Middle-Class Secret of Success

Democrats like Senator Jim Webb claim that the middle class is in crisis. In his “barn-burner” of a speech responding to President Bush he claimed:

Wages and salaries for our workers are at all-time lows as a percentage of national wealth, even though the productivity of American workers is the highest in the world. Medical costs have skyrocketed. College tuition rates are off the charts. Our manufacturing base is being dismantled and sent overseas. Good American jobs are being sent along with them.

In short, the middle class of this country, our historic backbone and our best hope for a strong society in the future, is losing its place at the table.

Well, is Jim Webb right?  Money columnist Liz Pulliam takes a look.  Are people “helpless pawns in a game that’s rigged against them” as Jim Webb claims?  Or could it be that they are screwed because it’s their “Own Damned Fault?”

I believe a middle-class life is still possible for most people. But you have to be smarter, more cautious and faster on your feet than ever before. You have to obey some deceptively simple rules. And one thing is certain: Wherever you currently stand on the economic ladder, the surest way to rise is to pull yourself up.

And that sums up the truth in Jim Webb’s diatribe.  We Americans have to be smarter.  We can’t just live a bump-on-a-log life and expect the world to ladle out the gravy.  Sure wages and salaries are low compared to corporate profits.  But then where do higher wages and salaries come from?  Our manufacturing base is being dismantled.  But Americans now work in front of computers, not in front of steel furnaces.

It’s easy to rail about the effects of globalization in barn-burning speeches.  But the only way to stay No. 1 is to work harder and smarter than No. 2.

The problem is that some people may think that a chap like Jim Webb can come along and bring back the good old days of lifetime employment and guaranteed pensions. 

Ain’t gonna happen. 

And Jim, here’s a question.  If medical costs have skyrocketed and college tuition rates are off the charts why would that be?

It couldn’t be that health care and college education are both riddled with government subsidy, could it?

Let's Get Serious About Energy

Why do we keep on this chimera of “energy independence?” Ever since the oil shock of the 1970s the government has been talking about it.  And as Charles Krauthammer notes,

By my count, 24 of the 34 State of the Union addresses since the oil embargo of 1973 have proposed solutions to our energy problem.

Now we have another call for energy independence—to switch to ethanol, of all things, ethanol made from switchgrass.

[T]he happy talk displaces any discussion about here-and-now measures that would have a rapid and revolutionary effect on oil consumption and dependence. No one talks about them because they have unhidden costs. Politicians hate unhidden costs.

There are three serious things we can do now: Tax gas. Drill in the Arctic. Go nuclear.

Oh dear.  We wouldn’t want that now, would we?

Now, let’s do a quick analysis to see who is serious about energy in the United States.  Who opposes these serious things?

• Tax gas—conservative oppose
• Drill in the arctic—liberals oppose
• Go nuclear—liberals oppose

So that means that conservatives win in the seriousness stakes, 2 to 1.

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.