Romney’s the One

Another great article by National Review, i thought i would share this with you..... 

 Why the former Massachusetts governor deserves the GOP nomination BY RAMESH PONNURU 

 "Even though nobody has yet cast a vote in the primaries, Republicans are increasingly resigned to Gov. Mitt Romney’s winning the party’s presidential nomination. Every week he gets a few more endorsements from Republican officeholders. He has never had a commanding lead in the polls, but one by one the other candidates who have occupied the top tier with him — first Rep. Michele Bachmann, then Gov. Rick Perry, then Herman Cain — have fallen back out of it. The current surge for Newt Gingrich looks like one last fling before Republicans settle down with Romney. Republicans should not be gloomy about this prospect. Romney isn’t merely the candidate who is likely to win the Republican primaries. He’s the candidate who should win them. That’s why he’s likely to win. We all know the knocks on Romney. His health-care plan in Massachusetts was Obamacare in one state. He’s a flip-flopper. Inauthentic. His conservative detractors say he’s the establishment/moderate candidate — or worse. (Actual Thanksgiving conversation in the Ponnuru home: Conservative brother-in-law: “So, which of these characters are you supporting?” Me: “I think Romney’s the best of the bunch.” Him: “I didn’t know you were a Democrat.”) It’s true that Romney took a sharp right turn when he moved from state to national politics. But it’s also true that in 2008 he was the candidate behind whom Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, among other conservative notables, said that the conservative movement should rally in order to stop John McCain from getting the nomination. He has not moved left since that time. His positions on policy questions are almost all the same as they were then. On a few issues he has moved right: He now favors a market-oriented reform to Medicare, for example. If Romney was to McCain’s right then, he is still. He’s to George W. Bush’s right, too. Bush never came out for the Medicare reform Romney has endorsed. Bush never said that Roe v. Wade should be overturned, either. Romney has. Romney’s long list of policy advisers includes people who are, within their fields, roughly in sync with the politics of the Bush administration or to its right; almost nobody is significantly to its left. 

 If Mitt Romney becomes president, he will almost certainly be dealing with John Boehner as speaker of the House and Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader. While they, too, have their conservative detractors, they are the most conservative congressional leaders Republicans have had in modern times, and they will exert a rightward influence on the Romney administration. If they send him legislation to repeal Obamacare, cut taxes, or reform entitlements, he will sign it where Obama would veto it. If at some other point in his presidency a liberal-run Congress sends him tax increases, he will veto them where Obama would sign. Compared with President Obama, a President Romney would do more to protect the defense budget. A President Romney’s judicial nominees would be superior to President Obama’s simply because he would not be trying to stack the bench with liberal activists. But they are likely to far exceed that low bar. 

Each Republican president since the Nixon-Ford era has nominated a higher percentage of conservatives as justices to the Supreme Court than his predecessor. That’s mostly a testament to the growth and development of the conservative legal network. Romney is likely to look for nominees whom conservative lawyers like — Robert Bork is a top adviser — who are professionally accomplished, and who cannot be portrayed as extreme. If Republicans hold the Senate they will almost certainly be confirmed. If they do not, they will probably be confirmed. 

 Romney’s regulatory agencies will be relatively restrained. His appointees to the National Labor Relations Board will not punish Boeing for locating a plant in a right-to-work state. He will act, within the limits of his legal authority, to keep the Environmental Protection Agency from imposing expensive restrictions on carbon emissions. He will reinstate conscience protections for pro-life health-care workers. It’s true that almost any Republican president, not just Romney, would do these things. But that’s the point. The Republican party now features a remarkable degree of programmatic consensus. The entire field wants to cut corporate tax rates, convert Medicaid into block grants, and (the asterisk candidacy of Gary Johnson aside) protect unborn human life. Even Jon Huntsman, the candidate positioned farthest left in the field, favors these policies. None of them enjoyed such uniform support in previous primaries, and some of them had none. When the candidates differ, it is typically on issues that are unlikely to matter during the next presidency. Representative Bachmann may, unlike some of the others, wish to abolish the EPA, but no conceivable Congress within the next eight years will grant her wish. The narrowness of the candidates’ differences on pertinent issues militates in favor of picking the one who can best implement the sensible agenda they largely share. It also reduces conservatives’ need to worry about candidates’ sincerity. If President Romney were to do an about-face on carbon caps, the right to life, or taxes, he would be going to war with the vast majority of his party. The fact that conservatives do not regard him as the leader of their movement tightens this constraint on him. A Republican president with more capital among conservatives would be able to deplete it. Romney’s public positions and his political interests both suggest he would govern as a conservative, albeit a cautious one. Many conservatives want more than that from a president, more than executive experience and public agreement with them on the issues. They want a president who shares their convictions and instincts, who will actively seek occasions to advance their views, and who will take political risks for them. They are right to want these things, for the most part, and there is no guarantee Romney will deliver them. 

 On the other hand, there is also something to be said for calculation in a politician. Successful political leaders need to have a realistic sense of what public opinion, and the political system, will bear, a sense cultivated by the habit of calculation. And there is a limit to how much political risk conservatives should want a president allied to them to take. Most of the time conservative activists should be trying to reduce the risks of advancing conservative initiatives rather than to goad elected officials to political recklessness. Conservatives should, that is, point the way for ambitious politicians to advance good ideas that can command the support of a national center-right majority. Governor Romney’s political career may not reflect the ideal balance between conviction and calculation. But a presidential primary offers a choice among imperfect alternatives, not embodied ideals. Weighed against the available alternatives, Romney comes out ahead — way ahead — because he is the only one of the primary candidates with a good shot at achieving a prerequisite for advancing a conservative agenda as president: namely, actually becoming president. Huntsman is highly unlikely to win the nomination because Republican voters divine in him a disdain for them, and return it. The others, even if they got the nomination, would be almost-certain losers in a general election. They are either too out of sync with the electorate, too personally erratic, or both. Representative Bachmann says that President Obama is certain to lose reelection, so Republicans should feel free to nominate the candidate of their dreams, without regard to electability. The president certainly looks beatable. But writing him off is unwise. His approval numbers are weak but not disastrous, the Republican party remains unpopular, incumbency almost always carries advantages, and the composition of the electorate is likely to be much more Democratic than it was in 2010. If the bottom drops out of the economy, perhaps as a result of Europe’s disorders, then maybe even Gingrich or Perry could win the race. But the stakes are too high for that kind of gamble. Even if one of them did win the White House, what we have seen of their campaigns suggests that his presidency would be a bumpy ride. In Perry’s case, the problem would be an apparent unfamiliarity with national issues that looks good only in comparison with Herman Cain’s proud ignorance. Gingrich, meanwhile, is a constant reminder that political leaders can have too much, as well as too little, imagination. His recent proposals on immigration are classic Gingrich: innovative-sounding, accompanied by high-tech gadgetry, and wholly absurd. Local community boards will decide which illegal immigrants to expel! We will be “humane,” while denying temporary workers the vote and stripping their children of citizenship! The last time Gingrich held office, he reached a depth of unpopularity that suggested that the public did not merely disagree with his policies but disliked him as a person. Memories have faded, and his current fans say he is a changed man. But he still has the rhetorical style — by turns incendiary, grandiose, and abrasive — that turned off middle-of-the-road Americans then. (November 16: “Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher . . .”) And he does not seem to have learned that aspiring presidents should weigh their words carefully. Recall the events that led to his campaign’s meltdown this summer, in which he first praised Paul Ryan’s plan for entitlements, then condemned it as “right-wing social engineering,” and finally apologized to Ryan for the comment. There is another issue with Gingrich, the broaching of which risks cruelty but cannot be avoided in the cold analysis Republicans have to perform. We don’t know whether Gingrich’s marital history will weigh heavily on voters, but we know it won’t help. The contrast to President Obama’s family will tell against him. Gingrich’s election would represent several firsts. He would be the first president with multiple ex-wives, and the first president with any ex-wives who speak negatively about him on the record. He would bring with him the first first lady who could be labeled a “home wrecker.” President Obama would not have to say a word about any of this for the press to make it an issue. Governor Romney has his weaknesses as a candidate, too. In the past only high-income voters have demonstrated a natural affinity for him. His flip-flops are well documented. He won’t be able to take full advantage of the unpopularity of Obamacare. A significant number of voters will hold his Mormonism against him, although Republican voters in recent surveys seem likely to look past this misgiving in the interest of retiring Obama and most Democrats who oppose Mormon candidates won’t be available to any Republican nominee. But he is also reasonable, articulate — phenomenally articulate, by the standards of recent Republican presidential candidates — and reassuring. Democrats will try to make him into a scary figure, but they will have less to work with than if Republicans nominated Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Perry, or Rick Santorum. He has improved as a campaigner, and now usually projects an air of command that eluded him in the last presidential race. To Romney’s conservative critics, this assessment is all wrong. Romney cannot win in November 2012, they say, because conservative voters will lack the motivation to cast ballots for someone so uninspiring and moderate. Thomas Sowell and George Will are among the conservative heavyweights who have made this case recently, with Sowell noting pointedly that the conservative Reagan won two presidential elections where moderates such as Bob Dole and John McCain have lost them. Yet George W. Bush won two elections, albeit close ones, with positions to Romney’s left and rhetoric that attempted to distance him from the bulk of conservatives. (He was the compassionate one, you may recall.) The truth is that Republicans have never lost a presidential election because an otherwise viable nominee could not get conservatives to vote. The exit polls from the 2008 election show that the race was lost in the center of the electorate. 

If Romney is anywhere near Obama in the polls in October 2012, conservative voters will show up to help him. To win, though, he will also need some votes from people who voted for Obama in 2008 — and he has a much better chance of getting them than his rivals do. So far the Republican primaries have been a testament to the common sense of the party rank-and-file. As candidates and near-candidates have enjoyed their bursts of publicity, Republican voters have greeted them one by one with an open mind and high hopes, only to reject them as their flaws became apparent. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Bachmann, Perry, and Cain have all gone through this process. In reacting this way, Republican voters have disproven the caricatures that liberals and too many conservatives have indulged: that they care only about attitude and volume, not knowledge or judgment. The right thing for Republican voters to do now is to make Romney undergo the rigors of a competitive primary and then grant him the nomination. My bet is that’s exactly what they’re going to do."

Multiculturalism in Europe

Another great blog entry by Mark Steyn for National Review magazine:

When it’s not explicitly hostile, Western liberals’ attitude to Ayaan Hirsi Ali is deeply condescending. One thinks of Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times, pondering the author’s estrangement from her Somali relatives:I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps Hirsi Ali’s family is dysfunctional simply because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: “I love you.”

In Somalia, they don’t bite their tongues but they do puncture your clitoris. Miss Hirsi Ali was the victim of what Western hospitals already abbreviate to “FGM” (“female genital mutilation”) or, ever more fashionably, “FGC” (the less judgmental “female genital cutting”). Group hugs may work at the Times op-ed desk when the Pulitzer nominations fail to materialize, but Mr. Kristof is perhaps being a wee bit Upperwestsideocentric to assume their universality. Miss Hirsi Ali has been on the receiving end of both Islam and the squishy multiculti accommodation thereof. For seven years, she has been accompanied by bodyguards, because the men who killed the film director Theo van Gogh would also like to kill her.

She was speaking in Calgary the other day and, in the course of an interview with Canada’s National Post, made a sharp observation on where much of the world is headed. It’s not just fellows like Mohammed Bouyeri, the man who knifed, shot, and, for good measure, near decapitated van Gogh. She noted the mass murderer Anders Breivik, who killed dozens of his fellow Norwegians supposedly as a protest against the Islamization of Europe — if one is to believe a rambling manifesto that cited her, me, Jefferson, Churchill, Gandhi, Hans Christian Andersen, and many others. Much media commentary described Breivik as a “Christian.” But he had been raised by conventional Eurosecularists, and did not attend a church of any kind. On the other hand, he was very smitten by the Knights Templar.

"He’s not a worshiping Christian but he’s become a political Christian,” said Ayaan, “and so he’s reviving political Christianity as a counter to political Islam. That’s regression, because one of the greatest achievements of the West was to separate politics from religion.” Blame multiculturalism, she added, which is also regressive: In her neck of the Horn of Africa, “identity politics” is known as tribalism.

That’s a shrewd insight. We already accept “political Islam.” Indeed, we sentimentalize it — dignifying the victory of the Islamist Ennahda party in post–Ben Ali Tunisia, the restoration of full-bore polygamy in post-Qaddafi Libya, and the slaughter of Coptic Christians in post-Mubarak Egypt as an “Arab Spring.” On the very day Miss Hirsi Ali’s interview appeared, the mob caught up with the world’s longest-serving non-hereditary head of state. Colonel Qaddafi had enlivened the U.N. party circuit for many years with his lavish ball gowns, but, while he was the Arab League’s only literal transvestite, that shouldn’t obscure the fact that most of his fellow dictators are also playing dress-up. They may claim to be “pan-Arabists” or “Baathists,” but in the end they represent nothing and no one but themselves and their Swiss bank accounts. When their disgruntled subjects went looking for something real to counter the hollow kleptocracies, Islam was the first thing to hand. There is not much contemplation of the divine in your average mosque, but, as a political blueprint, Islam was waiting, and ready.

Multicultural Europe is not Mubarak’s Egypt, but, north of the Mediterranean as much as south, the official state ideology is insufficient. The Utopia of Diversity is already frantically trading land for peace, and unlikely to retain much of either. In the “Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets” — the heart of London’s East End, where one sees more covered women than in Amman — police turn a blind eye to misogyny, Jew-hatred, and gay-bashing for fear of being damned as “racist.” Male infidel teachers of Muslim girls are routinely assaulted. Patrons of a local gay pub are abused, and beaten, and, in one case, left permanently paralyzed.

The hostelry that has so attracted the ire of the Muslim youth hangs a poignant shingle: The George and Dragon. It’s one of the oldest and most popular English pub names. The one just across the Thames on Borough High Street has been serving beer for at least half a millennium. But no one would so designate a public house today. The George and Dragon honors the patron saint of England, and it is the cross of Saint George — the flag of England — under which the Crusaders fought. They brought back the tale from their soldiering in the Holy Land: In what is now Libya, Saint George supposedly made the Sign of the Cross, slew the dragon, and rescued the damsel. Within living memory, every English schoolchild knew the tale, if not all the details — e.g., the dragon-slaying so impressed the locals that they converted to Christianity. But the multicultural establishment slew the dragon of England’s racist colonialist imperialist history, and today few schoolchildren have a clue about Saint George. So the pub turned gay and Britain celebrated diversity, and tolerance, and it never occurred to them that, when you tolerate the avowedly intolerant, it’s only an interim phase. There will not be infidel teachers in Tower Hamlets for much longer, nor gay bars.

The “multicultural society” was an unnecessary experiment. And, in a post-prosperity Europe, demographic transformation is an unlikely recipe for social tranquility. If Ayaan Hirsi Ali is right, more than a few Europeans cut off from their inheritance and adrift in lands largely alien to them will seek comfort in older identities. In the Crusaders’ day, the edge of the maps bore the legend “Here be dragons.” They’re a lot closer now.

Europe in decline

This is another great article by Mark Steyn for National Review magazine he names "Lethal Leisure"....

In 1853 or thereabouts, Czar Nicholas I described Turkey as the sick man of Europe. A century and a half later, Turkey is increasingly the strong man of the Middle East, and the sick man of Europe is Europe — or, rather, “Europe.” The transformation of a geographical patchwork of nation-states into a single political entity has been the dominant Big Idea of the post-war era, the Big Idea the Continent’s elites turned to after all the other Big Ideas — Fascism, Nazism, and eventually Communism — failed, spectacularly. The West’s last Big Idea is now dying in the eurozone debt crisis. Although less obviously malign than the big totalitarian -isms, this particular idea has proved so insinuating and debilitating that the only question is whether most of the West dies with it.

“Europe” has a basic identity crisis: As the Germans have begun to figure out, just because the Greeks live in the same general neighborhood is no reason to open a joint checking account. And yet a decade ago, when it counted, everyone who mattered on the Continent assumed a common currency for nations with nothing in common was so obviously brilliant an idea it was barely worth explaining to the masses. In the absence of ethnic or cultural compatibility, the European Union offered Big Government as a substitute: The project was propped up by two pillars — social welfare and defense welfare. The former regulated Europe into economic sloth even as India, China, and Brazil began figuring out how this capitalism thing worked. The latter meant that the U.S. defense umbrella ensured once-lavish budgets for hussars and lancers could be reallocated to government health care and other lollipops — and it still wasn’t enough. Whatever the individual merits of ever-more-leisurely education, 30-hour work weeks, six weeks’ vacation, retirement at 50, the cumulative impact is that not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. And once large numbers of people acquire the habits of a leisured class, there are not many easy ways back to reality.

Defense welfare does the same at a geopolitical level. In absolving the Continent of responsibility for its own defense, the United States not only enabled Europe to beat its swords into Ponzi shares but, in a subtle and profound way, helped enervate the survival instincts of some of the oldest nation-states on the planet. I tend to agree with John Keegan, the great military historian and my old Telegraph colleague, that a nation without a military is in a sense no longer a nation. One of the few remaining serious second-tier powers is now joining their ranks: Under the “Conservative” premiership of David Cameron, a nation that within living memory governed a fifth of the earth’s surface and a quarter of its population and provided what global order there was for much of the rest will have a military incapable of independent force projection. Were the Argies to seize the Falklands today, Her Majesty’s Government would have to content itself with going to the U.N. and getting a strong resolution. Were the toppling of Saddam to be attempted today, Britain would be incapable of reprising the role it played eight years ago — of holding down the lower third of Iraq all but singlehanded while the Yanks pressed on to Baghdad. But beyond that, in a more general sense, nations that abandon their militaries tend also to abandon their national interests: Increasingly, instead of policies, they have attitudes. “Global warming” — “saving” the planet — is the perfect preoccupation for the ever-more-refined sensibilities of the post-national nation.

While Europe slept in and slept around, new powers emerged. China and India, on course to be the world’s top two economies within a couple of decades, both act as more or less conventional nation-states. So too do Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey — and many lesser players. We live on a planet in which the wealthiest societies in history, from Norway to New Zealand, are incapable of defending their own borders while basket cases like North Korea and Pakistan have gone nuclear, and Sudan and Somalia are anxious to follow. Whatever supple lies it may tell itself, a rich nation that cannot bother keeping up an army is retreating not only from imperialism and conquest but also from greatness. Continentals enjoy more paid leisure time than anybody else, yet they produce less and less great art, music, literature. A land of universal welfare invariably universalizes mediocrity.

Whether Greece defaults or gets bailed out one mo’ time doesn’t really matter: It’s insolvent, and there isn’t enough money in Germany to obscure that fact indefinitely. The longer “political reality” tries to dodge real reality, the bloodier the eventual reacquaintance will be. Europeans are going to have to relearn impulses three generations of Continentals have learned to regard as hopelessly vulgar. Can they do that? A land of 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees has so thoroughly diverted the great stream of life that it barely comprehends what’s at stake. “Europe” as a geopolitical rather than geographical concept has been for half a century the most conventional of conventional wisdom. Those, like Britain’s Euroskeptics, who dissented from it were derided as “swivel-eyed” “loony tunes.” The loons were right, and the smart set — the political class, the universities, the BBC, Le Monde — were wrong. “Europe” was a blueprint for sclerosis and decline, and then a sudden, devastating fall. As the “loony tunes” could have told them, it ends with, “That’s all, folks.”

Conservatism per Timothy Geoglein

Timothy Goeglein, longtime deputy director of public liason for George W. Bush sums up what conservatism means to him:

"The essential nature of 21st century American conservatism is a view that the federal government is too large and should be relimited; that governments, like families, should live within their budgets; that the market economy is the road to prosperity and is consistent with human nature; that our defense budget must be robust in defense of our liberty; that above all we need to preoccupy ourselves with the moral framework of our freedom; and that we need to preserve the values of Western civilization in the Greco-Roman but especially the Judeo-Christian traditions as the bulwark of virtue that nurtures freedom."

No Taxation without Representation

A message from the future

BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON and NATIONAL REVIEW MAGAZINE

Hey, Grover Norquist — I have a message from Mason and Emma, two adorable little newborn Americans still in diapers: “Pay your own goddamned taxes.”

Mr. Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, is the Republican party’s self-appointed policeman working the beat against tax hikes — for us. In effect, he’s working for tax hikes on those Americans being born today and in the next several years, Americans who have no say in our current fiscal policies but will end up paying a heavy price for our indiscipline.

Most Republicans in Congress have signed a well-meaning but destructive pledge to Mr. Norquist’s organization that they will not vote for any tax increase. This includes not only increases in tax rates but also ending special-interest tax subsidies, such as the ridiculous ethanol handout that lately renewed the war of words between Mr. Norquist and his chief Republican antagonist, Sen. Tom Coburn. Senator Coburn, to his credit, has been pushing to get rid of part of our embarrassing corn-gas program, specifically, the part composed of special tax credits for the ethanol emirate. Mr. Norquist, to his discredit, insists that any reduction in the ethanol tax subsidy be accompanied by an equal reduction in other taxes, lest the maneuver constitute a net tax increase and thereby start transforming United States into Germany or Canada or some other country not running Godzilla-sized deficits and spending its children into future penury.

Senator Coburn, Mr. Norquist argues, is an absolute fiend for tax increases: “He’s trying to screw the rest of the Republican party because he is so mad at the world,” Norquist told National Review Online. “He didn’t want to get rid of the ethanol tax credit without raising taxes. The important thing in his life was raising taxes.” Senator Coburn has his shortcomings, to be sure, but it is plainly absurd to claim that “the important thing in his life” is “raising taxes.” Mr. Norquist’s rhetoric then took a sharp turn from the absurd to the perverse as he characterized Senator Coburn’s tactics thus: “He said, ‘Ha, ha, popped your cherry, lost your virginity. Now give me $2 trillion in tax increases.’ As soon as they voted, he turned around and called them sluts. Guys like that didn’t get second dates in high school.” As tempting as it is to apply psychoanalysis here, I’ll stick to fiscal analysis.

The original Americans for Tax Reform were the Boston Harbor renegades and the musket-toting revolutionaries of 1776, and they marched under the banner of “No Taxation without Representation.” The Crown had argued that the American colonists enjoyed “virtual representation” in a parliament in which they had no vote. The Americans didn’t buy it, and neither did William Pitt, whose fine English nose detected a distinctly bovine aroma about the “virtual representation” argument: “The idea of a virtual representation of America in this House is the most contemptible that ever entered into the head of a man,” he proclaimed. “It does not deserve a serious refutation. The Commons of America, represented in their several assemblies, have ever been in possession of the exercise of this, their constitutional right, of giving and granting their own money. They would have been slaves if they had not enjoyed it.”

Roman Genn

Slaves, the man said. But the Stamp Act and the tea tax, odious though they were, are the lightest of yokes compared with the burdens the American Congress is laying upon the shoulders of American citizens not yet born, who have absolutely no say in the matter. If tradition is the democracy of the dead, as G. K. Chesterton put it, then thrift is the liberty of the unborn, who ought not to be encumbered with massive debts that will fundamentally alter the very nature of the American enterprise without their ever having been given the courtesy of a vote. They should not be indentured under a social contract they never signed and would not sign if they had a lick of sense about them.

Your average Age of Obama trillion or so in annual deficits? Chump change next to where our entitlement programs are going. Children being born today might expect to retire around 2075. Unless we take serious action in the very near future to reduce the size of our public debt, those newborn Americans will almost certainly spend their working lives encumbered by much higher taxes — 88 percent higher to accommodate present spending, according to an International Monetary Fund working paper, “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?” You can imagine what such a tax increase would do to economic growth, investment, innovation, and the prospects for satisfying employment. (If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on your paycheck — forever.) The middle-of-the-road version from the IMF crew is a mere 35 percent hike in every federal tax, combined with a 35 percent cut in benefits, just to maintain basic national solvency.

And national solvency is a real concern. To get an idea of the size and heft of the millstone we’re hoisting around the necks of little Mason and Emma (the most popular names in 2011 for boys and girls, respectively, inexplicably), take a panicky gander at the annual report of the trustees of Social Security and Medicare. By the time today’s little curtain-climbers get ready to hit the shuffleboard decks or the holodeck or whatever it is retirees end up doing for low-impact kicks in 2075, the two big-boy entitlements will be leaving annual craters in the American economy about the size of the one left by the meteor that sent T. Rex & Co. into the evolutionary version of Chapter 11. Left on its current course, Social Security — Social Security alone — will run a deficit of $3.758 trillion in 2075. (Those are 2011 dollars, not inflated spaceman dollars from 2075, when a loaf of bread will cost $20 or so, if inflation in the next 65 years equals inflation in the past 65 years.) Add in Medicare hospital insurance (which the Social Security trustees also estimate) and you have a one-year deficit of $4.802 trillion — for two programs. That’s under the “intermediate” scenario. The trustees also calculate a “high-cost” run-for-the-hills scenario, under which that 2075 deficit hits $19.3 trillion — which then jumps to $30.5 trillion in 2085. That’s not the whole federal deficit — that’s just the deficit from two programs in one year.

Admittedly, the high-cost scenario is unlikely, which is not to say implausible; fiscal forecasting is hardly an exact science. And, sure, Pollyanna says, those numbers look shocking today, when our GDP is only about $15 trillion or so. But in 65 years our economy will be a heck of a lot bigger, and $30 trillion or whatever won’t be such a big bad wolf of a terrifying deal. About that, I have some bad news for you, Sunshine: If our economy grows for the next 65 years at the same rate it grew for the last 65 years — and that may be optimistic — that gets us only to about $100 trillion, meaning that we’d be spending about 24 percent of GDP on two entitlement programs, and about 5 percent of GDP on deficits in those two programs. Currently, all federal spending amounts to just over 25 percent of GDP — and that’s nearly an all-time high, exceeded only during the war years of 1943–45.

What if we don’t grow as fast as we did for the past half century? If GDP growth looks more like the 1.9 percent it has averaged since 2000 and outlays stay on track, then we’ll be spending about half of GDP on those two programs, which will be running a combined deficit equal to 10 percent of GDP. Which is to say, we’ll be spending about twice as much on Social Security and Medicare hospital insurance as we spend on the entire federal government today.

It is hard to tell a believable story in which a nation remains thriving and competitive — or even solvent and functional — while spending half of its GDP on two entitlement programs. Not when the Congressional Budget Office is projecting that, barring some real reform, our publicly held national debt will hit 200 percent of GDP around the time Mason and Emma are getting out of college. (That’s under CBO’s “Alternative Fiscal Scenario,” which is not a worst-case projection, but one “incorporating some changes in policy that are widely expected to occur and that policymakers have regularly made in the past,” as CBO puts it.)

Everybody but Grover Norquist and the majority of our elected representatives is starting to get the picture. Even AARP, which for years has been to Social Security reform what Americans for Tax Reform is to tax reform — a pig-headed obstacle — has quietly conceded that some cuts in benefits are inevitable, if not desirable. ATR and its allies have been adamantine on taxes but have been in effect AWOL on the real issue, which is spending. Incredibly, the Republicans’ favorite line of attack against Obamacare is that it entails Medicare spending cuts. When Democrats proposed cutting Medicare, Sen. Mitch McConnell denounced them. When Rep. Paul Ryan proposed cutting Medicare, Newt Gingrich denounced him. Granted, the Democrats’ Medicare cuts almost certainly are fictional, but Republicans ran against the very idea of cuts — the one thing they should be championing. If you can’t cut spending and won’t raise taxes, you are, in effect, one half of the Bipartisan Coalition for Eternal Deficits, haunted by the Ghost of Taxes Future.

You think Mason and Emma would, given a choice, vote themselves higher taxes in order to help Newt Gingrich come in third in Iowa instead of fifth? Hard choices have to be made. We demand premium Canadian levels of government spending at discount Colombian levels of taxation. We are demanding that our children pay our taxes so that we don’t have to pay them ourselves. Cutting spending would be a lot easier, and there would be a greater constituency for it, if we paid our own taxes.

King George III, like any self-respecting power-mad colonial potentate, taxed the unrepresented to lard up his treasury and keep himself in wig powder. Our forefathers showed his generals the door at the point of a bayonet. To what end? We’re all Hanovers now, practicing a form of inter-temporal colonialism, a particularly nasty variety of taxation without representation, pillaging our own children and grandchildren to put off unpleasantness now. The longer we wait to fire both barrels at the deficit and debt, the bigger the tax increase we’re passing on to Mason and Emma, and the lower the standard of living we’re leaving them. No taxation without representation — not for us, not for them.

Violence and mental illness

This is a great article by E. Fuller Torrey for National Review in 2011 titled "Let Them Take Pills": misguided civil-liberties concerns hurt the mentally ill and the public. 

 For many years it has been politically correct to claim that people with schizophrenia or other forms of mental illness are no more dangerous than the general population. Even after the recent homicides in Arizona attributed to Jared Lee Loughner, an obviously mentally ill young man, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law stated: “Studies show that having a mental illness, in itself, does not increase one’s propensity to commit serious violence.” Likewise, Mental Health America, previously known as the National Mental Health Association, publicly claimed that “people with mental health conditions are no more likely to be violent than the rest of the population.” Advocates for the mentally ill seem to think that if they repeat this often enough, it will become true. The facts are otherwise, as shown by several studies over the past two decades. It’s true that most individuals with mental illnesses, including all those taking the medication needed to control their symptoms, are not more dangerous than the general population. However, among the 4 million individuals with serious mental illnesses, primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, a small number are clearly more dangerous — and, as happened to Jared Loughner, they become headlines when their delusional thinking and auditory hallucinations lead them to commit some heinous act. Since 1990, eight major studies have been carried out in the United States assessing violent acts by individuals with serious mental illnesses. The 1998 MacArthur Foundation–funded study, which is usually cited by mental-health advocates as proving that these individuals are not more violent, actually proves the opposite. The study followed 951 patients who were discharged from psychiatric hospitals. Although many patients had refused to participate in the MacArthur study, thus removing some of the most paranoid members from the sample, in a one-year period the 951 individuals committed a total of 608 acts of serious violence (physical injury, threat or assault with a weapon, or sexual assault). The violent acts included six homicides. Overall, 18 percent of the patients who were not substance abusers, and 31 percent of those who were, committed an act of serious violence. These rates were 25 percent higher than the rates among other residents of the high-crime neighborhood in which the study was carried out. 

An alternative means of measuring violence is to question those who have a mentally ill family member. In 1992 the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill asked more than 1,400 of its members whether their mentally ill family member had physically injured anyone or threatened to do so in the previous year. Eleven percent responded that their family member had harmed someone, and an additional 19 percent said their family member had threatened to do so. Given such studies, it should not be surprising to find that approximately 10 percent of all homicides in this country are committed by individuals with serious mental illnesses, a figure that was reported in two small studies in California and New York and a recent large study in Indiana. Can we predict which mentally ill people are most likely to become violent? The two strongest predictors of violence in all individuals, mentally ill or not, are a history of violence and the abuse of alcohol or drugs. 

For those who are mentally ill, however, there are additional predictors. The strongest is a failure to take their medication. Virtually every high-profile violent act committed by a mentally ill person was done by someone not taking medication. 

Another factor that increases the risk of violence is the presence of certain kinds of psychiatric symptoms, especially paranoid delusions or a belief that someone is trying to control your mind. Jared Loughner had both of these risk factors, according to those who knew him. Given the prevalence of such episodes of violence, what should we do? The real tragedy is that they continue to occur even though serious mental diseases are treatable in most cases. We have a variety of effective anti-psychotic medications that control a patient’s symptoms and let him live a reasonably normal life, even if they don’t cure him. If Jared Loughner had been properly treated, he would probably now be finishing community college and able to hold a job, rather than facing the probability of life in prison. But medications are, of course, effective only if the person takes them. And there’s the rub. Approximately half of all people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are aware of their illness and thus competent to make an informed decision about whether to take medication. The other half, however, are not aware of their illness. The disease impairs the part of the brain that we use to think about ourselves, much as Alzheimer’s disease does. Such people deny they are sick or need medication, and most of them will not take medication unless it is mandated. Out of this dilemma emerged laws requiring some mentally ill individuals to take medication involuntarily. Such laws, often called assisted outpatient treatment (AOT), basically say to the person: You can live in the community as long as you take your medication, but if you do not, we have the legal right to bring you back to the hospital. In states where it has been studied, AOT has been shown to be remarkably effective in decreasing rehospitalization, homelessness, incarceration, and violence. In a North Carolina study of subjects with a history of serious mental illness and serious violence, the proportion who committed further acts of violence declined from 42 percent to 27 percent when AOT was continued for at least six months. In New York, AOT reduced the proportion of individuals who “physically harmed others” from 15 percent to 8 percent. Unfortunately, however, AOT is little used by most states, including Arizona. Six states — Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Tennessee, New Mexico, and Nevada — do not even have a provision for AOT. And neither AOT nor any other psychiatric services will be effective if they are not available. Arizona and most other states have markedly reduced the number of psychiatric beds and outpatient services they provide, so it is extremely difficult to get treatment, even for someone who is severely mentally ill. The states have done this under the illusion that they are saving money. It is now clear, however, that the costs of untreated serious mental illness show up in other ways, such as social services, court costs, the expense of keeping mentally ill individuals in jails and prisons, and of course homicides. The most important reason many seriously mentally ill people do not get treated is the opposition of groups that place civil liberties above all other considerations. 

But in protecting a person’s right to remain psychotic, are we really doing that person a favor? Being seriously mentally ill and homeless or in jail is unpleasant on some days and a living hell on others. 

And what about the civil rights of those who must endure the consequences of this non-treatment? Shouldn’t citizens going to talk to their congresswoman be considered as well? In the Tucson killings, six people were deprived of their lives as well as their civil rights. The ultimate duty to fix the mental-illness mess rests with the states. For two centuries, they had the primary responsibility for overseeing treatment of the mentally ill, but in recent years much of the funding for mental-health services has been shifted to federal sources. Given the publicity surrounding the Arizona tragedy, maybe this would be a good time to experiment with alternative ways to deliver mental-health services. For example, in two or three states, all federal funds now going to support mentally ill individuals, including Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, and SSDI, could be block-granted, with the states free to devise a better treatment system and spend the money accordingly. The results would be carefully assessed prior to, and three years after, the block grant. We can’t do any worse than we are presently doing. 

 Mr. Torrey, a psychiatrist, is the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center (www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org) and the author of The Insanity Offense: How America’s Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens (W. W. Norton, 2008).

The alternative to Obamacare

In light of all of the exemptions (waivers) being doled out by the democrat administration to their friends in the business world and their friends in the labor unions (companies, non-profits, and unions would have to otherwise drop their health insurance plans without the waivers due to the high cost of the required changes forced upon them by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or "Obamacare"), there is much talk of repealing the law and starting over with healthcare reform. The more reliable republican alternative was offered during the McCain campaign but was not well defended by the candidate and therefore ignored by most of the voting population. What is the alternative for improving (reforming) our healthcare system:

• End the tax preference/benefit for employer-provided health insurance gradually over the course of several years. This will encourage the growth of the market for individually purchased insurance (I actually have such a plan) that gives individuals or families more control over their plan and its costs, and make it possible for them to take it from job to job.



• The tax break should be converted into a flat credit so the most expensive insurance plans (used for high wage employees) lose the incentive to overspend. Employees should be able to use the credit toward their company plans OR allowed to use them for self-purchased plans.



• Allow individuals and families to buy insurance across state lines. The competition among insurers would reduce premiums, and the regulations of individual states would arguably have less impact on one's costs.



• With individual plans purchased on the open market, people would be able to select renewable policies instead of relying on an employer's plan that terminates when they quit or get laid off and causes great difficulty to those with chronic illness in getting a new policy (the pre-existing condition problem). Although younger people can lock in renewable policies right now on open market plans, people with pre-existing conditions right now would still be unserved, so republicans support creating a government "high-risk pool" subsidized program for the uninsurable today that would be weened away after several generations.



• The federal government should cap (establish maximum not to exceed funding level) Medicaid and let the states run the program to provide aid to only the most needy in each state.



• Medicare must be converted to a voucher program with the budget for each person established using reasonable formulas or criteria. The alternative is provided in Obamacare: tax increases and healthcare rationing.

The healthcare system pre-obamacare was not a free market system, it was over-regulated and therefore an excessively government manipulated system. It was not a market failure, but a failure to have free markets that has caused many of the problems.

Earth Hour

This is a great article by James Lileks of National Review, i had to post it:

"This year's 'Earth Hour' came and went without much hoorah. A few cities turned off their lights downtown for 60 minutes to show how glorious the world could be if we were all kickin' it Pyongyang-style, and people swooned. The objections are obvious: it's symbolic. It accomplished nothing. It flatters those who believe they are better people because they fret about carbon, compost their fair-trade coffee grounds, and lecture people who use superglue when they could use Himalayan yak spittle (seriously, you can find it at any co-op). If Freud were around these days, he's reduce their psyche to the Id and the Super-eco.

Here's the problem with Earth Hour: how do you know when it's over without consulting some carbon-powered instrument? I know, I'll check the sundial, like the wise old carbon-neutral Greeks! Someone light a candle so i can see what time it is. But candles give off the CO2, the Devil's Breath. One candle, it is estimated, gives off 0.00000001 PBs of carbon, with 1 PB being the amount it takes to melt a glacier and strand a photogenic polar bear on a floe. So no wicks, no tapers. Better to curse a candle than to light the darkness.

Perhaps one could use a wind-up timer to know when Earth Hour's done. That would have a symbolic message possibly lost on the celebrants: civilization, like and egg-timer, winds down unless maintained and resupplied with energy. The problem with our current energy situation, though, is that we won't hear the ding! when time is up. Things will just grind down until the economy is on blocks in the front yard because gas is six bucks a gallon, inflation is galloping like a stagecoach horse, and the entitlement state has become so enormous the only thing Congress can do is meet twice a year to turn it over so it doesn't get bedsores. We're supposed to be panicked about unsustainable fuels and switch to putt-putt plastic cars that run on hemp, but we could sustain ourselves for osme time with the oil we have and nuclear plants we could have. Might give us some breathing room, so skylines need not be darkened to divert the last precious watts to a hospital's ICU.

In the high holy holidays of the ecology movement, Earth Hour is the precursor to Earth Day, the annual reminder that despite 4 decades of laws and regulations, the planet is still precariously imperiled. Grade-school students will spend the day writing letters to Congress so the Koch brothers don't interject plutonium into the earth's core as part of their "mwah hah hah, die everyone die" initiative. But just as Earth Hour has lost steam, Earth Day has challenges. The latest Gallup poll indicates that Americans are caring less about global warming than before. The care most about 'contamination of soil and water by toxic waste,' which will surely spur the moribund EPA to fight all those laws that permit American Cadmium and Lead to pour their industrial waste into ponds by the elementary school. Most people also worry 'a great deal' about 'air pollution', 28% don't give it much thought at all, but they're sitting in boardrooms lighting cigars with $100 bills to kick off National Belching Smokestack Week. A majority of people, 57%, are worried about 'urban sprawl and loss of open spaces.' That is also the percentage of people who have never flown across the Midwest and looked out the window.

Bottom of the list: global warming. 51% "worry" about it "a great deal or a fair amount." The poll didn't dig into specifics, alas, one would love to know how the people who worry a great deal go about their day. [...]

The beauty of Earth Hour: it's predictable, it's voluntary, it happens at night, and it doesn't interrupt anyone's dentist appointment. Countries that have their own unscheduled "earth hours" several times a day must look at the West like a starving person regards a trencherman who announces he will abjure oysters once a year between 3 and 4 PM. We can give it up because we don't have to. Yet. If the grid goes down for good, and the human infestation on aching Gaia is reduced to hominids huddled in huts, children may ask toothless gramps to tell them what it was like when the great dark towers shone at night, when the night was banished by the proud gleam of our hasty and tireless servant, electricity. But if gramps was a green, he might well scoff: "twas a vain boast that man could outmatch the stars, and what did we get out of it? Besides a century of unparalleled prosperity? A 0.5 degree rise in global temperatures. Or so some say. The instruments that compute such things had to be plugged in to work. Anyhow, stop your fussin' and go to bed, sun's down, day's done."

NPR: National Progressive Radio

In October 2010 NPR accepted $1,800,000 from George Soros' leftist "Open Society Foundations". NPR president at the time Vivian Schiller soon fired Juan Williams arguably for his affiliation with the Fox News channel. Although the democrat controlled media outlets do not discuss Mr. Soros and his associations, his views are shared by those at NPR. Matthew Shaffer collected evidence of the political sympathies of board members of NPR Inc. and its fundraising entity the NPR Foundation in November 2010. Almost every board member has demonstrably liberal/democrat political leanings (support for democrat candidates, pro-abortion groups, and environmental activism for example). NPR Foundation chairman Antoine W. Van Agtmael was a trustee at the leftist Brookings Institution. Jane Katcher gave Democrats and Emily's List more than $64,000. Sukey Garcetti was also director of the Roth Family Foundation ("progressive" PAC). 50 such examples were collected by Mr. Shaffer. The content of NPR programming is one issue, but as to who runs the partially taxpayer funded operation, there is no argument, it is run by the democrat/liberal side of our country's 2-party ideological split and has no business being granted taxpayer money.

Stages of adulthood

I had to chuckle at a comment by James Lileks (National Review writer). He wrote this in an article poking fun at the observation today that people in their 20's are taking longer to grow up (i.e. government taking care of you, parents acting like friends with money instead of parents, etc).

What are the 5 stages of adulthood:

1. Finishing up school
2. Not sponging off the parents
3. Getting a job
4. Swapping rings with someone who will put up with you
5. Turning out replacement units

I have completed the 5 stages so i guess i am entering my mid-life crisis :)

Progressive = Totalitarian

This is a nice piece by Johah Goldberg of National Review:

"I had to chuckle at a lengthy post on a [liberal] website by a guest blogger named Sara Robinson:

'Every American over the age of 10 knows what the GOP and the conservative movement stand for. [...] low taxes, small government, strong defense, traditional families. See? You know the tune, and the harmony line, too. Ok, now: What do Democrats and progressives stand for? Take your time. It's a tough question. Give up? So have most progressives. Even the movement's most deeply committed members often have a hard time answering this one. And that is the problem. [...]'

Robinson goes on and on in this vein, as if hers were a new observation. The reality is that this is one of liberalism's mossier cliches. Whenever liberals get in trouble, [they will argue] it is not because they are wrong, it is because they have not communicated their [ideas] sufficiently. A few years ago, this claim was best reflected in the writings of George Lakoff, the linguist who thinks everyone will love trial lawyers if we just call them "public protection attorneys". This idea has great and obvious appeal to liberals [democrats] because it places the blame on the public for failing to appreciate just how right [the liberal elite] are, while offering themselves a backdoor compliment: we are too smart to talk at the hoi polloi's level.

That said, i think Robinson is right about one thing. Progressives do have a branding problem. But it stems from the nature of progressivism. What progressivism stands for is having progressives be in charge. Period. Progressivism stripped of all its pretensions and its many good intentions (and it does have many good intensions) is at its core the dogmatic belief that the familiar band of technocratic egalitarian statists [democrats] should be calling the shots.

This is the upshot of liberalism's much vaunted "empiricism" and hostility to labels, ideology, etc. When liberals [democrats] claim they do not believe in labels, what they are saying is that they don't want to be locked into a view, an idea, a principle, that will constrain them later.

This view is what defined FDR's "experimentalism" and JFK's "cool pragmatism." JFK argued that "political labels and ideological approaches are irrelevant to the solution" of contemporary challenges. "Most of the problems...that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems." These problems "deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men" and therefore should be left to the experts. These days, if you hear a libearal invoke pragmatism, you can reliably translate his statement into "shut up we know what to do." This has more or less defined Obama's 'pragmatism' since he took office.

Even where progressives claim to be laissez-faire - say in matters of sexuality or abortion - there is always an implied expiration date (does anyone believe that progressives will remain so dogmatically pro-choice the day homosexuality can be prevented in utero?). It is very hard to find an area where liberals claim to be truly liberal (by which i mean libertarian) and their love of freedom is not conducive to their preferred outcome. Personal liberty is awesome, so long as you eat the right food and smoke fashionable plants. They are for free speech in principle, but would define away disagreement as a 'hate crime'. Dissent is the highest form of patriotism when it is liberal dissent, while the dissenting tea partiers are [called] plain old racists.

This arrogant double dealing mindset is what creates progressivism's branding problem. They cannot admit to their real slogan: "shut up, we are in charge."

Johan Goldberg, National Review, Nov. 2010

Climate-mania over?

From the March 8 issue of National Review......

"Exaggeration and alarmism have been a chronic weakness of environmentalism since it became an organized movement in the 1960's. Every ecological problem was instantly transformed into a potential world-ending crisis, from the population bomb to the imminent resource depletion of the 'limits to growth' fad of the 1970's to acid rain to ozone depletion, and there was always an overlay of moral condemnation for anyone who dissented. With global warming, the environmental movement thought it had hit the jackpot - a crisis sufficiently long-range that it could not be proved nonexistent and broad enough to justify massive political controls on resource use at a global level. Former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth was unusually candid when he remarked in the early days of the climate campaign that:

'we've got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing - in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.'

Not surprisingly, after Wirth left the Senate and the Clinton administration, he ended up at the UN.

The global-warming thrill ride looks to be coming to an end, undone by the same politically motivated serial exaggeration and moral preening that discredited previous apocalypses. On the heels of the East Anglia University 'Climategate' scandal have come embarassing retractions on an almost daily basis from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarding some of the most loudly trumpeted signs and wonders of global warming, such as the ludicrous claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear within 30 years, that nearly half of the Amazon jungle was at imminent risk of destruction from a warming planet, and that there was a clear linkage between climate change and weather-related economic losses. The sources for these claims turned out to be environmental advocacy groups, not rigorous peer-reviewed science. Then Phil Jones, the scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal at East Anglia University (he is the author of the now infamous phrase 'hide the decline') dropped several bombshells in a surprisingly candid interview with the BBC. He admitted that his surface temperature data are in such dissarray that they probably cannot be verified or replicated; said the medieval warm period may have been as warm as today; and agreed that there has been no statistically significant warming for the last 15 years - three points that climate campaigners have been bitterly contesting.

To be sure, these revelations do not in and of themselves mean that there is no anthropogenic global warming. But this is probably the beginning of a wholesale revision of the conventional wisdom on climate change. Al Gore and the climate campaigners cannot go on saying with a straight face that the matter is 'settled science'. One of the central issues of Climategate - the veracity and integrity of the surface temperature records used for our estimates of warming over the last few decades - is far from resolved. The London Times ran a headline last week: 'World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists'. The next frontier is likely to be a fresh debate about climate sensitivity itself. There have been several recent peer-reviewed papers suggesting much lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases than the IPCC 'consensus' computer models predict. And alternative explanations for observed climate change in the Arctic and elsewhere, such as shifts in ocean currents and wind patterns, should receive a second look.

Dissenters who pointed out these and other flaws in the IPCC consensus were demonized as deniers and ignored by the media, but they are now vindicated. The American media are still averting their gaze, though the British press - even the left-wing Guardian and The Independent - is turning on the climate campaigners with deserved vengeance. The IPCC is mumbling about non-specific reforms and changes to the process by which it will produce its next massive climate report, due otu in three or four years. It should emulate a typical feature of American government commissions and include a minority report from dissenters or scientists with a different emphasis. But the next report may not matter much, with the collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen talks, and the likely rejection of cap-and-trade in Congress, climate mania may have runs its course."

Swiss ban islamic minarets

This is another great article by one of my favorite pundits, Mark Steyn, who is a writer for National Review magazine....

"The Swiss minaret ban and the leaked climate e-mails are really the same story - or, more precisely, are symptoms of the same disease. In the Times of London, Olive Kamm deplored the results of Switzerland's referendum, consigned it to the garbage can of right-wing populism, and for good measure dismissed my analysis of euro-demographics. Instead, Mr. Kamm called for a 'secularist and liberal defense of the principles of a pluralist society'.

"That's not the solution to the problem, but one of the causes. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for liberalism and pluralism and whatnot. And, in the hands of a combative old bruiser like Christopher Hitchens, they're powerful weapons. But most people are not like Mr. Hitchens. And so in much of the post-Christian West 'a pluralist society' has subsided into a vast gaping nullity too weak to have any purchase on large numbers of the citizenry. In practice, the 'secularist and liberal defense' is the vacuum in which a resurgent globalized Islam has incubated."

"It is only human to wish to belong to something larger than oneself, and thereby give one's life meaning. For most of history, this need was satisfied by tribe and then nation, and religion. But the Church is in steep decline in Europe, and the nation-state is all but wholly discredited as the font of racism, imperialims, and all the other ills. So some (not all) third-generation Britons of Pakistani descent look elsewhere for their identity, and find the new globalized Islam. And some (not all) 30th generation Britons of old Anglo-Saxon stock also look elsewhere, and find global warming. 'Think globally act locally' works for environmentalism and jihad. Adherents of both causes are saving the planet from the same enemy - decadent capitalist infidels living empty consumerist lives. Both faiths claim their tenets are beyond discussion. Only another climate scientist can question the climate-science 'consensus':you bus-boys and waitresses and accountants and software designers and astronomers and physicists and meteorologists are unqualified to enter the debate. Likewise, on Islam, for an unbeliever to express a view is 'islamophobic'. As to which of these competing globalisms is less plausible, I leave it to readers: Barack Obama promises to lower the oceans; Hizb ut-Tahrir promises a global caliphate. The Guardian's ecopalyptic Fred Pearce says Australia will be uninhabitable within a few years; Islam4UK says Britain will be under Sharia within a few years. I'm not a betting man but if i had to choose....."

"Think globally, act locally, but if you're on the receiving end of globalized pathologies, it's very hard to act locally. A conventional if tyrannical nation-state is free to act against both Islam and 'the environment'. China is happy to stick it to the Uighurs and to turn the Yangtze into a frothing toxic cauldron. But these days non-tyrannical nation-states are barely nations at all, and certainly not to the extent of having anything so declasse as a 'national interest'. If the Swiss are indeed the raging right-wing populists Oliver Kamm says they are, their knuckle-dragging neofascism is a limp and effete strain. If you truly believe Islam is the cuckoo in your clock, you might ban new mosque construction or even muslim immigration. Instead they have banned a symbolic architectural flourish, while the mosque building and the immigation continue, which means that one day the minaret ban will be overturned. And were the country a member of the European Union, even this forlorn gesture would not be permitted."

"In Switzerland's defense, it was pointed out that Saudi Arabia prohibits not just church spires but churches. But this argument went nowhere, except to give detractors an opportunity to tut that the Swiss had chosen to become Alpine Saudi. To progressive opinion, it's taken as read that 'multiculturalism' is a one-way street: it seems entirely reasonable for a Wahhabist to say an Anglican church in Riyadh would see, gee, i dunno, just somehow kinda un-Saudi, whereas it is entirely unacceptable for Heidi's grandfather to say a Deobandi mosque in Lucerne is un-swiss. In contemporary Western discourse, a commitment to abstract virtues - secularism, pluralism - must trump any visceral sense of ethnocultural allegiance."

"That's a very shifting patch of sand to draw a line in. Recently, the writer Barbara Kay testified to the House of Commons in Ottawa about a jewish teacher at a francophone school in Ontario. Around 2002 she began to encounter explicitly anti-semitic speech from muslim students: 'Does someone swell a Jew? It stinks in here'. 'You are not human, you are a jew.' Had Anglo-Saxon skinheads essayed such jests, Oliver Kamm's warriors of pluralism would have crushed them like bugs. But when the teacher went to the principal, and the school board, and the local 'hate-crimes unit', they all looked the other way and advised her that it would be easier if she retired. 60 out of 75 French teachers at the school opted to leave: a couple were jewish, a few more practicing catholics, and most of the rest were the liberal secularists on whom Oliver Kamm's defense of the west rests. The francophone children withdrew too. And now the principal and most of the students and faculty are muslim."

"Maybe it would have wound up like that anyway. But having nothing to stand in your way except liberal progressives certainly accelerated the progress. And as it went at one schoolhouse, so will it go on the broader horizon: if you believe in everything, you're unlikely to stand for something."

Democrat Economic Policies Doomed to Failure

This is an article by Brian Riedl (National Review), it was so good I had to post it.

"Conservatives have correctly declared [the economic stimulus policy of the democrats and President Obama] a flop. [...] Yet few have explained correctly why the stimulus failed. By blaming the slow pace of stimulus spending, many conservatives have accepted the premise that government spending stimulates the economy. [...]"

"In 1939, after a doubling of federal spending failed to relieve the Great Depression, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau said that 'we have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work...After eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started...and an enourmous debt to boot.' Japan made the same mistake in the 1990's (building the largest government debt in the industrial world), and the USA is making it today."

"This repeated failure has nothing to do with the pace or type of spending. Rather, the problem is found in the oft-repeated Keynesian myth that deficit spending injects new dollars into the economy, thereby increasing demand and spurring economic growth. According to this theory, government spending adds money to the economy, taxes remove money, and the budget deficit represents net new dollars injected. Therefore, it scarecely matters how the dollars are spent. John Maynard Keynes famously asserted that a government program paying people to dig and then refill ditches would provide new income for those workers to spend and circulate through the economy, creating even more jobs and income. Today, lawmakers cling to estimates by Mark Zandi of Economy.com that on average $1 in new deficit spending expands the economy by roughly $1.50. If that were true, the record $1,600,000,000,000 deficit spending over the past fiscal year would have already overheated the economy. Yet despite this spending, which is equal to fully 9% of GDP, the economy is expected to shrink by at least 3% this fiscal year. If the spending constitutes an injection of 'new money' into the economy, we may conclude that, without it, the economy would contract 12%, hardly a plausible claim.

If $1,600,000,000,000 in deficit spending failed to slow the economy's slide, there is no reason to believe that adding $185,000,000,000 - the 2009 portion of the stimulus bill - will suddenly do the trick. But if budget deficits of nearly $2 trillion are insufficient stimulus, how much would be enough? $3 trillion? $4 trillion?

This is no longer a theoretical exercise. The idea that increased deficit spending can cure recessions has been tested, and it has failed. If growing the economy were as simple as expanding government spending and deficits, then Italy, France, and Germany would be the global economic kings. And there would be no reason to stop at $787 billion: Congress could guarantee unlimited prosperity by endlessly borrowing and spending trillions of dollars.

The simple reason government spending fails to end recessions is that Congress does not have a vault of money waiting to be distributed. Every dollar Congress 'injects' into the economy must first be borrowed or taxed out of the economy. No new income, and therefore no new demand, is created. They are merely redistributed from one group of people to another. Congress cannot create new purchasing power out of thin air.

This is intuitively clear in the case of funding new spending with new taxes. Yet funding new spending with new borrowing is also pure redistribution, since the investors who lend Washington the money will have that much less to invest in the economy. The fact that borrowed funds (unlike taxes) must later be repaid by the government makes them no less of a zero-sum transfer today.

Even during recessions, when total production falls, leaving people with less income to spend, Congress cannot create new demand and income. Any government spending that increases production at factories and puts unemployed individuals to work will be financed by removing funds (and thus idling resources) elsewhere in the economy. This is true whether the unemployment rate is 5% or 50%.

For example, many lawmakers claim that every $1 billion in highway stimulus will create 47,576 new construction jobs. But Congress must first borrow that $1 billion out of the private economy, which will then lose a roughly equivalent number of jobs. As transportation-policy expert Ronald Utt has explained, 'the only way that $1 billion of new highway spending can create 47,576 new jos is if the $1 billion appears out of nowhere as if it were manna from heaven.' Removing water from one end of a swimming pool and dumping it in the other end will not raise the overall water level. Similarly, moving dollars from one part of the economy to the other will not expand the economy. Not even in the short run.

Consider a simpler example. Under normal circumstances, a family might put its $1000 savings in a CD at the local bank. The bank would then lend that $1000 to the local hardware store. This would have the effect of recycling that spending around the town, supporting local jobs. Now suppose that, induced by an offer of higher interest rates, the family instead buys a $1000 government bond that funds the stimulus bill. Washington spends that $1000 in a different town, creating jobs there instead. The stimulus bill has changed only the location of the spending.

The mistaken view of fiscal stimulus persists because we can easily see the people put to work with government funds. We don't see the jobs that would have been created elsewhere in the economy with those same dollars had they not been lent to Washington.

In his 1848 essay 'What is Seen and What is Not Seen', French economist Frederic Bastiat termed this the 'broken window' fallacy, in reference to a local myth that breaking windows would stimulate the economy by creating window repair jobs. Today, the broken window fallacy explains why thousands of new stimulus jobs are not improving the total employment picture.

Keynesian economists counter that redistribution can increase demand if the money is transferred from savers to spenders. Yet this 'idle savings' theory assumes that savings fall out of the economy, which clearly is not the case. Nearly all individuals and businesses invest their savings or put it in banks (which in turn invest it or lend it out), so the money is still being spent somewhere in the economy. Even in this recession, with tightened lending standards, banks are performing their traditional role of intermediating between those who have savings and those who need to borrow. They are not building extensive basement vaults to hoard cash.

Since the financial system transfers savings into investment spending, the only savings that drop out of the economy are those dollars literally hoarded in matresses and safes - and there is no evidence that this is occurring en masse. And even if individuals, businesses, and banks did distrust the financial system enough to hoard their dollars, why would they suddenly lend them to the government to finance a stimulus bill?

Once the idle-savings theory collapses, so does all the intellectual support for government spending as stimulus. If there are no idle savings to acquire, then the government is merely borrowing purchasing power from one part of the economy and moving it into another part of the economy. Washington becomes nothing more than a pricey middleman, redistributing existing demand.

Even foreign borrowing is no free lunch. Before China can lend us dollars, it must acquire them from us. This requires either attracting American investment or raising the Chinese trade surplus (and the American trade deficit). The balance of payments between America and other nations must eventually net out to zero, which means government spending funded from foreign borrowing is zero-sum.

I've purposely ignored the Federal Reserve, which actually can inject cash into the economy, but not in a way that constitutes stimulus. Congress can deficit-spend, Treasury can finance the deficit spending by issuing bonds, and the Federal Reserve can buy those bonds by printing money. Any economic boost is then due to the Federal Reserve's actions, not the deficit spending - and of course the Federal Reserve will have to raise interest rates, slowing the economy again, to bring the resulting inflation under control.

If government spending doesn't cause economic growth, what does? Growth happens when more goods and services are produced, and the only true source of this is an expanding labor force combined with high productivity. High productivity in turn requires educated and motivated workers, advanced technology, adequate infrastructure, physical capital such as factories and tools, and the rule of law.

Government spending could boost long-run produtivity through investments in education and infrastructure - but only if politicians could target those investments better than the private sector would. And it turns out that politicians cannot outsmart the marketplace. Mountains of academic studies show that government spending generally reduces long term productivity.

The only policy proven to increase productivity in the short term is to lower tax rates and reduce regulation. Businesses can grow only through consistent investment and an expanding, skilled workforce. Cutting marginal tax rates promotes these conditions, by creating incentives to work, save, and invest.

It's happened before. In 1981, President Reagan inherited an economy stagnating under the weight of 70% marginal income-tax rates. Under Reagan, the top rate fell to 28%, and the subsequent surge in investment and labor supply created the strongest 25-year economic boom in American history.

Such tax-rate reductions are superior to tax rebates designed to 'put money in people's pockets'. Rebates - like government spending - simply redistribute existing dollars. They don't increase productivity because they don't change incentives: no one has to work, save, or invest more to get a tax rebate. The 2001 and 2008 rebates failed because Congress borrowed money from investors and foreigners and redistributed it to families. Not surprisingly, any new personal consumption spending was matched by corresponding declines in investment spending and net exports, and the economy was stagnant.

Congress can only redistribute exisitng demand, it cannot create new demand. [...] The more serious, long-term danger is that President Obama's Europeanization of the economy will bring the same slow growth, stagnant wages, job losses, high taxes, and lack of competitiveness that have plagued Western Europe, leaving the USA at an ever-growing disadvantage with Asian countries not so afflicted.

[Conservatives and free-market supporters - Republicans - must be elected into Congress to put the brakes on the deficit spending and high taxation, and return the money to the private sector where it can grow the economy and improve our standard of living.]

Joe Wilson said "You Lie", and he was right.

This is an excerpt from Ralph Reed's commentary on Sept. 13, 2009. Although shouting out in the middle of a speech is poor manners, our Congress is still fantastically proper relative to legislatures such as those in South Korea or Great Britain. Joe Wilson did, however, make a correct statement.

"[...] Consider just a few of the dishonest statements in Obama's speech:

First: He said "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits - either now or in the future." If so, then the President should have announced his public opposition to the Senate leadership bill and HB3200 months ago [the democrat health care plan]. In June the Congressional Budget Office found that the legislation would increase the budget deficit by $240,000,000,000 over the next 10 years. That's just the beginning. A new study by the Lewin Group finds that in the second 10 years, it will increase the deficit by $1,000,000,000,000. The White House has publicly praised and supported both [democrat] bills. So Obama stated a whopping $1,240,000,000,000 falsehood.

Second: [President] Obama said he would not cut Medicare and affect basic care for seniors. But the Obama plan includes $600,000,000,000 in UNSPECIFIED Medicare cuts. It destroys Medicare Advantage with $250,000,000,000 in cuts, decimating a pro-consumer option that 25% of seniors [use] and allows them to choose the best insurance and doctor for them. Even the Associated Press [dominated by democrat reporters] has called Obama on this lie. AP reported that "although wasteful spending in Medicare is widely acknowledged, many experts believe some seniors almost certainly would see reduced benefits from the cuts. That's particularly true for the 25% of Medicare users covered through Medicare Advantage.

Third: [President] Obama said that Sarah Palin and others have claimed that "we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens." [...] What critics have pointed out is that seniors will be required to submit regularly to "end of life" counseling sessions (page 425 of HB3200) that, combined with cost controls and rationing of care, could lead to them being denied life-saving treatment. As healthcare expert Betsy McCaughy, chairwoman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, has pointed out, the bill includes "substantial funding for "comparative effectiveness research" which is generally code for limiting care based on a patient's age. Economists are familiar with the formula, where the cost of treatment is divided by the number of years (called QUALYs, or quality adjusted life years) that the patient is likely to benefit.

Fourth: [President] Obama claimed that the bill does not use taxpayer funds for abortion. This is also false. The Democrats rejected amendments in the House committee that would have specifically excluded abortion from coverage under the so-called government option. In its place, Democrats took the private portion of the premium (not the public subsidy) and specified that only those funds could be used for abortion services. This is an accounting gimmick. The fact is that abortion will be massively subsidized with billions of dollars in taxpayer funds for the first time in US history.

Fifth: [President] Obama claimed that his plan did not provide care for illegal immigrants. Here again, false. By rejecting a Republican amendment requiring proof of legal residence prior to receiving care under the government-run plan, the Democrats have opened the door for non-citizens and non-legal residents to receive care for which they have not paid into the system. If one refuses to require proof of citizenship or legal residence, one cannot claim to limit benefits to only USA citizens. [wait times and costs increase with increses in demand from illegals].

Healthcare services and industries should not be managed by the federal government. This is a mistake that our kids and grandkids will pay for if this democrat plan goes through and is not sunset by the next republican Congress.

Canadian Healthcare: Free but Slow (see investigative video)

This is a 20 minute video but it is worth watching if you want to see what government managed healthcare is like. This is what will happen to us in the USA if we allow Democrats to pass federal government managed healthcare:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2jijuj1ysw&feature=related

The feds need to stay out of the healthcare industry except for regulation to prevent fraud and unreasonable litigation.

Stossel also put together a shorter piece:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJgkvF19QA&feature=related

Quote of the Day: Governor Rick Perry

"There are certain truths that have to be agreed to. One is that economies grow when they are free from over-taxation, over-regulation, over-litigation, and they have a skilled workforce. Government is not difficult in theory, don't spend all the money, keep taxes low, have a fair and predictable regulatory climate, keep frivolous lawsuits to a minimum, and fund an accountable education system so that you have a skilled workforce available. Then get the hell out of the way and let the private sector do what the private sector does best. It's simple in theory, but it's difficult to accomplish. In Texas, we've implemented that theory, and it's produced an economy that has no match in America."
--- Texas Governor Rick Perry, Republican

This quote was published in the National Review article "Going Alamo" by Kevin D. Williamson, which talked about why so many people are moving to the republican controlled state of Texas: great economy because of great republican economic policies and limited government interference. Texas has a divided executive branch (Lt Governor and Governor have distinct powers)and a weak legislature because of strict constitutional limits, preventing government from causing too much harm :)

"The Texas experience suggests that the more government you say no to, the more investment you say yes to."
--- Kevin Williamson

Wind Farms: All hype and ill effects

The public or media enthusiams for wind farms (large tracts of land taken up by huge wind turbine towers, some 400 feet tall) needs to come to an end. Consider the following:

1. Property values in areas where wind turbines are visible decrease, negatively impacting everyone who lives within the line of sight of these ugly turbine towers.



2. Tourism in areas where their originally pristine natural views are changed by the installation of wind farms goes down. See study done in Scotland www.viewsofscotland.org/library/tourism.php



3. The air pressure difference in front of and behind a turbine blade are strong enough to cause lung blood vessel bursting in bats. Wind turbines are responsible for the killing of thousands of bats every year. A Tennessee windfarm study found an annual bat kill rate of 64 bats per turbine.



4. A study of Denmark windfarm industry found that the large wind turbines had serious negative environmental impacts, insufficient production reliability, and high production costs. Conventional power plants (ie coal powered) cannot be simply turned on and off as the wind comes and goes, so the wind farms have not led to any notable decrease in coal powered energy consumption.



5. Infra-sound emitted by turbines can pose a hazard to human health. I didnt believe this either until a european doctor started collecting data on cases of health problems for residents near turbines.



6. Lights on the turbine towers ruin night sky visibility for star gazers and astronomers.



7. Deforestation and/or the large footprint taken up by large numbers of wind turbine towers create terrible negative environmental impacts on local wildlife and recreational land users.



8. CO2 emission savings is only equal to one 18-wheeler truck PER TURBINE, that is it. Canadian study discovered this fact which all but makes wind farms appear to be a waste of time and money and land: www.aandc.org/research/wind_pec_present.html

Cartoon of the day

Obama apologizes for America's history