Tag Archives: economics

Journalistic…Naiveté

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Throughout the long negotiations over the fate of Iran’s nuclear program, President Hassan Rouhani has withstood scathing criticism from hard-liners at home by sticking to his case that a deal with his country’s longtime enemies will bring peace and prosperity.

So the political stakes are high for the moderate president as talks enter their homestretch toward a June deadline.

If he succeeds in sealing an agreement, Iran could see much-hoped-for relief from withering sanctions that are dragging down the economy at a time when the OPEC producer is trying to ride out a severe slump in oil prices.

This AP article goes on in this vein, touting the economic benefits to Iran, and so the political benefits to Rouhani, of “sealing an agreement.”

This is naïve. Success in “sealing an agreement” means Iran gets its nuclear weapon. Full stop. Economic and political benefits in the near term are purely side effects. Political benefits in the longer term are nuclear Iranian domination of the Middle East and the destruction of Israel.

So, unfortunately, is Dubai-based political analyst Theodore Karasik naïve.

Rouhani was elected on, promoted and supported the idea that he would help the Iranian economy recover. And of course the nuclear agreement is tied to that because of the sanction. If there is no nuclear deal, the presidency will go back to a more ultraconservative leader—under a nuclear Iran[.]

Iran remains under, has been under for quite some years, ultraconservative leadership. The mullahs, led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are in charge. Their global face, Rouhani, is just smoother about it than Rouhani’s predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

What the AP (and, apparently, Karasik) constantly miss in this is that getting the weapon is the purpose of these “negotiations,” and the drive for the weapon is to satisfy Iran’s goal of wiping Israel from the map and beyond that of emphasizing that regional domination. The mullahs, after all, are less Islamic than they are political descendants of Cyrus, Darius, and the Xerxes. (A longer term side effect is the ability to arm Iran’s terrorist allies, don’t forget.)

Who’d-a Thunk?

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According to President Barack Obama’s Department of Education, his student loan forgiveness program already is experiencing cost overruns to the tune of nearly $22 billion. Obama’s 2010 PAYE expansion at the time was projected to add $9 billion to the taxpayers’ bill for students not repaying their debt. As the DoE put it,

The 2015 amount includes a net upward reestimate of $21.8 billion, primarily related to revised interest rates and increased participation in income-driven repayment plans.

Or, in the words of James Schneider, who wrote the article at the second link,

[S]welling enrollment due to looser loan rules is driving up costs….

Or, Romina Boccia, of the Heritage Foundation:

They didn’t account for the market risk in making these loans[.]

Or, Steve Ellis, of Taxpayers for Common Sense:

…hard to see how this is going to come out as a net positive as the administration predicts[.]

Or, Lindsey Burke, also with the Heritage Foundation:

Somebody pays for that loan forgiveness. And that is the three-quarters of Americans who don’t have bachelor’s degrees themselves.

Now, how does that work, exactly? Who could have expected such an outcome? Apparently everyone in the Universe except Democrats.

Oil Price “Tax Cut”

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US retail sales slumped in January for a second straight month…. Sales at retailers and restaurants fell 0.8% last month [January 2015]…. Retail sales dropped 0.9% in December….

This despite sharp oil and gas price drops since the summer, resulting in similarly sharp drops in fuel costs, including especially gasoline and airline jet fuel.

If we’re not spending all those savings, then, where is the money going? One clue comes from a Trading Economics graph.MonthlySavingsRates

It was being spent, all through the fall. Then, apparently, the windfall started getting saved.

I speculate the following: spend it while it lasts, but now the fuel price drop is starting to look reasonably permanent, so start saving. Or, through the fall pent-up demand for consumer goods (appliances, cars, more expensive foods, etc) created by the present sluggish sort-of recovery was being satisfied, and now, with the new year, demand is penting up again (that’s a technical term…), and savings is occurring again (possibly against that penting up demand). Keep in mind, though, that one month does not make a trend.

Senate Democrats and a DHS Shutdown

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The House has passed a bill fully finding the Department of Homeland Security while canceling President Barack Obama’s unconstitutional “Executive Actions” regarding immigration. The Senate Democrats have successfully filibustered the Senate version of that bill.

The Senate Democrats thus have shown themselves entirely willing to shut down the DHS, severely damaging our nation’s ability to defend itself against terrorist attack—or any man-caused disaster. These Democrats are holding American citizens hostage against their ability to impose their minority position on all of us.

Let Senator Mark Kirk (R, IL) say this about that.

If we have a successful terrorist attack—all the dead Americans from that should be laid at the feet of the Democratic caucus.…

In the end, they have to defend the country. They have sworn the allegiance to do that. They need to live up to their oaths of office. In the Democratic mind, politics is everything. I would say to them, politics is not everything. If you don’t have a country to defend, what is the purpose of politics?

What he said.

Collateral Damage

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In an era of antiseptic war, one fought with drones and precision weapons that limit to an amazing degree the collateral damage done by these limited strikes executed during very limited conflicts, we’ve gotten spoiled. We expect war generally to be antiseptic.

And our “leaders” in DC have gotten spoiled, too.

Several large-scale cyberattacks in recent months have prompted a number of lawmakers and policy makers to call for a more forceful response, including suggestions that the US engage in counterattacks that would disable or limit the culprits’ own networks.

But White House officials and some technology security experts remain skeptical that such “offensive” cyberattacks would work, saying they are concerned about the difficulty in targeting specific hackers without causing widespread spillover, among other things.

And so, in the face of this wide-open cyber war being waged against us, these White House officials and those “some others” insist that we do nothing, since what we would do would be imperfect and cause collateral damage.

…cybersecurity experts are mostly split on the merits of retaliation, with some saying it could distract companies from doing more to prevent breaches.

Because defense and offense cannot possibly be carried out simultaneously. Yeah.

Bob Gourley, late of the Defense Intelligence Agency:

Once the planners and everyone looks [into retaliation], it puts it on an escalation ladder we don’t want to be on. The first thing we need to do is protect our systems. Until we do that, we’re almost inviting them to attack, saying “Come on, take our stuff.”

Wait, what? You’re saying that after years of suffering cyberattacks from Russia, the People’s Republic of China, northern Korea, Iran, individuals, you still haven’t bothered to “protect our systems?” How does that work, exactly?

 

Certainly collateral damage should be limited to the extent possible, from both moral and efficiency perspectives. But this is war. Collateral damage is part of the messiness of war. If we let our fear of collateral damage paralyze us, we will lose the war, with catastrophic consequences to us, completely subsuming any collateral damage done us by this war.

It’s for those who sit in leadership chairs in DC to stop wasting their energy looking for excuses to do nothing and instead direct their energy to responding. Forcefully. As tidily as possible, but with recognition that there will be messes, sometimes big ones.

That response must include actually defending our systems, and it must include correcting this failure:

Businesses are largely prohibited by law from a practice known as “hack back,” which could either be done to punish a cyberthief or take back information that was stolen from any specific firm. That has left companies relying on the government’s response, which so far largely has come in the form of sanctions or criminal indictments.