Iran Tottering on the Edge

How bad are things in Iran?  It’s hard to know.  Our international media are good at showing us made-for-TV bombs in Baghdad, but not very good at peering under the blankets of thug-dictator regimes like Ahmaninejad’s.

According to Spengler, things are in very bad shape.  Inflation is 20 percent, monetary expansion 40 percent, and it is beginning to look as if the regime is faking its economic statistics.  Then there is employment, or lack of it. 

Iranian dissidents put overall unemployment at 30% and youth unemployment at 50%. Government subsidies sustain a very large portion of the population; 42% of the non-agricultural population is employed by the Iranian state, compared with 17% in Pakistan.

 And now Ahmaninejad has passed a decree to roll back interest rates. Yeah.

So what is going to happen?  Is Iran going to stop its imperial program, or go for broke?  Can we talk them out of it?

An old piece of diplomatic wisdom states that one always should give one’s enemy a way out. But I see no way out for the pocket empire of Persia.

That means war, and war sooner rather than later.  Maybe even this very summer.

After all, it is at least 18 months till the Democrats take over in the US and that may be too long.

We Are All in It Together, Clinton Says:

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says that the Bush “ownership society” is really an “on-your-own” society, according to Holly Ramer

"I prefer a ’we’re all in it together’ society," she said. "I believe our government can once again work for all Americans. It can promote the great American tradition of opportunity for all and special privileges for none."

That means pairing growth with fairness, she said.

One of the interesting questions when a Democrat ups and says something like this is: Are you saying that the $2.5 trillion the government spends on social programs from education to training to health care to pensions isn’t working?

Everyone believes is fairness. Everyone believes that we’re all in it together.  The question is what do you define by “fairness” and what do you propose to do about it?

Judging from the content of Clinton’s speech, she wants to jiggle around the various special tax breaks and dodges and increase energy taxes. 

I’m not sure what that has to do with being in it together.

Since Hillary Clinton is a Democrat we assume that what she wants to do is spend more money on Democratic voters, stuff like increasing the earned income tax credit.  But Democratic voters are already drowning under $2.5 trillion a year in government programs.  I don’t know if they can stand any more.

Of course, Clinton also wants to increase income taxes, to restore the tax system of the 1990s.

And when the president’s irresponsible tax breaks for high-income Americans expire, we will return to the income tax rates for upper- income Americans that we had in the 1990s, rates that were consistent with a balanced budget and economic growth.

Funny thing.  AP writer Holly Ramer didn’t mention Clinton’s proposal to increase personal income taxes in her article. You would think that would be the most important “news you can use” and that as a professional journalist, Ramer would be anxious to communicate this to her readers. 

I wonder why.

GOP Tide in Full Ebb

Don’t look now, writes David Frum, but the party of Ronald Reagan is heading into “a horrible Republican defeat in 2008.”

And it’s not going to do any good to invoke the Gipper this time around. 

Ronald Reagan was elected at a time when every social indicator seemed to be moving in the wrong direction: crime up, abortion up, divorce up, welfare dependency up, test scores down.

 Reagan-era politics just isn’t going to cut it in the 21st century.

No doubt.  But let’s not get carried away by the gloom and doom.  It is right and proper for the Democrats to win in 2008.  It is time for a change.  The whole point of democratic politics is that you get to throw the rascals out.  Again and again.

Here’s a cheery thought.  After 1932 and the Great Depression it took 5 presidential terms before the voters upchucked the Democrats.  After 1960 it took 2 terms, after 1976 one term.  Then when Clinton was elected in 1992 it took half a term for the voters to upchuck the Democratic Congress.  Sensibly, Clinton governed like a Republican from then on.

It will be interesting to see how Democrats fare after 2008.  First of all, they’ll want to raise taxes to pay for all their programs.  Then there is the question of the war on terror.  Then there is the Social Security mess, the Medicare mess, the education mess, and the single parent mess (see above) for everyone except college graduates.

All in all, I’d say the Democrats deserve to win in 2008.

As H.L. Mencken said:  “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Marriage in America: It's a Class Thing

As the June wedding season swings around The Economist(sub) is taking a look at marriage in America, keying off Kay Hymowitz’s Marriage and Caste in America.  What do they find?

There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing.

They have a handy little graph which shows the percentage of children living with single parents since 1964.  It looks like this:

Mother’s education	1964	1995	2001
Less than high school	13%	42%	37%
High school	7%	27%	29%
Post high school	6%	25%	23%
College degree	5%	11%	10%

 Yes.  It’s special, isn’t it?

Now the question is, why?  How could the child-raising practices of Americans have diverged so much over half a century?  It couldn’t be anything to do with the War on Poverty, could it?

Let us do some reckless speculation.  The reason that college-educated women don’t go in for single parenthood is that you can’t raise a middle-class kid in a neighborhood with decent schools and send them to college if you are a single mother.  The numbers just don’t add up. For college-educated women it just makes sense to dial in a husband and father when you are planning to have children.

But if you have no education then the government offer of support looks pretty good.

But notice that the incidence of single motherhood has been going down among the least educated since 1995.  That’s interesting, isn’t it? 

Now let’s see.  In 1996 Congress enacted welfare reform.  It could be that since the end of welfare-as-we-know-it more under-educated women have been choosing marriage for raising their children. 

It’s a concept.

Down the Memory Hole

Last fall John J. Miller observed that military history is dying out in our nation’s universities.  There are still a few old codgers left, aging professors close to retirement, but they aren’t being replaced.

On this Memorial Day Rich Lowry adds his two cents worth.

John A. Lynn recently looked back at the past 30 years of the prestigious academic journal The American Historical Review. He found no articles on the conduct of World War II, the American Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars.

We know why wars and military history are marginalized in the modern university.  It is bias, pure and simple.

New Republic contributing editor David A. Bell locates that bias deep in the social sciences: "The origin of these sciences lie in liberal, Enlightenment-era thinking that dismissed war as primitive, irrational and alien to modern civilization." This represents a fundamental misapprehension of human nature and thus the nature of history.

That is to say, it goes beyond bias to the fundamental understanding of the world held by Enlightenment-era thinkers and their adepts.

The odd thing is that, in its revolutionary subculture, the Enlightenment folks understand conflict completely.  They understand that marginalized peoples must elbow their way into history or be ground underfoot.  The racism-sexism-classism-homophobia folks experience everything in terms of power and conflict.

And Saul Alinsky famously wrote his Rules for Radicals to teach lefties how to battle the reactionary establishment.

The good thing is that men love studying wars and conflict so much that plenty of military history can go forward outside the academy.  It shows up on the groaning shelves of military history at the local bookstore and on cable’s History Channel which has so much programming about World War II that wags have renamed it the "Hitler" Channel.

Chances are that in the near future we’ll need a generation of leaders well versed in military arts and military history in order to deal effectively with radical Islam.

It’s a pity that our universities won’t be of any help.

Peggy Noonan Against Senate Bill

It’s one thing for your normal right-wing knuckle-dragging yahoos like you and me to be against the Senate Immigration Bill.  But Peggy Noonan?

Naturally I hope the new immigration bill fails. It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it’s being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept. The bill’s Capitol Hill supporters have a great vain popinjay’s pride in their own higher compassion. They are inclusive and you’re not, you cur, you gun-totin’ truckdriver’s-hat-wearin’ yahoo. It’s all so complex, and you’d understand this if you weren’t sort of dumb.

Yes.  Nice Peggy Noonan wrote that, including the italics.

Yeah.  Well.  Americans don’t go for that popinjay attitude.  And I’d say that for some time the American people have been looking for a way to blow their political popinjays a raspberry.  We can’t do it on Social Security; we can’t do it on the war.  But we can do it on immigration.

What would Peggy have us do?

We should stop, slow down and absorb. We should sit and settle. We should do what you do after eating an eight-course meal. We should digest what we’ve eaten.

Close the borders, she says, and have a conversation. That may not be as easy as she thinks, if you read what Alan Reynolds had to say recently. 

While we are having our conversation we should go to work on our existing immigrants.

As we end illegal immigration, we should set ourselves to the Americanization of the immigrants we have. They haven’t only joined a place of riches, it’s a place of meaning. We must teach them what it is they’ve joined and why it is good and what is expected of them and what is owed.

And we know who has been stopping the Americanization process in recent decades.

Peggy insists that the solution should not lead to scenes of sobbing families being torn apart and sent away on buses.

But one commentator pointed out that you probably don’t have to do that to call a halt to illegal immigration.  All you have to do is get a bit tougher:  Tougher on apprehending illegals and tougher on employers who hire them.  It really is a dollars and cents thing.  If it costs too much to hire the coyote to get you across the border, then fewer people will come.  If it is too hard to avoid arrest by local law enforcement, fewer people will come.

It’s a control issue. America needs immigration.  It just doesn’t need immigration that swamps the existing culture.  The United States of America is a remarkable society.  Why it should be so favored with staggering prosperity and good government is a question that many people have asked and few have really answered, even the great Tocqueville.

If we wanted to guess how to keep our prosperity and our good government the best answer would probably be: Change things, but don’t change things too fast.

That, of course, has been the conservative prescription ever since Edmund Burke.

Evangelicals Enter Establishment

Lberal religion reporter Hanna Rosin is one of our favorites here at Road to the Middle Class.  Not because she is a liberal but because she gets out and reports on conservative Christians in America.  She doesn’t really like them but she does a professional reporting job on them.

Now she’s taking a look at evangelical lawyers like Laura Goodling, the former Justice Department official who testified on Capitol Hill this week about the US Attorney firings.

Don’t think these are all just hayseeds, warns Rosin.

Goodling is part of a new generation of evangelicals ushered in by Falwell, who insisted that Christians get involved in politics. They are graduates of the exploding number of evangelical colleges, which no longer aim to create a parallel subculture but instead to train "Christian leaders to change the world," as the Regent mission statement reads.

Goodling is a graduate of the law school at Regent University, founded by Pat Robertson.  And she got her bachelor’s degree at Messiah College.  There are 150 graduates of the Regent law school in the White House.

Exactly.  Liberals be afraid; be very afraid. 

These people are all over the place and when the next Democratic administration comes to Washington they will be scattering to Congressional staffs and to conservative think tanks.  Writes Rosin

It took the conservative political movement 30 years to become a fixture in American politics, and it’s taken evangelicals about the same. Like conservatives, evangelicals may remain chronically ambivalent, afflicted with a persecution complex despite their obvious successes. But they are embedded firmly enough into Washington to provide jobs for smart young Christians for generations to come.

Think about that for a moment.  It means that there are now two right-of-center movements that have penetrated into the governing establishment in the last generation: the philosophically-oriented conservative movement; and the spiritually-oriented evangelical movement.

What’s not to like?