Handicapping Election 2006

It will take a gain of 15 seats for the Democrats to take control of the House of Representatives this fall. Can they do it?

Long time elections expert Michael Barone says maybe. It would seem that gaining 15 seats should not be that hard, given that the Republicans gained 52 seats in 1994 to take the House. But this isn’t 1994. At least not yet.

Democrats' chances of taking those 15 seats are not very good — if the voting patterns and political contours that have held steady since the 1995-96 budget showdown continue to prevail.

And that’s the point. Voting patterns have stayed steady for about the last ten years. The Republicans gains came from three sources, says Barone. First was the Democratic Class of 1974 that had won in fairly Republican districts. Twenty years later, as those incumbents moved on, their seats reverted back to the Republicans. Then Republicans benefited from an improvement in candidate quality, the movement of the conservative South into the Republican camp, a remarkable anti-incumbent feeling, and finally an anti-Clinton feeling among voters who in 1992 thought they were voting for a moderate and instead got tax increases and national health care.

How do those factors work this time around? Not too much. It doesn’t seem likely that Republicans are in for a perfect storm like Democrats were in 1994.

In his analysis, Jay Case writes in RealClearPolitics.com that we should not underestimate the difficulty of unseating an incumbent congressman. There are only about 17 Republican open seats and most of them are districts that voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004.

Then he goes through the conventional wisdom that points to a Democratic pickup in November. Democrats could win if they could unify around a set of issues. Republicans are in trouble because they are not united. Right track/wrong track polls indicate trouble for the Republicans, and so on.

All wrong, says Case. The fact is that 95 percent of Republican congressmen are running for reelection. And the open seats are mostly in districts that voted for Bush. That makes it almost impossible to retake the House unless the sentiments of the voters change significantly before November.

So it ain’t over yet.

A Look Inside Iran

Here’s an interesting look inside Iran. The Iranian establishment is increasingly worried by the actions of the president of Iran, according to John R. Bradley in the Washington Times.

Iran's clerical and business establishments, deeply concerned by what they see as reckless spending and needlessly aggressive foreign policies, are increasingly turning against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad was elected on a populist platform to root out corruption and to give priority to the needs of the poor. Is he ever!

Iran's long-term planning calls for vigorous efforts to reduce the size of government and to curb subsidies to state-owned entities, which account for an estimated 75 percent of the economy. But the Ahmadinejad budget boosts spending by 25 percent and envisions a 31 percent increase in spending on state enterprises.

We’ve seen this before. This sort of reckless expansion of the government sector to throw subsidies at the poor always ends in tears. The economic strength of a nation comes from its productive sector. And that means business enterprise not government enterprise. This isn’t too difficult to figure out, is it.

The clerical establishment has close ties with the capitalist class and is said to be appalled at the rapid slide of the economy since Mr. Ahmadinejad's inauguration. The clerics are also thought to be deeply apprehensive about the president's aggressive foreign policy.

The Iranian establishment wants the West to ease off on the confrontation with Ahmadinejad. “Let the Iranians deal with him,” they say. Then he’ll be a failure and out of power within a year.

The Outlook for Energy

Ever since Col. Drake discovered oil in Pennsylvania back in 1859 people have been solemnly forecasting that oil is about to run out.

They forecast it back in the 1860s, and they forecast it just before they discovered oil in Texas. Now the current fad is “peak oil,” the idea that we just passed by the peak in oil production and that it is downhill from now on.

Maybe they are right. But it really doesn’t matter.

Actually, the forecast that we are running out of energy goes back even before the oil age. In the early nineteenth century they were worrying about the wood energy crisis in Britain. The iron smelting industry was cutting down all the trees to melt iron, and everyone knew that they would soon run out of energy. Then they discovered coal in Newcastle.

In TCSDaily, Max Schulz does a good job of showing why the peak oil hypothesis has the whole problem upside down.

The chief problem with those who say the world is running out is that they have always looked at the issue the wrong way. Questions about energy supply shouldn't be thought of in terms of how much is available, but in terms of how good mankind is at finding and extracting it.

Leave aside that extraction technology is always improving. Leave aside that there is a ton of coal out there, and then there is nuclear.

In a hundred years or less we could be erecting solar panels in space and bringing the energy back to the earth by microwave or down the umbilical chords of space elevators.

Evergy is not a question of finite resources. It is a question of human ingenuity.

And what, you might ask, is really real? Material resources or human ideas? The truth is that we just don’t know.

It's Not A Gender Gap but a Marriage Gap

For a generation Democrats have been selling the idea of a gender gap, the idea that more women vote for Democrats and that therefore Republicans have a problem.

Never mind that the gender gap implies also the reverse, that more men vote for Republicans and that therefore Democrats have a problem.

Instead, let’s talk about a marriage gap, writes Jeff Jacoby.
In 2004 there was a 36 percent marriage gap among women.

In the most recent presidential election, unmarried women voted for John Kerry by a 25-point margin, while President Bush won the votes of married women by an 11-point margin: a marriage gap of 36 points.

It’s really just practical. If you are a single woman, you rely on government for your safety net. If you are a married woman, you rely on your husband.

OK, now let’s expand Jacoby’s analysis a little. First of all:

Financial protection. Single women, especially if they have children, are more likely to be dependent on the government for welfare, Social Security, and other economic benefits... Married women, by contrast, are much less likely to depend on government support. Instead, many come to see the welfare state and its tax burden as a threat to the well-being of their family, making them more inclined to vote Republican.

Nothing remarkable there. Then there is:

Children and cultural values. Married parents with children are less likely to support the party whose policies make it harder to shield their children from corrosive cultural influences.

Yes, and the Democrats, as the party of single people, cannot get away from condoning complete license for single people. Finally, there is (easy now):

Male influence. Women are significantly less likely than men to follow national and international affairs, a knowledge gap that researchers have documented for decades.

The consequence is that married women tend to take up the political opinions of their husbands on national and international affairs.

What would be nice is for women to start taking control of local politics and getting control of their children’s education. Some of us out here shake our heads in frustration that women haven’t done something about education. How can married mothers put up with the nonsense that’s dished out at their children at the local government school?

Anything we can do to help, ladies?

Laffer Curve vs. Phillips Curve

There’s one thing about economic guru Larry Kudlow. You could never accuse him of pessimism. And, he points out, there’s every reason not to give in to the MSM drumbeat of bad news. You know the story. There’s

the insurgent-ridden reconstruction effort in Iraq, the looming Iran threat, the failed Dubai ports deal, the twin deficits, the president’s sagging poll numbers, the Jack Abrahamoff scandal, and on and on — there’s one thing they just can’t taint: This U.S. economy remains very healthy.

Now why would that be? To Kudlow, it is a tale of two curves. There’s the Laffer Curve, the notion that the economy does best when marginal tax rates are low and uniform. Then there’s the Phillips Curve, the notion that there is a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. Senator! A question! Which one is a notion and which one is a practical guide to policymaking?

No contest. We tried an economic policy based on the Phillips Curve back in the 1970s. What was the result? We got both inflation and unemployment. But then Ronald Reagan came to power and applied the Laffer Curve. He lowered marginal tax rates—in the teeth of mocking criticism from liberals—and the result has been twenty years of prosperity.

In the months ahead... President Bush will continue to embrace the pro-growth Laffer curve. And the anti-worker Phillips curve will be pushed into the dustbin of history. In other words, economic growth principles will keep American capitalism on the prosperity path.

You can’t say fairer than that.

Labor Shortage Reported in China

Here is astonishing news from China. In Shenzhen in south China, they have got themselves a labor shortage, according to Jane Macartney of the London Times.

There are only nine workers available for every ten jobs on offer in Guangdong and the situation is getting worse.

And it is not just that workers are scarce. They are also choosy about where they work.

The days of sweatshop labour may be numbered. Workers have mobile phones and word soon goes round of any mistreatment. Mr Chen said: “If you are a profitable company then you must offer good working conditions. The business environment is very different now, and a factory owner can’t expect to earn profits out of the mouths of his workers.”

Cell-phones, eh. Who knew?

The same thing is happening in India. I talked with an Delhi architect in the fall of 2004 and he said that Indian companies are finding that they can’t find enough labor when they open factories near Delhi. So they have to build further out from the big cities.

It seems that in East and South Asia the same cycle that Europe and America experienced is repeating itself, although on a blisteringly fast track. Initially, when industrialization starts, workers are frequently abused and exploited. But after a time, they no longer have to take whatever is on offer, and the exploitation fades away.

How exactly does that work, and how can we adjust institutions to mitigate and minimize the problem? Two hundred and fifty years after the start of the industrial revolution, we still don’t really know.

Do labor unions, wage and hour laws, child labor laws really help? We really don’t know.

What we do know is that after a period of initial exploitation the workers emerge into prosperity.

Dangerous Crime Family Uncovered in Britain

Enough of the frivolity, this is serious. Columnist Simon Heffer has uncovered a vast underground crime network in Britain. It all began innocently enough when an 82 year-old woman walked into a pub wearing a hat. The pub staff naturally enough wanted her to remove the hat, for security reasons, you understand.

[S]he could then be easily identified on security cameras when she started to break bottles and smash the place up - as old ladies like her inevitably tend to do.

The old lady in question, of course, feigned ignorance about her obvious breach of the peace, saying

that she always wears a hat, and that her late mother "wouldn't have set foot outside the house" without wearing one. So what they say about criminal dynasties is clearly true, then.

You can see in this incident the power of the conservative “broken windows” policing policy. It is casual law-breakers who inevitably turn out to have a rap sheet as long as your arm. Thank goodness that this crime family has finally been exposed.

Read the whole thing.