Tag Archives: political parties

Paper Tiger

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We’re in the middle of a war far more damaging, far more threatening to our survival as a free nation, than wars President Barack Obama is so proudly walking away from.  This is a cyberwar that the People’s Republic of China is waging against us, and we’re losing it.  Badly.

One set of incidents includes this:

[Wall Street] Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co. said Thursday that the paper’s computer systems had been infiltrated by Chinese hackers, apparently to monitor its China coverage.  New York Times Co disclosed Wednesday night that its flagship newspaper also had been the victim of cyberspying.

Every computer in the NYT was hacked, and every password of every journalist (among other things) was taken.  The reason was the two newspapers’ articles critical of PRC leadership.  And they did this with ease and with impunity.  The hacking went on for months and only recently was stopped, maybe.  And that’s just a couple of newspapers.

There are no consequences for the PRC or for individual hackers, because the US is utterly powerless to do anything.

President Barack Obama is talking and shaking his finger very firmly at the Chinese, however.

The Obama administration is considering more assertive action against Beijing to combat a persistent cyber-espionage campaign it believes Chinese hackers are waging against U.S. companies and government agencies.

And

…the administration is preparing a new National Intelligence Estimate that, when complete, is expected to detail the cyberthreat, particularly from China, as a growing economic problem.  One official said it also will cite more directly a role by the Chinese government in such espionage.

Yeah, that’ll show them.

Erstwhile Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an interview on her way out the door,

We have to begin making it clear to the Chinese—they’re not the only people hacking us or attempting to hack us—that the United States is going to have to take action to protect not only our government’s, but our private sector, from this kind of illegal intrusions.  There’s a lot that we are working on that will be deployed in the event that we don’t get some kind of international effort under way[.]

This war has been underway for a number of years, our vulnerability is uncorrected, and we’re “going to have to take action?”  We’re not already?  Clinton let the cat out of the bag on our capacity to protect ourselves later in that same interview:

Obviously this can become a very unwelcome and even dangerous tit-for-tat that could be a crescendo of consequences, here at home and around the world, that no one wants to see happen[.]

This administration is afraid to respond, because striking back might angrify those who are hurting us.

James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, exposes with his commentary another aspect of the problem:

In the next year there will be an effort to figure out a way to engage the Chinese more energetically.  The issue now is how do we get the Chinese to take this more seriously as a potentially major disruption to the relationship.

This flows, though, from a false premise: the Chinese don’t care about our relationship as much as we do, and they see the relationship materially differently from us.  We’re also too desperate to have a relationship with them.  Indeed, in an aptly titled editorial (“Barbarians at the Digital Gate”), the WSJ notes

…hacking—both for purposes of monitoring and to steal commercial intellectual property or government secrets—has become the Chinese way.

You can see from all the idle chit-chat—we’re still trying to talk to the PRC and still avoiding concrete action—that our government is too timid, too powerless, and too ignorant actually to do anything to protect our country.

Some Remarks on Budget Negotiations

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Can the Progressives in this Congress and White House really be this…lacking in understanding?

The White House had suggested GOP willingness to let sweeping defense cuts take effect was the culprit [for the fourth quarter economic contraction just reported].

However, House Speaker John Boehner (R, OH) spokesman Brendan Buck had this:

These arbitrary, automatic cuts were a creation and demand of the White House in 2011.  Twice the House has passed legislation to replace them with common sense cuts and reforms.  If there was any uncertainty late last year about the sequester, it was because the Democratic-controlled Senate, per usual, never lifted a finger to pass a plan to replace it.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) chimed in:

…today’s disappointing GDP report [of fourth quarter 2012 contraction] is a direct result of the economic uncertainty created by House Republicans’ strategy of obstruction and manufactured crises.

An exploding deficit, a destructive debt, stagnant and too-high unemployment, and a failed recovery from the Panic of 2008 aren’t crises at all—these are normal.  Congressman Sam Graves (R, MO), Chairman of the House Small Business Committee, noted

Is this stunt in economic growth really a surprise?  Anti-growth policies and an anti-business White House produce just that—a lack of growth[.]

Congressman Kevin Brady (R, TX), incoming Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee added

The bottom line is that America’s economy continues to struggle primarily due to President Obama’s penchant for political brinkmanship and the pervasive uncertainty caused by his focus on higher taxes, regulation and ObamaCare.

Unfortunately, yes.  And that’s to the severe detriment of our country.

A Whole Eight Years

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Social Security’s disability trust fund will be bankrupt in three years, and all those folks currently on disability will see their payments slashed.  Those coming onto disability will see far smaller payments than they were expecting.  Whether or not there should be a disability program, if so at what level of payment, or who should fund it are separate issues.  Let’s talk about what we have, and how we got here.

With the Panic of 2008, unemployment spiked, reaching above 10%.  President Barack Obama’s economic policies have slowed our recovery to the point of not recovering at all.  Even the current unemployment rate of 7.8% both is as high as it was when he took office and misleading in itself since it’s based on a far smaller work force than when he took office.

On top of this unemployment rate, whose primary effects here are to reduce the tax monies going into the disability fund and to increase the number of people going onto disability—anything to get enough money for an unemployed person, or someone who’s given up trying to find work, to put food on his family’s table or to pay the rent/mortgage—we have the following.

Obama is actively making it easier to apply for disability with no parallel move to make funds available to make the payments.  Indeed, Obama has steadfastly refused to allow any of our entitlement programs to be fixed, or revamped, or changed in any way so as to enable them to survive (again, whether they should as Federal programs is a separate discussion).

His Lieutenant in the Senate, Chuck Schumer (D, NY), insists that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are off the table in any debt, deficit, or budget discussion.  Obama said in his inaugural address last week that

the commitments we make to each other—through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security—these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us.

Leaving aside the vapid ignorance of this remark, the statement demonstrates his refusal to touch them in any way.

And we have this nonsense from a tired old man, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV), about entitlements generally, using Medicare as his example:

…savings from cutting wasteful spending and fraud will extend the solvency of the Medicare trust fund by an additional eight years….

Let’s ignore the fact that Reid cannot name a single instance of actual wasteful spending or of fraud—or explain why those have not already been rooted out, if he knew of them—Medicare’s (for instance) lifetime could be extended for a whole eight years, he says, like he’s proud of that fact.

Then what?

Takers vs Doers

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Nicholas Eberstadt has the call.

A growing body of empirical evidence points to increasing dependency on state largess.

Then he enumerates [emphasis his]:

  • Over the 50-plus years since 1960, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, entitlement transfers—government payments of cash, goods and services to citizens—have been growing twice as fast as overall personal income.  Government transfers now account for nearly 18% of all personal income in America—up from 6% in 1960.
  • According to the BEA, America’s myriad social-welfare programs (the federal bureaucracy apparently cannot determine exactly how many of these there are) currently dispense entitlement benefits of more than $2.3 trillion annually.  Since those entitlements must be paid for—either through taxes or borrowing—the burden of entitlement spending now amounts to over $7,400 per American man, woman and child.

To pay for this, every child is born with a $7,400 debt.  Including those who will be recipients of this welfare.  Which means, as a practical matter, the other children are born with an even greater debt.

  • In 1960, according to the Office of Management and Budget, social-welfare programs accounted for less than a third of all federal spending. Today, entitlement programs account for nearly two-thirds of federal spending.  In other words, welfare spending is nearly twice as much as defense, justice and everything else Washington does—combined.  In effect, the federal government has become an entitlements machine.

Yet President Barack Obama insists that entitlements don’t sap us, they strengthen us.  He’s partially right: they strengthen those who control the handouts from these entitlements.  Politically.

  • According to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly half (49%) of Americans today live in homes receiving one or more government transfer benefits.  That percentage is up almost 20 points from the early 1980s.  And contrary to what the Obama White House team suggested during the election campaign, this leap is not due to the aging of the population.  In fact, only about one-tenth of the increase is due to upticks in old-age pensions and health-care programs for seniors.
  • As entitlement outlays have risen, there has been flight of men from the work force.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of adult men 20 and older working or seeking work dropped by 13 percentage points between 1948 and 2008.
  • In recent years, the biggest increases in disability claims have been for “musculoskeletal” problems and mental disorders (including mood disorders).  But as a practical matter, it is impossible for a health professional to ascertain conclusively whether or not a patient is suffering from back pains or sad feelings.  The government’s disability-insurance programs were intended to address genuine need.  On the current trajectory, the Social Security disability fund is projected to run out of money during Mr Obama’s second term.
  • The president and others describe Social Security and Medicare as “social insurance” programs rather than transfer schemes.  True, the eventual beneficiaries of these programs contribute payroll taxes to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds during their working lives.  But “insurance” programs are meant to pay for themselves; Social Security and Medicare cannot do so.

Moreover, insurance programs pay the premium payer or the payer’s designated beneficiary later, not some stranger currently.

And who’s paying for all of this?  Slightly over half, and dwindling, of those Nancy Kress called mules in her Beggars novels.  And those of our children who are picking up the debt.

The Blinders of the Liberal

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Juan Williams has a piece in The Wall Street Journal that illustrates this quite nicely.  He writes of the “Clouds over [President Barack] Obama’s Second Term,” and surely there are such clouds.  But he couches his discussion in this way.

…there is no sign that the GOP’s current goal is anything other than hastening this president’s transition to lame-duck status and stopping any Democrat from succeeding him in 2016.

…Republicans have made it difficult for the president to get any bill passed without a supermajority of 60 votes because of the minority party’s increased use of the filibuster in the modern era.

Even leaving aside the fact that the rise in the use of the filibuster includes several Congressional sessions of Democratic Party minority, this is an interesting argument.  Williams is claiming that Republican opposition to Obama’s bills couldn’t possibly be because those bills are terrible ideas.  No, being universally fine, the only purpose for opposing them must be personal—to harm Obama.

But this is entirely consistent with Williams’ next point.

…one factor for anyone judging Mr Obama is race.

Really, Mr Williams?  Have we met?  Certainly it’s no secret to my half-dozen readers that I disagree, with considerable enthusiasm, with nearly all that Obama has done or said.  But on what basis do you ascribe my opposition to race?  I reject your racist slur.

Along these lines, Williams offers this:

Even among his liberal supporters, the conventional wisdom is that Mr Obama’s leadership style is lacking in forcefulness because he is the “first black” in the White House.  By that line of thinking, he is not allowed to be too forceful in his emotions, or he will risk being seen as scary—an “angry black man.”

This is another manufactured beef, or it’s a concession that Liberals generally are racist.  Certainly no Conservative whom I know looked at Obama as anything other than a bad president.  Not a bad black president.  And not, even when he did show anger, an “angry black man.”

Where are you getting this stuff, Mr Williams?