Tag Archives: government

Still Equivocating

Posted on by
Reply

Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama continues to soft pedal our government’s reaction to the atrocious attacks on our embassies and our personnel.

Fox News reports that in a call Tuesday to Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, Obama had this to say:

…he rejects efforts to denigrate Islam…there is never any justification for violence against innocents.

Still caveating, still being squishy.  Still more concerned with the hurt feelings of thugs than with the safety, the honor of Americans and America.

And this, in a who-cares statement (indeed, throughout his entire prepared statement, Obama merely recited his lines, consulting his note cards more than the faces of his audience, with no emotion other than evident boredom, no outrage fueling his statement):

While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, we must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants.

No.  No conditioned statement is necessary.  No caveats.  How do you “balance” the murders of innocents against anything?

There is never any justification for violence against innocents.

Period.

Addendum:  “We tragically learned that [Ambassador Stevens] had died.”  Tragically learned.  Not learned that [Ambassador Stevens] had tragically died.  Oh, no.  It’s Obama’s tragedy, not Stevens’ and his family’s.

Think I’m being too hard on Obama for a misspeak?  Watch the video.  He was reading from his prepared script.  He knew what he was saying.

Update: from Fox News this morning:

Secretary of State Clinton issued a statement strongly denouncing the anti-Islam video that is purportedly the cause of the violence as the administration sought to pre-empt further turmoil at its embassies and consulates.

“The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video,” Clinton said before a meeting with the foreign minister of Morocco at the State Department. “We absolutely reject its content and message.”

Duck and cover.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  Apologize for having interrupted their fists with our face.  Don’t even think of denouncing the riots, the desecrations of our flag, the murders of our citizens, unequivocally.  In an actual statement of condemnation (hopefully accompanied by concrete action) that pulls no punches and that contains no other comments at all.  No, just point the finger at someone else.  Anyone else.  Especially at those evil Americans exercising their right of free speech.

Jobs

Posted on by
1

The latest Labor Department jobs report, as James Pethokoukis of AEIdeas noted, was especially dismal.  For one thing, there’s this:

The Labor Department also said that 41,000 fewer jobs were created in June and July than previously reported.  The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for June was revised from 64,000 to 45,000, and the change for July was revised from 163,000 to 141,000.

These are very sharp downward corrections of initially erroneous (it turns out) numbers.  In fact, this initial coarse overestimation of job creation by Labor has become pretty commonplace this year.  Some might say that Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s Labor Department is trying to cook the books for their boss’ benefit.  I’m not convinced of that.  It seems more likely to me that our economic situation simply is so dismal that it’s much harder today for the government to collect reasonably accurate near-real time data than it was in past times.

Here are some ugly graphs that further illustrate the depths of our economic woes three and a half years on, and three years after the nominal end of this recession.

This graph, from Pethokoukis’ article, shows the sharp fall-off (I hesitate, so far, to call it a collapse) in labor force participation over the last dozen years.

Notice that.  The recession formally ended in spring 2009, yet, as The Wall Street Journal noted, participation has kept right on falling during these three years of recovery—an unprecedented decline in our history.  And to put a bit more perspective on this decline, see the next graph, from the same WSJ link:

We haven’t had so low a per centage of Americans trying to find work in 30 years.  And it took the last three years—three years during which we’re “recovering,” we’re “on the right path,” and “it just takes a bit more time,” as some have lately insisted—to sink to such a depth.

One more ugly picture.  Pethokoukis also cited a graph from The Hamilton Project that illustrates the “jobs gap” in our current economy.  (It’s an interactive graph at the Project; go over and play with it).  This gap, according to the Project, is the monthly number of jobs that the US economy needs to create in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while also absorbing the people who enter the labor force each month.

The 96,000 jobs in this graph is the increase the latest Labor report says we had for the month of August.  The other three lines represent, in decreasing order, the effect of steady increases of 472,000 jobs/mo (from the highest single month in this century), 321,000 jobs/mo (the average of the best year in the ’90s), and 208,000 jobs/mo (the average of the best year in the 2000s).

We’re not even keeping up.  To paraphrase Anderson Cooper, those insisting we’re “making progress” are in an alternate universe.

There He Goes Again

Posted on by
Reply

Alan Blinder had another one in The Wall Street Journal the other day.  This time he’s bellyachingtalking about the Romney/Ryan ticket and averring that it’s from too deep in right field.  He supports this with three main points grounded in an FDR-ian…consensus:

  • a modest social safety net to protect vulnerable Americans from some of the downsides of unfettered markets,
  • Keynesian-style policies to shorten recessions, and
  • a progressive tax-transfer system to mitigate income inequality

It continues to amaze me that he can say those things with a straight face.  He didn’t make deep right field this time, either.  He fanned.  Struck out in three pitches.

There’s nothing modest about today’s “safety net.”  Far from FDR’s original supplemental income design for social security, with retirees expected to look to their own families for any needed additional support, today’s social security is intended to be replacement income, funded not by themselves and their own families, but solely by direct transfer payments from strangers—at immediate cost to those strangers’ ability to see to their own and their own parents’ financial futures.

Those highly touted, wholly unsuccessful Keynesian policies didn’t shorten the Great Depression, they prolonged it.  By putting floors under food and labor prices, Keynesianism made it far more difficult for companies to resume hiring and for the out-of-work (among too many others) to buy their food (and so were created food stamps).  On top of that, FDR’s Keynesian spending crowded out of the economy that already straitened private sector.  FDR’s own Treasury Secretary confessed the utter failure of these policies.  Henry Morgenthau confided to his diary:

We have tried spending money.  We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.  I want to see this country prosper.  I want to see people get a job.  I want to see people get enough to eat.  We have never made good on our promises.  I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started.  And enormous debt to boot.

Obama’s Keynesian stimulus spending has been a similarly dismal failure.  Unemployment remains above 8% (and underemployment above 14.5%) nearly four years after he began his spending spree.  Fewer people are working today than at the end of the Panic of 2008, even with the 4 million “new” jobs that the economy has created despite his policies.  Obama today has spent “more than we have ever spent before,” it still “does not work,” and he has “never made good on [his] promises.”

To see what does work, review the actions taken by President Ronald Reagan in response to the Carter Recession.  Then go back to the FDR era—just a decade prior to FDR himself—and review the actions taken by President Warren Harding in response to the Depression of 1920-1921, still in progress when he took office (and begun from the policies of another Progressive President).

Mitigate income inequality?  This is the wrong goal, and separately, it’s immoral.  It’s the wrong goal because everyone’s economic prosperity flows from supporting opportunity equality, not income equality, so that every man can show the best that there is in him, so that  every man can seek to the fullest of his ability (in John Adams’ terms) his own happiness.  This also allows—and actively facilitates—every man to maximize his ability to satisfy his duties to himself, his family, and those less well off than he by maximizing his ability to accumulate the resources with which to achieve that satisfaction.  Working toward income equality necessarily caps the ability of a man to maximize the outcomes of his own potential, and it disincentivizes both the man redistributed from and the recipient.  Here, then, is the immorality of forced income equality: it denies every man his opportunity to honor his own obligations.

There are a couple of lesser points in Blinder’s piece.

Any piece of legislation running 2,319 pages will have flaws.

There’s a hint there.  And

For people now under age 55, the Republicans would like to replace Medicare by vouchers that will almost certainly fall short of covering future insurance costs.

There are two small things about this.  First, it’s a carefully static analysis that ignores free market responses to the competition that flows from letting people exercise responsibility for their own medical costs.  But, then, how free would our market be after four more years of Progressive central planning?  The other thing is that this is of a piece with the Progressives’ general refusal to allow any part of today’s Social Security to be privatized.  Americans, you see, are just too grindingly stupid to be able to manage our own fiscal affairs.  We need our Progressive Betters in government to “guide” us.

“How Democrats Made America Exceptional”

Posted on by
Reply

Indeed.  But not in a good way.  Alan Colmes has an op-ed of this title in The Wall Street Journal; let’s look at some of his claims.

Conservatives blast the left for not appreciating “American exceptionalism”—even though Barack Obama is the only president to have ever used that phrase, at least in the past eight decades or so.

Which Democratic Presidential Candidate Obama did pejoratively:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

Sure.  Our exceptionalism is just one among 20.  Or 192.  But this is a minor quibble.

Here’s the important stuff.  Here’s Social Security, for example.

Roosevelt created Social Security [wrote Colmes], a program that today keeps 40% of seniors above the poverty line and helps families with disabilities and those who have lost loved ones.

FDR did this at a time when there were seven American workers for every retiree, and the retirees had a life expectancy of five years in retirement.  Moreover, FDR designed it as a supplemental income program, with the retirees still expected to look to their families for any additional support needed.  Today, Social Security has three workers for every retiree, and the retirees have a life expectancy of fifteen years in retirement.  And today’s family man is taxed for the current retirement support of utter strangers.  He’s not allowed to set that money aside for his own retired parents in particular, or for his own future retirement.  Under these demographic facts, Colmes objects to redesigning Social Security, so that the promise of a safety net can be kept—if under different guise.

[Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan] wants to dismantle that same Social Security program.

No, let’s just leave it alone, and let it fail completely.

Food stamps.  Ah, yes.

Today the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, feeds one in seven Americans. The program was established in 1939 by FDR’s then Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace.  Recipients are not all lazy bums sitting on their posteriors….

The only ones talking about food stamp recipients being lazy are Progressives trying to distract by denying a charge that isn’t being made.

More importantly, though, Colmes actually recites that food stamp dependency ratio like it’s a good thing that government policies have reduced 15% of Americans to such straits.  But why do we have a food stamp program at all?  FDR, via the National Labor Relations Act, put a floor under the wages employers were allowed to pay—at the height of the Depression, with 20+% unemployment—thus making it too expensive for employers to hire.  On top of this, he put a floor, with his Agricultural Adjustment Acts, under the price of food at which farmers could sell, ensuring that all of those out of work Americans—too many now unemployable by law—could not afford their daily bread.  Enter FDR’s food stamps, in an attempt to enable the artificially priced out of work to buy their food at those artificially inflated prices.  And those CCC and WPA programs of which Colmes is so proud?  Well-intentioned, to be sure.  But they worked in concert with FDR’s price and wage floors to crowd out the private employers that otherwise would have done the hiring—with the private economy’s far greater impact.  Indeed, these New Deal policies, far from providing relief from the impact of the Depression, prolonged it.

“Reproductive rights.”  Colmes has this to say:

The fight for women’s rights continues, as regressives try to put an end to already-established reproductive rights. Even if you don’t believe that 98% of Catholic women have used birth control, as a 2011 Guttmacher Institute study showed, the overwhelming majority has[.]

and

If Messrs. Romney and Ryan have their way, reproductive rights would be overturned and millions of Americans denied health-care coverage.

Here Colmes is cynically conflating the right to choose to have children—or not—with insurance coverage for the birth control mechanisms and abortifacients that facilitate that choice.  And he insists that it’s OK to force people or their religious institutions to pay for these even when it goes against their religious beliefs.  The fact that so many of us are sinners, anyway, somehow excuses this.  More, Colmes conflates objection to being forced to pay for something that violates one’s conscience with denial of availability altogether.  This is just more cynicism.  There’s nothing wrong with birth control for those who want it.  Insurance policies even exist that cover the incredibly cheap contraceptives as well as the abortifacients.  The problem is when the user is, by law, allowed to force others to pay for her contraceptives, her abortifacients, instead of buying them with her own money.

Colmes’ Progressives want the wrong type of exceptionalism for America.  They don’t want the old, foundational exceptionalism of self-reliance, individual responsibility, and a limited government that recognizes both the fundamental wisdom of Americans and that it has no standing to do for us for our own good.  They want Big Government acting in our stead.

Hmm….

Posted on by
Reply

Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama had a lot of rhetoric in his acceptance speech last night.  He also had this, ostensibly referring to Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney:

You might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can’t visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally.

Was Obama really talking about himself, though?  After all, he’s the one who insulted Great Britain by sending back to them the bust of Churchill that had sat in the oval office for years, a gift from our closest ally.  And then doubled down on the mess by giving an iPod full of Obamatalk to Queen Elizabeth. He’s the one who travelled to Copenhagen to make a personal plea (“I’m the President,” he said then, and in his speech last night) for Chicago to host the 2016 Olympics, only to see them go with Rio de Janeiro without any further consideration of Chicago’s bid.

How’d he do in Beijing last week, then?

Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China has laid claim to the entire South China Sea, nearly to the shores of the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia.  Without any opposition from anyone, other than helpless protests from those victimized nations—and idle chit-chat from the pivoted-toward-Asia United States.