I am soon to have dinner with a budding new friend who is very bright, very Savannah. We have shared some interesting e mails and we are both in agreement on an awful lot. He approaches matters from the social side and I from the economic side. He received a liberal education, I a business one.
As our relationship unfurls I am sure it will provide us both many interesting hours of conflicting conversation.
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Another Sowell article about fact free liberals. (See 2 below.)
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Ornstein on the next three years. (See 3 below.)
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As I just wrote in a previous memo , Obama will make income inequality his SOTU focus. Why? Because he must keep people stirred up and against each other. That is the only way he knows how to lead - from the rear stirring the pot and creating divisiveness and mistrust among Americans.
That way the disgruntled continue to feel aggrieved and do not recognize his lack of accomplishments and he can continue to throw them a government bone via food stamps while his policies prevent them from getting a job and a good meal. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) Let's chill out about global warming
By John Stossel
The Hill, the newspaper that covers Congress, says this year, there will be a major policy battle over "climate change." Why?
We already waste billions on pointless gestures that make people think we're addressing global warming, but the earth doesn't notice or care. What exactly is "global warming" anyway?
That's really four questions:
1. Is the globe warming? Probably. Global temperatures have risen. Climate changes. Always has. Always will.
2. Is the warming caused by man? Maybe. There's decent evidence that at least some of it is. We can love nature and still hate the tyranny of bureaucrats' rules.
3. But is global warming a crisis? Far from it. It's possible that it will become a crisis. Some computer models suggest big problems, but the models aren't very accurate. Some turned out to be utterly wrong. Clueless scaremongers like Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Cal., seize on weather disasters to blame man's carbon output. After Oklahoma's tragic tornadoes last year, Boxer stood on the floor of the Senate and shrieked, "Carbon could cost us the planet!" But there were actually fewer tornadoes last summer.
4. If the globe is warming, can America do anything about it? No. What we do now is pointless. I feel righteous riding my bike to work. That's just shallow. Even if all Americans replaced cars with bicycles, switched to fluorescent light bulbs, got solar water heaters, etc., it would have no discernible effect on the climate. China builds a new coal-fueled power plant almost every week; each one obliterates any carbon reduction from all our windmills and solar panels.
Weirdly, the only thing that's reduced America's carbon output has been our increased use of natural gas (it releases less greenhouse gas than oil and coal). But many environmentalists fight the fracking that produces it.
Someday, we'll probably invent technology that could reduce man's greenhouse gas creation, but we're nowhere close to it now. Rather than punish poor people with higher taxes on carbon and award ludicrous subsidies to Al Gore's "green" investments, we should wait for the science to advance.
If serious warming happens, we can adjust, as we've adjusted to big changes throughout history.
It will be easier to adjust if America is not broke after wasting our resources on trendy gimmicks like windmills.
Environmental activists say that if we don't love their regulations, we "don't care about the earth." Bunk. We can love nature and still hate the tyranny of bureaucrats' rules. We do need some rules. It's good that government built sewage treatment plants.
Today, the rivers around Manhattan are so clean that I swim in them. It's good that we forced industry to stop polluting the air. Scrubbers in smokestacks and catalytic converters on cars made our lives better.
The air gets cleaner every time someone replaces an old car with a new one. But those were measures against real pollution -- soot, particulates, sulfur, etc.
What global warming hysterics want to fight is merely carbon dioxide. That's what plants breathe. CO2 may prove to be a problem, but we don't know that now.
The world has real problems, though: malaria, malnutrition, desperate poverty. Our own country, while relatively rich, is deep in debt. Obsessing about greenhouse gases makes it harder to address these more serious problems.
Environmentalists assume that as people get richer and use more energy, they pollute more. The opposite is true. As nations industrialize, they pay more attention to pollution. Around the world, it's the most prosperous nations that now have the cleanest air and water.
Industrialization allows people to use fewer resources. Instead of burning trees for power, we make electricity from natural gas. We figure out how to get more food from smaller pieces of land. And one day we'll probably even invent energy sources more efficient than oil and gas.
We'll use them because they're cost-effective, not because government forces us to.
So let's chill out about global warming. We don't need more micromanagement from government. We need less.
Then free people -- and rapidly increasing prosperity -- will create a better world
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2) Fact-Free Liberals: Part III
By Thomas Sowell
Since this year will mark the 50th anniversary of the "war on poverty," we can expect many comments and commemorations of this landmark legislation in the development of the American welfare state.
The actual signing of the "war on poverty" legislation took place in August 1964, so the 50th anniversary is some months away. But there have already been statements in the media and in politics proclaiming that this vast and costly array of anti-poverty programs "worked."
Of course everything "works" by sufficiently low standards, and everything "fails" by sufficiently high standards. The real question is: What did the "war on poverty" set out to do -- and how well did it do it, if at all?
Without some idea of what a person or a program is trying to do, there is no way to know whether what actually happened represented a success or a failure. When the hard facts show that a policy has failed, nothing is easier for its defenders than to make up a new set of criteria, by which it can be said to have succeeded.
That has in fact been what happened with the "war on poverty."
Both President John F. Kennedy, who launched the proposal for a "war on poverty" and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, who guided the legislation through Congress and then signed it into law, were very explicit as to what the "war on poverty" was intended to accomplish.
Its mission was not simply to prove that spending money on the poor led to some economic benefits to the poor. Nobody ever doubted that. How could they?
What the war on poverty was intended to end was mass dependency on government. President Kennedy said, "We must find ways of returning far more of our dependent people to independence."
The same theme was repeated endlessly by President Johnson. The purpose of the "war on poverty," he said, was to make "taxpayers out of taxeaters." Its slogan was "Give a hand up, not a handout." When Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark legislation into law, he declared: "The days of the dole in our country are numbered."
Now, 50 years and trillions of dollars later, it is painfully clear that there is more dependency than ever.
Ironically, dependency on government to raise people above the poverty line had been going down for years before the "war on poverty" began. The hard facts showed that the number of people who lived below the official poverty line had been declining since 1960, and was only half of what it had been in 1950.
On the more fundamental question of dependency, the facts were even clearer. The proportion of people whose earnings put them below the poverty level -- without counting government benefits -- declined by about one-third from 1950 to 1965.
All this was happening before the "war on poverty" went into effect -- and all these trends reversed after it went into effect.
Nor was this pattern unique. Other beneficial social trends that were going on before the 1960s reversed after other bright ideas of that decade were put into effect.
Massive "sex education" programs were put into schools, claiming that this was urgently needed to reduce a "crisis" of teenage pregnancies and venereal diseases. But teenage pregnancies and venereal diseases had both been going down for years.
The rate of infection for gonorrhea, for example, declined every year from 1950 through 1959, and the rate of syphilis infection was, by 1960, less than half of what it had been in 1950. Both trends reversed and skyrocketed after "sex education" became pervasive.
The murder rate had been going down for decades, and in 1960 was only half of what it had been in 1934. That trend suddenly reversed after the liberal changes in criminal laws during the 1960s. By 1974, the murder rate was more than twice as high as it had been in 1961.
While the fact-free liberals celebrate the "war on poverty" and other bright ideas of the 1960s, we are trying to cope with yet another "reform" that has made matters worse, ObamaCare.
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On the cusp of his 2014 State of the Union message, President Obama is not exactly floating on air.
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How Obama Can Save His Presidency (Or Not)
(Alex Wong/Getty Images)
On the cusp of his 2014 State of the Union message, President Obama is not exactly floating on air.
His fifth year, which started out with some promise of major legislative accomplishments—momentum for
bipartisan legislation on gun background checks and immigration, movement with a cadre of Republican
senators toward at least a mini-grand bargain involving revenues and serious long-term changes in
Medicare and Social Security—came a cropper early, when the gun bill failed on—what else—a filibuster
in the Senate. As a harbinger, Sen. Pat Toomey, the chief Republican sponsor of the background-check
bill, explained its failure to Pennsylvania reporters by saying some of his GOP colleagues simply
wouldn't vote in favor because Barack Obama was for it.
Second-term presidencies rarely result in strings of major accomplishments. Things get tougher as each
year passes. One's own party begins to get distance as the sixth-year midterms approach, and the
number of one's partisans almost inevitably diminishes with that election. And members of the other party
pay less and less attention to a lame duck.
But those generalizations are not inevitable. There have been examples of major policy victories in a
second term, most notably Ronald Reagan's bipartisan triumph on tax reform. And trends and patterns
are not written in stone. Here is a very optimistic scenario for the rest of Barack Obama's term, followed
by an equally pessimistic one.
Through a combination of his skilled use of the bully pulpit to define
an agenda, and the growing public unease about dramatic economic
inequality and long-term unemployment, the president scores a set
of small but important victories, from an increase in the minimum
wage to an extension of unemployment insurance. Building on ideas
that have been advanced by conservative intellectuals, Obama finds
a bipartisan coalition to support a series of moves to deal with the
long-term unemployment problem, including job-sharing, incentives
for businesses to hire new workers, a revamp of the Earned Income Tax credit, and a governmen
t-supported apprenticeship program. He uses executive action to expand his manufacturing initiative.
A newly awakened business community lobbies aggressively to head off another debt-limit debacle and
to move the House to pass a narrow version of immigration reform that gets to a conference and
provides an avenue for a comprehensive bill that passes the Senate with broad bipartisan support and
gets adopted with a different coalition (more Ds than Rs) in the House. The business community also
throws its muscle behind a major infrastructure package, creating an infrastructure bank financed in part
via repatriated business profits from abroad. New Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden
works with Dave Camp and Paul Ryan to pull together a tax-reform plan similar to the one Wyden and
Dan Coats, among others, supported in the past, broadening the base, reducing deductions and credits,
and also providing some redistribution to aid lower income Americans.
works with Dave Camp and Paul Ryan to pull together a tax-reform plan similar to the one Wyden and
Dan Coats, among others, supported in the past, broadening the base, reducing deductions and credits,
and also providing some redistribution to aid lower income Americans.
Obamacare, following the earlier patterns of Medicare and Medicare Part D, moves beyond its early
glitches with bumps but increasingly smooth operation, with the active assistance of an insurance industry
and other health providers who have a strong stake in making it work. Like Massachusetts and Romney
care, the young and healthy sign up at the very last moment, creating reasonable risk pools. Most voters
, unaffected directly by it, don't embrace it but begin to ignore it, while most who are affected are happy
with the new opportunities and subsidies lowering their costs. Health cost inflation continues to slow,
easing deficit pressures and providing a boost to the economy.
The mid-term elections keep a narrow Republican majority in the House, but also leave Democrats in the
majority in the Senate, albeit with a smaller margin. But the continuing majority enables Obama to fill
many more judgeships under the new filibuster regime, and to handle the turnover in his executive
positions.
The energy boom continues, providing opportunities for American energy exports, another boost to the
economy, and reducing carbon emissions as more natural gas, cleaner coal, and alternative fuels enter
the system, encouraged by the green jobs boosted by the infrastructure program. Obama achieves
significant additional progress on the climate-change front through assertive and creative use of
executive power. And he achieves notable successes on the global front, in Syria, Iran, and the Middle
East. If Iraq and Afghanistan remain in turmoil, with sectarian violence and frequent bombings, they
happen without a significant American military presence or American casualties, and neither country
descends back into the abyss.
Now the bad scenario. March 2014 brings another debt-limit farce. Speaker John Boehner, after blasting
outside radical conservative forces and shepherding through the spending deal, overcompensates on
the other side by indulging the radicals with a set of unachievable demands before increasing the debt
ceiling. This time, we actually breach the limit before a severe adverse reaction from the global markets
forces an extension. But the brief breach means another downgrade in U.S. credit, which forces some
pension and mutual funds to divest their treasuries, leading to serious economic hiccups, raising interest
rates and hurting economic growth, and causing even more public anger at the idiots in Washington.
Republicans in Congress refuse to extend unemployment insurance, leaving large numbers of long-term
unemployed struggling to stay in their residences or pay their heating bills. House Republicans refuse to
move any immigration bill, believing that even a narrow border-security bill will trigger a conference and
the speaker will pull a bait-and-switch and force them to vote on a comprehensive bill with amnesty. Tax
reform falters, with Democrats demanding some revenues and Republicans insisting on using tax reform
to cut taxes further. Even a narrower corporate-tax reform flounders when businesses demand not just
lower marginal rates but retention of all their tax breaks.
The health reform rollout continues to be rocky and difficult, with a new wave of glitches at the back end,
meaning many people who signed up and thought they had insurance find out they don't. Insurers
struggle with the new risk pools, and the worst projections of Obamacare opponents prove accurate—
further angering Americans about government and damaging Democrats and Obama. The mid-term
elections retain the GOP majority in the House and give Republicans a one-vote majority in the Senate,
leaving Obama with an inability for his final two years to fill any significant executive positions, much less
judgeships. Investigations into alleged wrongdoing and scandal ramp up in both houses, with Darrell Issa
unleashed even more, and joined by counterparts in the Senate. The new GOP majority in the Senate,
working with the House, pushes for more budget cuts in discretionary spending, further eroding our
health and scientific-research infrastructure.
Syria collapses into regions controlled by different factions, including Alawites, Sunni and radical Shiites,
providing new ground for terrorists, and the deal with Iran over nuclear weapons falls apart. Karzai falls
in Afghanistan, with a new Taliban regime emerging. Iraq's vicious civil war intensifies. Under pressure
from a coalition of war-weary and antiwar liberals and libertarian isolationist conservatives, America pulls
back significantly from its role in the world, leaving new opportunities for Russia, China, and Iran.
Of course, the greatest likelihood is that we, and the president, will end up somewhere in between. One
would have to be hopelessly pollyannish to expect these major legislative achievements. But there is a
real chance, with some savvy and toughness on his part, and just a little bit of luck, that he could end up
with a final three years tilted enough to the bright side that he can be satisfied
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4)State of the Union to focus on inequality
By Amie Parnes and Justin Sink -
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