Tag Archives: government

So Now Our Government

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…is apologizing for the uniquely American value of free speech?  And we tax payers are paying for this shameful behavior with our own dollars!?

This from Fox News:

The American Embassy in Islamabad, in a bid to tamp down public rage over the anti-Islam film produced in the US, is spending $70,000 to air an ad on Pakistani television that features President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton denouncing the video.

And beyond this appalling obsequiousness, there’s this blatant duck and cover [emphasis added]:

In the ad, Obama is seen talking about America’s tradition of religious tolerance and Clinton is seen saying that the US government had nothing to do with the video….

It’s not us—we in government didn’t do it.

It gets…better:

[State’s spokeswoman Victoria] Nuland said it was common practice to pay to air public service announcements in Pakistan and noted that the embassy there had done it at least one other time, in the aftermath of a deadly 2005 earthquake that hit the country.

So, here’s our government putting its apology for American values on a par with expressing sympathy for a tragedy.

Can we afford four more years of retreat and timidity concerning American rights and culture?

Even Progressive Europe

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…recognizes the foreign policy of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama to be an abject failure.  Spiegel Online International quotes a few of the German papers’ recognition of this.

The left-leaning [Spiegel‘s characterization here and below] Berliner Zeitung:
Four years ago, Obama pledged to seek reconciliation with the Muslim world. Now, it is doubtful whether he has succeeded. The US and its European allies now have to ask themselves how much support they still enjoy in the countries of the Arab Spring.

The center-left daily Süddeutsche Zeitung
America hardly has influence in the region any longer, and now sees itself confronted with anti-American sentiment in places where it no longer controls the dictators. Meanwhile, forces that simultaneously exploit and spurn America are gaining influence.

The conservative Die Welt
US President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy is in ruins.  …Washington has provided the image of a distracted superpower in the process of decline to the societies there. This image of weakness is being exploited by Salafists and al-Qaida….

And so on.

Still Equivocating

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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

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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

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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.