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Of course this is just talk since he’d rather continue the endless campaign, especially as his style of “governing” consists of having no opposition.
President Obama, speaking at his campaign-turned advocacy group, contradicted media reports that his primary focus right now is setting up House Democrats to retake the majority in the 2014 midterms.“It’s not about 2014,” Obama told Organizing for Action this evening, per the pool report. “I actually wanna govern, at least for a couple of years.” He added that “If a senator or congressman from a swing district is about to take a tough vote on immigration or guns, they need to feel supported.”Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, explained that winning the House in 2014 is a high priority for Obama.
At his current rate of progress not only is winning the House a fantasy, he stands to lose the Senate. Petulant and obtuse as he usually is, he’ll be a real prize those last two years.
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1a)
Henninger: Escape From Spending Hell
The sequester proved that spending cuts aren't a political third rail.
So it looks like we've all been sentenced to spending at least two more years in budget hell with Barack Obama. Under the rules of budget hell set the past four years by the prince of Pennsylvania Avenue, you're not allowed to do anything real about federal spending. You can only fight over federal spending. Forever.
Paul Ryan on Tuesday tossed his third House GOP budget into this void. He hopes to reduce long-term spending to an average of 19.5% of GDP. The Beltway press called it an opening "salvo." Yesterday his Senate counterpart, new Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray, introduced the Democrats' budget, teeing up what the Washington Post called a "budget duel." Welcome to the Obama street-fighting army, Sen. Murray.
All hope is not lost. Amid the sequester smackdown with the White House, Republicans did something off-script: They called the Obama bluff. They let the sequester's spending cuts occur, and the apocalypse didn't descend. The only thing that cracked was the president's approval rating.
The sequester's big discovery was that spending reduction isn't a political third rail. But if the winds are starting to shift, Republicans are going to need all the help they can get to convince the American people that more cuts in spending will preserve and protect their economy.
Help is at hand—economist Alberto Alesina.
Mr. Alesina, a professor at Harvard University, may be the last economist that Democrats want to deal with at the moment Americans are finding sympathy for spending cuts.
Ever since Ronald Reagan legitimized the efficacy of tax cuts, Democrats have sought to discredit his idea and restore the New Deal theory of a Keynesian multiplier, which dates to 1931. It holds that more public spending will revive a struggling economy.
No president has believed more in the miracle of the multiplier than Barack Obama. Across four years he has led the country on a kind of Keynesian death march, pushing federal spending to 25% of GDP and producing weak growth. We're looking at four more years before the Keynesian mast unless the Republicans can offer an intellectually respectable alternative.
Mr. Alesina has identified the alternative. His, and others', work the past decade with how struggling economies revive suggests that the Obama spend-more solution is the opposite of what the U.S. should be doing.
There is general agreement on at least two things about the current U.S. economy. It is emerging from the deepest recession since the Great Depression, and its debt level is unsustainable. The path back to stronger growth, argues Mr. Alesina, is a combination of significant, permanent cuts in public spending and relatively small tax increases, if any.
This view isn't born of "right-wing" ideology. Mr. Alesina is an Italian, as are many of his co-authors. As Europeans, Mr. Alesina and his colleagues were forced to confront the biggest challenge facing Western economies the past 40 years. Europe rose from the ashes of war, but how would it rise from the ashes of debt, as benevolent postwar spending programs outstripped revenue?
Mr. Alesina and his colleagues wanted to answer the most basic question: What works?
They sought the answer (which they published in an August 2012 paper on "fiscal consolidations" for the National Bureau of Economic Research) by analyzing an International Monetary Fund history of all the fiscal plans that 17 OECD governments enacted between 1978 and 2009, including the U.S., Canada and Japan. Together, these countries tried everything to grow—raise spending, cut spending, raise taxes or cut them, in endless combinations. What helped?
"Adjustments based upon spending cuts," the economists concluded, "are much less costly in terms of output losses than tax-based ones. Spending-based adjustments"—that is, cuts—"have been associated with mild and short-lived recessions, in many cases with no recession at all. Tax-based adjustments"—tax increases—"have been associated with prolonged and deep recessions."
The debate over "failed austerity" is misleading because it emphasizes spending cuts but rarely mentions tax increases. "Austerity" plans, the Alesina studies suggest, fail to revive growth when they too heavily rely on raising taxes on income and capital—as across Europe and now in the U.S.
There is no magic ride back to prosperity. The Alesina team is describing the least-bad antidote for the long-term poison of destructive national debt. Fiscal plans based on large, permanent spending cuts are associated with renewed growth more than any alternative policy mix that has been tried. Indeed, spending cutswithout big tax increases look to be the only thing that really works. The leading example the past 15 years is . . . Canada. And just an observation: The Dow proceeded to its high after the sequester happened. The cuts were the first credible step in rebuilding private-sector confidence.
The Patty Murray budget: A $975 billion spending cut and a $975 billion tax increase.
The Paul Ryan budget: $4.6 trillion of spending cuts and no new taxes beyond the fiscal-cliff increases.
Neither budget is anything the world has never seen. The available record suggests which of the two is the road to perdition.
1b)A New Pope on a Pilgrim's Path
In choosing Pope Francis as his new name, Jorge Mario Bergoglio conjures Francis of Assisi, emphasizing the church's humility, poverty and charity.
By DANIEL JOHNSON
The election of Pope Francis may prove to be not only a turning point for the Catholic Church, but for all humanity. For the first time in a millennium, the most venerable institution on earth will be led by a man from outside Europe, the Argentine son of an Italian.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio told the multitudes after the announcement of his elevation on Wednesday that he would lead them on "the path of love"—a reference, surely, to Francis of Assisi, the great 13th-century saint from whom he has borrowed his pontifical name. The daring novelty and profound symbolism of the new pope's name cannot be overstated. Just as Benedict XVI named himself after the great founder of Western monasticism and preserver of Western civilization during the Dark Ages, so Francis has named himself after the founder of the Franciscans in order to signal the church's humility, poverty and charity.
As a Jesuit, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires has set his sights on a simpler, humbler, more missionary style than the intellectual grandeur of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, now pope emeritus.
Jesuits are of course famously intellectuals too, but Pope Francis is the son of a railroad worker and poor Italian immigrant. He has always stayed true to his roots, and his election signifies the longing of the cardinals to return the church to its roots, too—as an unworldly, dedicated band of pilgrims.
Not coincidentally, this was Benedict's farewell to his flock: To be a pilgrim, he said, was his only wish during his remaining days. A pilgrim church, then—this is the theme of continuity that unites the new pontificate with the old.
Cardinal Bergoglio, as he then was, finished second to Benedict at the 2005 papal conclave, so his appointment is neither a revolution nor a surprise. Pope Francis and the pope emeritus have much else in common, not least a steely orthodoxy that was honed in the battles with liberation theology and other Marxist heresies during the past century.
It is true that the new pope's age (76) did raise eyebrows, given the leadership vacuum that two ailing popes have created. Yet the cardinals rightly attach more importance to the character, holiness and principles of their chosen pontiff than to such superficial matters as his age. Pope Francis will, we must hope, be as youthful at heart as the young nation he was born into.
The "path of love" of Pope Francis will be a momentous journey for 1.2 billion Catholics. After so many scandals, so many souls who have abandoned the faith, here is a chance for a cleansing of the Vatican stables, a root-and-branch reform of the Curia, the Papal administration, and a radical new emphasis on the core mission of the church: to reach out to the world.
Pope John XXIII opened a new chapter when he convened the Second Vatican Council in 1962, declaring: "I want to throw open the windows of the church so that we can see out and the people can see in." John Paul II did the same when he vanquished the church's communist persecutors: "I gave the tree a good shake and the rotten apples fell." Benedict XVI took on the"dictatorship of relativism" and grappled with the threat of Islamist persecution, before setting an example of self-abnegation by retiring into a life of prayer.
Now a new pilgrim pope promises to lead the church into the next phase of its history, a phase that threatens to be more perilous even than the past century. The cardinals have taken into account the possibility that, without embracing the whole of humanity, Rome may once again decline and fall.
This was the first conclave in modern times not to be preceded by the death of a pope. It lacked the intense, heightened atmosphere that surrounded the last election in 2005, when the long-drawn-out agony of John Paul II had suffused the Catholic world in grief and gratitude. At the time, as the new pope was announced, there was a moment of confusion before the news sank in. But now there is a real sense of a new dawn, a moment of grace for the universal church, when she can put the trials and tribulations of the past behind her and begin anew the task of evangelization that is her raison d'être.
It will be incumbent on the new pope to risk everything for the sake of proclaiming the Gospel. He cannot do that without encouraging priests to practice what they preach and removing them from office when they don't. But Pope Francis will have to be more brutal than his predecessors in dealing with clerical abuse and corruption, and that may bring with it an episcopal backlash.
Even as the new pope settles into his apartment at the Vatican, he will come under fire from those who hate the church. Many a pope has suffered for his principles in the past. One of the greatest reformers, the 11th-century Pope Gregory VII, exclaimed bitterly after he was driven out of Rome by Emperor Henry IV: "I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile."
One issue cannot be dodged: the role of the laity, especially women. The decline of the female religious orders has left many women feeling that they no longer have a central vocation in a church that has always revered femininity in the form of the Virgin Mary. Pope Francis will seek to find new ways in which women can serve Christ, even though ordination is closed to them. The promotion of women into secular roles at the Vatican would be a significant first step. The impression that the hierarchy is a closed, exclusive, all-male club must be dispelled, and the unique qualities of women harnessed to restore the reputation of the church.
Francis may take some getting used to, after the two great popes who came before him, but he is a humane and gentle pastor who will win over hearts as well as minds. This pope comes from the Society of Jesus, but his mission is to restore the church into what it once was and could be again: a mission to spread the word of Jesus in society. If Pope Francis loves justice and hates iniquity, he may indeed find himself an exile in this world—but then so did Jesus himself.
Mr. Johnson is the editor of Standpoint magazine.
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| Over the past several years, I've outlined an "End of America" scenario– a global loss of faith in the U.S. dollar caused by our federal government's runaway debts. Some might point to the Dow Jones Industrial Average's new all-time highs and wonder if I got it wrong. But as I argued yesterday, when the dollar loses value, it causes the nominal price of stocks and the nominal amount of earnings to go up. In short, a weaker dollar is one path to a higher stock market. But it's not the path to prosperity or wealth. It's just a sign of more dollars in the system. For proof of this, let's look at some data points that describe our economy today versus nearly six years ago, when we were last at these levels on the Dow. By the way, I've deliberately chosen to examine specific, real-world prices as often as possible, because I have no faith in the official government statistics. What did energy cost six years ago? This is the one area where America's economy has clearly seen a drastic improvement. The discovery of massive new energy supplies in America is the one thing that could realistically save us from our debt crisis. We're now producing more liquid fuel than Saudi Arabia. That hasn't been true since 1992. As a result, the cost of energy in our economy has fallen significantly. Back in 2007, a gallon of propane cost $1.54. Today, it's only $0.84, a 45% decline. A barrel of oil cost $98 in 2007. Today, it's trading for $90. But gasoline has gone up. A gallon of gas (wholesale) in 2007 was $2.39. Today, it's $2.85. Why has gas gone up? Mostly because of political restrictions on building new refineries… but also because most of the existing refineries are designed to process sour crude, not the light, sweet crude we're producing domestically. And since the crooks in Washington won't let companies export crude oil, these markets can't be put into better balance. What did food cost six years ago? Corn is the most important food crop in America. Back in 2007, government efforts to build a domestic ethanol industry (which led to dozens of bankruptcies) sent corn prices soaring to around $4 a bushel – a price most farmers couldn't believe. (That's what happens when you decide to burn 40% of the domestic crop in an insane effort to make gasoline out of food…) Today, corn sits at $7 a bushel, 75% more expensive than it was six years ago. And we're still stupidly using food as a fuel. What were wages six years ago? The federal minimum wage at the beginning of 2007 was $5.15 per hour. Today, it's up 40%, to $7.25 per hour. How much was real estate? Real estate – where the previous credit bubble was focused – has seen price declines. The average home in Miami Beach, for example, cost $370,000 in the fall of 2007. Today, that figure is $294,000. On the other hand… rents – which were not directly connected to the big credit bubble – have gone up. A typical two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in downtown Atlanta, between Buckhead and Midtown, cost $1,075 per month in 2007. Today, it's $1,350 per month. That's a 25% increase. How much were domestic-manufactured goods? One of the best examples of the decline in the purchasing power of the dollar is domestic-manufactured items. The Ford F-150 is the bestselling vehicle in the United States. Ford is an iconic American company… and it didn't take a bailout in 2009, either. The base F-150 model retailed for $18,275 in 2007. Today, it retails for $23,670, a 30% increase. I'd argue that the real-world data shows pretty clearly that the value of the dollar has fallen by a substantial amount. I'd estimate between 20% and 40% of its purchasing power has been erased. But of course, there are other measures that matter, too. For example, how has the dollar fared against other currencies? Actually, since 2007, it has strengthened against both the yen and the euro – as those currencies have seen even greater purchasing-power losses. What about gold? Gold has gone from $832 per ounce to around $1,500 per ounce. That represents an enormous decline in the dollar's purchasing power. As the dollar has fallen, our debts have continued to grow – at a faster and faster pace. Total U.S. federal debt has gone from $9 trillion in the fall of 2007 to more than $16 trillion today. That's an increase from 65% of GDP to more than 103% of GDP. The total debt in our economy has grown from $55 trillion to more than $58 trillion. Meanwhile, the government continues to take up more and more of the credit in our economy. Likewise, as a percentage of GDP, federal government spending has grown from 19% of GDP to more than 24%. States spend another 15% of GDP on top of this, pushing government in all forms to more than 40% of GDP. Forget about the U.S. becoming the next France… we're already there. Regards, Porter Stansberry -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3)Threat and Response—Part Two “Creeping sharia” Did you know that in the past several years there have been over 50 court cases in America where sharia law was applied? Most Americans don’t know this—including those in politics, the media and academia. Consider the words of Muzammil Siddiqi, Chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America, exhorting his followers to be politically active:
Wouldn’t you agree that we should take Muslim leaders like Siddiqi and Ahmad at their word? That we should take this threat seriously?
ALAC prohibits judges from applying foreign law when doing so conflicts with the constitutional rights of anyone involved in the case. And there are many ways in which sharia law conflicts with constitutional rights—especially when it comes to the rights of women. That’s why last fall a Kansas judge refused to apply sharia law in a case, citing the Kansas ALAC law.
Meanwhile, we’re like that bunny with the battery you see on TV. We just keep going and going! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4)Germany Emerges, After America and China, as the Powerful Third Postion in the New World Order
By CONRAD BLACK,
The disintegration of the Western Alliance was a predictable response to the end of the Cold War and the disappearance
of a threat to the security of the entire democratic world. For most of the 20th century, first an imperialist and then a rabidly nationalist and racist Germany, and then Soviet Russia and international Communism, threatened the West, led by the
Americans, British, and French, as the premier democracies.
The United States provided the margin of victory at the end of World War I and furnished emergency assistance to Great
Britain to keep it in the war in 1940–41. Roosevelt compared unlimited assistance to Britain and Canada to lending your
garden hose to a neighbor fighting a fire, as he extended U.S. territorial waters from three to 1,800 miles and ordered the
U.S. Navy to attack any German vessel on detection. (He declared most of the North Atlantic “a neutrality zone,” but it was
an odd definition of neutrality.) The only time a U.S. president sought a third term, our civilization depended on his receiving it.
Germany, allied to the USSR, Italy, and Japan, had overrun France and crushed half of the shield, composed of the French
army and the British navy that had been America’s front line of defense for most of the previous century. The U.S. provided most of the war supplies of the Allies, and most Western military capacity in World War II, although the Russians
serendipitously absorbed more than 90 percent of the casualties and physical damage incurred subduing Germany, after
their shameful alliance with the Nazis blew up. And the U.S. was the overwhelmingly preeminent leader of the Western
Alliance that contained the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
When Stalin unleashed the Cold War, he committed the third-greatest strategic error of the century, after Wilhelm II’s
recourse to indiscriminate submarine war against neutral American shipping in 1917 and the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor in 1941. President Truman and his chief advisers led the reconstruction of Europe with the Marshall Plan and the
protection of the West with the purely defensive North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in which an attack upon one was an
attack upon all.
The Free World was deemed to include Franco, Salazar, Syngman Rhee, the Shah, Saudi Arabia, and the over-bemedalled Ruritanian juntas of Latin America, but almost all of those countries became democracies in the course of the Cold War.
There were errors, most conspicuously Vietnam, but it must be said that American strategic direction was masterly, from Roosevelt’s Quarantine Speech in Chicago in 1937 to the fall of the Berlin Wall (officially the “Anti-Fascist Defense Barrier”)
in 1989, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union like a soufflé.
There followed the brief shining moment when America, the omnipotent super-state, bestrode the world as an unassuming, unaspiring colossus. It had no strategy to execute such a role, and was under no particular pressure to devise one. There
has been no mortal threat. Of course the terrorists and militant Islam generally are a terrible and often tragic nuisance.
But try as demographers might to conjure up the proliferation of swaddled terrorists as an existential threat, the Islamic
countries do not remotely possess the ability to endanger the entire West and other more or less civilized areas such as
India and China, as Nazism and Soviet Communism did. The post–Cold War United States made a few purposeful noises,
such as George H. W. Bush’s “new world order” (reviving a phrase of Hitler’s from the Thirties, which Roosevelt dismissed
with the comment that it “is not new and it is not order”).
Unthreatened, though not unprovoked, like an athlete that goes out of training and affronts the mayor of New York City’s
dietary restrictions, the United States quickly built up an $800 billion current-account deficit, which in the last five years it
has topped up with $1.5 trillion annual federal budget deficits, and an explosion of debt that has all the characteristics of
deferred, vastly inflationary money-supply increases. It accounts for 46% of world military spending, but practically all of its conventional ground-forces military capacity was tied up for a whole decade in the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars, which do not
now look like they accomplished anything even slightly worthy of the 6,000 American dead and the nearly $2 trillion that
have been lost there.
George W. Bush abused the solidarity of the Western Alliance and even the United Nations after the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, by ushering 48 countries into Afghanistan, and then largely decamping to Iraq. The beneficiary of
Western largesse in Afghanistan, the arch-thief and ingrate Karzai, played footsie for a decade with terrorists financed by
Pakistan, to some degree with American aid, and now has the effrontery to accuse the United States of fomenting Taliban aggression.
No sane person mourns the passing of Saddam Hussein, whom the senior Bush could easily have disposed of in the Gulf
War of 1990 (and who died with comparative dignity, his hanging filmed on a cell phone, having been fished ignominiously
by American soldiers out of a hole in the ground). But almost nothing connected to the U.S. national interest has been
achieved by these exertions.
Now we have the demeaning spectacle of the administration’s blundering into sequestration and claiming that budgetary
constraints prevent sending the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman to the Persian Gulf, as Obama’s lassitude has practically
ensured a nuclear-armed Iran. (It is even claimed that school tours of the White House are now unaffordable.)
This administration has abdicated from world leadership, and the “pivot to Asia” is really a retrenchment to America. The
regions of the world can and should resume the management of their own security. The only one that is really a high-
explosive area is the Middle East, and the U.S. has not shown any aptitude to ameliorate political conditions there since the
Bush-Sharon agreement that accompanied the Israeli departure from Gaza in 2005.
The Middle East will probably become a nuclear-armed camp bristling with atomic weapons in the hands of all the major
local players, from Turkey to Pakistan. I do not think this has been well thought out by the recent and current American
leadership, but the U.S. never promised to take care of the security needs of the world permanently and most of its allies,
all but the British, Canadians, and Australians, were just hangers-on anyway.
This process of disintegration is evident in every region. China is acting out the old playbook of bumptious new powers, like
Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, and like Germany after Wilhelm II, in a premonitory bout of insanity, dismissed
Bismarck in 1890. The Chinese are claiming the international waters around them as their “lake,” like Mussolini describing
the Mediterranean (before the British navy smashed his fleet).
Latin America is riven between the witless and larcenous populism of Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and
Ecuador, and the countries that are actually progressing toward or have arrived at mature government, led by Brazil,
Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and
Peru. Africa and the Arab world are in convulsive turmoil.
The most startling realignment is in Europe. France, having perpetrated one of the most astounding acts of contrariety in
its modern history by electing to the presidency the utterly unqualified François Hollande on a platform of outright hostility
to every economic activity except a sort of fatuous arts-and-crafts communalism, and having been rewarded with the
greatest flight of capital since the Reign of Terror, has staged its greatest U-turn since the Munich Conference with an incomprehensibly complicated system of commercial-tax rebates that equals a 6 percent cut in unit-labor costs.
It won’t work. Britain is floundering, and Italy’s fate is now in the hands of the ineffable Berlusconi and the even more
astounding political figure Beppe Grillo, a television comedian, who in 2007 convened a national “F*** You Rally” that
attracted 2 million people.
The real European leadership is in Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel is now being outflanked on the right by
German Alternative, a group that wants to ditch Europe and the euro, and — like the UK Independence party, which
recently outpolled the Conservative government in a by-election — is now cutting heavily into the governing party’s support.
Chancellor Merkel has so far clung to her former leader Helmut Kohl’s euro policy, but she turned on a pfennig and
abandoned her nuclear-energy policy after the Fukushima meltdown, and will do the same on Europe.
A Grosse Deutschland that was the dream of Bismarck and less reputable German nationalists is emerging, with Germany
benignly conducting Austria, and the Dutch, Scandinavians, Poles, and Czechs, to a powerful third position in world
economic power (and military power as well if there is any need for it) behind the United States and China. A world of
regional leaders in reasonable relationships with one another is emerging. The United States need not fear such a thing,
but it will then be too late to lament that it isn’t the world’s super-state anymore.
cbletters@gmail.com. From the National Review.
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