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.