Monthly Archives: May 2012

The Desperation of President Obama

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President Obama has opened a new front in his re-election ad hominem campaign.  Now, through his chief campaign strategist, David Axelrod, he’s accusing those who disagree with him of being criminals.  This is a continuation of the Obama effort to draw attention away from those failed policies behind the curtain, and it demonstrates both his own moral bankruptcy and his inability to defend his policies on their merits or results.

What Obama is saying now, using Axelrod’s mouth:

We’re also going to be prepared, and I want to be clear, to respond to the attacks that we expect to continue from—not just from the Romney campaign but from the Karl [Rove] and Koch brothers contract killers over there in SuperPAC land, who are going to continue to pound away on behalf of Governor Romney[.]

Expensive Energy

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Do “green” energy subsidies work?  Pretty much by definition, they do not.  Without the subsidies, “green” energy is unsustainably expensive.  Even—especially—when the subsidy is a government mandate to use/buy the “green” energy, the only thing green about it is the money necessary to buy it.  The cost of the ethanol subsidy/mandate in our gasoline has been well documented as appearing not only in the cost of our gasoline, but in the cost our food, as well.

Wind energy provides another example of an expensive, and failed, “green” energy subsidy.  The Wall Street Journal writes

Twenty-nine states have these rules requiring local utilities to purchase between 20% and 33% of their electric power from renewable sources.

Minnesota, in particular, the WSJ reports, required as recently as 2007 that utilities in the state push their use of renewable energy  to 25% by 2025, to 12% by this year.  That means wind energy because in that Midwestern and northern state, the sun doesn’t shine as much as it does in New Mexico or Arizona.

The Minnesota Rural Electric Association says its members lost $70 million last year because these utilities are forced to buy wind power they “can’t use and can’t sell.”  Even so, residential utility bills for MREA’s customers run $50 to $100 per year higher than they would absent the mandate.  That’s not chump change for Mr Everyman.

What are Minnesotans getting for their extra $100 of energy expenditures?  Nada.  Not more energy.  The wind does not blow all the time, so the wind mills stand idle while still costing money.  When the wind blows too hard, the wind mills must be shut down, so they stand idle while still costing money.

Not more jobs.  Minnesota’s wind-generated electricity doesn’t come from wind mills built in Minnesota.  They import it from North Dakota.  When the wind is blowing just right.

The WSJ also described a study published this year by the Manhattan Institute, a New York City-based market-oriented think tank, that compared states with renewable energy mandates with those that allow utilities to purchase the cheapest electricity available.

The states with mandates paid 31.9% more for electricity than states without them.  Residents of North Dakota, a state without a mandate, pay $7.63 per kilowatt hour for electricity.  Neighboring Minnesota pays $10.76.

Hmm….

Thoughts on Defense Spending

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Mark Gunzinger and Andre Krepinevich (with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a non-profit defense-oriented think tank), writing in The Wall Street Journal, warn of a reversal of events that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union—an arms race that they couldn’t afford and so couldn’t win.  This time, it’s Russia and the People’s Republic of China that are pursuing an arms race, this time of powerful, fast, accurate weapons that will bankrupt us countering, if we don’t change our weapons philosophy.

Russia and the PRC are actively developing high-energy lasers designed to shoot down incoming weapons, while we continue to rely on expensive—$10 million per shot—missiles and fighters—$150+ million—per to do the same mission.

Gunzinger and Krepinevich report on two types of lasers that we could field in six years, were the will extant to make the switch: solid state and chemical lasers.

Experts in the US Navy state that within six years, using technologies already developed and demonstrated in test firings, they could field solid-state lasers on warships with sufficient power to counter anti-ship cruise missiles, unmanned aircraft, and fast-attack “swarm” craft like those of Iran.  These lasers could reduce the need for warships to carry bulky—and expensive—defensive munitions, while freeing space for other weaponry.

On the matter of chemical lasers, they write

…new chemical lasers can generate much greater power outputs than their predecessors, enabling them to engage a wide range of air and missile threats, including long-range ballistic missiles. Also within six years…the Air Force and the Army could field ground-based, megawatt-class chemical lasers to help protect key bases in the Persian Gulf and Western Pacific.

And in the homeland.

But that’s just one set of game changing weapons.  Another weapon is the rail gun on which the Navy also is working.  Rail guns use electromagnetic energy rather than explosives—gun powder—to accelerate a projectile down their barrels.  As a result, such weapons can fire accurately a projectile much farther—out to 100 miles vs a current 13 miles—and the ships carrying them don’t need to commit limited shipboard space to that gunpowder, and so they don’t have to worry about all that explosive going off if the ship is hit in combat.

France and the US

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Guy Milliere has an interesting article on the French elections last Sunday and on the decline of a once proud nation (the article was written before the elections, but what he wrote remains valid today–RTWT).

Milliere decries the failure of France and sees its present strait as no better than the precipice, beginning with:

…among the 10 candidates in the first round [of the French presidential elections last month], three were Trotskyites advocating a Leninist revolution; a disciple of Lyndon La Rouche; a former Norwegian judge who appears to think she is an environmental Robespierre (Eva Joly); a populist from the extreme right (Marine Le Pen); a moderate who would find his place in the left wing of the American Democratic Party (François Bayrou); a Gaullist speaking as if it were still 1965 (Nicolas Dupont Aignan); a very « socialist » Socialist (François Hollande); and the outgoing President Nicolas Sarkozy, a Bonapartist who, in the UK, would be to the left of the Labour Party.

At least with a two-party system (and occasional third-party spoiler) like ours (or even a three-party system with occasional spoiler flashes in the pan, as in Great Britain), the fringe groups don’t have much post-election effect, beyond the spoiling aspect of turning an election from one main party to the other.

But Milliere continued:

…no candidate defended free-market principles;…all of the candidates harshly attacked the financial world, multinational corporations, and globalization;…of the two finalists, one[‘s]… program appears to have been written before the development of the Internet.

Now we get to the parallels.  President Obama’s hostility toward free market principles, and toward business generally and banks explicitly, are both manifest (his claims to the contrary even as he follows them with screeds against the fat cats notwithstanding) and rooted in (and unchanged from) the late ’60s and early ’70s radical “community organizing” of his mentors.

Milliere went on:

France’s problems date from long before the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy.  [It is a] country where no budget has been balanced since 1974, and where public expenditures have risen continuously in recent decades to represent a crippling 56% of its gross domestic product….  It is a country whose public debt is growing far faster than the public debt of its main economic partners in Europe, and will hit 87% of GDP this year (actually 146%, if what France owes to the European Union is included).  It is a country where reports on the inevitable failure of pension systems were presented to successive governments for over 25 years without a decision being proposed or taken.  It is a country where the…number of people living in poverty is between eight and ten million out of a population of 65 million.  It is also a country where…two-thirds of all higher education diplomas are worthless on the labor market.  Graduates with Master’s degree become fast-food servers or cashiers in a supermarket—if a position is available.

So it is in the US.  Our current economic disaster has been years, and administrations, in the making: very few actually balanced (as opposed to accounting gimmick balancing) budgets and national debt exploding over the last three years.  We’ve been ignoring the impending failure of our entitlement programs for decades, even though the originally forecast date range of their bankruptcy has moved very little in all that time.  Nearly 45 million Americans are currently receiving food stamps, which is roughly the same 14% of our population as is Milliere’s Frenchmen living in poverty; although, according to the CBO report at the link, that number is 70% higher than it was in 2007, immediately before the housing bubble burst.  And we insist on loaning taxpayer monies to students who wish to degree in gender studies, women’s contemporary literary issues, or basket weaving instead of in the productive STEM skills that a burgeoning and technologically evolving economy needs for national survival.

It’s necessary to change course.  And that course change must be in the direction of smaller, limited government that leaves more of our money, and our responsibility, in our hands.

Or we’ll end up like France.

Tomorrow!

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President Obama once said that if he doesn’t turn our economy around, he would be a one-term president.  Now he says that the question

is not just about how we’re doing today, it’s about how we’re doing tomorrow.

But as the Progressive’s hero, John Maynard Keynes once said

In the long run we are all dead.

Indeed.  Americans are hurting today.  Today, the labor force is shrinking to historic lows as people give up on finding a job.  Today, people can’t pay their bills.  Today, people are losing their homes.  Today, people are becoming ever more dependent on food stamps.

No, as Obama said in another of his sound-bite slogans, “We can’t wait” for tomorrow.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, I love you, tomorrow
You’re always a day away