current American
Administration is not in step with the strong sympathy of the American people for a tiny and just nation fighting for its life. Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi” whom The Washington Post calls “the most famous Rabbi in America,” has just published his newest best-seller, “The Fed-up Man of Faith: Challenging God in the Face of Tragedy and Suffering.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3)Pimco’s Gross: US Economy ‘Running Out of Time’
Its fuel is central banks’ loose monetary policies, which are becoming increasingly ineffective at promoting real economic growth, Gross writes in his monthly investment outlook report.
Total U.S. credit outstanding is now at $56 trillion and growing, Gross writes. “It is a monster that requires perpetually increasing amounts of fuel, a supernova star that expands and expands, yet, in the process begins to consume itself.”
Expanding credit increasingly goes to creditors and market speculators and less and less to real economic growth. Instead of promoting small-business development, investment banking is dominated by leveraged speculation and Ponzi finance when additional credit is needed just to cover interest payments.
“Each additional dollar of credit seems to create less and less heat,” he states. “In the 1980s, it took $4 of new credit to generate $1 of real [gross domestic product]. Over the last decade, it has taken $10, and since 2006, $20 to produce the same result.”
To see the impact of zero-based interest rates, look at Japan, which he calls a “credit market supernova, exploding and then contracting onto itself.”
“Money and credit may be losing heat and running out of time in other developed economies as well, including the U.S.,” Gross writes.
His supernova example is “more instructive than literal,” he adds, saying the end of the global monetary system is not near.
Still, we’re running out of time, and the countdown to the financial system’s end starts when investments have too much risk for too little return.
Central banks and private banks must generate real, or at least nominal, economic growth or the “risk of credit market entropy will increase.”
Gross recommends investors prepare for inflation by buying short-term bonds and TIPS, moving money to countries with less debt and safer credit systems such as Australia, Brazil, Mexico and Canada, investing in global equities with stable cash flows and seeking gold and other commodities that you “can sink your teeth into.”
Many other experts are not as fearful as Gross is.
Goldman Sachs’ Abby Joseph Cohen predicts corporate earnings growth of 12 to 13 percent this year.
“The U.S. economy is showing some dynamism,” said Cohen, who sparred with Gross at a Barron’s Roundtable discussion. “Exports have been robust. Only one sector of the economy isn’t growing: government spending.”
Jack Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Group, says the rise in the Dow Jones Industrial Average recently means little for the economy.
“I don't think the economic signs are going to change very much.” Bogle anticipates growth of 2 to 2.5 percent for this year. “That hasn't changed whether the Dow is 14,000, or 12,000 or 16,000.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)Why Israel will rule the new Middle East
Arthur Herman
Jan. 30, 2013: Israel's President Shimon Peres, right, listens as Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party, speaks during their meeting in Jerusalem. (AP/Reuters Pool)
If you still think the future of Israel looks bleak, think again.
A few months ago it looked like the Jewish state might not survive until 2013. Rockets were raining down from Gaza; revolution was about to install one Islamicist government in Egypt, and another was poised to take over in Syria. Iran was threatening to finish what Hitler’s Holocaust started, with an atomic bomb. The Obama administration seemed unwilling to stop that happening– while Israel’s only alternative to nuclear annihilation was a preemptive strike that was bound to start a major shooting war in the Middle East.
Now, however, Israel’s future may be brighter than ever.
Iran remains the neighborhood’s unpredictable mad dog, although its nuclear bark is still far worse than its bite. But Israel itself is set to dominate the region like never before. Thanks to the industrial technological miracle known as fracking, Israel is about to become the new energy Mecca of the Middle East, and there’s very little its Arab neighbors can do to stop it.
Indeed, instead of plotting Israel’s destruction, its Arab neighbors could find themselves courting Tel Aviv’s favor the way the United States and Europe courted OPEC in the 1970's and 1980's.
What’s tilting the region’s dynamics toward Israel?
For one thing, the Arab Spring has spawned a chaos and instability in every country it’s touched, that’s going to grind on for years to come. A new report warns that Egypt is on the verge of collapse; Israel’s old adversary Syria, already is. Both are also very likely headed toward economic ruin–as has already happened to Israel’s other foe, Hamas in Gaza, and could hit Iran next.
Israel is going to be the famous “still point in a turning world”–a world turning in on itself, with little or no energy to spend confronting the Jewish state. And here’s where fracking comes in.
Hydraulic fracking is, of course, is the technology that uses a high-pressure mixture of water, sand, and chemicals to crack open deep deposits of shale oil and natural gas. It’s single-handedly revived our domestic energy industry–to the point where by 2020 we’ll be the world’s biggest oil producer.
What many people don’t know is that the land of Israel holds almost 250 billion barrels of oil shale reserves (that’s according to the World Petroleum Council). That’s almost equal to Saudi Arabia’s 260 billion barrels–and as conventional oil sources there and in the Persian Gulf gets harder to extract (it already’s happening) and the cost goes up, Israel will be the new energy frontier of the region.
It’s already happening. The fracking-savvy Canadians have joined an Israeli energy technology fund, to help companies like Israeli Energy Initiatives begin production of oil shale in reserve-rich areas like the Valley of Elah near Jerusalem; the Russians have signed a deal to help open up the vast natural gas reserves discovered in 2008 and 2009 off Israel’s coast–some 16 trillion cubic feet worth.
Right now production is still tiny, but as fracking technology continues to advance Israel could soon move beyond its declared goal of energy independence, and become a major oil exporting country–including to oil-poor neighbors like Egypt and Syria and Lebanon.
The implications are nothing less than staggering.
Instead of an embattled and isolated outpost of Western democracy, Israel would look like the Middle East’s new economic colossus.
Instead of shunning Israel for fear of offending oil-rich Arab states, Western Europeans could find themselves beating a path to Israel’s oil shale fields–and rethinking who they want as their ally in the region, and who they don’t.
That includes the United States. Fracking is changing the world’s economic map; it’s about to change the Middle East. It’s time policy-makers caught up with reality, and realized that our relationship with Israel may be our most important bond to that region’s future.
Syrian ruler Bashar Assad has ordered the resumption of weapons transfers to the Lebanese Hizballah. This was agreed withIran’s National Security Director Saeed Jalilee, who arrived in Damascusafter Israel’s reported air strike last Wednesday, Jan. 30, inter alia, on Syrian trucks preparing to ferry to Lebanon for Hizballah the sophisticated Iran-supplied arms stored at the Jamraya military complex north of Damascus.
The Syrian ruler assured the Iranian official that he would not be deterred by what he called acts of “aggression.” It was up to Syria and Iran to put their heads together to find a safe method of getting the hardware across to Hizballah without exposing it to Israeli attack in truck convoys on the open road.
Jalilee is still in Damascus. He arrived Saturday to discuss with Syrian and Hizballah how to activate against Israel the secret mutual defense pact binding Iran, Syria, Hizballah and Hamas.
According to sources, Israeli military tacticians believe that as winter weather starts clearing up, Syria and Iran will devise crafty methods for outwitting Israel and getting the weapons to Lebanon – for example, disassembling the missiles and launchers and disguising them as non-lethal merchandize. They could then be spirited across from Syria to Lebanon in small packages by the smuggling rings regularly operating on their common border.
In anticipation of such tricks, the Israeli Air Force has in recent days thrown a round-the-clock blanket over the border area. It is constantly monitoring the traffic moving across and is ready to prevent any arms traffic. Without going through any formalities, Israel has thus effectively imposed a no-fly regime over a buffer zone straddling the Syrian-Lebanese border and placed it under the control of its air force.
Israeli officials have been warning for months that the IDF will not allow the transfer of advanced Syrian weapons – including chemical and biological weapons – to terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda affiliated Al-Nusra Front and Hezbollah.
Without directly confirming the Israel attack on the Jamraya military compound, defense minister Ehud Barak told the Munich security conference Sunday “…what happened in Syria several days ago… that’s proof that when we said something we mean it… and we say that we don’t think it should be allowed to bring advanced weapons systems into Lebanon.”
Israel’s actions to this end, including over flights by its air force which are widely reported by the Lebanese media, were undertaken after Assad was seen to be bent on testing Israel’s resolve to prevent arms transfers to Hizballah. These transfers were expressly prohibited under UN Security Council Resolution 1701 which ended the Israeli-Hizballah war in 2006
Hillary Clinton’s polling ahead of GOP challengers in Texas and Kentucky. And then there’s the youth vote, minorities, women, and the white working class. She’s the one to beat in 2016, writes Lloyd Green, former opposition research counsel to the George H.W. Bush campaign.
Hillary Clinton shakes hands after her farewell address to the staff at the State Department on Friday. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Message to the Republican Party: be afraid, be very afraid.
Hillary Clinton stands atop of the Democratic 2016 scrum, set to resume where Bill left off. A second Clinton candidacy would likely put the white vote in play and jeopardize the GOP’s dominance in the Old Confederacy. Recent polls put Hillary ahead of possible Republican challengers in vote-rich Texas and in Kentucky, home of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Tea Party favorite Rand Paul.
Unlike her husband, Hillary is personally disciplined. Unlike Barack Obama, she has demonstrated an ability to connect with beer-track voters across the country.
To understand why Hillary is particularly dangerous to the Republican Party, recall where the Democratic Party stood on the eve of Bill’s 1992 run for the White House, poised for what would have been their sixth loss in seven presidential elections.
The 1960s marked the exodus of blue-collar ethnics and Southerners from the Democratic Party. What was once the base of the FDR’s New Deal coalition headed for the exits in the aftermath of inner-city rioting, violent protests, and rancorous demonstrations. White flight marked Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide victory over George McGovern. Nixon won 61 percent of the popular vote and two thirds of ballots casts by white voters. Not even Ronald Reagan equaled that margin. And in the South, the Democratic vote crumbled, as McGovern gleaned less than three in 10 voters there.
Roe v. Wade came next. The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision recognized abortion as a constitutionally protected right and was a milestone for the women’s movement. But in politics as in physics, actions generate reactions, and it also helped to forge an alliance between devout Catholics and evangelical Protestants. By the end of 1988, white Catholics had voted Republican in three consecutive presidential elections. The Democratic Party was no longer their natural home. For its part, the GOP was no longer the exclusive enclave of Thurston Howell III, the descendants of Union soldiers, or Northern rural Protestants. Instead, the Republican Party had morphed into a winning, albeit monochromatic, coalition.
Enter Bill Clinton. His candidacy and presidency reversed the Democrats’ fortunes by playing to voters who had become dissatisfied with the Republican Party’s overt piety and Southern-fried politics, but who were wary of the Democrats’ sympathy for identity and grievance politics, foreign policy by McGovern-Carter, and disdain for market-based economics. Both Ice Storm suburbanites and Reagan Democrats were receptive to Bill’s message.
Bill’s attack on Sister Souljah and embrace of free trade signaled that he was breaking from Democratic orthodoxies. The numbers told the story.
In 1992 Bill Clinton came within 1 point of winning a plurality of white voters. He came within 3 points in 1996. No Democratic candidate has since come that close. Indeed, Barack Obama garnered less than two in five white votes against a hapless Mitt Romney. To top it off, Clinton also tied the Republicans in the South in 1996. There was stirring in Dixie.
At the electoral high end, the Ivy Leaguers of the 1960s had grown up and traded their beards, tattered jeans, and placards for Wall Street, Ralph Lauren suits, business cards, and a home in Larchmont. And so Clinton won an outright majority of voters with graduate degrees and kept the GOP to less than 60 percent among affluent voters. In fact, since 1992 grad-degree voters have gone Democratic in each subsequent presidential election.
Bill’s successes served as the electoral predicate for Obama’s victories and position Hillary to pick up where Obama ultimately leaves off. Obama won reelection by forging a New Deal 2.0 coalition in the industrial Midwest, while cementing a high-end low-end coalition in the South of college-educated whites and minorities.
Although Obama lost among non-college-graduate whites by 19 points nationwide, his deficit among that same demographic in the Great Lakes was only in the single digits. Significantly, Ohio and Pennsylvania held for Obama in 2012, two of the states which Obama lost to Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries.
And that is where the GOP’s problem begins. In addition to benefiting from Obama’s ascendant coalition of younger voters, minorities, and women, Hillary connects with the white working class and would likely improve upon Obama’s showing among this bloc. Instead of the forced optics of Obama sitting down to a beer with the prof and the cop, voters would likely be treated to moments of a relaxed Hillary knocking back a boilermaker in Youngstown or Dearborn.
Clinton could make a serious play in the South and build upon existing margins in the Midwest. North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Texas would be in play. Indeed, Hillary could reclaim the newest bloc of swing voters: America’s wealthy.
In 2008 voters with incomes north of $200,000 went Democratic, as did college graduates. Historically, that was huge. It marked the fact that the wealthy were no longer reflexively Republican. In 2012 wealthier Americans went Republican, but by a smaller margin than in 2004. In other words, high-end America is up for grabs, and Hillary appears better suited to take advantage of that fact than Obama was.
Four years is a long time. The economy is a slog, and the world remains a dangerous place. But at this early juncture, with the Republican Party in disarray and disfavor, Hillary looks like the one to beat.
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