Federal Deficit Cut in Half

Of course Democrats are not impressed, according to Stephen Dinan. They look at the budget surplus inherited by President Bush’s administration and see nothing but failure.

"No amount of Republican Party spin can obscure the bottom line: The Bush administration and congressional Republicans inherited a projected 10-year budget surplus of $5.6 trillion in 2001, and in just 70 months turned that surplus into a projected deficit of $4 trillion," said House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat.

It’s their right to ignore the recession and the tech crash and imagine that President Clinton gave the economy to President Bush in fine fettle.

But it certainly is impressive that, despite the huge increases in federal spending over the last six years, and despite the huge tax rate decreases, and despite the three years of economic flatline after the NASDAQ took its tumble we are back to a federal deficit of 1.9 percent of GDP.

Of course the real story on the federal budget is the $10 trillion unfunded deficit on Social Security and the $40 trillion unfunded deficit on Medicare. The smart assumption to make is that the government will renege on its promises. That is going to cause a lot of suffering.

But meanwhile President Bush can savor a small victory.

"We have now achieved our goal of cutting the federal budget deficit in half and we've done it three years ahead of schedule," the president said, crediting his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts with spurring economic growth and thus more tax revenue.

As he should, of course, he doesn’t take all the credit. It’s not just his fiscal policies but “the hard work of the American people” that did the trick.

Don’t forget supply-side economics, either. That’s the idea that when you reduce marginal tax rates you speed up the economy.

Dems Deathbed Conversion to Missile Defense

Twenty years ago Democrats poured scorn on President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. They called it Star Wars.

In the Clinton Administration Democrats forced a slowdown in missile defense research and development.

According to WorldNetDaily,

RNC research notes that during the Bush administration, Democrats have voted against missile defense nine times, while Chairman Mehlman notes, 'It is simply not credible that the same Democrats who've opposed missile defense for decades have in the month before the election discovered North Korea's long-range missile capability.'

And according to Sheryl Gay Sholberg in The New York Times missile defense is starting to get traction on the campaign trail.

Democrats, including [Senate candidate] McGavick’s opponent, Senator Maria Cantwell [D-WA], say they would support a missile defense program if one were proven effective.

So that’s all right.. After twenty years of opposition to missile defense research and development, Democrats now say they would support a system if it “were proven effective.”

It all reminds me of the two attitudes that Scientic American magazine used to have towards defense programs. It was opposed to effective systems on the grounds that they would be destabilizing. And it was opposed to ineffective programs on the ground that they were a waste of money.

And Democrats wonder why serious people don’t take them seriously.

Has Bush "Squandered the Political Authority of a Great Country?"

It used to be, writes Alice Miles in The Times, that “the world would wait to hear what the president of the United States had to say” about a crisis event like the North Korean nuclear test. But not any longer.

This time, when President Bush intoned gravely about “a threat to international peace and security” she found herself saying “oh sod off.” As if “the world would care.”

[I]t reveals, I think, a sad truth: the 43rd President of the United States of America has squandered the political authority of a great country.

That is certainly one way of looking at it. And it is true that the transnational elite has closed ranks remarkly against George W. Bush. But that might say more about them than about President Bush.

It might be more correct to say that the European elite picked up on the meme developed by the Democrats during and after the 2000 election: first that Bush was a boob, and second that he was illegitimate, selected not elected.

It then became convenient for the unpopular German Chancellor Schroeder and the ineffective French President Chirac to run anti-American campaigns for reelection. They could afford to. The United States had won the cold war for them a decade earlier and they no longer needed the military strength of the Yanks to push back the evil empire of the Soviet Union.

The question always returns to this. What do you think about the prospect of a thug dictatorship with nuclear weapons having control of all the oil in the Middle East? That is the strategic possibility that every US President must fight to prevent.

It is not something that the elites of New York and Europe have to worry their heads about. Not yet.

Put North Korea on China's Back

So the North Koreans either did or did not successfully explode a nuclear device last weekend. Or it fizzled. Or it was all a big hoax. What’s the point?

The point seems to be that if you have nuclear weapons then people can’t mess with you.

That was the lesson that Saddam Hussein learned in the retreat from Kuwait in 1991. The only mistake he made, he realized, was not getting his nuclear weapons before invading Kuwait.

Of course, it’s laughable that a basket case like North Korea should imagine that it can solve any of its problems with nuclear weapons. When you implode, you implode. Nuclear weapons have nothing to do with it. The lands of the Former Soviet Union are testament to that.

And the word on North Korea is that the implosion will come soon, as we pointed out recently.

Meanwhile the strategy of the United States should be to put the monkey on China’s back.

You ChiComs wanna have Japan go nuclear? You wanna have South Korea go nuclear? Go right ahead, pal. Let Kim Jong Il fire up his rockets and his nuclear weapons.

How To Make Our Schools Safe

What do we do about the school shootings? Ban handguns? Make schools into secure zones like airports? What do you think?

Dave Kopel takes a look at the situation in NRO. He proposes a menu of common-sense protection for our children.

To start with, don’t put the perpetrator’s face on magazine covers. We don’t want them to achieve celebrity with their evil deeds.

Then there must be active defense. The cluelessness of Columbine where police and SWAT teams sat outside while the killers killed inside has fortunately been fixed.

Now, the standard police response to an “active shooter” is immediate counter-action. For example, at a March 2001 attack on Santana High School in Santee, California, the police response was immediate, and saved lives. It was the first time ever that a school shooting had been met with prompt police counter-action.

Are anti-bullying programs the answer? Hard to tell, but one thing that works is for students to come forward and warn school authorities about developing problems. It’s the old truth about policing. It can do nothing without informants.

It’s important for would-be assailants to understand that schools are not soft targets. That’s why gun-free zones are not a good idea.
But it is a good idea for assailants to fear that someone at the school may be carrying a weapon.

But what about self-defense training for students? Shooting incidents are not like muggings. Shooters are interested in killing people. So potential victims can best help themselves by taking out a shooter before he gets control of a situation.

Self-defense training also teaches that it is dangerous to let a criminal take control of your surroundings; even if a criminal is pointing a gun at you, you are probably better off to try running away, than to let him put you in a car where he can transport you to an isolated location.

But some people are outraged by self-defense proposals.

[To them] the idea that teachers and students should be encouraged to learn active resistance is outrageous.



Our nation has too many people who are not only unwilling to learn how to protect themselves, but who are also determined to prevent innocent third persons from practicing active defense. A person has the right to choose to be a pacifist, but it is wrong to force everyone else to act like a pacifist. It is the policies of the pacifist-aggressives which have turned American schools into safe zones for mass murderers.



School shootings are the ultimate form of bullying, and long experience shows that the more likely and more effective the resistance, the less the bullying.

You can see the tenor of Kopel’s ideas. There is no substitute for people capable and willing to defend themselves from aggression.

$20 Tickets at the Met

Earth to Metropolitan Opera! Your audience is dying off!

Seriously though, the new general director at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera is perfectly aware of that. So Peter Gelb is handing out $20 tickets. $20 for a night at the Metropolitan Opera. Here’s how Robin Pogrebin describes the offer.

Last week, the opera house announced that it would sell 200 seats for every weeknight performance for just $20 each. Tickets for these seats, which would normally sell for $100, go on sale two hours before curtain time. On Tuesday, the day of the announcement, 160 tickets were sold in 20 minutes. The remaining 40 were sold out by 7:10 p.m.

Here in Seattle, we wish the Metropolitan well. The general director of Seattle Opera, Speight Jenkins,
is indefatigable in working to build the audience. For the last 20 years he has done anything, everything to sell opera to Seattle.

You can see the results in the flesh on any night at the newly refurbished McCaw Hall. The audience may be dying off at the Met, but not in Seattle. There are a lot of young things parading around wearing dresses off the shoulder. Which is as it should be.

But every time my eyes rest lightly on one of these young things, I thank Speight. He’s the guy, ably assisted by the people at Seattle Opera, that did the heavy lifting.

Metropolitan Opera, please copy.

Big Families: Here They Come

Give this trend another year, and it will be on the cover of Time.

You know what I’m talking about: the trend towards large families.

Right now, the attitude seems to be: Why not? We can afford it, so why not? The threat of “overpopulation” is over, so why not? Our kids are a lot of fun, so why not?

Not to mention this: We’ve got a gigantic McMansion, so why not?

Of course, parents of big families still encounter a lot of judgmentalism, according to David Crary. And that is wrong. Bonny Clark, mother of three, was pregnant with twins.

"There were a lot of unwelcome comments, like, 'If I had three kids and was having twins, I'd kill myself,'" Mrs. Clark said.

You and I, tolerant non-judgmentalists, may be excused if we are shocked by the mean-spirited attitude behind such judgmentalism. And to think that they were probably made by women!

Mrs. Bennett, mother of five with a sixth on the way,

says the main reaction she gets from mothers with fewer children is, "How do you do it?"



"My answer is I don't think about it too much," she said. "You do what you need to do, and you have to just let go of a few things. Don't expect things to be perfect every day."

Still, you’d think she’d stop at five, in deference to that other Mrs. Bennet, mother of Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia.