L'Esprit d'Escalier at KPLU

Last night I went into the belly of the beast to the taping of a roundtable at the local NPR affiliate KPLU. I and five others listened to audio clips of presidents past, present and future talking about Social Security and welfare—safety nets—and then talked about our feelings to KPLU reporter Paula Wissel.

After an experience like that you always think of the zingers you could have delivered, but didn’t. The French have a word for it: l’esprit d’escalier, the spirit of the stairs.

No problem here though. We eevil conservative Republicans now have our blogs. So we get the last word.

For a conservative, the problem with the whole set-up is that it presumes, almost at an instinctive level, that the Democratic way of social safety nets is the only one thinkable.

You know how it works. It start with a pressing social problem. Concerned activists raise consciousness. Experts devise solutions. Politicians step in with a government program. Everyone cheers and the bureaucrats go to work--for ever.

But the conservative understanding of social safety nets is that, unless you base the safety net on the “mediating structures” of family, church, neighborhood, and private association, you are going to fray the social fabric and eventually break the safety net. Governments don’t do safety nets. They do wars and rumors of wars.

That is what we have seen in the seventy years since Social Security was passed. And it is women and children that get hurt the most.

As we pointed out yesterday, the biggest problem the United States faces is that in the last generation the percentage of children being raised by a single parent has gone up. Among college graduates, it has doubled from five percent to ten percent. But among parents with less than a high-school education it has nearly quadrupled, from around twelve percent to 40 percent, before declining, since welfare reform, into the high 30s.

Children being raised by a single parent are much more likely to live in poverty.

Children being raised by a single parent are much more lilkely to suffer abuse—up to 35 times more than a child living with married biological mother and father.

Children being raised by a single parent probably don’t have a father in the house. The presence of a father means, for boys, that they act out less, and for girls, that they have fewer emotional problems.

The way to avoid all these problems is to anchor people in the mediating structures, discussed by Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus in To Empower People. But that would mean backing out of the government progams and reempowering the mediating structures between individuals and the megastructures of big government, big coporations, and big unions.

Don’t look for our liberal friends at NPR to be talking about that sort of thing any time soon.

And it’s not because they are deliberately avoiding a national conversation about the social safety net. They probably never heard of Berger and Neuhaus, or read Michael Novak’s Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. They probably don’t get the import of Hayek’s dictum that government just doesn’t have the bandwidth to do the things it tries to do and consistently does so badly. And why should they? What would be the point?

Reporter Paula Wissel did a fine job moderating the roundtable. Until it came to the very end. Everyone on the panel openly and freely admitted who they were going to vote for. But not Paula Wissel (who looks a bit like a younger and more intelligent Helen Thomas). Said she: Oh no, I can’t tell you that. Mumble, mumble, “objective journalist.”

Oh please!

Still, it’s salutary to be in the room when an MSM journalist actually utters that canard. The thing is: she isn’t fooling anyone. She is so obviously a second-wave feminist with a standard second-wave feminist political philosophy that it would clear the air for her to be honest and up front. As in, hey, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, and proud of it. Probably never voted for a Republican in my life.

You could respect someone like that.

The roundtable I attended is one of a series that KPLU is putting together for broadcast every Tuesday between Labor Day and the November election as “Looking Backward to Look Forward.” Florangela Davila, lately of the Seattle Times, is the project manager doing the heavy lifting to make the program series happen. News Director at KPLU is Erin Hennessey.

What Ails Education?

What’s wrong with education in the United States? It used to be that Americans were the most educated people in the world. Yet eduational performance seems to have peaked in the late 1960s, according to David Brooks.

[H]igh school graduation rates peaked in the U.S. in the late 1960s, at about 80 percent. Since then they have declined.

So what went wrong? Researcher James Heckman says that it’s not falling school quality.

Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.



Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.

What we need to do is boost educational attainment at the bottom, according to Brooks. And on this the GOP is largely irrelevant. It is in Barack Obama’s education proposals that you can find attempts to improve early childhood education. McCain talks about school choice rather than “human capital policies”

Óf course this takes for granted the old progressive template: problem + expert research + government program = solution. Is it, David Brooks?

Maybe the problem is not so much the education system but the decline in family environment. The Economist ran an article a year ago about marriage (sub) in the United States.

Since 1964 the percentage of children raised by single mothers has gone up from five percent to 10 percent — for college graduate mothers. But it’s gone up from 12 percent to 40 percent for mothers with less than high school education.

Now that sort of result goes beyond misfortune or even the monstrous injustice of the liberal welfare state.

This is nothing less than a disaster. Forty percent of kids of high-school dropouts being raised without a father?

It’s not just a question of fairness you know. It’s a question of safety. A child living with mother and boy-friend is 35 times more likely to suffer abuse that a child living with its married biological mother and father.

This is not a question about who has the best policy analysis of recent research in education. It goes back to the enormous social changes that have been visited on the poor by the last forty years of liberal social policy.

And every year that we just sit and do nothing the liberal welfare state dumps another cohort of kids in the garbage.

Who Cares About Inner City Schools?

According to Sen. Barack Obama, the conservative solution to pervasive school failure is "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice."

That’s what he told the American Federation of Teachers.

Of course, he’s right. Conservatives flog away at pushing for more school choice and more access to vouchers for the children of the poor in lousy inner-city school districts and the Democrats keep cold-cocking them. You get really tired after being cold-cocked for the tenth or eleventh time.

In any case, Democrats and teachers unions are still standing in the schoolhouse door with the tired rhetoric the you don’t care about kids unless you pay them more money.

It’s the great civil-rights issue of the twenty-first century, and as usual, Democrats are on the side of injustice and want to keep blacks enslaved on the liberal plantation.

In the Wall Street Journal today there’s an editorial criticizing Obama’s union-friendly approach to education.

Mr. Obama told an interviewer recently that he opposes school choice because, "although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you’re going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom." The Illinois Senator has it exactly backward.

Kids at the top already have school choice. Maybe their parents can afford to live in a ritzy area with decent schools. Or maybe they can afford private school. Sen. Obama should know. His kids go to a fancy private school.

[The Obama] daughters attend the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where annual tuition ranges from $15,528 for kindergarten to $20,445 for high school.

But just a few blocks south of tony Hyde Park in South Chicago kids don’t have the kind of choices that the rich Obama kids have.

And don’t forget, the Obamas are “the rich.” Based on Michelle’s $400,000 salary at the University of Chicago Hospital alone the Obamas are in the richest one percent of income earners.

You wonder. Why do we conservatives bother. Black parents are never going to vote for Republicans. So why should we bother to help their kids get a decent education?

Because it’s the right thing to do.

Because it’s a question of justice for the poor.

President Bush and Blacks

President Bush’s domestic signature in 2000 was “compassionate conservatism,” resulting in two domestic initiatives: No Child Left Behind and “faith-based” outreach to the poor, writes Mona Charen.

In other words the Republican president was concentrating his programmatic domestic agenda not on helping and paying off Republican voters but on trying to make a dent in the awful mess in the underclass.

So black and poverty leaders are ecstatic, right? Can’t get enough of the compassionate conservative George W. Bush?

Er no. Quite the opposite. Of course, this is nothing new. Black leaders didn’t like Reagan and Bush 39.

But from the beginning, George W. Bush was painted as the devil by many black leaders. It’s remarkable that this was so, considering Mr. Bush’s steadfast and unwavering interest in the poor and minorities, but there it is.

Now, of course the results are in and test scores are up in inner-city schools.

Education Week reported last month that student achievement in math and reading has risen over the past several years, with particularly strong improvements noted among fourth-graders in both subjects. Significantly, the gap between minorities and other students has narrowed.

Where’s the grudging acknowledgement of respect? Well, it’s nowhere, of course.

The thing is this. We conservatives don’t expect to get an even break from traditional Democratic groups, even when we go out of our way to help the poor and the marginalized. So we console oursleves with the notion that we do the right thing anyway.

But when political activists and voters don’t recognize and don’t understand who is helping them and who is hindering there is a price to be paid. The price, of course, does not get paid by the suits. It gets paid by the poor and the vulnerable. And that’s worse than a shame. It’s an injustice.

Obama's Secret Mission

It can now be told. The reason for Barack Obama is simple. He has been sent down to Earth to drive conservatives to distraction.

Today Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) spoke to the German people (and really the people of Europe, for Germany is the center of Europe). Evoking the “soft power” of the Berlin airlift when (hint, hint) the US turned back the Soviets without firing a shot, he told them that this is the moment: to dry up the well of terrorism, rid the world of nuclear weapons, free ourselves of the shadows of yesterday, build on the wealth of open markets, create a new dawn in the Middle East, save the planet, give hope to those left behind, and so on.

The infuriating thing for conservatives is that this is exactly what President Bush has been trying to do, and what liberals here and in Europe have spent the last 7 1/2 years doing everything they can to stop him from doing.

• Liberals wouldn’t concede the 2000 election and insisted ever after that President Bush was illegitimate.
  
• Liberals encouraged Europeans in the idea that President Bush was an idiot and a Texas cowboy.
  
• Liberals encouraged Chancellor Schroeder and President Chirac in their sabotage of President Bush’s diplomatic efforts at the UN before the invasion of Iraq.
  
• Liberals have cold-cocked every domestic reform proposed by President Bush, mostly, it seems, out of spite, a determination to deny him any domestic political victory (after all, domestic issues are what liberals do).
  
• Liberals said that the war in Iraq was lost, and refused to support President Bush’s new strategy, calling it a failure even before it began.
  
• Liberals are the authors of the mortgage meltdown, as prime sponsors of the disfunctional government sponsored mortgage giants.
  
• Liberals are the authors of $4.50 gasoline having tried to stop development of any and all practical energy development in the United States for the last generation.
  

Yet now we are to believe that “we,” Obama and his liberal elite crew, are the ones we have been waiting for.

What a talent! How To Infuriate Conservatives Without Really Trying.

The Mess in the Academe

In her latest article marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher takes out after the fake Obama world tour. Even Andrea Mitchell, she writes, realizes that Obama is faking it, faking press conferences when no media was actually there.

"Let me say something about the message management. He didn’t have reporters with him, he didn’t have a press pool, he didn’t do a press conference," either in Afghanistan or Iraq, noted Mitchell on the air. Instead Obama manufactured "what some would call ’fake interviews,’ because they are not interviews from a journalist[.]"

The problem is that the candidate is all symbolism and impressions, not grounded and critical.

This ties in with some mournful comment about the halcyon days of the university—before the PC era. Paul Greenberg writes about the extraordinary professors he studies under at Columbia, Missouri.

The remarkable thing about those teachers was not their scholarship, though theirs was indeed remarkable, but the immense care and patience - the tenderness almost - that they took with us students.

Of course, these professors were almost all liberal. But they wanted their students to know both sides of the story. In The New Criterion historian Alan Kors writes elegiacally of the “sadnesss” of today’s university education.

The problem is that professors today are in a hurry. They have only four years to demolish the US-centric world-view of their students so they don’t have time for scholarship and development of a critical mind. They must just push their agenda, every day.

The problem with this sort of thing is that, in the end, you end up hurting yourself, not your students. And the folks powering Sen. Barack Obama’s fake world tour will find that out too, sooner or later.

Today’s generation of liberals won’t listen to conservatives, and won’t give them the opportunity to contribute to the academic conversation. That means that the mistakes of today’s generation of liberals will not be exposed until they have actually been enacted into law and into foreign policy.

We can see a preview of what is in store from the current energy flap. It’s all very well to confidently predict a new Flood a century from now as global warming engulfs the planet. These prophecies may be right or they may be wrong. But what about the impact of $4.50 per gallon gasoline on working Americans right now? Our liberal friends seem not to have thought about tha. Indeed they seem not to care.

Conservatives have been worrying about it for a while. In part, we care because liberals have taught us to care.

So when the current liberal generation comes face to face with reality, whether in 2009 or 2013, it ain’t gonna be pretty.

What the NYT Wouldn't Print

The flap over The New York Times refusing to print an oped by John McCain is a gem. Their refusal to print McCain’s responding to an Obama oped published last week is the sort of thing that conservatives love.

And the absurd rationale offered by the NYT editor was a gem. David Shipley didn’t like the oped because it didn’t mirror Obama’s oped but instead criticized Obama.

But now the New York Post has published McCain’s oped and concerned voters can compare the two political documents side by side.

I’d have to say that Obama’s oped is the more tendentious. After all, he has to wriggle through the fact that he thought that Iraq was lost a year ago, and now it turns out that it isn’t.

The difference in narrative is substantial. Writes Obama:

Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he writes, says that we can’t step up the effort in Afghanistan until we draw down the troops in Iraq.

That’s true, but now that we are winning in Iraq we can spare the troops needed in Afghanistan. And that is exactly what President Bush proposes to do.

McCain points out the obvious. Obama doesn’t seem interested in winning.

I’m dismayed that he never talks about winning the war - only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will - and a triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us.

That is true. Obama does not mention the word “win” in his oped. But when you are in a war, it’s a question of winning or losing. When Obama says he would “pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan,” you have to ask: Well, what’s the point of those combat brigades? Are they there just to pursue a strategy or are they there to win the war?

Thirty years ago, liberals insisted that the US “end” the war in Vietnam. That meant, in fact, losing the war in Vietnam. It took Ronald Reagan to turn the US around and erase the defeat in Vietnam with a “surge” that ended up winning the Cold War and putting the Soviet Union on the ash heap of history.

Do we have to go through the whole process again with the war on Islamic extremism?

Obama and Berlin

Politicians are creatures of their staff. And this becomes even more so as we climb the food chain to the presidential level.

So when we say that President Bush is clueless, we are really talking about the quality of his staff. Their job is to make him look good. Of course, he hired them, so it’s his fault if they screw up.

In the current flap about Obama’s speech in Berlin, we should keep this in mind. We can’t really expect Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) to know all about the gaffe factors associated with making a speech at the Brandenburg Gate or at the Siegessäule.

But we should expect that his staff to be up to speed on the symbolic meaning of the Brandenburg Gate, built at the end of the eighteenth century with Viktoria looking east (to the greater Prussia created during the wars of Frederick II). And we should expect his staff to know about the Siegessäule, a column erected to the victory of Prussia over Denmark in 1862 and very much associated with the rise of imperial Germany.

Obviously, they don’t.

Maybe, of course, all this navel scratching about German monuments and their association with the Second Reich and the Third Reich is just twentieth century stuff. We are the ones we have been waiting for and all the Prussian militarism and Nazi stuff is so yesterday.

Of maybe it indicates that the Obama staff are narrow, arrogant, and shallow. And that the Obama administration will also be narrow, arrogant, and shallow.

A Good Denier Day

First a note to our readers. The American Physical Society wants you to know that the paper published by Lord Monckton and the posting by Jeffrey Marque does not represent a change in APS policy. On the APS home page:

The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:



"Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate."

Whew! That was close. Why, as Dr. David Evans writes in The Australian:

The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990[.]

And a lot of that money has been spent on scientists. Even so, more research is needed, as any scientist will tell you.

The flap over at the APS is over a forum posting. The editor of the forum on Physics and Society made an announcement:

With this issue of Physics & Society, we kick off a debate concerning one of the main conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body which, together with Al Gore, recently won the Nobel Prize for its work concerning climate change research. There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.

One of the kickoff articles is by the controversialist Lord Monckton, “Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered,” and carries a red banner on the APS site:

This article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.

Leaving aside the Council of the American Physical Society’s disagreement, Lord Monckton argues that the assumptions of the UN’s IPCC are incorrect. The climate is probably not senstive to changes in CO2.

One of the tell-tales of anthropogenic forcing ought to be a hotspot in the earth’s atmosphere at the equator, writes Lord Monckton. Only trouble is: It ain’t there. Dr. Evans:

The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

However, and this is important, don’t forget the warning notice at the top of Lord Monckton’s article:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.

That’s something to think about. The $50 billion in research money, I mean.

Liberals' Race Crutch

Affirmative action opponent Linda Chavez comments today on a boringly same-old-same-old race poll conducted by The New York Times. Guess what. African Americans are convinced that the US is racist.

But the interesting part of the post is the comments section. There’s Scott:

I am a bureaucrat in a big city welfare department. I am constantly amazed at the level of racial hostility I see in my black co-workers, including those with graduate degrees who earn over $100,000 a year. rom listening to these folks, one would think we are living in Alabama in 1955.

Why not? Race resentment has been a goldmine for blacks. Then there’s Shefali, from India.

I live in Austin, Texas. In my neighborhood, it’s about 45% white, 25% Hispanic, 10% Asian and 20% black. Over the Fourth of July my next door neighbors had a cookout. Everyone was invited. Many people were away visiting family, but of the people who were around, almost everyone - Latino, Asian, white - showed up. But the blacks stayed away.

So blacks don’t want to integrate with the rest of America. But why should he apologize for white racism?

[A] lot of blacks seem to have a tribal mentality. It’s sad, but I don’t see how I, an immigrant from India, can be to blame for their suffering as slaves, etc. My ancestors were treated horribly by the British but I have had English friends and I don’t blame modern Brits for the cruelty of their forefathers.

Maybe he has a point!

Maybe in a few years, after the bloom is off the Obama rose, the Democratic Party will end up as the party of the Cultural Creatives and the African Americans. Everyone else will have MovedOn to the party that ended slavery, ended stagflation, ended the Cold War, and liberated Iraq.

Everyone Doesn't Do it

Everyone agrees, don’t they, that candidates appeal to the base in their primary campaigns and then they tack to the center when it’s time for the general. Agreed?

And nobody has done that more completely and ruthlessly than Sen. Barack Obama (B-IL). As Tony Blankley writes:

[I]f there are two things people know about Barack Obama, one of them is that he recently has changed his positions on abortion, gun control, capital punishment, FISA laws, the status of Jerusalem, faith-based federal programs, public financing of his campaign, welfare, NAFTA and free trade, the surge in Iraq, and his commitment to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his Trinity Church, among other public policies.

But just a minute. Just how much did presidential candidates do this sort of thing in the past?

Let’s review a few. Candidate Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative” right through the 2000 election cycle. And then there was Ronald Reagan:

Who can forget Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, when he came out for tax cuts, lower social spending and more military spending in the primary, only to back away from those policies in the general election when he famously said: "I got a little rhetorically over-excited during the primary. On closer examination, President Carter seems to have built up our defenses sufficiently. We will have to see about those tax cuts; we may need the revenues for more social spending."

Not!

Writes Blankley:

I am not aware of anything remotely comparable to Sen. Obama’s recent reversals of positions.

So what is going on? Here’s a theory. You need to bear sharp left to win the Democratic nomination because of the crazy left. But you can’t possibly win on the left’s agenda. So every Democratic candidate has to tack, more or less, to the center to get elected.

That is the reality. But to cover it up (not to us, but to itself) the mainstream media makes up the notion that everyone does it.

Rush Limbaugh says: Liberals can’t win by being themselves. But it’s worse than that. Liberals can’t even be themselves to themselves.

The Business of Government Isn't Business

President Calvin Coolidge famously proclaimed that “the business of America is business.”

Unfortunately some people evidently misheard him. They thought he meant that government should get into business.

Please. Government does everything badly, including making war and legislating. Yet helpless and abject failure doesn’t seem to matter too much when government keeps to war and law enforcement.

The last thing that anyone should think of is getting government involved in business.

But when Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) thinks that he can help out the banking regulators, or when political careerists think they can run GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, then even the man on the street can see that something ain’t right.

It seemed like a dandy idea to set up a government agency back in the Great Depression to create a secondary market in mortgages with the Federal National Mortgage Assocation. And then in 1968 it seemed like a great way of reducing the budget deficit to spin Fannie Mae off as a quasi-public agency and create Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae as competitors.

But when the teetering mortgage giants need a bailout to prevent global financial meltdown, then something has gone wrong.

That something is the very idea that a government-sponsored enterprise can ever be run in a businesslike fashion where the risks are properly understood and managed.

Look at it this way. Two recent Fannie Mae notables were James Johnson, an aide to Democrat Walter Mondale and now a Washington power broker, and Jamie Gorelick, Deputy Attorney General in the Democratic Clinton administration and creator of the famous wall that hindered the intelligence agencies from connecting the dots before 9/11. What in tarnation do pols like that understand about finance?

Now take a look at the obituary of Dennis Weatherstone, former head of JP Morgan Chase. Weatherstone was the son of a clerk who never went to college but rose to sit in the chair of the greatest banker of all time, J.P. Morgan.

“If you can’t understand it, don’t do it,” was one of Weatherstone’s maxims. When Morgan’s bright young men invented new trading instruments and deal structures, they were allowed three short attempts to explain them to him; if they failed, their projects did not proceed.

Can you imagine Jim Johnson or Jamie Gorelick saying that to some brilliant young man at Fannie Mae? Why, you have staffers to do that sort of work.

Government has no business in business. It should stick to wars and moral equivalents of wars. They can even be fun—for the politicians. But business is grunt work. Why don’t you Olympian gods leave it to ordinary mortals?

What About the Real Problem with Obama?

The oh so sophisticated New Yorker has a picture of Obama and wife on the cover, depicting what they assume is the right-wingnut slur of Obama as a Muslim and his wife as a chic radical guerrilla.

As usual, the sophisticates miss the point. Conservatives worry more about Obama’s out-of-touch Hyde Park elitism, the curious access he seems to have had to City Hall divorce records of opposing candidates, the unsavory connections like Tony Resko, and the general not-ready-for-prime-time aroma of his public pronouncements.

But don’t mind us. We’re just a bunch of mean-spirited, racist, homophobic Swiftboating extremists.

And then there’s the real problem with Obama, that he seems to represent the one last Big Push for big government. Liberals know best, you know.

It is ordinary rank-and-file Democrats that will have to pay for his hubris, the hubris that he has picked up by osmosis from his life in the liberal bell jar.

Who Are the Top One Percent?

Yesterday we looked at the IRS’s most revealing spreadsheet (xls), the one that says that the top one percent of income tax filers pay 40 percent of the federal income tax.

It’s mighty nice of those folks to pony up all that cash, particularly when you consider that they only earn 21.20 percent of the income reported to the IRS. But who are these generous chaps and chapettes?

In short, how much money do you have to make in order to make it into the Top One Percent? What do you think? A million dollars a year? A hundred million? A billion?

Actually not so much. In 2005, the latest year available from the IRS tax return stats, you needed an income of $365,000 to make it into the One Percent Club. That’s up from 2004, but about the same as 2000.

It’s interesting to see how the club entry fee has trended over the years. Back in 1986, you could get into the club with an income slightly under $100,000. Not any more. Not after the Clinton years. That’s when the entry fee for the Top One Percent Club went from $100,000 to $350,000.

What is it about those Democrats? They talk a good line about helping the little guy, but when push comes to shove they’d rather line the pockets of their rich friends.

When George W. Bush became president, he taught those high-rollers a lesson. After he’d finished with them, he’d lowered the entry bar to $250,000. That’s the soft bigotry of low expectations for you.

Of course, Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) wife, Michelle, belongs in the Top One Percent all on her own, with her reported $400,000 job at the University of Chicago.

In other words, the Obamas are part of the problem. They are not paying their fair share. Right, Senator?

All right. Just kidding.

Only the Rich Pay Taxes (update)

The IRS keeps a handy-dandy spreadsheet on the federal income tax. The latest version, for 2005, is here (xls).

The IRS’s spreadsheet shows that “only the rich pay taxes,” well income taxes, anyway.

Stephen Moore, boss of the Club for Growth, writes that he talked to his pal at the Treasury, and the latest results are about to come out. The new numbers will hit a major milestone.

The 2006 numbers will show, for the first time, that the top one percent of federal income tax filers will be paying over 40 percent of federal income tax. The bottom 50 percent pay three percent. In other words, the rich pay the overwhelming share of the income tax.

In 2005, the rich earned 21.20 percent of the income and paid 39.38 percent of the income tax. The bottom 50 percent paid just under four percent of the income tax burden.

As the graph below shows, the share of tax paid by the rich has been going up for the last decade.

The other two lines on the chart show the top income tax rate—which has been going up in Democratic administrations and down in Republican administrations—and the top capital gains rate. If the amount of tax paid by the rich responds to changes in the top marginal tax rate then it is almost certainly responding to the cap. gains rate, which is a tax on profits.

Moore says that two-thirds of the returns of the top one percent are from small businessmen and women.

Many liberals, of course, are outraged that the rich have been getting so much richer. But in a capitalist system like today’s, where startling changes and inventions are changing the market place you will see startling profits, just like the late nineteenth century when Rockefeller amd Carnegie made fabulous fortunes by lowering oil prices by 90 percent and steel prices by two-thirds.

And with the low tax rates on realizing capital gains, the rich are willing to expose their profits to the taxman.

Sen. Barack Obama, of course, wants to change all that. And change, have no doubt, is what he will get.

Vanity of Vanities

Jane Austen’s last complete novel, Persuasion, is about vanity. Principally, it turns around the vanity of the novel heroine’s father, Sir Walter Elliott. This empty vessel (Latin: vanus: empty) is remarkably proud of his title, his lineage, his good looks, and his splendid mansion, Kellynch. He provides a suitable contrast to the heroine, Anne. “[N]one so proper, none so capable, as Anne,” as the hero Captain Wentworth, puts it.

The spectacle of Sen. Barack Obama (D-NY) expatiating on his embarrassment that few Americans speak French, or his proposal that American kids should be forced to do community service remind us about the unseriousness, the emptiness, the vanity of the modern liberal.

Decades ago our liberal friends set upon a serious program, to bring material benefits to the other half. They would provide a safety net to people that had none, and they would lift up the forgotten man to a decent standard of life.

Today it is easy to criticize their program.We can say that their safety net was no safety net, but an an umbilical cord to the welfare state and permanent dependency. We can look at free education today and ask what happened. We can look a Social Security and say: if only we had put Fidelity and Vanguard in charge of this. We can look at the ruins of the working class, now the underclass, and shake our heads at the follies of the liberals.

But fifty, sixty years ago, only a couple of prophets, men like F.A. Hayek, were saying that the welfare state was a Road to Serfdom. No serious person thought that.

But today’s liberals are no longer serious. They want to fiddle with health care. But Americans have basic health care, the kind that saves the lives of mothers and babies. They want women to be able to abort their babies. No serious person could ever do that. They want to carve out benefits for gays and lesbians, who being childless, are not really the most important item on the docket. They are more eager to battle Americans that don’t agree with them than Islamists who want to take over the world.

Anyone can now see that liberals, in the late summer of their power, have become empty, vain, unserious.

We have not experienced, directly, the un-seriousness of liberals in full political power for nearly a generation, not since the un-serious presidency of President Carter. Maybe it’s time for a refresher course.

More Capital Needed at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Yesterday, shares in Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored Federal National Mortgage Assocation were down 16 percent, while shares in the government-sponsored Freddie Mac were down 18 percent. There was concern on the market that both needed “to raise more capital amid larger-then-expected losses.”

So the brilliant managers at the government’s mortgage mills are going to need a bailout too. Only, you can bet that the shareholders of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae won’t get the haircut that the folks at Bear, Stearns got.

The idea of government-subsidized mortgages was to make housing more affordable to the average American. Something seems to have gone wrong.

Here are the numbers. In 1950, when per-capita income was $2,000, the median house price in the US was $7,350, according to the Census Bureau, or 3.7 times income. Today, with per capita income around $47,000, the median home price is about $220,000, or 4.6 times the median house price.

So with all that subsidy and help from our elected officials, houses cost more than they did half a century ago.

That is what you call progress.

The Trouble With Faith-based Initiatives

Back when President Bush was pushing his idea for faith-based organizations to have access to government monies it seemed like a good idea. But many conservatives warned against it, because whatever the government touches the government controls.

Think the Catholic adoption agency in Massachusetts that decided to get out of the adoption business rather than be forced to accept gays as adoptive parents.

A number of conservatives have had their doubts in the years since. Now Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has come out in favor of faith-based initiatives. Writes Rev. Robert Sirica,

Barack Obama has announced that he likes President Bush’s program of public funding for religious charities. In fact, he wants to expand the program.

Yes. Think about it. Think what the liberal government managers will do, and think what the liberal activist groups will do with faith-based initiatives.

The point is, of course, that government is the last place in the world that you would look for giving people a hand up. Government is about power and patronage. It is not about faith, love, and charity. When government helps people it thinks immediately about binding those people into supporting it at the next election.

But votes are all that the liberal politicians care about. Fraser Nelson wrote recently about the people in the welfare ghetto of east Glasgow, Scotland, where 50 percent of the adult population is on “incapacity” benefits and male life expectancy at birth is 54 years:

I once had the job of signing up the good people of Glasgow East to the electoral register — at the time, regarded as an invitation to pay poll tax. Gang graffiti scars the walls, police are virtually unseen. This no-go-zone status is new, and cost billions to achieve. Houses there are in good condition, money is being spent. But it has funded a hideous social experiment, showing what happens when the horizontal ties which bind those within communities to one another are replaced with vertical ties, binding individuals to the welfare state.

Liberals like to talk about the “safety net” afforded by government programs, but the metaphor is misleading. In a safety net, the people are the knots, supported by horizontal ties to work, family, church, and neigborhood. In a welfare state, the only tie is the umbilical cord to the welfare state placenta. Cut that one cord, and you are dead.

Maybe umbilical cord is the wrong metaphor. Maybe the reality is that the vertical tie by which dependents are bound to the welfare state is a rope.

Clark's McCain Put-down

You and I can only guess at the tactical political calculations of presidential campaigns.

So we just shake our heads and wonder at the attempt by Gen. Wesley Clark, an Obama supporter, to brush off Sen. McCain’s military experience as mere by-play. As Jake Tapper quotes,

“He hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron,” said Clark, who did command NATO allied forces during the war in Kosovo.



And the corker: “Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” Clark added.

You have to assume that remarks like that were poll tested by the Obama campaign and run by focus groups. Unless. Unless the Obama campaign is just an amateur operation that just shoots from the hip.

(This is not impossible. The only campaign I served on was a very amateur operation, as it was bound to be when it ran mostly on volunteers.)

But let us assume there are adults at the Obama campaign. They must think that they have to take down McCain’s advantage as a combat veteran with actual service in the military. It is true, of course, that service in the military does not immediately transfer to “national security” experience. But we know that McCain has made national security a key concern as a United States Senator. You are really taking a big risk to try impeach his credentials as a serious actor on national security.

So I reckon that the Obama folks reckon they are toast unless they can take McCain out on national security. That means that they are looking at polls and focus group results with negative results on Obama’d electability that you and I can only guess at.

But hey, with the help of the mainstream media, maybe they can do it!

Or maybe, given the fact of evil right-wing swift-boating extremist bloggers, they can’t.

New Hope for Global Warming Deniers

There are some of us, and we are few, who reflexively recoil from the latest liberal enthusiasm.

(And why is it that every liberal enthusiasm involves a dip into your pocketbook?)

So we grab at hopes that the liberals are wrong—again.

Last week there was a straw to grasp for us global warming deniers. A couple of astsro-physicists published a paper on sunspots and the solar cycle.

As reported by Andrew Bolt the phsysicts are predicting that the sun may turn quiet with very few sunspots in the next 20-30 years. Some scientists believe that global temperatures typically dip by 1 to 2 degrees during these episodes.

The theory is that the convection currents in the sun are driven by the rotation of the Jovian planets, Jupiter and Saturn. They represent the biggest mass in the solar system after the Sun, and cause the sun to “wobble” around the center of the Solar System.

If this is true, and if Cycle 24 is really a quiet cycle, and if the climate cools by one or two degrees... Well, it could dent the current global warming “consensus.”

Author Ian Wilson comments on his paper.

It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 - 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World’s mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 - 2 C.

Well, it means new hope for global warming deniers.

But go ahead, AlGore. You can crank up the thermostat in your energy-guzzling house if things get a little chilly. We won’t mind.