Bill Whittle’s thoughts on the children of Wall Street.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Pass A Budget
…or shut down the Congress. I like this idea.
The Deutsche Mark
Is on its way back? I’ve long thought that it was just a matter of time.
The Gathering Storm
Thanks to the utter fecklessness of the administration, foreign policy may be a significant campaign issue next year.
[Update a while later]
Welcome to the Islamist Middle East:
First, to describe the Obama administration’s Middle East policy as a disaster — I cannot think of a bigger, deadlier mess created by any U.S. foreign policy in the last century — is an understatement.
Second, the dominant analysis used by the media, academia, and the talking heads on television has proven dangerously wrong. This includes the ideas that revolutionary Islamism doesn’t exist, cannot be talked about, is not a threat, and that extreme radicals are really moderates.
I won’t review all the evidence here, but it amounts to a retreat for moderates, allies of the West, and American interests coupled with an advance for revolutionary Islamists.
I blame George Bush. No, really. I supported removing Saddam Hussein because I thought that the administration had a strategy. I was apparently wrong.
And now Obama has simply compounded it.
[Update a while later]
This is worth repeating:
Without taking any position on climate issues, let me put it this way: Why are people frantic about the possibility that the earth’s temperature might rise slightly in 50 years but see no problem in hundreds of millions of people and vast amounts of wealth and resources becoming totally controlled by people who think like those who carried out the September 11 attacks?
Good question.
Commercial Crew Hearing
Joe Pappalardo from Pop Mechanics is live tweeting it. So is Marcia Smith.
[Noon EDT update]
Clark Lindsey has compiled a lot of the tweets.
The EU Debt Crisis
Could hammer the US, particularly housing prices.
The IPCC
…exposed. I’m just shocked, shocked that the reports were written by Greenpeace, WWF and other watermelon activists. Not.
Declaring War On Class Warfare
Looks like Paul Ryan is going to deliver a much-needed speech tomorrow.
[Update a few minutes later]
“That’s not class warfare. It’s math.”
Forget math. This guy can’t even do basic arithmetic. And apparently neither can anyone on his staff. Can we see his grades, now?
[Update a few minutes later]
A follow-up for those attempting to defend the president’s math.
Tomorrow’s Commercial Crew Hearings
Yglesias Blows Graphs
Liberals, especially, should be almost desperate to shrink government to a size that’s sustainable in the long run. Here’s a graph–one of many documenting the public’s declining faith in government efficacy, in this case that of the federal government. It shows that in 1986 Americans estimated that the government wasted 38 cents of every dollar it raises. Now they estimate it wastes 51 cents. It’s not hard to read the inevitable death of even Clinton-style liberalism in the rising slope of that chart, and others like it. Surely at least part of the voter’s disdain for government comes from their (accurate) perception that it’s bloated and keeps bloating, with new agencies and inefficiencies simply layered in on top of the old ones. Meanwhile, the private sector has used computer technology to streamline itself, eliminating layers rather than adding.
Democrats, as the party of government, need to turn that perception around by. Obama, by dedicating his stimulus to preserving bureaucracy as we know it, has by and large missed this opportunity. (Clinton would not have missed it.)
Public sector employment is also pretty much the worst sector to stimulate if you care about government deficits, since the unnecessary jobs saved will linger after the recession ends, protected by powerful public worker unions, where they will add to government’s long term costs. If we stimulate the construction industry, the tire industry or any other private sector industry, there’s not that same budgetary downside. If all those jobs linger after the recession ends, so much the better.
Even direct government employment in new WPA-style jobs would be better in this respect, I think, than simply paying to preserve existing government jobs. It’s easier to wind a WPA down, when recession ends, than it is to shrink the entrenched education bureaucracy.
One of the few things that Franklin Roosevelt got right was that government employees should not be allowed to unionize. It has been a disaster for the nation.