Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV), during his Democrats’ attempt to ram through, unilaterally, another enormous extension of Federal unemployment insurance payments (in the middle of a quickening, according to those same Democrats, economic recovery) had this to say about one political party or another:
[They are] continually denigrating our economy…and frankly, I believe, our country.
I wonder: was he talking about his fellow Democrats?
There has been much discussion concerning the motivation behind President Barack Obama’s major foreign policy initiatives; Power Line has offered a useful summary and links (which should be followed). PL then offered its own view from that summary:
In my view, the deeper source of Obama’s strong tilt towards Iran is the same as the one that caused his “reset” with Russia, his early cozying up to Assad, and his support for Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. That source is an attraction to anti-American strongmen, a familiar phenomenon among American leftists for the better part of a century.
Given the outcomes of Obama’s initiatives (and of his other moves, particularly vis-à-vis Israel), that’s certainly a plausible view, and I don’t entirely disagree with it.
However, I also don’t think that’s all there is to it, and I don’t think that’s even a major part of Obama’s motivation. I think his motivation is (nearly) entirely domestic.
He spent most of his first administration ramming through Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, and he has been pushing for his version of immigration reform and his version of various welfare programs, and he’s had to fight with the minority party every step of the way.
I think he knew that would be the case from the jump—as far back as his community organizing days and his time in the Illinois Senate. I think he just wanted to reach accords—any accords—with our major adversaries and outright enemies so he could back burner external affairs and focus on his domestic agenda.
Recall that his first foreign policy initiative was bringing about America’s surrender to the Russians concerning our now functionally scrapped ability to defend ourselves against missile attack—Iran’s or Russia’s. Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Iran, terrorist organizations, the EU, etc, etc, etc were, and are, just additional distractions from his domestic imperatives, and that’s why his external policies have been so poorly thought out and hastily executed. This also explains his choice of State Department Secretaries—shallow thinkers who won’t distract him too much with external initiative wants or needs.
He’s given those and his Secretaries all of the attention that distractions get.
…in the Obama administration’s war on education.
The DoJ and the Department of Education have sent out another of their Dear Colleague letters, this time concerning the disparate impact of punishing minority students in our public schools. Investor’s Business Daily summarized the letter,
Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan Wednesday issued “recommendations” urging schools to find ways to avoid suspending or expelling students who act out. …
The two Cabinet members argued that suspensions deny minority students time in the classroom….
And suspensions of “majority” students don’t have the same effect? No, that’s not Eric Holder’s and Arne Duncan’s argument. They argued in their 32 pg letter that “minority” students get the treatment disproportionately—disparately. Never mind that these students misbehave…disparately.
The danger of applying this pernicious and racist disparate impact meme is clearly identified by Commissioner Gail Heriot of the United States Commission on Civil Rights in her remarks on the Commission’s School Discipline and Disparate Impact report:
There are two sides to the “disparate impact” coin. Secretary Duncan focuses only upon the fact that, as a group, African-American students are suspended and expelled more often than other students. By failing to consider the other side of the coin—that African-American students may be disproportionately victimized by disorderly classrooms—his policy could easily end up doing more harm than good to the very group he is attempting to help.
Indeed. This disparate impact policy on school discipline will have a disparate impact on minority students’ ability to get an education in a classroom full of disparate impact-protected misbehavers. All while carefully ignoring the underlying causes of one group having a higher misbehavior rate than another group.
More, a footnote in Heriot’s remarks also hints at the fundamental lawlessness of the Obama administration [emphasis added]:
4 [page 98 of the report, the same page as the portion of Heriot’s remarks quoted above] I agree with Commissioner Gaziano that Title VI simply does not permit the Department of Education to proceed against schools on a disparate impact theory and that the Department’s regulation nonetheless adopting that theory, 34 CFR sec. 100.3, is therefore unauthorized by law. It requires actual discrimination. See Section 601 (Title VI) of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 USC sec. 2000d (No person shall “on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”). See also Alexander v Sandoval, 532 US 275 (2001). I also agree with Commissioner Gaziano that the problem with disparate impact analysis is not simply that it goes beyond what Congress authorized in Title VI; it actually contradicts Title VI. If one group receives more school discipline than another because (for whatever reason) its members violated more school rules than the other, race-conscious efforts to alter the “disparate impact” are usually themselves discriminatory.
Sadly, this phase, in addition to denying minority students access to their education, is also another example of the unconscious racism of the Left.
Inequality in incomes and in accumulated material prosperity are the inevitable outcomes of our inalienable right to equality of opportunity, as exercised through our differing endowments of talents, skills, work ethic, and luck.
The well off—including those best off—use their gains from those inequalities in a variety of ways. Some of these ways are purely personal: luxuries and luxuries for their families. Some of those ways also include support for what are often termed, loosely, “the arts,” and other cultural supports and advancements. It is from these, and not from government, for instance, that support for museums of all sorts come, support for many artists originates, support for invention ideation and development begins.
These well off, also, serve as an example and a goad: I can do that. I want that stuff, too. And the efforts to emulate and/or to make oneself able to obtain those material symbols of “I’ve arrived” feed into the ideation/development/support cycle.
Of course this generates a steady supply of those less well off, a steady generation of poor. These folks see the prosperity—they’re not as stupid or as dead-end as Progressives make them out to be with the latters’ drumbeat of offers of welfare and dependency—and they do what they can to go where the success stories are, and then they do their best to achieve those same successes or something like them. In the absence of interference by governments [sic], they almost always succeed, almost always by their children’s generation if not of themselves directly. The Statue of Liberty stands as the quintessential beacon, inviting everyone, but especially inviting those seeking personal and familial betterment.
Our greatness, our exceptionalism, our status as a magnet for the world, though, is jeopardized when government gets in the way of our poor. Reread the preceding paragraphs. The thick cord that runs through them is the idea that our poor want to—and most importantly can—make themselves better off than they were. Our poor are fully capable of moving themselves up the economic ladder, fully capable of stopping being poor and becoming middle class, of leaving the middle class and entering upper classes, ultimately of reaching the top. If they cannot do that for themselves (although some do), they can create the conditions within which their children can (and most do), and those children can—and most do—create the conditions that enable their own children, the grandchildren of our first generation in these paragraphs, to move up still further.
But to do that, government must stay out of their way, or, today, get out of their way.
And so we’re back to income inequality. That inequality is what provides the motivation. And—hated concept of the Left—it trickles down from the top, too. As I alluded above, it’s the rich that provide the market for new things, for luxuries. These become desired by the middle class and poor and so while increased demand props up prices, increased production—and growing competition to produce in order to get some of that new market—outstrips demand, and prices fall—and the middle class and poor ultimately can afford what was exclusively the goodies of the rich. See air conditioning in houses, power steering and brakes in cars, televisions, telephones, and pocket computers that also run phone apps, and so on.
If, however, being successful is punished through government-mandated wealth redistribution, rather than that “redistribution” being the outcome of individual choices in a free market (where wealth is redistributed, simultaneously, in both directions, by every voluntary exchange leaving each participant in possession of things he wanted but did not have before the exchange) and individual choices in the means and objects of satisfying individual Judeo-Christian duties to help those less well off, then two things occur: the heretofore successful cease working so hard to be successful, and so the high end of wealth steadily lowers, except for those few who can find adequate favor from government. And the poor cease striving to better their own and their family’s lots, satisfying themselves with government handouts from other’s wealth; and so, from that dependence on those handouts, the low end of wealth also steadily lowers, and each one’s absolute “share” also steadily dwindles in size as the wealth from which those “shares” are confiscated steadily shrinks.
And that destroys both the capacity and the impetus for upward mobility.
The final outcome is a more subtle and general impoverishment, both materially and morally—the latter is especially insidious, as it is the moral that gives strength to the capacity for increasing the prosperity of all. The well-off lose their moral sense of helping others, both from malaise, as government confiscates their output, and from a surrender of their moral responsibility to that government, expecting instead that it will satisfy the imperative instead of them. The poor lose their capacity for responsibility for their own betterment, and so the drive to better themselves and their families in ways that best suit them, through their acceptance of their status as dependents of government.
John Goodman, over at NCPA, has an interesting point-out on Obamacare (and on a Paul Krugman New York Times column, but that’s neither here nor there).* OK, a little bit of here: Goodman cited Krugman as claiming that
Since 2010, when the [the Affordable Care Act] was passed, real health spending per capita—that is, total spending adjusted for overall inflation and population growth—has risen less than a third as rapidly as its long-term average. Real spending per Medicare recipient hasn’t risen at all; real spending per Medicaid beneficiary has actually fallen slightly.
Then Goodman presented this chart
and then Goodman noted
[T]he chart clearly shows[] nothing happened to the rate of increase in health care spending in 2010—the year ObamaCare was passed.
Yes, the growth rate of health care spending that year was well below the historical average. But it was just as much below it in 2009, the year before the act was passed! Health care spending growth in 2010 was exactly the same as it was in 2009. It remained exactly the same in 2011. And again in 2012. Looking only at the numbers, we would have to conclude that nothing that happened in 2010 had any impact whatsoever on health care spending.
On that last point (no Obamacare impact whatsoever), though, I have to disagree with Goodman. It looks pretty clear to me that Obamacare has utterly halted the downward trend in health care spending growth: that growth has stopped decreasing toward no growth. If allowed to continue, the trend would have reached zero growth and gone to outright decreases around 2012.
Keep in mind, too, that the spending aspects of Obamacare have not yet kicked in. Other than the increases in premiums and deductibles, I mean; those are getting started.
*Interestingly, Jason Furman, White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman, had an op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal that also burned through over 1,000 words showing all the ways he alleges Obamacare has slowed “health inflation.” While also carefully ignoring that already in place declining trend in the years prior to 2010.