Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary

Obama’s Priorities

45 Comments

He seems to be fiddling while Rome burns. And he’s the arsonist.

[Afternoon update]

More thoughts from Charles Krauthammer:

The logic of Obama’s address to Congress went like this:

“Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,” he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education — importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The “day of reckoning” has now arrived. And because “it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,” Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan’s Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

And as to why the market is plunging? Ask the investors:

BusinessWeek interviewed a wide array of investment professionals, and many said the first six weeks of the Obama Administration have soured their outlook on the stock market…

…”The basic agenda of Obama’s Administration is going to be more leftist and less centrist than I had anticipated,” says John Merrill, chief investment officer at Tanglewood Wealth Management in Houston.

They’re shocked, shocked. Fools.

[Update a few minutes later]

More investor non-confidence from Silicon Valley.

And is it time for Geithner to go? As she notes, it’s really Obama’s fault for not staffing Treasury. I think that the Obamaniacs are discovering that governing is a lot harder, and a lot less fun, than campaigning. So they revert to campaigning and (among other things) demonizing the opposition.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Lost Cause

5 Comments

Jim Powell, on continuing failed attempts to rehabilitate FDR’s Depression record:

Black commits one of the most familiar fallacies by reciting a litany of New Deal projects — libraries, schools, public works, and so forth — as if their funding came out of thin air. But government doesn’t have any money other than what it gets by (a) taxing people now, (b) borrowing money now and taxing people later, or (c) inflating the currency, which is another form of taxation. Every New Deal project on Black’s list meant that less money was spent elsewhere because it was taxed away. New Deal economics basically involved robbing Peter to pay Paul, with added inefficiencies along the way and a net loss for everyone.

Remember, too, that the New Deal was mainly paid for by the middle class and the poor, because the biggest revenue generator for the federal government during the 1930s was an excise tax on cigarettes, beer, chewing gum, and other cheap pleasures enjoyed disproportionately by those two groups. Until 1936, the federal excise tax generated more revenue than the federal personal income tax and the federal corporate income tax combined. Not until 1942 did the personal income tax become the biggest source of federal revenue. You can look it up in Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, volume 2, page 1107.

Perhaps Black is suggesting that politicians have a special talent for spending other people’s money in a way that will do more to stimulate the economy than if those people had spent it themselves. That proposition is laughable. All the available evidence verifies the common-sense truth that people are less careful with other people’s money than they are with their own. That’s true even when their intentions are good and their motives are pure — which was rarely the case in the New Deal. FDR’s spending programs stimulated a mad scramble among political bosses for control of the loot and the patronage.

This is an important debate to continue, because mindless and ahistorical worship of the New Deal lies at the heart of the current disastrous policies.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

More Words Of Conservative Wisdom

2 Comments

T. Coddington Voorhees VII is guest blogging at Iowahawk’s place again:

That conundrum of electoral calculus was the topic of much discussion two weeks ago, when my Nassau confreres and I were summoned to the White House for an intimate repast with the new President and his inner circle. Mr. Obama was radiant as ever, still basking in the afterglow of his historic victory. I admit to a recent wobble or two in my faith in him, as the severe beatings suffered by my various family trusts have necessitated some unanticipated cutbacks in my household staff. But that easy, commanding elegance was a bracing reminder of why I endorsed Mr. Obama as the true conservative presidential choice. After dessert (black walnut dacquoise with sections of quince) we retired to the Blue Room where chief of staff Rahm Emanuel entertained us with some droll tales of his days as terpsichorean with the Mossad ballet auxiliary, even treating us to a few thrilling, if f-bomb laced, arabesques. He was followed by Vice President Joe Biden, who put on a fine display of his famed wit and penchant for unpredictable cerebral infarctions. Amid the sparkling bonhomie the President solicited our views on the causes of — and solutions to — conservatism’s sad state. Seizing the opportunity for a tete-a-tete with the world’s most powerful, popular, and beautiful man, I explained the tragic plague of rubes who stand athwart our modernization program.

“Why not just drive them out?” asked the President, elegantly French inhaling his Marlboro Light 100. “Under the old bus, so to speak.”

“Alas, were it so easy,” interrupted Brooks, in a clumsy attempt to draw Mr. Obama’s attentions from me like some cocquettish debutante. Parker, Noonan and Frum were too lost in orgasmic schoolgirl giggling to offer anything more substantive. I ignored their embarrasing faux pas and pressed on with my thesis.

“We’ve tried, Mr. President,” I explained. “But there are unsavory elements within the party who keep bringing them back in.”

My reference, obviously, was to the self-styled luminaries of “populism” who hang like a millstone around the Republican neck — the Sarah Palins, the Plumbing Joes, the Bobby Jindals, the Rush Limbaughs, the motley middlebrow state college pretenders to the conservative throne. A shared contempt for these arriviste oafs unites the Nassau summitteers perhaps even more than our shared fondness for a snifter of well-behaved armagnac VSOP. I have made no secret of my feelings about la Palin and her grim brood of ill-mannered snowbillies, as well that horrid toilet tinkerer from Toledo whose fifteen minutes have somehow refused to expire. The recent emergence of Bobby Jindal and Rush Limbaugh in the intraparty maelstrom yet affords fresh opportunities for conservative dismality.

What is a conservative to do?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Probably Both

24 Comments

Roger Kimball wonders if the seeming wilful ongoing destruction of the American economy by the new administration is a result of incompetence or malice.

It’s hard to know for sure, of course. Back in the nineties, J. Porter Clark (at sci.space.*) came up with a variation on Clarke’s Third Law (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”), now known as Clark’s Law: “Any sufficiently advanced cluelessness/incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” I think it was in reference to spam, but it would seem to apply to current economic policy as well.

Political Commentary

A Voice Of Sanity Among Democrats

4 Comments

I hope they’ll listen to Senator Bayh.

[Thursday afternoon update]

Stephen Spruielle makes a good point (that sort of occurred to me at the time):

If one accepts the dubious proposition that government spending is required to mitigate the effects of the recession, how can one oppose higher spending that would take place this year — especially after voting for the trillion-dollar stimulus package? All this handwringing over the size of the omnibus from the likes of Bayh and Specter is just comical. It’s like listening to a guy who downed an entire bottle of tequila lecture his buddies on the dangers of taking one more shot.

Sometimes it seems like the lunatics are running the asylum.

[Bumped]

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

I Hope He Freezes In The Dark

52 Comments

Timothy Noah is cheering what he hopes is the upcoming demise of the nuclear power industry, in the wake of Obama’s closing off the Yucca Mountain option. I was never a big fan of Yucca Mountain — I think it a ridiculously overpriced solution to an hysterical non-problem. But for the money that they planned to spend on it, we could have come up with a safe and reliable launch industry, by using it as a market for storage on the moon.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Statists, Meet Petard

21 Comments

Northern Virginia and the other DC suburbs are going to be hit hard by the Obama tax plan. I’m guessing that these are areas that went overwhelmingly for The One, to give him his overall Virginia victory. Here’s a good example of Mencken’s dictum that democracy would give the people what they want, and ensure that they get it good and hard. And this points out the economic mindlessness and absurdity of picking an arbitrary income level to start punishing achievement:

Besides raising tax rates in 2011 on the highest income brackets, this year’s budget would lower the deductions families earning $250,000 can make from their income.

“In my district, we have a high household income, but I would say two things about that,” Himes said. “No. 1, there’s huge diversity in my district. It includes some of the poorest families in the country and some of the wealthiest.

“And second, income has to be held against expenses. We have one of the highest costs of living in the country as well, which is problematic for all sorts of things,” Himes said.

The median sales price for a home in Greenwich, according to the real estate website Trulia, is $735,000, but that’s down significantly. Bloomberg reported in February that home sales in Greenwich, where the nation’s hedge fund industry generally lives, plunged 84 percent in January 2009 compared to a year earlier.

It’s still cheaper to buy a home in Fargo, where the average listing price is $192,436, according to Trulia. It’s also safe to say that wages are a little lower in the Red River Valley.

There is a reason that federalism is a good idea. Like a national “minimum wage,” to the degree that such a thing should exist at all, it’s ridiculous to apply a one-size fits all to the entire country. Both tax rates and wage and price controls should be left to the states, not Washington. But hey, they wanted “change.” Don’t come crying to me.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Is Rush Limbaugh…

38 Comments

…Barack Obama’s Goldstein?

There are many things that bug me about Barack Obama — the insane laundry list speeches, the silly rhetoric, the hostility to the free market — but these are all talked about. He has another habit that hasn’t been talked about so much and, of all the things he does, it makes me the most queasy.

It’s pretty subtle, but I think it’s worth keeping an eye on because, if it were to become full-blown, it has the potential to be the most socially damaging element of his presidency.

I’m talking about what I’m going to call his Goldstein-ism, his tendency to make veiled, dark allusions to a recently vanquished “other”, an evil being (he is never specific) who is, he always implies, the real cause of all our problems.

George Orwell wouldn’t have been one of the rubes.

[Mid-morning update]

Obama’s sledging tactics of intimidation.

Why does this administration keep reminding me of my trip to the museum?

[Update late afternoon]

Rush makes the president an offer he can’t accept.

They want to have it both ways. If the White House really wants to portray Rush as the leader of the Republicans, then why not have the leader of the Democrats debate him? Harry Reid already found out what happens when you pull on Rush’s tail.