Misunderestimated Again

President Bush seems to understand what President Reagan understood before him. A president has a chance to make only two or three moves on the chessboard of history. So he’d better make them good ones.

Alternatively, he can engage in fancy footwork like Third Way dancers Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, serving up eye-catching initiatives every week.

However even the best chess moves don’t necessarily look good at the time. Many people are more impressed by fancy footwork.

In his end of year piece Michael Barone reminds us why he is the dean of pundits. He just has a solid judgment. And it shows.

Before you count President Bush out, he writes, don’t forget that the first few years of every war are years of blunders and mistakes.

Franklin Roosevelt picked the right generals and admirals from the start in World War II, but the first years of the war were filled with errors and mistakes.

And now that President Bush has found the right generals, we can affirm that &ldquoAmerican troops are surely the most capable military force in history. They just need to be given the right orders.”

Another important lesson to learn from Iraq is that social transformation works easiest from the bottom up. Our media elites are obsessed with top-down politics. They would be, that is their job: to report the doings of high politics.

But the impetus for change [in Iraq] has come from the bottom up, from tribal sheiks in Anbar province who got tired of the violence and oppression of al Qaeda in Iraq, from Shiites and Sunnis who, once confident of the protection of American forces and of the new Iraqi military, decided to quit killing each other. They did not wait for orders from Baghdad or for legislation to be passed with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

Why be surprised? That’s the way it works in the US.

At the beginning of the 1990s we seemed to have intractable problems of high crime and welfare dependency. Experts argued that we couldn’t hope for improvement. But state and local leaders got to work and showed that change for the better was possible.

Today, people seem to have forgotten that crime and welfare were once intractable problems. That just shows how successfully we reformed welfare and crime fighting. And how wrong the folks were who wailed about millions of children thrown into the streets.

Now it seems that President Bush has learned from the fumbles of the first years in the War on Terror Why wouldn’t he? Isn’t the US famous as a nation of can-do optimists?

What Presidents Wear

When the Duke of Wellington fought the Battle of Waterloo, he did not wear a resplendent uniform. He wore, as Paul Johnson reminds us, “dark blue civilian dress.” He was, you may say, sending a message about military might. Victory in battle is all very well, but after it’s over, we are going home to peacetime pursuits.

At the Potsdam Conference immediately after World War II, he relates

[Prime Minister Churchill] appeared in Royal Air Force uniform, one of his favorites. Marshal Stalin, as he liked to call himself, appeared in the white full dress uniform of a Marshal of the Red Army. But... Harry S Truman... wore a neat blue civilian suit.

Harry Truman served in World War I and in the reserves thereafter, but US Presidents do not wear uniform while in office. It sends an important message about the role of the commander-in-chief. The president is a civilian, and the United States believes in civilian control of the military.

But when the president visits the troops theses days, he does wear uniform. It is interesting to realize what that uniform is. Typically, it features a baseball cap—often emblazoned with the insignia of the unit or the ship he is visiting—and a baseball warmup jacket.

When the president visits the troops, he dresses like a baseball coach.

That’s an interesting message to send to the world. Think of the President of the United States as a kind of jumped-up baseball coach.

Liberal Fascism. So?

The liberals are already reaching the tipping point on Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Someone already vandalized the product page at Amazon. (Would that be an inside job?)

But what’s all the fuss about?  Liberalism comes from the same stable as communism and fascism?  Of course.  They are all reactionary movements trying escape from an alienation towards the modern age.  They are beset, as Roger Scruton writes in Modern Culture,

by those ancient and eradicable yearnings for something else — for a homecoming to our true community.

You see this in German Romanticism, in Marx, and in the “reactionary nationalism of Fichte and Gierke for whom the Volk and the Volksgeist where the primary objects of social hope.”

Our liberal friends believe in their special version of this.  They will lead us to safety in a true community of educated people, the rule of the altruistic educated middle class over the hopelessly compromised commercial middle class.

How will our liberal friends deal with the challenge of Liberal Fascism?  Probably by ignoring it.  It’s the best way.

But we can read all about it.  First, check into Jonah’s thoughts on The Glenn and Helen Show.

Is There a Conservative Future?

In this time of conservative discontent, seers and pundits are peering into the future. Will there be a conservative coalition in the future, they wonder?

Conservative pundit Tony Blankley takes a look, and wonders what it would take to keep a majority coalition going.

It would have to hold almost all of its Reagan coalition plus gain the support of at least 40 percent of the growing Hispanic vote.

And that is a tall order, considering that it usually takes at least a generation for US immigrants to become unhyphenated Americans that vote for the American party rather than the Identity party.

All that assumes that the conservatives can keep the Reagan Democrats and social conservatives. And that is pretty uncertain. If economic hard times come then expect the economically insecure to return to the Democratic Party. Says Blankley:

Although the economy remains strong, the public’s economic anxiety about the future has been building steadily during the past half-decade.

Gold stars all round to the MSM for that.

It is precisely these kinds of economic fears that Mike Huckabee is talking to... I think it is highly likely the Republican Party (as the presumed continuing vehicle for a right-of-center coalition) will have to talk persuasively to the growing economic anxiety.

Can we do it? Can we persuade the economically insecure that the worst thing they could do would be to throw in their lot with the economically Neanderthal Democrats?

It’s a challenge, at the very least.

At least history in on our side. The last two times the economy went south, in the 1930s and in the 1970s, the Democrats completely screwed up the economy (with help, it must be admitted, from the Republicans.)

Xmas at the Party of Government

You gotta love Hillary’s Xmas Card. I refuse to watch it (ok, I did watch it when I went to get the link) but Jonah Goldberg says it’s about Hillary Clinton getting all her Xmas gifts together, the ones she is going to give to you, the voter.

One is labeled "Universal Health Care," another is "Alternative Energy," another is "Middle Class Tax Breaks." And then the supposedly hilarious kicker. Wringing her hands and furrowing her brow with maternal angst, she exclaims, "Where did I put universal pre-K?"

Very droll, especially for a Democrat. After all, if you are a Democrat these things are either for you for for you to manage or to get a paycheck out of.

But Republicans have a different take. Hillary didn’t pay for those presents. We, the taxpayers, are going to pay for them. The facts are up on Rush Limbaugh’s website, forever.

Ninety-six percent of income taxes are paid by the top 50 percent of taxpayers. And that is probably before counting in the effect of the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Why be surprised? It all makes sense, given the political system in this country.

The way Hugh Hewitt tells it, the United States has a Six Party System.

The Republican Party is a coalition of the Faith Party, the Wealth Party, and the National Security Party.

The Democratic Party is a coalition of the Race Party, the Government Party, and the License Party.

Hillary Clinton is running for the leadership of the Government Party. And she is wrapping all the lovely gifts she is going to give her party rank-and-file with Other Peoples’ Money.

What’s not to like?

Don’t agree? Drop me a line.

As Hillary Clinton puts it: Let’s talk!

Reconciliation In Iraq?

Obviously something has changed in Iraq in the last year.  The question is what, and what will happen next.

Will the defeat of Al Qaeda in Iraq lead to a reconciliation between Sunni and Shia, or will the civil war resume once the US starts to reduce its forces in the year ahead?

Conservative commentators like Michael Ledeen are optimistic.

Meanwhile, the country’s leading religious leaders seem on the verge of issuing an historic document: a fatwa condemning violence. The signatories would be two towering figures, one Sunni, one Shiite.

Lefty blog posters have a different point of view. Here is talisman.

Ah, but the so-called "turnaround" in Iraq is merely one of slightly decreased violence - and only a temporary one, from most established on-the-ground accounts, which means Bush can declare "victory" while still keeping our kids over there as cannon fodder.

Actually, he might be right.  We simply do not know how the various factions in Iraq will act in the aftermath of the “surge.”

We can understand this divide.  Both conservatives and liberals want to be proven right.  Conservatives want to believe that the US was right to go into Iraq.  Liberals want to believe that it was wrong to go into Iraq.

But whatever happens in Iraq, there is still the question of Iran.

Why Is It So Cold? Maybe the Sun?

Everyone knows that the polar bears are in trouble and Greenland is about to melt because of all the global warming.

In fact, though, the world is in the middle of a cold snap, according to geophysicist (and, presumably climate change denier) David Deming.

South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918...


Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever... In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered.

What could be going on? Well, scientists say that it could be the Sun. Right now it’s at the end of a 22 year sunspot cycle, Cycle 23, and scientists are wondering when the next cycle, Cycle 24, is going to start.

That’s important because in previous centuries the earth’s climate has been cold when the sunspot count was low and warm when the sunspot count was high. The most famous period of low sunspot incidence was the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1710. That period has another name: The Little Ice Age. If you look at the link, you will see a nice little graph which labels our current period since 1950 the “Modern Maximum.”

Could that explain the increase in global temperatures.

Right now, this minute, on December 19, 2007, there are no sunspots on the sun. That’s because the one visible sunspot group has just rotated out of sight. You can check up on the sun here.

There is some indication that the next sunspot cycle has begun. The first two weeks of December showed an increase in sunspots.

What we don’t know is how active the new cycle will be. Some people think that sunspot intensity is driven by the position of the major planets like Jupiter and Saturn in the same way that tides on the Earth are driven by the Moon.

But it might be prudent to plan on a cold winter this year. Just to be on the safe side.

Ripping the Republican Big Tent Apart

Fifty years ago the US conservative movement began in a fusion between Burkean conservatives and libertarian conservatives. In the late Sixties they were joined by the “mugged by reality” neoconservatives.

Then in the 1970s the Supreme Court created the Christian Right with Roe v. Wade and added social conservatives to the movement.

These different factions in the conservative movement have not always got along, but they have learned to live with each other and to respect each other’s agenda. The poster boy for this is Rush Limbaugh. Divorced several times, he is a success-oriented conservative; yet he is respectful towards social conservatives and he is pro-life.

Having learned to live with each over the years many of us were shocked when John McCain ran for president against the social conservatives in 2000. Why would anyone want to do that, we wondered? It’s become clear, in the years since, that McCain is a national security conservative only, and just doesn’t understand, and doesn’t want to understand the other factions of the movement.

The initial first tier candidates for 2008—Giuliani, Romney, Thompson—are all fusion candidates. They may target their appeal to one faction or another, but they do not try to split the conservative movement.

But insurgents like Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee are splitters. Ron Paul is trying to create a divide between libertarians and the rest of the conservative movement and Mike Huckabee is trying to create a divide between evangelical conservatives and the rest of the conservative movement. And then there is John McCain, who still wants to split off national security conservatives from the rest of the movement.

I’m rooting for one of the uniters to win. And I hope that all of the dividers fail. Our conservative movement needs to grow. It needs to be ready and welcoming when the next troop of Americans is cast out into the political wilderness by the liberal establishment.

The various wings of the movement have broadly similar goals and the particular concerns of each faction informs and inspires the others.

We don’t want no stinkin’ dividers.

Huckabee Sucks Up to Liberals

They say that presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, despite his aw-shucks manner is a true product of Arkansas politics—like Bill Clinton.

So it’s not surprising that in his upcoming article for Foreign Affairs magazine he says just what the liberal Council on Foreign Relations would want to hear.

The Bush administration’s arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad.

You could say that.  Or you could say that the Bush administration’s steadfastness and willingness to adapt when its policy had failed is the reason that we now see light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq.  In the last year the Sunni rejectionists seem to be abandoning revolutionary politics for politics-as-usual.  They have abandoned their alliance with Al Qaeda in Iraq and are working with the US and the Iraqi government.

Frankly, I have no time at all for second-guessers.  Any attempt to do something in this world—as opposed to sitting on the fence—is necessarily a catalog of mistakes.  Every business plan is invalidated the moment it is finished.  Every political campaign is a roller-coaster of “gaffes” and mistakes.  Every war is a parade of folly.

The question for every leader always is: shall we continue on the path we have begun, or is it time to change course?

If you were right to continue on course then the fence-sitters like Mike Huckabee say you are tenacious and courageous.  If you are wrong, then you have an “arrogant bunker mentality.”

But, in fact, the Bush administration has learned from its mistakes, and has changed course when it became clear that its policy wasn’t working.

So what do you call that?

Hewitt Peels a Brokaw

Radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt is a master of the interview. His particular skill is painting a picture of a subject’s political views when the subject refuses to be categorized.

No, they say, in answer to the question about voting for Reagan or Bush. I don’t tell who I voted for. So Hewitt spends the next 30 minutes—or 60 minutes—painting an exact picture of the subject’s world view. Just so his listeners will know.

Last week Hugh Hewitt interviewed Tom Brokaw on his book Boom! Voices of the Sixties. For Hewitt, the book was predominantly about the Left Sixties, and it left out the story of the Un-sixties Sixties. But Tom Brokaw wan’t about to admit that.

No, the fact that the subjects in the book were 55-12 left of center to right of center didn’t mean anything. Anyway, Hewitt was stereotyping people.

Eventually, Hewitt asked about Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago.

HH: Right. One of the best portraits in here, because I think it’s so jarring given who he is and what he believes, is Richard Daley, current mayor of Chicago. He’s a Boomer, his son’s in the military, his dad was at ’68, and he’s frustrated with environmentalists, because they won’t let him update his airport.



TB: Right.



HH: It’s a fascinating portrait…



TB: And does he come down on the left of center?



HH: He’s left of center. Sure he is. He’s a Democrat activist…



TB: He’s a centrist. He’s a centrist. The way he runs Chicago is as a centrist.



HH: Well, of course the way he runs Chicago. But the way he’ll get Hillary the votes that she needs to win Illinois is nothing got to do with the center, is it?

You can’t do it any better than that. Sure, Dick Daley in Chicago governs as far to the right as he can. Why wouldn’t he? He wants Chicago to prosper. But when it comes to practical politics he’s a Democrat and that means electing whatever the Democrats nominate.

When you carry water for the left that means you belong on the left. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just nice to get it out in the open and not pretend.

What is the Meaning of Change?

When the Democrats talk about "Change," what do they mean? Mark Steyn wondered about that for the benefit of his readers. It’s puzzling, because, as he writes:

The Democrats are the party of stasis: on affirmative action, there can be no change; on abortion absolutism, there can be no change; even on a less cobwebbed shibboleth such as the Iraq war, there can be no change

The other day Barack Obama broke with the program and proposed on Social Security

just the teensy-weensiest little tweakette of a change to keep the wheels from coming off the entitlement bus, and immediately he got clobbered by Paul Krugman and Democrat activists as a pathetic stooge for the heartless right’s plans to get rid of the whole racket.

After all, if you are talking about Real Change, you must be talking about making a real course correction in the nation’s politics. At least that’s what I would think it would mean.

Obama’s current slogan is “Change You Can Believe In.” What exactly does that mean? Or what is it intended to mean to Democratic primary voters?

Obviously, it can mean only one thing to the Democratic rank-and-file. To them, “Change” means another government program. It means the whole progressive ball of wax, finally delivering on affordable everything. Or, as Steyn says, better than I:

more entitlements, more regulation, more incremental government annexation of health care

Not to mention more “choice” and wonders of healing from embryonic stem cells.

There’s just one problem with all this, according to Star Parker. “Life is not a defined benefit.”

Michael Novak for Romney

Readers of RMC will know that Michael Novak is one of our RMC Chappies.  That’s because of his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and its notion of the Greater Separation of Powers.

So when Michael Novak comes out for Mitt Romney, we listen. He says he’s been privately for Romney for some time but the egregious bigotry of Mike Huckabee forced him to go public.  And he argues from the old biblical injunction “By their fruits you shall know them.”

[E]very one of the Mormons I have ever worked with, beginning with a great graduate assistant for one of my classes at Stanford in about 1967, have been the most well-mannered, inquisitive, competent, kind and thoughtful people I know.

Me too.  And nothing has revolted me more in this campaign season than the anti-Mormon bigotry of Mike Huckabee.

Michael Novak’s notion of the Greater Separation of Powers proposes that we think of democratic capitalism as a society of three sectors: the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

In his view these sectors should be free and differentiated like the three branches of government.  They should each have power and each use their power to jealously limit the powers of the other sectors.  It’s a powerful concept, taking the separation of powers concept from government to the wider society.

That brings us to the signature sound bite of British Conservative Party leader David Cameron: There is such a thing as Society; it’s just not the same as the State.

Because the State means the political sector takes over and totally dominates the other sectors.  But conservatives believe in a distribution of power among the various sectors of society.

Can Obama Really Solve Everything?

Many conservatives have been annoyed by the intrasigence of Democrats during the Bush years. There’s no doubt it’s been effective and deflected Republicans from overdue reforms of the welfare state.

But the Dems have come to believe in a dangerous illusion that as Jonah Goldberg puts it:

If only Democrats ran things, there’d be no war, our allies would love us, global warming would be brought to heel, and we would have universal health care, happily married gay neighbors and embryonic stem cells for everybody.

If only. Up to now Dems thought they would see Happy Days are Here Again with Hillary Clinton. Now it’s beginning to look more and more like Sen. Obama.

But the idea that returning Democrats to power is going to change things is starting to die an agonizing death.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said it best himself in Monday’s Roll Call: “Have we stopped the war in Iraq? No. Have we gotten health care? No. Have we improved education? No. But we have been able to do what we’ve done. We’ve done a lot of things.”

Yes, and a lot of the things done were pretty shabby.

The truth is, as Rush Limbaugh says, that Democrats are calling plays out of a 30 year-old playbook. Their ideas, for withdrawal from Iraq, for an intensification of government intervention in health care, don’t really move the country forwards.

And once they return to the White House, people will start to notice.

If that is what it takes to prepare the American people for genuine reform, then so be it.

We Interrupt This Message

The shocking thing about the actions of New Life Church member Jeanne Assam’s takedown of assassin Matthew Murray is the break with the narrative.

There we were, worrying about “hate speech” and the NIE assessment, whether Hillary Clinton is slipping in the race for the presidency, and listening respectfully to all the important talking heads when suddenly the story changed.

Instead of the usual liberal narrative about “hate” we had a true hater knocking off Christians in Colorado. And all of a sudden a woman takes him down—with a gun.

There was another security guard at the church with a gun, but he was dithering. Assam was a trained police officer. So she just kicked in her police training. She ran towards the gunman, shooting as she went.

Then she appeared at a press conference and talked about God’s Will.

It’s a slice of life without your usual liberal suspects, and we are not used to that.

The shocking thing about the whole incident is listening to the different world view. Said Assam at her press conference:

"God was with me. I didn’t think for a minute to run away. God guided me and protected me.


"It seemed like it was me, the gunman, and God."

Yes, we usually try to keep that sort of thing out of the newspapers. But we are used to the rhetoric of the gunman, Matthew Murray:

"You Christians brought this on yourselves," Murray wrote, [on a website]. "All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you ... as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world."

Talking about God on TV. That’s controversial in today’s America. Blaming Christians for all the world’s problems. Why that’s what they teach in school.

Is Huckabee a Liberal Plant?

If you are like me you haven’t been too impressed by Mike Huckabee.  Just something about the guy.  So now that the hit-jobs are coming out, I can’t say I’m that upset.  Douglas MacKinnon even wonders whether Huckabee is a liberal plant!

If you are the eventual Democratic nominee for President in 2008, who would you like to run against? Answer: A Republican you can beat.

Never mind about horserace stuff like that.  According to Club for Growth’s Steve Stephens you should be more concerned about Huckabee’s record and a taxer and a spender.  As David J. Saunders puts it:

Anti-tax groups, like the Club for Growth, have been at odds with Huckabee for a while, and at times it’s become quite heated...

In 2003, when Grover Norquist, president for Americans for Tax Reform, criticized Huckabee’s tendency to raise taxes instead of scaling back spending, he fired back.

“What do our critics want - to rip the feeding tubes out of an 8-year-old or an elderly person on Medicaid? Grover needs to run for governor somewhere, win, and then try to govern,” Huckabee told the Washington Times. “He makes it sound so easy.”

Yes.  No doubt.  But the truth is that keeping government under control is hard work, and if you aren’t hard at work pruning then you are letting it grow out of control.

And the quote about 8–year-olds and grannies is a liberal line, not a principled conservative one.

Because to a conservative the job of looking after 8–year-olds and grannies belongs to their family.  It does not belong to other peoples’ families through the tax system.

Libs Ante Up in War on Terror

Many conservatives are angry about the naked political slanting in the latest National Intelligence Estimate.  How do we suddenly know with high confidence that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003?  But I am more sanguine.

With the NIE the opponents of President Bush within the administration have put a bet on the table.  It’s one thing to be embarrassing the Bushies with embarrassing leaks.  It’s another thing when you suddenly up and say: Hey, look, No Nukes!  All of a sudden you have actually done something, and in today’s political climate that means that you become a target.

For instance, Kenneth R. TImmerman took a look at the NIE and found something different than what he was supposed to find.

What the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran actually said for the first time in an official, United States government document released to the public, is that Iran was actively pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003.

Well!  That’s certainly something to think about!

We conservatives must realize that the battle over the war on terror is a multigenerational thing, both within and without the United States.  We can’t win in one election cycle and put it behind us.  It’s going to be like the Cold War where the Democrats played a game of now we’re with you, now we’re against you, depending on the mood in the crazy left. 

So it’s good that the liberal mid-level bureaucrats have put out their marker.  That gives our side something to shoot at.

And anyway it doesn’t change the strategic situation.  Iran is a revolutionary power that the United States wants to keep under control.  Nukes or no nukes.

Romney's American Creed

You can read the MSM’s hostility to religion any time you open a newspaper or tune into a network news broadcast.  Here’s CNN on presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s speech on religion and America December 6, 2007.

White House hopeful Mitt Romney on Thursday articulated his position on the role of religion in America, but avoided details about his personal faith.

What is it about these people?  What is it?

Well we know.  Or modern secular educated elite thinks that it has a better belief system than the one developed by our Judeo-Christian tradition and manifested in the religious culture of the United States. And you can see why.

The pluralistic non-established religions of the United States cannot be controlled by the secular educated elite.  That is why they are trying to create an established secular religion with its “teachers” and “counselors” in every public institution of education.

But Mitt Romney is an American, not a secular American.  And the danger is that he can talk, as a presidential candidate, over the heads of the media directly to the American people. 

He can appeal directly to the American tradition that goes back to the founders, the tradition that the secular educated elite want to replace.

He can talk, as he did about the first prayer breakfast of the United States of America, before there was a United States.  It happened in the fall of 1774.  Given the dark clouds of war closing in, the members of the Continental Congress felt the need to pray.  As told by Romney:

But there were objections. ’They were too divided in religious sentiments’, what with Episcopalians and Quakers, Anabaptists and Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Catholics.

"Then Sam Adams rose, and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot.

"And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God, they founded this great nation.

That’s the sort of thing that our secular educated friends don’t want to hear, and they don’t want you to hear.  And if they had their way no American in public life would dare to recount that incident, at least not without irony or scare quotes.

That is why there is a culture war being fought in the United States.  It is a war between those who want to continue the Judeo-Christian culture of the United States and those who want to replace it with a secular culture.

Gingrich pushes platform in Iowa

Newt’s in Iowa and running for VP.  He’s also pushing his latest update on the Contract with America, a poll-tested set of issues called “Platform for America.”  Here’s what he’s pushing, according to Ralph Z. Hollow.

The former speaker said his appearances in Iowa this week are "about a single-page flat tax" (82 percent), a "moment of silent prayer in school" (94 percent) and the "death penalty for anyone carrying out a terrorist act in the United States" (79 percent).

Newt says that the problem is that:

this is a center-right country caught between an incompetent right-wing party and a ruthlessly organized, energized, militant, minority left-wing party.

You can’t argue with that.  But the question is: why?

My answer is that the Republican Party would like to roll back the vast government edifice, as in:

Pensions: 6.2 percent GDP
Health Care: 6.2 percent GDP
Education: 5.7 percent GDP
Welfare: 3.0 percent GDP
source: usgovernmentspending.com

But they can’t because the Democratic Party stands “ruthlessly organized, energized, militant,” ready to defend every last program to the last 0.1 percent of GDP. 

Derb Admits He's Bored With Election

The federal government makes such a mess of everything that there’s not much any of the candidates can do.  And they are good candidates. Writes John Derbyshire:

I even like some of these guys. War hero... confident and successful businessman/governor... tough no-nonsense mayor... laid-back, witty showbiz type with good conservative creds... There’s plenty to like, almost an embarrassment of riches.

Leave aside the mess in housing, the declining dollar, the mess in Iraq.  There’s immigration.  What can a president do about that?

I think we’ve arrived at a point where the president may propose, but the courts, the federal bureaucracy, the interest groups, the lobbies and trial lawyers, and the ACLU, and CAIR, and MEChA, and LULAC dispose.

So what’s the point?  Better wait until things get really screwed up.

I may be bored, like Derb, but I’m not idle.

Right now, I’m loading up data on state and local government spending into my usgovernmentspending.com site. As the billions roll by, year after year, you ask: What are these people doing with all that money?  It's just wasted, isn't it?  Every last billion.  It's all about government doing what people could be, should be doing for themselves.

And there's another thing. This is a democracy, and the way democracy works is that the other chaps get to have a go.  Especially when the other chaps are mad as hell.  So it's time for the Democrats to get back to the White House.

in the bigger picture we are playing out the string on the welfare state right now. We know, from the Reagan era, that the Democrats are not ready to talk about reform yet.  We need another decade of welfare state ineptitude and waste and self-dealing to play out before we conservatives will get the chance for another wave of reform.

It's happening in Britland right now.  Ten years ago, the Labour Party was elected on the theme of "education, education, education."  What do you think has happened?  Britain has dropped in the OECD league tables, according to the Daily Telegraph.

In reading 15-year-olds in the UK dropped from seventh in 2000 to 17th... In maths, pupils fell from eighth to 24th... In science, secondary school students in the UK dropped from fourth to 14th.

And so, wonder of wonders, the Conservative Party is rising in the polls, and leader David Cameron is starting to look like a man who could be Prime Minister.

The point is that there is a flow in the tide of events, and the best thing is to be ready when the tide is flowing in your favor.

When the tide is ebbing, it’s best to anchor and wait for the tide to turn.

Chavez Loses Vote--Just

Let’s give one cheer for the failure of President Hugo Chavez to make himself president-for-life.  Venezuelans voted down his proposed constitutional “reforms.”  As Frank Bajak reports:

Foes of the reform effort - including Roman Catholic leaders, media freedom groups, human rights groups and prominent business leaders - said it would have granted Chavez unchecked power and imperiled basic rights.

It’s a sad fact of the modern age that the folks just arriving in the city from the farm—the working class, if you like—experience life as a battle against the powerful. 

So they vote for leaders who will fight for them against the powerful.

Unfortunately nearly all such leaders end up fighting the economy and leading their people to economic ruin.

Because whatever the working class may think, the market economy gives them the best prospects for a decent life—both in the short term and in the long term.

What workers should be doing is voting for politicians who will dismantle all the economic privileges that have been put in place to help the existing elite.  But they don’t.  They think that the answer to their economic struggle is to vote for a guy who will give them privileges.

When you make a mistake like that in this world, it ends up costing you big time.  And it looks as thought Venezuelans are already beginning to experience the inevitable result of a government that meddles recklessly with the national economy.

What is unconscionable is that media, educational, and cultural elites won’t tell the people the truth: that privileges, subsidies, and government handouts harm the people they are supposed to help.

Why won’t they? Probably because they too are clueless about the extraordinary system of democratic capitalism that we have built in the last two hundred years. After all, if you wrote for a living, taught school for a living, or acted in movies or TV what would you know about the reality of making products and services for the consumer?

So Bush Was Right on Stem Cells

One thing you can say about President Bush.  He makes a decision and then accepts the consequences.  Back in 2001 he decided to restrict the use of federal funds in research on embryonic stem cells.

As we know, Democrats decided that they had an issue.  So they dragged out helpless victims and Ron Reagan to argue that stem cells would help the blind see and the lame walk.  Presidential candidate John Edwards got in on the act, as you would expect.

Obviously the only thing that stood in the way of a medical miracle was the president and his fundamentalist Christian morality and the theocrats who supported him.

But last week the New York Times reported that two scientists. James A. Thomson and Shinya Yamanaka, had found a way of making stem cells equivalent to embryonic stem cells without using embryos.

As Charles Krauthammer puts it:

A decade ago, Thomson was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells. Last week, he (and Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka) announced one of the great scientific breakthroughs since the discovery of DNA: an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem cells.

He highlights a quote of Thomson’s:

If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.

Really?  I thought only knuckle-dragging Bible-thumpers had a problem with embryonic stem cell research.

It all points up the fact that President Bush is a serious man who is not afraid to make serious decisions.

When you make serious decisions it helps to have a serious politico-religious world view.  For most people, that means taking a fully worked out politico-religious system—such as, for example, Christianity—and using it as a guide.  President Bush, who had a less than perfect youth like many well-born baby-boomers, became a serious Christian when the time came to grow up.  Obviously this belief system—and we all have one—informs his decisions about government policy.

The reason why this is helpful is that Christianity, like Anglo-Saxon law, is an accumulation of centuries of actual human experience in dealing with serious decisions about life and death.  Over the centuries hundreds of lawyers and judges have worked on our great edifice of law, adapting it slowly in the light of new cases and conflicts that come up for adjudication.  The same thing is true with religion.

In our modern era we have a lot of people who want to throw up all the accumulated wisdom and start from scratch with a new system better adapted to modern times.  Unfortunately—and you may have noticed this—starting over means making all the mistakes of our ancestors all over again and learning from them the hard way.

In the twentieth century the hard way added up to about 200 million human deaths in world wars and terrors.

Anyway, now it turns out that President Bush was right.  We don’t need to use human embryos in stem cell research.  After all the fuss, the president looks like a serious man who thought seriously about an issue, talked to all the experts, and made a serious decision. 

Quite often, more often than you might think, when you do that you get to be right.

What Should Harry Do?

Yes, what should Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) do?  In case you forgot, here is Clifford D. May on Harry Reid. 

Pity poor Harry Reid. Back in April, the Senate Majority Leader proclaimed the war in Iraq “lost.” Two months before General David Petraeus had in place the reinforcements he needed to implement his bold, new strategy — which included a “surge” of operations against al-Qaeda forces in Iraq — Reid also said: “The surge is not accomplishing anything.”

Now, some conservatives take a very dim view of Harry Reid, but you can understand why Nevadans vote for him.  Reid is good at getting Federal land around Las Vegas made available for development: homes, schools, shopping centers, that sort of thing.  And good at getting his percentage out of the deal. Percentage or not, Reid provides Nevadans what they need: homes, schools, etc.

But Harry Reid, along with many of our Democratic friends, is not much of an expert when it comes to judging military operations.  So he kinda jumped the gun on declaring the Iraq war “lost.”

Oh well, nobody really minded except a few crazy right-wing nutcases.

But what should Reid do now?

May kindly offers a few sound bites for Reid to use when he decides that it is time to walk back to reality.

Say that President Bush should have foreseen that toppling Saddam would create a vacuum... Say it took Bush too long to [replace] Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top generals in Iraq... Say the credit for turning the situation around in Iraq goes to American men and women in uniform.

And so on.  But when should Harry Reid do this?  Here’s a suggestion.  Wait until after the primaries this winter.  Then, when the Democratic presidential nominee has been well and truly chosen and the crazy left doesn’t matter any more, then it will be time to make a principled tack back to the center.

Whaddya think?

Middle Class Benefit Most from Welfare State

We have been banging on for weeks here about the middle-class S-CHIP chiselers, liberal slackers who get to be first in line when there is free government money going for expensive things like health insurance.

This week in Britain the Civitas think tank issued a report on how the middle class in Britain get first in line in the British National Health Service (NHS). 

In Quite Like Heaven? Nick Sedden writes about the advantages that the middle class has in navigating a big bureaucracy for things like hip replacements.

Higher socio-economic groups are more likely to have family or friends who work in the health services, and even if these contacts are not directly used to gain access to services they act as an important source of advice on how to work the system … at least one study-of hip replacement utilisation has found evidence of the effectiveness of the "sharp elbows" of the middle class in the welfare state.

Exactly.  I had a friend in Britain whose 80-ish mother needed a hip replacement.  No deal, they said; we’ll put you on a waiting list.  Getting the procedure done in a private hospital would have cost a bundle, so my friend complained to her Member of Parliament.  One thing led to another, and her mother got her hip replacement.

It is well said that when you can’t compete on price then the only thing left is footwork and connections.  As the Daily Telegraph puts it:

[T]he fault lies in a system in which the purchasing power of money is absent, leaving social know-how as the only currency.

When the middle class pays their own way then it makes sense to put the squeeze on them to be generous and help the poor with charity and know-how.  But when there’s a government system then you get the middle class using its skills selfishly to get to the head of the line.

And as we know from Arthur C. Brooks in Who Really Cares? secular, liberal people give less to charity than conservative, religious people.

Mendacity, the Mark of Decline

Remember the good old days when Tennessee Williams wrote about the mendacity of the white South?  In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof the corrupted South had to lie.  They lied about the shameful homosexuality of Brick, the star college athlete and heir.  They had to lie about Big Daddy’s cancer.  And they made a virtue of it.  As Big Daddy tells Brick:

Boy, I’ve lived with mendacity. Now why can’t you live with it? You’ve got to live with it. There’s nothin’ to live with but mendacity. Is there?

That was back in the high noon of American liberalism when the idealistic New Dealers could sneer at the corrupt racists and bigots all around them.  Liberals were idealistic and ethical; they would never lie.  They would never need to.

But now the vortex of mendacity centers around a corrupt liberalism in terminal decline, and nowhere more so than in the university, writes Michael Barone.

Barone fingers the lie about race for starting the rot.  Colleges started admitting minorities to campus who didn’t “meet ordinary standards.”  Of course, the colleges couldn’t admit that.  And to compound the lie, they decided that nobody else on campus could tell the truth either.  Hence the speech codes t“which prohibit speech deemed hurtful by others.”

They were instituted, it seems, to prevent [the minority] students from feeling insulted and to free administrators from criticism for preferential treatment.

But it was still a lie, and the lie deepens and corrupts all the more as it gets entangled in Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Then there’s the cheap mendacity of partisan attack dogs like Media Matters.  Never mind about whether they are fair and honest when they ruthlessly take comments out of context.  They can’t even be straightforward about their very identity. 

Is Media Matters an “avowedly political institution,” as Byron York suggests?  Or is it “a nonpartisan, progressive nonprofit that is unaffiliated with any political party or candidate” as Media Matters insists?

And is it worth insisting on the distinction just for the sake of a stinking non-profit designation?

It really is beside the point to take pleasure in the decline of liberalism or even to mourn it.  Everything in this world begins with soaring hope and high ideals and ends in shame and rotting cancer.

But for those of us who yearn for the moderation of a Burkean world of ordinary life and modest reform, the decline of liberalism does come as a relief.

Revived Libertarians

Since the shock of 9/11 we haven’t heard much from libertarians, not until Ron Paul ran for president.  Ron Paul will lose, of course, writes Patrick Ruffini.  But he might win by losing.  That’s what Pat Robertson did in 1988.

Pat Robertson’s 1988 campaign signaled that Christian Conservatives had arrived in the GOP. Ron Paul is doing the same for libertarians.

So, on Ruffini’s view, Ron Paul could be a positive force for Republicans rather than splitting the libertarians off into a third party.

That would be good, because the GOP needs a consistent libertarian force, a third corner tugging in the direction of smaller government while the social conservatives tug in the direction of virtue and the national security conservatives tug in the direction of a strong nation state.

The fact is that you can’t have a state with lots of freedom unless the people are self-regulating.  Until the millennium, that will mean religious people.

So if libertarians want a government that doesn’t write a new law to regulate every problem, they need a populace that is self-regulating and doesn’t need constant supervision.  Goes together like ham and cheese. 

Then the only thing needful would be for libertarians and national security conservatives to find common ground.  How about reciprocity in foreign policy?

The key principle is one of reciprocity. If you behave peacefully and embrace the norms of a libertarian society, we leave you alone. If you seek to destroy a free society, we will destroy you.

Ron Paul has attracted a lot of young voters.  That’s worth its weight in gold.

Income tax in the United States

The chaps at Wikipedia have a nice article on the US Income tax: Income tax in the United States, and very good one it is.

But the article only had a partial table of income tax rates.  Until now.  Yes now you can go and look at the history of income tax rates over at Wikipedia, courtesy of the tax research experts here at Road to the Middle Class.  Here’s a sneak preview. If you’d like.

Partial History of U.S. Federal Income Tax Rates Since 1913
Applicable Year	Income brackets	First bracket	Top bracket	Source
1913-1915	-	1%	7%	Census
1916	-	2%	15%	Census
1917	-	2%	67%	Census
1918	-	6%	73%	Census
1919-1920	-	4%	73%	Census
1921	-	4%	73%	Census
1922	-	4%	56%	Census
1923	-	3%	56%	Census
1924	-	1.5%	46%	Census
1925-1928	-	1.5%	25%	Census
1929	-	0.375%	24%	Census
1930-1931	-	1.125%	25%	Census
1932-1933	-	4%	63%	Census
1934-1935	-	4%	63%	Census
1936-1939	-	4%	79%	Census
1940	-	4.4%	81.1%	Census
1941	-	10%	81%	Census
1942-1943	-	19%	88%	Census
1944-1945	-	23%	94%	Census
1946-1947	-	19%	86.45%	Census
1948-1949	-	16.6%	82.13%	Census
1950	-	17.4%	84.36%	Census
1951	-	20.4%	91%	Census
1952-1953	-	22.2%	92%	Census
1954-1963	-	20%	91%	Census
1964	-	16%	77%	Census
1965-1967	-	14%	70%	Census
1968	-	14%	75.25%	Census
1969	-	14%	77%	Census
1970	-	14%	71.75%	Census
1979	15 brackets	14%	70%	IRS
1982	12 brackets	12%	50%	IRS
1987	5 brackets	11%	38.5%	IRS
1988	3 brackets	15%	33%	IRS
1991	3 brackets	15%	31%	IRS
1993	5 brackets	15%	39.6%	IRS
2001	5 brackets	15%	39.1%	IRS
2002	6 brackets	10%	38.6%	IRS
2003-2006	6 brackets	10%	35%	IRS

What a tale of woe!  And what a lot of tinkering.  Why can’t our Solons just set the tax rates low and leave them alone!

In Guatemala Today

In the highlands of Guatemala it’s one volcano after another.  Of course, they are all extinct.  For now.  And the tourist hotels are conveniently located to give a good view of the nearby volcano.  Volcanoes do look cute—until it rains an they let loose a mudslide.

Since Guatemala has been a pawn in US politics over recent decades, with poster girl Rigoberta Menchu as a victim of US imperialism, you have to go there to get a decent picture of what it’s really like.

And what it’s really like is a country in the middle of the flight from the land.  Guatemala City is growing like mad, up to 3.5 million in a country of 14 million, and the “chicken buses” (converted US school buses) race up and down the Panamerican Highway at top speed from Chichicastenanga in the rural Mayan heartland to Guatemala City and back and for less than a buck a ride.

It’s like any third world country.  Part rural, with women wearing traditional clothes, and part urban with restless young men driving around like maniacs.

And it’s ten years since the government and the rebels signed a peace treaty ending 30 years of civil war.  Which is about par for the course.  They say that your average serious civil war takes about thirty years, enough to consume two generations of hot-heads in the refiner’s fire of war.

Today there are horrific tales of armed robberies in Guatemala City, and stern warnings from guides about pickpockets in the market.  But people are building and working and going to school in Guatemala.  It’s the restless energy of humankind that cannot be denied for long.

No Child Left Behind. End It or Mend It?

Don’t blame me, says conservative elder Paul Weyrich.  “I opposed NCLB from the beginning.”  All it does is add a layer of bureaucracy.  And the study from Cato Institute, “End It, Don’t Mend It: What To Do With No Child Left Behind,”  seems to back him up.

[W]hile both 4th- and 8th-grade math scores rose between 2003 and 2005 (the only period during which score changes could be attributed to NCLB), the rate of improvement actually slowed from that achieved between 2000 and 2003, a period before NCLB was enacted and implemented in schools. "In reading," CATO’s report notes, "the results were worse, with the period covered by NCLB seeing a score decline for 8th graders and stagnation for 4th graders, following improvement between 2000 and 2002."

As always, usgovernmentspending.com rides to the rescue on this, because it lets us look at the full cost of education in this country. 

United States Federal, State,
and Local Government Spending
Fiscal Year 2008
Amounts in billions of dollars

	Pensions:	$910.0
	Health Care:	$916.5
	Education:	$836.7
	Defense:	$692.0
	Welfare:	$436.4
	Protection:	$296.6
	Transportation:	$240.5
	General Government:	$103.1
	Interest:	$348.1
	All Other Spending:	$301.1
	Total Spending:	$5081.1

source: usgovernmentspending.com

There it is, $836.7 billion on government education in 2008.  when we are barely teaching kids to read and write and half of kids going into community college need remedial courses, surely we should be asking: what’s the point?

Our liberal friends are all exercised right now because the Iraq War is going to cost $1.6 trillion when you factor in all the indirect costs.

Education costs $1.6 trillion every two years.  And what do we get for it?

A Tale of Two Narratives

How’s the American family?  Time to write the obituary yet?  According to a recent Brookings Institution report, writes Maggie Gallagher, not too bad.

Two-thirds of us who were children in the late-1960s have grown up to earn more (adjusted for inflation) than our own parents did at the same age. By 2006 the median family income of the adults in this study was $71,900, up 29 percent compared to the median income of their parents in 1968.

The report, “Economic Mobility of Black and White Families,” by Julia B. Isaacs, does point up some major societal problems, of course.  These studies always do.

I know what you are thinking:  “World Ends, women and minorities hardest hit.”  Good try.

In fact the story of the last generation is that the income of white women has soared, and the income of black women has increased substantially. 

The story on the male side is not so good.  White male income has stagnated, and black male income has gone down.  I’m not sure how you reduce that to a sound bite.

If you read the executive summary of Isaac’s report over at Brookings, you find the usual de-familied jargon, except for this:

The lack of income growth for black men combined with low marriage rates in the black population has had a negative impact on trends in family income for black families.

But more research is needed to get better longitudinal information of minority families.

In Gallagher’s review of the study, things are not quite so soothing.  She is, after all, a marriage advocate.

For her, one thing comes out starkly: the collapse of the black family.  With 25 percent of white children born outside of wedlock you can say we have a problem.  With 70 percent of black children born outside of wedlock...  Well, what would you expect?

Obviously, you will say, in that environment, we should expect severe problems in the black male community.

Here’s how the data come out.

Race/Gender 1974 Median Income 2004 Median Income Change White Women $4,021 $22,030 +448% Black Women $12,065 $21,000 +74% White Men $41,885 $40,081 -4% Black Men $29,085 $25,600 -12%

Not too pretty, is it?  What has happened over the last generation is that white women have come out of the unpaid sector into the paid sector and they have elbowed everyone else aside, white men most notably and black men most particularly.

The fact is that when men are not harnessed into the role of husband and provider they go down rather quickly.  They work less, they live less healthy lives, and they don’t contribute much to society.

You could look it up.

Income Mobility

Our friends at the Wall Street Journal edit page (not to be confused with the lefties in the Journal newsroom) have spent a lot of energy over the years refuting the Two Nations concept first enunciated 160 years ago by conservative Benjamin Disraeli.  You know how it goes in his novel Sybil, or The Two Nations:

Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy... the rich and the poor.

The image presented is of two separate enties, like Kipling’s east and west—ne’er the twain shall meet.  Actually (and I’m half way through it, so can’t be sure how it turns out) it looks like the angelic (but poor) Sybil may have noble blood in her veins.  It seems likely that she was cheated out of her birthright by the evil Whig landowners who despoiled the monasteries in the 16th century.

But what if the two, the rich and the poor, are mixing it up, with the poor rising into the middle class and the rich falling away from their riches?  It rather spoils the Two Nations narrative, that’s what it does.

In an unsigned editoral the Journal folks point up a US Treasury study on income mobility released today.  It is a “longitudinal study,” following the experience of actual taxpayers over a ten year period.  Here’s a link to “Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005” (pdf).  It paints a picture of remarkable, persistent income mobility. 

What about people at the bottom of the income pyramid?  How did they do?

Those who start at the bottom but hold full-time jobs nonetheless enjoyed steady income gains. The Treasury study found that those tax filers who were in the poorest income quintile in 1996 saw a near doubling of their incomes (90.5%) over the subsequent decade.

That’s quite something.  Guess who ended up worst off?  That’s right: the rich.

Only one income group experienced an absolute decline in real income—the richest 1% in 1996. Those households lost 25.8% of their income. Moreover, more than half (57.4%) of the richest 1% in 1996 had dropped to a lower income group by 2005.

Rather spoils the fun doesn’t it?

But the message is unmistakable.  The United States is not a still, stratified lake, but a churning, turbulent river.  And, not surprisingly, there is a definite reversion to the mean.  People who are rich have a good chance of losing out.  People who are poor have a decent chance of making it into the middle class.

And that’s how it should be.

Inventing the New Conservatism: Education

We conservatives are running around wondering what the new conservatism means.  And we at Road to the Middle Class are doing our part. You can read the latest effort here.  It’s a riff on David Cameron’s speech in Manchester on co-operatives.

The transplant American Janet Daley was listening to David Cameron too, and she’s just as jazzed as we are.  The argument that is slowly emerging into mainstream politics in this post-Clinton and post-Blair age is a big one.

It is nothing less than the question of who should have the real power in a free society - a government elected by the people, or the people themselves through their own direct agency.

Up to now it’s all been about generalities.  The pundits in their helpful way have been yelling for specifics and accusing Cameron of being a lightweight. 

But now we are seeing specifics, starting with education.  In the Cameron plan,

You and your neighbours who are fed up with inadequate local schools could band together and form a cooperative to open a school (or take over an existing one), and lay claim to the funding allowance which the state provides for the education of your children to finance it.

The argument against the plan, of course, is an old one.  It’s the paternalist pat on the head.  All very well for you, old sport, but what about the people who don’t have the ability to take advantage of the new system?  What about the people left behind?

What about those who will not, or cannot, take up the offer of real power because they are indifferent or benighted or so disadvantaged that the challenge is more than they can comprehend? Surely there must be uniform provision of schooling by the state precisely to balance this inequitable distribution of parental concern?

The answer is a simple one.

The point about community "cooperative" power is that not everybody has to participate actively for everybody to benefit from it.

It’s the same as consumer power in business.  You do not have to be a genius yourself to make cars or iPods or houses.  You can rely on other people to do that.  But the benefit of their work comes to you in the form of low prices and high quality, not to mention the rank-and-file jobs that are available to average people.

And, let us not forget, if you don’t like it you can get your money back.  Now there’s a concept!

So it could be in education and other social questions.  Activist parents and social entrepreneurs will set up the new institutions.  Average bears like you and me can then come along and take advantage of their work.

That’s not so hard is it?

Entitlements: Life is not a defined benefit

The GAO chappies issued a report on the nation’s entitlements recently, according to Star Parker.  They described the situation as a party on the beach while the “tsunami” gets ever closer.

You can get the same idea by taking a look at usgovernmentspending.com.  It shows unmistakably how big entitlement programs sit on top of the government spending pile, crowding everything else out. Here’s the story for 2008.

---

United States Federal, State,
and Local Government Spending
Fiscal Year 2008
Amounts in billions of dollars

Change View:		Fed	Gov. Xfer	State	Local	Total
Pensions		730.7	0.0	146.0	33.4	910.0
Health Care		672.3	-293.7	416.8	121.1	916.5
Education		92.8	-93.7	272.3	565.3	836.7
Defense		689.9	0.0	2.1	0.0	692.0
Welfare		262.7	-38.8	125.5	87.0	436.4
Protection		47.0	0.0	79.7	169.9	296.6
Transportation		79.3	-48.0	95.5	113.7	240.5
General Government		20.7	-0.8	32.4	50.8	103.1
Interest		261.3	0.0	37.4	49.4	348.1
All Other Spending		45.3	-48.0	15.2	288.6	301.1
Total Spending		2901.9	-523.0	1223.0	1479.2	5081.1
Spending: actual, budgeted, estimated, guesstimated source: usgovernmentspending.com

---

There they are, those three biggies: Pensions, Health Care, and Education, the big three entitlements that the government gives us for free, or in return for our taxes.

Parker has an interesting way of writing about this.  The welfare state treats life as a defined benefit, she says.

Trouble is, of course, it isn’t. Like the defined benefits that the auto workers voted themselves half a century ago, it’s all going to hit the buffers, because, not surprisingly, we voted for a lot more in defined benefit than we could ever afford.

But the entitlements crisis isn’t a government crisis, or an economic crisis. 

The entitlements crisis is a moral crisis and we ought to grasp that ownership is part of the "values" agenda. Life is not a defined benefit.

There is another way, of course, but we probably won’t get off the beach until it’s too late, like those vacationers unfortunate vacationsers in Phuket, Thailand, in December 2004.

Hillary's No Maggie. Who Cares?

Hey, it’s worked in the past.  When Hillary Clinton played the helpless woman in the campaign for the Senate in 2000, it worked.  When she wore Pretty in Pink to blame a right-wing conspiracy for her husband’s political problems, it worked.

So why shouldn’t she blame the boys for ganging up on her?

And who cares that Hillary is no Margaret Thatcher?  Peggy Noonan reminds us about the Iron Lady.

[Thatcher] represented a movement. She was its head. She was great figure, a person in history, and she was a woman.

Hillary is different.  In fact the entire reason for her campaign is that she could be the historic First Woman President of the United States.  Otherwise her campaign is about keeping the gravy-train going for the next generation of slacker liberals.

I say, You Go Girl.  I believe that 2008 is going to be a bad year for Republicans, what with the mortgage meltdown, surging inflation, and a recession and all.

The best thing that Republicans can do is elect a Democrat with seriously deficient political skills.  Elect another FDR and he could show the Republican Party the door.

But Hillary.  Well, she is certainly no Bill Clinton in the political skills department.

And when the welfare state hits the buffers it would help if the Democrats had a leader who didn’t have the political skills to get out of the way. 

Rangel's Taxes Raise Republican Morale

Last week good old Charlie Rangel (D-NY), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, unveiled the “mother of all tax bills” that lowers corporate tax rates, fixes the AMT, and raises marginal tax rates rather smartly on people earning over $100,000.

Really nothing remarkable.  It reflects the Democratic idea that you should run the nation’s income stream through expert bureaucratic institutions rather than through enterprising individuals.

Republicans are ecstatic.  They see an issue to run on in 2008.  But Democrats are not so happy, reports Donald Lambro

The political buzz in Democratic backrooms last week, after the liberal Ways and Means Committee chairman proposed the "mother of all tax bills," wasn’t happy.

Why advertise a tax increase now, they grumble?

Why indeed?  But the Rangel tax increase proposals do concentrate the mind.  And the point to the future where we baby-boomers are going to eat the federal budget alive unless Congress starts cutting just about every other program in sight.

Of course, if the Democrats slow the economy by raising marginal tax rates on the most productive workers in the nation then there will be even less money for “programs.”

The fact of the matter is, if you look at usgovernmentspending.com, that the Big Three items on the national budget are government pensions, government health care, and government education.  And all three of them are a complete mess.

Throwing more money at them will only make the problem worse.

But the Democrats don’t know anything else.

Rail Still the Fashion?

Economist Randal O’Toole is upfront about government planning, and he’s written all about it in his book The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

I’ve realized all government planning is bad. Government planning... always does more harm than good because the planners don’t have an incentive to make sure that their plans are the right plans.

Real planning in the real world is an adaptive business.  You plan and adjust, day to day, as conditions change.  But government doesn’t have the will or the bandwidth for that kind of planning.  So government simplifies.  And doesn’t often update the plan.

Also, governments follow fads and right now the fad is Smart Growth, pushing light rail transit and infilling of urban areas,  building up not out.

Then there are the unanticipated outcomes.  Rail transit usually costs a lot more than anticipated.  So transit agencies have to cut back on bus service.  The result: lower transit ridership.  In Los Angeles:

They were sued by the NAACP for building rail lines into white, middle-class neighborhoods at the same time they were cutting bus service in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

But at least they were trying to save the planet!

The transit guys had a setback in Seattle yesterday, according to Andrew Garber. A big transit proposal to extend the expensive light rail system, sweetened with road projects (they called it a road-and-transit proposal), went down to defeat.

"People like roads, people like transit, people don’t like taxes," said state Rep. Fred Jarrett, R-Mercer Island, the ranking Republican on the House Transportation Committee and a Proposition 1 supporter.

Amazingly the Sierra Club opposed the plan because they thought it had too much road and not enough transit.   What is with those guys!

We Should Thank the Socialists

Dear old lefty Guardian columnist George Monbiot has suddenly woken up to an international nightmare of injustice.  It’s lefty-trendy “biofuels,” fuels made from crops like sugar cane, corn, and even, in Swaziland, cassava.  But all is not well in the Brave New World of Swazi biofuels.

Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava.

Well bust my buttons.  Nobody, but nobody could have seen that coming.  Why the Guardian never warned us.  The mainstream media never put it on the nightly news.  Maybe if good old Mike Wallace were still in his prime he could go on 60 Minutes  and say: “You mean to say...”

Let’s not get into the prediction that to convert the whole economy to biofuels we’d have to convert all the cropland in the world to fuel production.

While we are all rocking back in shock, let’s look at another brewing crisis.  Oil.

Did you know that most of the oil reserves in the world are owned by government-owned oil companies?  You didn’t?  Richard W. Rahn thought so.

Most people do not realize that about 90 percent of the world’s liquid oil reserves are controlled by governments or state-owned companies.

Little old Exxon Mobil only owns 1.08 percent of world reserves. 

And, of course the government-owned oil companies are badly run.  Mexico’s Pemex is corrupt and inefficient.  Venezuela’s dictator Chavez has completely bollixed up his national oil company.

Well, don’t despair.  There is plenty of oil in the world.  And a lot of it is in Canadian tar sands and Colorado oil shale.  And with oil prices way above $30 to $40 per barrel, they are becoming economic.

That means that they will be competing with the government oil companies and bringing prices down.

So the socialists always help us in the end.  They screw things up so badly that their foolish plans always end in disaster. 

The sooner government gets separated from business and enterprise the better for the people.

Maybe the sensitive George Monbiot will eventually come to realize that government-owned oil companies, like government-owned biofuels, make people poorer.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Fixing the mortgage crisis, but how?

Now that the mortgages are well and truly melting down the experts are gathering to offer advice.

Here’s Josiah Baker, professor at George Mason University, with his ideas.

The mortgage crisis requires legislation that supports punishing existing lenders for poor or misleading businesses practices. Specifically, enforcement must focus on originators and brokers.

But you could look far and wide to find regulators actually cracking down on abusive lenders, he writes.

The government does not need additional regulations — they just need to enforce the existing regulations.

Well, yes.  That all sounds fine.  And Barney Frank wants to lift the loan limits on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But let’s step back a bit.

The reason that abusive lenders (and listening to their voices on the mortgage radio ads, you knew you’d heard that guy before—maybe on a used car lot?) were flourishing was that money was sloshing around, and anyone with a pulse could set up a mortgage company and sell mortgages.  That’s where the problem started.  Tons of money sloshing around looking for a borrower.  And of course, when we are talking about money sloshing around we are usually talking about the government.

For instance, there are the government’s mortgage giants, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginny Mae, all in the business of throwing money at housing.  When you subsidize things like that you are going to get distortions in the market.

It’s not too surprising that the downmarket end of the business was up to some nasty shenanigans.  It usually is.  In the downmarket mortgage business the government has been pressuring lenders to lower standards for years.

But why should the politicians complain.  When things go wrong it creates splendid opportunities for politicians to posture and to blame other people for things that they initially set in motion.

So the best we can hope for is to get out of the mortgage mess without the politicians really screwing things up.

Give them a chance and they will create a royal mess.  Remember the Great Depression?

Who Needs ID Anyway?

For ordinary Americans the flap over illegal aliens and drivers licenses is a no-brainer.  Nobody should get a drivers license or state ID unless they can prove their bona fides.

It’s hard therefore to figure out why presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was waffling about drivers licenses for illegal aliens in New York State at the presidential debate earlier this week.  Writes John Fund:

At first she seemed to endorse the idea, then claimed, "I did not say that it should be done, but I certainly recognize why Governor Spitzer is trying to do it."

In case you are wondering what the flap is about,  Fund has the answer.  It’s about making it easier to vote.

Remember the Motor Voter bill back in 1993?  It was a Clinton wheeze.

It required all states to offer voter registration to anyone getting a driver’s license. When renewing a drivers license you simply fill out a form and check a box stating that you are a citizen; you are then registered to vote and in most states do not have to show any ID to vote.

That sort of loosey-goosey attitude towards the law brings back the thrill of the Clinton years.  Presumably it arises because Democratic leaders feel that many of their rank-and-file supporters are not the kind of people who proactively get registered to vote when they move.

Maybe they get riled up by a campaign, or maybe they get up on election day and decide to vote.  Either way, the Clintons wanted them to be able to vote.  And why not catch them when they go by the DMV to get their drivers license renewed?

(But, these days, do Democratic voters even bother to get a drivers license?)

The answer is that a loosey-goosey system like Motor Voter is an invitation to voter fraud.

The answer is that 80 percent of Americans want photo ID at the polling place.

The answer is that 8 of the 19 9/11 hijackers had registered as voters.

The question we might all ask Mrs Clinton and Gov. Spitzer of New York is this.

If you guys want to be so loosey-goosey about drivers licenses and voter ID, why bother about ID at all?  Let anyone drive.  Let anyone vote.  It’s the American thing to do.

And let’s save some money by laying off all those unimportant DMV clerks.  Then we can spend they money on programs that help people.

Larry Elder on Race in America

Radio talk-show host Larry Elder belongs to the Cosby-Sowell-Thomas wing of the black community.

So he was not that impressed with the young black woman trainee at a San Francisco airport car rental counter.  Not when she said:

"You know, I should have finished my training program some time ago, but because I’m black, they’re making me stay longer."

That’s a new one.  Training while black.

Still, Elder got his two cents in, telling her:

"You know, given your people skills and your drive, whatever obstacles others place in your way, you’ll be able to overcome them."

When you are sending a message like that, you ought to send it Western Union.

But he also told the story of Stanley O’Neal, recently ousted black CEO of Merrill Lynch.  The company lost billions on his watch in the mortgage meltdown. And so he had to go.

O’Neal is a rags-to-riches story, a meteoric rise from picking cotton in the South to the executive suite via a General Motors assembly line.

And the way that we make progress on race in this country is that when a guy like O’Neal can cut the mustard he gets to be CEO of Merrill Lynch.  When he messes up he gets fired.  It’s the American way.

No need for comment from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

You've Got to be Kidding, Girls

A decade or so ago we all laughed about political correctness.  It was so stupid that nobody could have been taken in by it.

But here we have, in 2007, a program of deliberate indoctrination of college students, political correctness run wild at the University of Delaware, according to Mike S. Adams.

The University of Delaware has just become one of the most Orwellian campuses in America. Students in its residence halls are now being subjected to a re-education program that is actually dubbed - in the university’s own tax-payer funded materials - as “treatment” for students who have incorrect attitudes and beliefs.

You know what those incorrect attitudes are.  And you know the penalty.

One student was identified in a write-up as the “worst” one-on-one session stating that she was tired of “having diversity shoved down her throat.”

Now we have Congress working on another major problem, writes Allison Kasic.  It’s the underrepresentation of women in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—in the university. In the first day of hearings conducted by Congressman Brian Baird (D-WA),

[n]o Committee Member or panelist challenged the presumption behind the hearing—that discrimination is the primary cause of women’s underrepresentation among science and engineering academics[.]

I’m sorry, girls, but this doesn’t pass the smell test.  Do you really think that, in 2007, there is a male faculty member in the university who would dare to discriminate against a woman, for any reason whatsoever?

Oh sure, there may be some men around who might sneer behind a woman’s back.  But no academic today in America would dare to risk a career in such a way.

Anyone who has the kind of cojones you need to buck the system like that is in finance or a technology startup, not in the university.

But let us suppose that women do suffer discrimination in STEM.  Is it really a problem that rises to the level of legislation?  Is this egregious discrimination that amounts to a civil rights matter?  Or is it just an annoyance?  Should important solons be taking time out from other important educational matters, such as the abysmal state of K-12 education, for instance, to solve this problem?

Come on, girls, you’ve got to be kidding.

We conservatives could take a Leninist view of this: The Worse The Better.  Or we could take a Rhett Butler view of it: Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

After all, conservatives have been run out of the university and marginalized in academe to an extent that must certainly exceed any discrimination that women suffer in STEM.

But the fact is that we do care.  The universities do matter.  And it matters that liberals are running the universities into the ground as they slowly ratchet up the level of compulsion and as they force every student, every faculty member, every building, and every ivied wall to conform to their belief system. 

Just as they have ruined everything else in the government by an excessive faith in the power of rational compulsion.

But really, what can we do?

Stuck on Stupid? Dems Want Carter Era Tax Rates

The central idea of the Reagan revolution was that punitive tax rates, like the 70 percent top rate on “unearned” income, was a jobs killer.  Greedy entrepreneurs just won’t go out and risk capital when the government is going to claw back up to 70 percent of their earnings.

Liberals sneered at the Laffer Curve and called it “trickle-down” economics.  But they pocketed their TIAA-CREF pensions swollen with the gains from a stock market that went from 1,000 to 10,000 in 20 years with nary a squeak.

Now Democrats like the sepuagenarian Charles Rangel want to return to those days, last seen in the Carter administration, by raising tax rates for high-income Americans.   James Pethokoukis explains.

[Rangel’s 4.6 percentage-point surtax on high incomes] only looks like a restoration of [Clinton’s tax rates]. But if the Bush tax cuts expire, the four-and-a-half points stays on top of the 39.6 [top Clinton tax rate]. So they are taking the rate to 44 percent. Then you add on 1.3 points ... another 2.9 points on top of that for the Medicare tax. So we are back to the 50 percent marginal rate under that plan.

But that’s just the beginning.  In addition, the Democrats are talking about raising the cap on FICA taxes.  So that’s another 7 1/2 percent.  Now we are talking about 60 percent marginal taxes.  On wages.

Let’s not forget, by the way, that the top 1 percent of taxpayers already pay 37 percent of federal income taxes, and that the top 50 percent of taxpayers pay 97 percent of federal income taxes.  Check it out at RushLimbaugh.com (truth in taxes) or the IRS(xls).

It’s just like the 1930s when for ten years, the United States was Stuck on Stupid.