President Bush Flips the Bird

The problem that all we pajama-clad commentators share is simple. We don’t have a clue what is going on. Are we winning or losing in Iraq? We just don’t know.

President Bush emphasized that on Tuesday when he flipped the bird at everyone: at the MSM, at his critics, and at Iraq.

He told the mainstream media what he thought about them by embarking them on a bus to Camp David and then telling them that he, Bush, wasn’t going to be there. He flipped the bird to his critics by staying the course. And he flipped the bird to the Iraqis by taking over Baghdad Airport to secure it for Air Force One, and by showing up unannounced at a meeting with Prime Minister al-Maliki. Finally, he addressed a group of our military and demonstrated that he fully enjoys their confidence. It was quite a performance.

But at least when the president acts, you can read a tea-leaf or two. The announcement that, on the request of Mr. al-Maliki, combined Iraqi and Coalition forces would start sweeps of Baghdad to secure the capital, starting immediately, raises an immediate question.

Why wait until now?

The answer is pretty clear. The U.S. must have refused to help secure the capital until the Iraqis stopped squabbling and put a government in place, complete with Defense and Interior Ministers. Sorry, old chum, they must have said. We’re not coming into the capital until you guys get your act together. It must have been a powerful incentive, because the whole world was wailing like a banshee that Baghdad was descending into anarchy. Do something, they cried! Sure, said Bush. After you guys form a government.

Of course, President Bush is right. Elections, shmelections. Real legitimacy is secured by a government that can quell enemies, foreign and domestic. It does no good for the US to do everything. The new Iraqi government must prove it deserves to rule by routing the terrorists: Saddamite, Al-Qaeda, and local militias. Otherwise the mantle of political power in Iraq will fall to someone else.

But the cavalier Bush acts this week also demonstrate that, as of now, the new Iraqi government is a mere US puppet. Hopefully that will change and in a year a confident Iraqi government will tell the US to get out.

E.J. Wants a New New Deal

You can rely on columnist E.J. Dionne for the straight up-and-down liberal view of things. And we mean that in the best way, that he is an honest liberal who just wants government to solve everything. Like jobs.

Things aren’t going too well on the jobs front, he worries, for the job creation since the last recession is “the slowest in any recovery since the Kennedy administration.” And, of course, they aren’t the “good” jobs of the golden years, “secure, well-compensated jobs” like the ones they used to have at the auto companies.

What's needed, [progressive politicians have] said, is heavy investment in education and job training to allow people to make the transition from the "old" economy -- those auto jobs -- to the new. "What you earn depends upon what you can learn," President Bill Clinton said over and over.

We need a new New Deal. Otherwise it will mean uncontrolled offshoring of jobs. Dionne then gets in his “narrative,” as the postmodernists would say:

Historically, voters turn away from conservative free-market politicians after they conclude that capitalism needs help in living up to its commitment to create widely shared abundance. After World War II, voters in rich countries entered a social democratic bargain in which capitalism became the bedrock of the economy but was tempered by a large public sector and a unionized industrial sector that provided social insurance, education, pensions and health care.

Actually, voters turned away from the free market in 1933 when the Progressive suits totally screwed up the economy. And then over the next two generations New Dealers totally screwed up social insurance, education, pensions, and health care. They screwed it up by running it all through the government so that social needs were driven by the need of politicians for votes. Let’s take them in turn:

• Social insurance like Social Security and Medicare? Heading for a brick wall.
  
• Education? A wasteland utterly abandoned to the special interests.
  
• Pensions? The good old defined-benefit pension utterly ruined by greedy unions and greedy corporations.
  
• Health care? An expensive mess because people pay for health care with other peoples” money.

Here’s the problem, E.J. We can’t have a new deal, or even a New Deal. Because we are already spending something north of 15 percent of GDP on the last New Deal.

If we really want a new deal of the cards we would have to put all that stuff on the table: all the programs, the subsidies, the handouts, the waste of the past seventy years.

And that is something that progressives like you, E.J., absolutely refuse to discuss. You won’t reform Social Security, won’t reform education. And you say nothing while disability rolls double every ten years.

If we want good jobs at good wages we are going to have to get the progressives out of the way. That is something that the voters may be getting wise to.

Leave Wal-Mart Alone, Says Poll

Stop bashing Wal-Mart, Democrats, if you want to win elections. That’s the message from a poll conducted by Democratic pollster Thomas Riehle.

By a 3-to-1 margin, 62% disapprove and only 21% approve of "Democratic candidates making Wal-Mart an issue in November's elections," in the RT Strategies poll conducted June 1-5 with a representative sample of 1,209 adults nationwide. The margin of error is + 2.7.

Here at Road to the Middle Class we have been fearless in speaking truth to the powerful over Wal-Mart. We utterly deplore the disdain and the power plays that rich, well-connected liberal and union activists have deployed against Wal-Mart. What do they know? They don’t even shop there.

The temptation to "stand up to Wal-Mart" as a campaign ploy reflects the sometimes cocooning and self-deceptive nature of Democratic Party activists. Indeed, in RT Strategies polls we consistently find that the most vociferously anti- Wal-Mart groups are Northeast and West Coast liberals who themselves rarely or never shop at Wal-Mart, shunning the retailer as not worthy of their patronage. They cannot understand how others fail to reach the same conclusion.

And now that Wal-Mart is starting to sell organic products on the cheap, the liberal rage at Wal-Mart is likely to know no bounds.

After all, the whole point of consuming organic products is the same as the point of consuming Lexuses and BMWs. It is Veblenian conspicuous consumption: You can’t afford it. In the case of organic products the line is: We pay more because it is “responsible.” It sounds very high-minded. But then high-status people always have high-minded reasons for their high-handedness. They can afford it.

By staying out of the stores themselves, anti- Wal-Mart Democrats might have missed the fact that:



• 84% of Americans shopped at Wal-Mart in the past year...



• It is not uncommon for thousands to apply when a few hundred new jobs open up at a Wal-Mart...



• The vast majority of Wal-Mart store managers rose to that post from hourly jobs on the floor.



• For the average family of shoppers, the savings at Wal-Mart are over $2,000 per year.

But who cares about all that when Wal-Mart is failing to provide first dollar health insurance coverage to its non-union employees.

How to Play "Wheel of Fortune"

No one can doubt that, at the center of the astonishing economy of the United States is the vital economic cog of the syndicated TV program Wheel of Fortune. The luscious blonde wheel turner Vanna White was sui generis. And the host of the program, Pat Sajak, has toiled away in the vineyard of Fortune seemly forever, still the bright, cheery emcee that the program demands. To top it off, Pat is a conservative.

And now Pat has offered to give us the secret of winning at Wheel of Fortune. You’d expect that, coming from a conservative. Not for Pat the easy life of sitting at a government job, counting the days till retirement and that pension. Not at all. Pat wants to help people. So he can make a lot of money charging extortionate rates to advertisers on his program.

What is the secret? It is simple. Buy vowels!

I know. That’s easy for him to say. Each vowel costs a contestant a princely $250 out of their winnings. But Pat says it is worth it. Here’s why.

There are 21 consonants and 5 vowels. That means you have a one-in-five chance of finding a vowel, while only better than a one-in-twenty chance of finding a consonant. Add to that the fact that buying a vowel removes the risk of landing on a "Bankrupt" or "Lose a Turn" space that spinning entails. If anyone on the Wheel staff (including the host) were playing the game, he or she would begin buying vowels as soon as possible, especially when the puzzle is a lengthy one.

Pat has another suggestion. But you should read his article to find out.

Meanwhile, just remember one thing. It’s what your rich uncle would have suggested. Buy vowels.

Eclipse 500 VLJ Nears Certification

Get ready for jet air taxis. Eclipse Aviation is getting close to FAA certification for its Eclipse 500 4-seat VLJ, very light jet. They’ve got 2,500 on order and air taxi operations are getting ready to shuttle you around at a cost similar to first class. Tom Ramstack has the details.

It’s been a long road for Eclipse CEO Vern Raburn. Originally the Eclipse 500 was going to be powered by a cheapo engine from Williams International Ltd., but when Williams couldn’t deliver Eclipse went to Pratt and Whitney. And the jet was going to cost $850,000. Now the price is up at $1.5 million.

There is competition coming up, but Eclipse will be first to market.

On Eclipse Aviation’s website gives the details of the project. A May 30 press release reports

that six customer Eclipse 500 VLJs are in various assembly positions on the production line. The Eclipse 500 is on track to achieve FAA certification by the end of this quarter and will be the first VLJ to market.

It sure would be cool to fly one of those babies. Cruising speed is about 375 knots and stall speed in landing configuration is 67 knots. Range is a surprising 1,395 nautical miles with four occupants.

There are more facts available from Wikipedia. Did you know that Bill Gates was an investor?

Democratic Message Out This Week

Democrats are presenting their national message for the fall elections this week, according to Marc Sandalow, confident of the opoportunity to pick up seats, “yet divided over how much an agenda will matter.”

The Democratic program will consist of bread-and-butter priorities: increasing the minimum wage, cutting costs of prescription drugs, reducing interest rates on student loans, rolling back subsidies for oil companies, and pay-as-you-go budgeting, according to party officials.

Hmm. I wonder what “pay-as-you-go budgeting” means. It sounds like giving first priority to government spending as second priority to family budgets to me.

Party strategists hope the timing will contrast favorably with the Republicans' recent push on social legislation such as constitutional bans on gay marriage and flag burning.



With President Bush and Republicans in political free fall, others in the party believe what Democrats do and say is of far less consequence than the price of gasoline and the daily casualties from Iraq.

That raises an interesting question. If gas prices came down by the fall, would it make a difference?

"The Fact Is, It Is Tax"

Years ago, back in the 1960s, veteran British journalist William Rees-Mogg had lunch with a young Irish businessman, Tony O’Reilly.

The young lad was selling Irish butter at the time and he managed to persuade the cranky journalist that Ireland made the finest butter in the world

coming fresh from cows that had personally kissed the Blarney stone, that Ireland had just entered on an economic renaissance that would spread far beyond the dairy industry, and that one of the leaders of the renaissance would be my young interlocutor, Tony O’Reilly.

Well, today Anthony O’Reilly is Ireland’s first billionaire. His Ireland has a per-capita income higher that Britain.

O’Reilly’s view is that the main reason for the Irish economic “miracle” has been the low level of corporate tax in Ireland... He comments that the Irish miracle is not “because the pubs are great, the golf is great and the climate is, well . . . the fact is, its tax.”

Do you mind if I repeat that last bit?

The fact is, it is tax.

Thank you. Let us continue.

Obviously, a 30 per cent [corporate] tax rate [in Britain] is less attractive to international business than 12.5 per cent [in Ireland]. London has therefore become less attractive than Dublin. Like water running downhill, companies will move from London to Dublin, or to other low-tax countries.

Like e-Stonia, for instance. Yes. As the Democrats here in the United States vote against the Death Tax and sensible reductions in taxes on capital other countries are taking unilateral action. They are lowering their tax rates because they know that the marginal tax rate is important for economic growth and international competitiveness.

Did I mention that marginal economics was invented 135 years ago simultaneously in Britain and Germany? Did I mention that you very seldom get the feeling that many politicians understand this little bit of science 135 years later? You think that maybe we have a problem?

The latest information is that the outflow of international companies from Britain is accelerating. There are at least 40 major companies in the pipeline to move; the sums involved run into hundreds of billions of pounds... They are looking at Holland, Ireland... Estonia even.

In the United States corporate income tax is higher even than in Britain... I wonder what Hank Paulson thinks about that.