No Sex Please, We're Married

Everybody knows that back in the bad old days husbands and wives never saw each other.  And as for sex.  Well, no wonder nobody talked about it.

So now everything is better, right?  Now everybody can talk it out when they have a problem and then get back to bonking.

Not quite, as Lesley Thomas reports.  Even though couples today are intimate, best friends, and all that, they are actually having less sex than they thought.  Or that anyone thought back in the good old days of the sexual revolution.

Esther Perel thinks she has found the anser to the problem.  It is too much intimacy.  In Mating in Captivity she argues that:  

For a pleasing sex life, couples need to create some distance. If the atmosphere in your marital bedroom is to be even vaguely erotic, there must be an edge. Love needs closeness, she says, desire does not. Spend some time apart.

Well, men have been longing for that since—well what do you think the story of the Garden of Eden was about?  Adam and Eve had been getting along famously until Eve took a bite into the apple.  Then they took a look at each other and discovered they were naked.

It’s about time.  This intimacy thing is ruining a whole generation of men.  Men need to be tough and distant, not hanging around the house all the time. 

It’s called the battle of the sexes.  Women want men to be more intimate.  Men want women to be more mysterious.  The trick is to make sure that neither sex gets what it wants.

Ben Stein: They are Lynching My President

There was American Spectator columnist Ben Stein sitting back watching the president’s State of the Union speech. “I thought it was darned good. Realistic, gracious, modest, sensible.”  But as soon as it was over the media started in on it. 

Then, whaam, as soon as the speech was over, ABC was bashing him, telling us how pathetic he was, how irrelevant he was, how weak he was, how unrealistic he was.

NPR even dragged singer Merle Haggard in to say how bad things were.

And suddenly it hit me. The media is staging a coup against Mr. Bush. They cannot impeach him because he hasn’t done anything illegal. But they can endlessly tell us what a loser he is and how out of touch he is[.]

So they are.  But how bad is it really?  After all, every Republican president since Eisenhower—no scratch that, Coolidge—has been painted by the media as a complete nitwit.  So what’s new? 

OK, so we get Hillary as president in 2008.  So what does she do?  A tax increase and universal health insurance?  Let’s see.  Something went really wrong for the Democrats when the Clintons tried that in 1993-94.

Let’s give the media their due.  Bush has been in for six years and it’s time for everyone to say that they would never have voted for him given what they know now.  That’s how democracy works.

But I don’t know that I’d want to be a Democratic president in 2009.  Too many chickens coming home to roost.  And not much lovely money to spend on Democratic voters.

And frankly, if I were the Democrats I’d hold off on universal health insurance.  If the already government-dominated health system were taken completely under the government’s wing, the mess would be indescribable. 

And you never know.  Voters might blame Democrats for the mess.

It's For The Children

Conservatives often complain about the way that liberals always say that every program, every expansion of government they propose is “for the children” writes Jonah Goldberg.  Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is playing the children card this week as she demands the reauthorization of "SCHIP", the State Child Health Insurance Program. 

Goldberg tells us where the children thing got started.  It was Marian Wright Edelman and the Childrens Defense Fund back in the 1970s.  Edelman realized that it would be better to advocate for programs for “the children” rather than for their poor and minority parents.  Then, of course, advocates could turn around and marginalize their opponents.

By making The Children the beneficiaries of welfare rather than the adults, the left could portray any attempt to curb the welfare state as "anti-child."

Goldberg wants to get away from all this cant, particularly since, when the Clintons start to talk about The Children they make partisan points while claiming that they want to take the welfare of children out of “political or ideological debate.”

Children are hugely important. But they shouldn’t be a Trojan horse for policies you can’t sell fair and square. If saying so makes me anti-child, so be it.

But Goldberg is wrong.  Children should be at the center of the debate.  And the conservative line should be: How can you possibly think that yet another underperforming government program—like the failed government education program—could do anything but harm children?

We should turn the words of the liberals back on them.  Take Randi Weingarten, head of the New York teachers’ union.  She likes to hiss that anyone opposed to her just doesn’t care about kids.  Very well.

If you are against curbing teacher tenure and accountability, Ms. Weingarten, it must be because You Don’t Care About Kids.

President Bush's Health Care Proposals

In his State of the Union address, President Bush made several health care proposals. 

First, I propose a standard tax deduction for health insurance that will be like the standard tax deduction for dependents. Families with health insurance will pay no income on [sic] payroll tax — or payroll taxes on $15,000 of their income. Single Americans with health insurance will pay no income or payroll taxes on $7,500 of their income.

What exactly does this mean?  Does it mean that everyone will deduct their health insurance costs from personal income tax?  Does it mean that people paying their own health insurance can deduct?  People whose insurance is paid by their employers?  What, exactly?  And is there a cap, so that if an employer pays more than $7,500/$15,000 a year it becomes taxable income to the employee?

According to Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Robert Pear in the New York Times, the idea is that people paying for their own insurance get a tax break and people hitting the limit at work get socked.

The basic concept is that employer-provided health insurance, now treated as a fringe benefit exempt from taxation, would no longer be entirely tax-free. Workers could be taxed if their coverage exceeded limits set by the government. But the government would also offer a new tax deduction for people buying health insurance on their own.

It’s a way of giving money to Republicans and limiting the expansion of before-tax employer-paid health insurance.  Anyway, Democrats say No Way.  For now.

Then the president continues.

There are many other ways that Congress can help. We need to expand Health Savings Accounts. (Applause.) We need to help small businesses through Association Health Plans. (Applause.) We need to reduce costs and medical errors with better information technology. (Applause.) We will encourage price transparency. And to protect good doctors from junk lawsuits, we passing medical liability reform. (Applause.)

Amen to all that.  You wonder how much of it he expects Congress to pass, and how much of it is issue fodder for Republicans down the road, operating on the assumption that the solution to the health care crisis is for more Americans to pay for health care with their own dollars.

President Bush Sets Up Republican Retreat

The key question, after the Republican defeat last November, is how President Bush plans the necessary Republican retreat.  You almost always have to retreat after a defeat in battle, and the quality of that retreat is what sets up the opportunity for a new offensive.

Said the president, as reported by Joseph Curl:

For all of us in this room, there is no higher responsibility than to protect the people of this country from danger. ... To win the war on terror, we must take the fight to the enemy. Both parties and both branches should work in close consultation...

If American forces step back before Baghdad is secure, the Iraqi government would be overrun by extremists on all sides.

But is this the situation?  Robert Haddick suggests what that the United States is really doing in the upcoming “surge” is not securing Baghdad but siding with Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim against Prime Minister al-Maliki and Moqtada al-Sadr.  And also trying to avoid a complete wipe-out of the Sunnis.  Yet the Sunnis are finished:

The Sunni insurgency is near its end. Far too late, the Sunnis now realize that only the Americans can protect them from the Shi’ite ethnic cleansing campaign... But even the Americans can’t help the Sunni Arabs now.

Haddick thinks that we are trying to help the Sunnis as a favor to the Saudis.  But what will be the result of stirring the pot?

Domestically, we can read that the president is setting up some issues on which he can deal with the Democrats—immigration reform and alternative energy, for instance.

But he is also throwing down markers.  His proposal to allow workers that lack company benefits to pay for health insurance with pre-tax dollars is one.  His call for school vouchers is another.  It is significant that Democrats immediately said: no deal.

No doubt.  But you win elections with issues, taking down immovable objects with irresistible forces.  With his markers on health care and education, Bush is setting up the Republican army for the future.

On top of that is the minefield that Bush has laid down on taxes.  With the Alternative Minimum Tax and the expiration of many tax rate cuts passed in the early 2000s, Democrats are going to find themselves in a very nasty place some time in 2009 and 2010.

All in all, not a bad plan for a measured retreat.  Now let us start planning for the next offensive.

Milton Friedman, E-mailer

Back in July 2006 the Wall Street Journal was emailing with Milton Friedman about China and exchange rates and economic policy.  Was he worried, for instance, about the low US savings rate?  No, he wasn’t. 

The right saving rate is whatever satisfies the tastes and preferences of the public in a free and unbiased capital market. Market can adjust to any rate. This is a very complicated question. Present estimates probably understate actual savings because of treatment of capital gains. In any event, the present situation does not raise any problems for the economy.

Did he think China should float the Yuan?  Yes, it should. 

If they do insist on pegging the yuan, they will sooner or later run into a situation in which they are either accumulating an excessive amount of U.S. dollars or they are in debt for an excessive amount of U.S. dollars and they will have a foreign exchange crisis.

And that, as they say, is not good.

Among other recommendations, Friedman recommended that a computer program run the US monetary policy and that the outlook for India was better than China.

China has maintained political and human collectivism while gradually freeing the economic market. This has so far been very successful but is heading for a clash, since economic freedom and political collectivism are not compatible. India maintained political democracy while running a collectivist economy. It is now unwinding the latter, which will strengthen freedom of all kinds, so in that respect it is in a better position than China.

Milton Friedman: Nobel laureate and great American.  Rest in peace.

Behind the NYT Happy Single Women Story

Good show for the New York Times. Their story on single women reported by Sam Roberts—that 51 percent of women are not living with husbands—required them to do a bit of massaging.  They lumped single teenaged girls and women whose husbands are on assigment into the “single” column, reports  NR But all the men of suitable age and educational level insist on sex on the first date, and she’s not interested. I hear from young people who would love to get married and stay married because they don’t want to put their own children through the misery of divorce that they endured.

 Morse says she hears from women “whose husbands abandoned them and their children, for no particular reason.”  And then there are the women.

Some divorced women leave their husbands with huge credit-card debts and three screaming children. I hear from these men all the time. And we’re supposed to just celebrate women’s freedom?

Let’s get real shall we?

Marriage is the most basic form of social cooperation. It is the institution in which children are born and reared.

If the New York Times, its radical experts, and its liberal readers want to replace marriage with something else then it’s about time they told us what that something is.  And I’d say that the burden of proof is on the liberals to prove that their alternative is better.

Some people have suggested that the reason that liberals are so down on marriage is that they all work for the government.  Failed marriages equals more government, so failed marriages means more jobs for liberals.

But I do not believe that liberals think that way.  I think that the liberal distaste for marriage is visceral, instinctive.  And, of course, it is a matter of liberals getting with the Zeitgeist.

UPDATE: In the New York Times Sunday review of the single women story by Kate Zernike they had this to say.

The last 30 years have seen a huge shift in educated women’s attitudes about divorce. Mr. Martin, who has written about women and divorce, said that three decades ago, about 30 percent of women who had graduated from college said it should be harder to get a divorce. Now, about 65 percent say so, he said.

But for less educated women and for men, the numbers have not changed; only 40 percent — a minority — say it should be harder to get a divorce.

That ties into Kay S. Hymowitz’s findings in Marriage and Caste in America, interviewed here by Kathryn Jean Lopez.

But with that big a change in public opinion, someone is going to find themselves in a buzz-saw pretty soon.